Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

edifices in the grand style; the Place Royale shows us the Paris of Henri IV—brick fronts, stone copings,
and slate roofs—tricolour houses; the Val-de-Grâce is the Paris of Louis XIII—low and broad in style,
with basket-handle arches and something indefinably pot-bellied about its pillars and humpbacked about
its domes. We see the Paris of Louis XIV in the Invalides—stately, rich, gilded, cold; the Paris of Louis
XV at Saint-Sulpice—scrolls and love-knots and clouds, vermicelli and chicory leaves—all in stone; the
Paris of Louis XVI in the Panthèon, a bad copy of Saint Peter’s at Rome (the building has settled rather
crookedly, which has not tended to improve its lines); the Paris of the Republic at the School of
Medicine—a spurious hash of Greek and Roman, with about as much relation to the Coliseum or the
Panthèon as the constitution of the year III has to the laws of Minos—a style known in architecture as
“the Messidor”; 44 the Paris of Napoleon in the Place Vendôme—a sublime idea, a bronze column made
of cannons; the Paris of the Restoration at the Bourse—an abnormally white colonnade supporting an
abnormally smooth frieze—it is perfectly square and cost twenty million francs.
To each of these characteristic buildings there belongs, in virtue of a similarity of style, of form, and of
disposition a certain number of houses scattered about the various districts easily recognised and
assigned to their respective dates by the eye of the connoisseur. To the seeing eye, the spirit of a period
and the features of a King are traceable even in the knocker of a door.
The Paris of to-day has, therefore, no typical characteristic physiognomy. It is a collection of samples of
several periods, of which the finest have disappeared. The capital is increasing in houses only, and what
houses! At this rate, there will be a new Paris every fifty years. The historic significance, too, of its
architecture is lessened day by day. The great edifices are becoming fewer and fewer, are being
swallowed up before our eyes by the flood of houses. Our fathers had a Paris of stone; our sons will have
a Paris of stucco.
As for the modern structures of this new Paris, we would much prefer not to dilate upon them. Not that
we fail to give them their due. The Sainte-Geneviève of M. Soufflot is certainly the finest tea-cake that
ever was made of stone. The palace of the Lègion d’Honneur is also a most distinguished piece of
confectionery. The dome of the Corn Market is a jockey-cap set on the top of a high ladder. The towers
of Saint-Sulpice are two great clarinets—a shape which is as good as any other—and the grinning zigzag
of the telegraph agreeably breaks the monotony of their roofs. Saint-Roch possesses a door that can only
be matched in magnificence by that of Saint Thomas Aquinas; also it owns a Calvary in alto-relievo
down in a cellar, and a monstrance of gilded wood—real marvels these, one must admit. The lantern
tower in the maze at the Botanical Gardens is also vastly ingenious. As regards the Bourse, which is
Greek as to its colonnade, Roman as to the round arches of its windows and doors, and Renaissance as to
its broad, low, vaulted roof, it is indubitably in purest and most correct style; in proof of which we need
only state that it is crowned by an attic storey such as was never seen in Athens—a beautiful straight line,
gracefully intersected at intervals by chimney pots. And, admitting that it be a rule in architecture that a
building should be so adapted to its purpose that that purpose should at once be discernible in the aspect
of the edifice, no praise is too high for a structure which might, from its appearance, be indifferently a
royal palace, a chamber of deputies, a town hall, a college, a riding-school, an academy, a warehouse, a
court of justice, a museum, a barracks, a mausoleum, a temple, or a theatre—and all the time it is an
Exchange. Again, a building should be appropriate to the climate. This one is obviously constructed for
our cold and rainy skies. It has an almost flat roof, as they obtain in the East, so that in winter, when it
snows, that roof has to be swept, and, of course, we all know that roofs are intended to be swept. And as
regards the purpose of which we spoke just now, the building fulfils it to admiration; it is a Bourse in
France as it would have been a Temple in Greece. It is true that the architect has been at great pains to