Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

as an evocative background for his novels, Hugo used a single building to unify the plot and to
carry the argument. In doing this he closed the emotional distance between his material and the
expectations of his contemporaries that Scott, in his introduction to Ivanhoe, made no apology
for keeping open. Hugo thereby overtook, in a single stride, the British, Georgian view of
Gothic, arriving at once at that fusion of fabric and meaning that would come to English
architecture with the work of A W N Pugin later in the decade. ‘ΑΝΑΓΚΗ’, ‘Fate’ is literally the
writing on the wall in the cathedral. Every part of it speaks. ‘Vaste symphonie en pierre, pour
ainsi dire; oeuvre colossale d’un homme et d’un peuple, tout ensemble une et complexe.’ [Great
symphony in stone, as it were, the colossal work of one man and of a people, a unity, both one
and complex.] 136 Meaning is embodied in the very stones and it is communicable. Notre Dame
can, like a sentient creature, comfort Esmeralda as she takes sanctuary:
L’église, cette vaste église qui l’enveloppait de toutes parts, qui la gardait, qui la sauvait, était elle-même un
souverain calmant. Les lignes solonnelles de cette architecture, l’attitude religieuse de tous les objets qui entouraient
la jeune fille, les pensées pieuses et sereines qui se dégagaeient, pour ainsi dire, de tous les pores de cette pierre,
agissaint sur elle à son insu. [The church, that vast church which enfolded her on every side, which protected her,
which saved her, was itself an unfailing calmative. The solemn contours of that architecture, the religious aspect of
every object that surrounded the young girl, the pious, serene thoughts that were, so to speak, exhaled from every
pore of that stone, worked on her, unsuspected.] 137
In Hugo’s vision all of the material past, from the cathedral downwards, could be made to speak,
if one had the requisite, antiquarian, knowledge. ‘Quand on sait voir, on retrouve l’esprit d’un
siècle et la physionomie d’un roi jusque dans un marteau de porte.’ [When you know how to
look you may find the spirit of an age and the likeness of a king in a door knocker.] 138
In Notre-Dame the concept of the Gothic as a metaphysical force, an idea that grew in
England from the 1790s onwards, arrives fully formed, as does the concept of the Renaissance as
a falling off, a death rather than a rebirth or, in Hugo’s words: ‘Ce soleil couchant que nous
prenons pour une aurora.’ [This sunset we mistake for dawn.] 139 The sentence comes in the
136 Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris, p.194.
137 Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris p.530.
138 Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris, p.229.
139 Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris p.292.
144