I have seen the Taj again; this time at noon. Under the vertical sun the melancholy phantom has vanished, the sweet sadness of the mausoleum has gone. The great marble table on which it stands is blinding. The light, reflected back and forth from the immense surfaces of white marble, is increased a hundred-fold in intensity, and some of the sides are like burning plaques. The incrustations seem to be sparks of magic fire; their hundreds of red flowers gleam like burning coals. The religious texts and the hieroglyphs, inlaid with black marble, stand out as if traced by the lightning-finger of a savage god. All the mystical rows of lotus and lilies unfolding in relief, which just now had the softness of yellowed ivory, spring forth like flames.—I retrace my steps, passing out of the entrance, and for an instant I have a dazzling view of the lines and incandescent surfaces of the building with its unchanging virgin whiteness.—Indeed, this severe simplicity and intensity of light give it something of a Semitic character: we think of the flaming and chastening sword of the Bible. The minarets lift themselves into the blue like pillars of fire.
I wander outside in the fresh air under the shadows of the leafy arches until twilight. This garden is the conception of one of the faithful who wished to glorify Allah. It is the home of religious delight:—“No one shall enter the garden of God unless he is pure of heart,” is the Arabian text graven over the entrance-gate. Here are flower-beds, which are masses of velvet,—unknown blooms resembling heaps of purple moss. The trunks of the trees are entwined with blue convolvulus, and flowers like great red stars gleam through the dark foliage. Over these flowers a hundred thousand delicate butterflies hover in a perpetual cloud. Many pretty creatures, little striped squirrels and numerous birds, green parrots and parrots of more brilliant plumage, disport themselves here, making a little world, happy and secure, for guards, dressed in white muslin, menace with long pea-shooters the crows and vultures and protect them from everything that would bring mischief or cruelty into this peaceful place.
On the surface of the still waters lilies and lotus are sleeping, their stiff leaves pinked out and resting heavily upon the dark mirror.
Through the blackness of the boughs English meadows are revealed, bathed in brilliant sunlight, and spaces of blue sky, across which a triangle of white storks is sometimes seen flying, and, at certain moments, the far-away vision of the phantom tomb seems like the melancholy spectre of a virgin.—How calm, how superb this solitude, charged with voluptuousness at once solemn and enervating! Here dwell the beauty, the tenderness, and the light of Asia, dreamed of by Shelley.
Dans l’Inde (Paris, 1891).
THE CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE-DAME.
VICTOR HUGO.
Most certainly, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame is still a sublime and majestic edifice. But, despite the beauty which it preserves in its old age, it would be impossible not to be indignant at the injuries and mutilations which Time and man have jointly inflicted upon the venerable structure without respect for Charlemagne, who laid its first stone, and Philip Augustus, who laid its last.
There is always a scar beside a wrinkle on the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals. Tempus edax homo edacior, which I should translate thus: Time is blind, man is stupid.
If we had leisure to examine one by one, with the reader, the various traces of destruction imprinted on the old church, Time’s work would prove to be less destructive than men’s, especially des hommes de l’art, because there have been some individuals in the last two centuries who considered themselves architects.
First, to cite several striking examples, assuredly there are few more beautiful pages in architecture than that façade, exhibiting the three deeply-dug porches with their pointed arches; the plinth, embroidered and indented with twenty-eight royal niches; the immense central rose-window, flanked by its two lateral windows, like the priest by his deacon and sub-deacon; the high and frail gallery of open-worked arches, supporting on its delicate columns a heavy platform; and, lastly, the two dark and massive towers, with their slated pent-houses. These harmonious parts of a magnificent whole, superimposed in five gigantic stages, and presenting, with their innumerable details of statuary, sculpture, and carving, an overwhelming yet not perplexing mass, combine in producing a calm grandeur. It is a vast symphony in stone, so to speak; the colossal work of man and of a nation, as united and as complex as the Iliad and the romanceros of which it is the sister; a prodigious production to which all the forces of an epoch contributed, and from every stone of which springs forth in a hundred ways the workman’s fancy directed by the artist’s genius; in one word, a kind of human creation, as strong and fecund as the divine creation from which it seems to have stolen the two-fold character: variety and eternity.