The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (31 page)

T
HE CATHEDRAL MIGHT
have seemed medieval, but this incarnation of Notre Dame de Paris had in fact been completed only seven years before, in 1864. The architects, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus, had been appointed to restore the existing cathedral by the Ministry of Justice and Religion in 1843, and they had taken great pains to ensure that their work would appear as authentically medieval as possible. In his report to the ministry regarding the project, Viollet-le-Duc explained, “The artist must efface himself entirely, must forget his own tastes and instincts in order to study his subject, to recover and follow the thoughts that guided the construction of the work which he wishes to restore.” His approach was based not on imagination but on the analysis of historical evidence. He continued:

It was necessary to perform this minute analysis in order to explain, complete, and often correct opinions resulting solely from textual sources, for all too often a text can lend itself to diverse interpretations, or be in itself unintelligible. Archaeological evidence, on the other hand, written on the stones of the building itself, despite the difficulty of dating, remains incontrovertible, and provides us with detailed information.

Viollet’s restoration involved, at root, two operations: the removal of the encrustations of ages, and the replacement of things that had
been removed from the building over time. The former was an archaeological challenge in itself, but scientifically replacing those things that had been taken away was more difficult. All the sculptures of the west front had been made by hands that had withered to dust centuries before, from stone hacked out of quarries long since exhausted or buried under new suburbs. All the stained-glass windows that had once lined the nave had contained images of which there now was no record. Not only had the contents of this encyclopedic library of the medieval mind been lost, but also the very materials of which it had been made and the very skills that had made it.

Viollet deplored those who sought to replace what had been taken away with ornaments of their own devising, made in modern materials that did not match the original. “It is impossible to conserve the form of something made in one material by making it in another,” he wrote; “concrete cannot reproduce the appearance of stone any more than wood can pretend to be iron.” Accordingly, his restored Notre Dame was constructed using materials and techniques that matched as closely as possible those that he supposed to be authentic. As to the form of the sculptures and other pieces that had been removed, he wrote:

We think therefore that the replacement of all the statues that adorned the great doors, the gallery of the kings, and the buttresses can only be carried out by carefully copying surviving sculptures on analogous monuments of the same era. Models exist at Chartres, Rheims, Amiens and in the many other churches that cover the Île de France. These same cathedrals also offer us models for the stained glass which needs to be replaced at Notre Dame: models which it is impossible to imitate, but wiser to copy.

The Notre Dame that was completed in 1864 was a work of painstaking research; and to the Communards who came to destroy it seven years later, it resembled absolutely the medieval cathedral whose phantom it was.

T
HE RESTORED
N
OTRE
Dame was a masterly work of historical science, but the impulse for this operation had been something quite different: a romance. Victor Hugo’s
Notre-Dame de Paris
, which he began writing in 1829, was set in 1482, and its hero had lived in the cathedral since he had been found on its steps as a baby. For Quasimodo, Notre Dame was the whole world, and he scarcely ever left it.

The only espaliers he could conceive were the stained glass windows, which were always in flower, the only shade that of the stone foliage blossoming in clumps, laden with birds, on the Saxon capitals, the only mountains the colossal towers of the church, the only ocean the Paris that surged at their feet.

And, indeed, Quasimodo resembled Notre Dame of Victor Hugo’s day, for he “looked like a giant, broken and badly reassembled.” The heroine of the novel was a dancing gypsy girl named Esmeralda; she too resembled Notre Dame—or at least Notre Dame as Hugo imagined it had been in 1482—for she had a strange and exotic beauty that captivated all who saw her. But the real heroine of the story was Notre Dame de Paris herself, and Hugo knew how his novel would end: in the wreckage of the hopes of hunchback, gypsy girl, and cathedral.

Esmeralda was led astray by specious reasoning and violated by the unscrupulous men who had professed to adore her. Having been ruined, tried, and condemned to death as a whore, a witch, and a murderess, she stood in a loose white shift before the cathedral, awaiting her last shriving. Then, suddenly, without warning, Quasimodo swung down on a rope and swept her off her feet into the air. Up she flew, up past the portals, and the Gallery of the Kings, and the great western rose, up to the perches of the gargoyles, in whose hideous company Quasimodo was at home. Here Esmeralda found sanctuary, and Quasimodo took care of her.

