This is why Notre Dame matters
With excerpts from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831)
On April 15, images of Notre Dame Cathedral engulfed by fire in the city center of Paris went viral on social media. In the following hours, millions around the globe were glued to their television screens and to their smartphones for updates on the fate of one of the world’s most famous buildings and one of Christianity’s most visited sites.
Notre Dame was on the brink of destruction. However, while the spire and much of the wooden roof were destroyed, the structure of the cathedral and some of its interiors, including its famous glass rose window, were saved.
Work began on Notre Dame in 1180 and the cathedral was largely completed in 1260. Through the centuries, it has survived wars, riots, the French Revolution, World War II, and the weather. Once before, in 1786, it survived the loss of its spire — weakened by centuries of weathering.
To honor the great history of Notre Dame and to celebrate the restoration and preservation work that will bring the cathedral back to its original splendor, here are excerpts from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) — translated by Isabel F. Hapgood.
“The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still no doubt, a majestic and sublime edifice. But, beautiful as it has been preserved in growing old, it is difficult not to sigh, not to wax indignant, before the numberless degradations and mutilations which time and men have both caused the venerable monument to suffer, without respect for Charlemagne, who laid its first stone, or for Philip Augustus, who laid the last. On the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals, by the side of a wrinkle, one always finds a scar. Tempus edax, homo edacior*; which I should be glad to translate thus: time is blind, man is stupid.”
“Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Art often undergoes a transformation while they are pending, pendent opera interrupta; they proceed quietly in accordance with the transformed art. The new art takes the monument where it finds it, incrusts itself there, assimilates it to itself, develops it according to its fancy, and finishes it if it can. The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort, without reaction, — following a natural and tranquil law. It is a graft which shoots up, a sap which circulates, a vegetation which starts forth anew. Certainly there is matter here for many large volumes, and often the universal history of humanity in the successive engrafting of many arts at many levels, upon the same monument. The man, the artist, the individual, is effaced in these great masses, which lack the name of their author; human intelligence is there summed up and totalized. Time is the architect, the nation is the builder. […]”
“All these shades, all these differences, do not affect the surfaces of edifices only. It is art which has changed its skin. The very constitution of the Christian church is not attacked by it. There is always the same internal woodwork, the same logical arrangement of parts. […] The service of religion once assured and provided for, architecture does what she pleases. Statues, stained glass, rose windows, arabesques, denticulations, capitals, bas-reliefs, — she combines all these imaginings according to the arrangement which best suits her. Hence, the prodigious exterior variety of these edifices, at whose foundation dwells so much order and unity. The trunk of a tree is immovable; the foliage is capricious.”
