Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

meaning ‘the sun.’”
“The sun!” she exclaimed.
“And the name of a certain handsome archer, who was a god,” added Gringoire.
“A god!” repeated the gipsy with something pensive and passionate in her tone.
At that moment one of her bracelets became unfastened and slipped to the ground. Gringoire bent
quickly to pick it up; when he rose the girl and her goat had disappeared. He only heard the sound of a
bolt being shot which came from a little door leading, doubtless, into an inner room.
“Has she, at least, left me a bed?” inquired our philosopher.
He made the tour of the chamber. He found no piece of furniture suitable for slumber but a long wooden
chest, and its lid was profusely carved, so that when Gringoire lay down upon it he felt very much as
Micromegas must have done when he stretched himself at full length to slumber on the Alps.
“Well,” he said, accommodating himself as best he might to the inequalities of his couch, “one must
make the best of it. But this is indeed a strange wedding-night. ’Tis a pity, too; there was something
guileless and antediluvian about that marriage by broken pitcher that took my fancy.”
Book III
I. Notre Dame
ASSUREDLY the Cathedral of Notre Dame at Paris is, to this day, a majestic and sublime edifice. But
noble as it has remained while growing old, one cannot but regret, cannot but feel indignant at the
innumerable degradations and mutilations inflicted on the venerable pile, both by the action of time and
the hand of man, regardless alike of Charlemagne, who laid the first stone, and Philip Augustus, who laid
the last.
On the face of this ancient queen of our cathedrals, beside each wrinkle one invariably finds a scar.
“Tempus edax, homo edacior,” which I would be inclined to translate: “Time is blind, but man is
senseless.”
Had we, with the reader, the leisure to examine, one by one, the traces of the destruction wrought on
this ancient church, we should have to impute the smallest share to Time, the largest to men, and more
especially to those whom we must perforce call artists, since, during the last two centuries, there have
been individuals among them who assumed the title of architect.
And first of all, to cite only a few prominent examples, there are surely few such wonderful pages in the
book of Architecture as the façades of the Cathedral. Here unfold themselves to the eye, successively and
at one glance, the three deep Gothic doorways; the richly traced and sculptured band of twenty-eight
royal niches; the immense central rose-window, flanked by its two lateral windows, like a priest by the
deacon and subdeacon; the lofty and fragile gallery of trifoliated arches supporting a heavy platform on
its slender columns; finally, the two dark and massive towers with their projecting slate
roofs—harmonious parts of one magnificent whole, rising one above another in five gigantic storeys,