But there would be no happy ending. The Parisian mob, convinced that Quasimodo had kidnapped their beautiful gypsy girl, decided to rescue her from his clutches. They threw themselves upon the west front of Notre Dame; but the cathedral resisted their efforts, standing
firm, like the gates of a great city closed against its besiegers. Indeed, Notre Dame did more than resist: she responded. Her gargoyles spewed forth a hellish bile of molten lead, and flames licked the sky between the two towers. The very stones of the cathedral joined in the defense, as slates and lintels began to rain down upon the besiegers. The mob was driven back.

But one young man made it up to the Gallery of the Kings. He laughed, flushed with success; but almost before he knew it, one of the stone kings rushed at him, grabbed him by his feet, swung him over the edge of the balcony, and dashed his brains out on the wall below. Quasimodo appeared on the gallery, the limp body of his victim in his hand; for it had not been Our Lady of Paris who had defended herself, but her tutelary spirit, the hunchback. He turned away from the terrified crowd and ran back inside. He hurried through corridors, up turnpikes, along ledges, until he came to Esmeralda’s sanctuary—only to find that his own gypsy lady of Paris was gone.

Soldiers dispersed the mob, and order was restored. The next morning, the bourgeoisie of Paris opened the doors and shutters of their houses. In the square in front of the cathedral,

some goodwives, milk-jugs in hand, were pointing in astonishment to the strange devastation in the main portal of Notre Dame and to the two rivulets of congealed lead between the cracks in the sandstone. This was all that remained of the night’s disturbance. The pyre lit by Quasimodo between the towers had died out.

Looking out from the gallery of the chimerae at the top of Notre Dame, Quasimodo surveyed the city and the sky before him. He “raised his eye to the gypsy, whose body he could see in the distance, hanging from the gibbet, and shuddering beneath its white robe in the final throes of death . . . and he said, with a sob that caused his chest to heave: ‘Oh, all that I have loved!’ ”

Hugo had composed an elegy for a Notre Dame that had long passed away; but his fictional cathedral was also a marvelous modern invention. The novel was finished in January 1831, and it was on the book stands by March. It was a huge success, and thousands of people
not only read the tragedy of the Ladies of Paris but went to visit the place where it had all happened. They could not help but construct in their minds what Hugo had described in words, ignoring the interventions of later ages and imagining splendors that had been destroyed. In 1837, the duchesse d’Orléans told the author, “I have visited
your
Notre Dame.”

Hugo had transformed the building into
Notre-Dame de Paris
, and it was not long before his reading public demanded that the stones of the building be made to correspond to the words of the book. In 1845, Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus began that very task.

T
HERE WAS MUCH
to do, for the Notre Dame de Paris of Hugo’s novel was hidden under several centuries of what the writer called the blindness of time and the stupidity of man. There is a spectacular canvas painted by Jacques-Louis David in 1804 that provides a record of what the church had looked like before Viollet-le-Duc began his work. In this picture, the medieval carvings and traceries that would become the imagined haunt of Quasimodo and Esmeralda are invisible under a layer of baroque marble, green and red and white, and the apse resembles nothing so much as a gilded salon at Versailles or a scene at the opera.

In the center of David’s painting, a diminutive man is gesturing before a golden throne. Napoleon Bonaparte, in deliberate imitation of Charlemagne, holds a laurel wreath aloft in his right arm; he is about to lower it onto the head of his wife, Josephine, to crown her as empress. The pope himself is visible at the high altar, and the aisles of the church are filled with the great and the good of France.

David’s painting suppressed their expressions of horror and fascination at Napoleon’s shameless appropriation of the scenery and props of the ancien régime. It is said that one of them, a former general of the French Revolution, was heard to mutter, “What a shame that the 300,000 Frenchmen who died to overthrow one throne are unable to enjoy the superb fruit of their sacrifice!” It is not recorded what happened to him after the ceremonies.

Ten years later, Louis XVIII—a real king—walked down the nave of Notre Dame, to give thanks for his own coronation and the restoration
of the monarchy after a quarter century of failed republic and ersatz empire. The cathedral was by then as exhausted and tawdry as a painted theater set after the lights have come up and the show is over. In 1829, history almost repeated itself in miniature: Louis XVIII was deposed in “three glorious days” of revolution, and for a moment it looked as if the republic might be restored. It was not. The king was replaced by his cousin Louis Philippe, of the House of Orléans.

That summer, the young Victor Hugo, alarmed by the apparent fragility of the restored monarchy, decided that if history would not take care of the preservation of Notre Dame de Paris, his novel would. He locked himself into his apartment and started to write.

H
UGO’S FANTASY OF
hunchbacks and gypsy girls was an exercise in romantic fiction. But as his contemporary readers would have known all too well, it was closely based on history—and recent history at that.