# Notre-Dame is a rare
reminder of medieval Paris. A devil joins the crowd of statues on the high
walkway between the cathedral’s two towers
EVERY CATHEDRAL HAS A face it presents to the world,
but somehow Notre-Dame’s feels particularly expressive. At the top, two square
towers with dark, shuttered arches stare out over the rooftops of Paris. In the
middle, a rose window and a filigree of stonework confirm the uncanny skill of
medieval masons. And at the bottom, three sets of doors are surrounded by
sculptures of saints and sinners forming a bible without words.
Like any human face, the cathedral façade has its slight
flaws (you can still see the small square holes where the wooden scaffolding
went in eight centuries ago), and looks more real for being slightly
asymmetrical – just enough to avoid monotony, and perhaps also to make a
god-fearing sign of respect before the only creator of perfection.
The queue to get in passes by a bronze marker in the
cobblestones, denoting ‘point zero’ – the spot from which all French road
distances are measured. As an official centre point, this makes a certain
amount of sense. Notre-Dame is on an island, washed by the strong current of
the Seine, that was one of earliest parts of Paris to be settled in Roman
times-conveniently neutral ground in the city’s Left Bank-Right Bank divide.
In 1160, Bishop Maurice de Sully judged Paris’s existing
Saint-Etienne cathedral inadequate, and the construction of a replacement began
three years later. The bishop never saw the finished building, which took shape
over more than a century. During construction, the builders were worried enough
about the growing structure to add the then-novel safety measure of flying
buttresses. As an architectural statement, they must have betrayed a certain
lack of confidence at first, but time has been the test, and now they seem at
one with the medieval tracery. Inside, the soaring ceilings are further proof
that stone can convey delicacy as well as bulk.
A lot of what appears medieval however is really
neo-medieval. The French Revolution took an anti-clerical turn, and the
cathedral suffered for it. Most of its bells were melted down and in 1793 the 28
royal statues on the main façade were vandalized, their heads hacked off-the
crowd had allegedly mistaken these Biblical rulers for kings of France. By
1831, when Victor Hugo wrote The
Hunchback of Notre-Dame, the cathedral had become a dilapidated embarrassment.
The architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc was brought in to bring Notre-Dame back to
glory in the 1840s. as with many of his restoration projects however, he took
some creative liberties along the way.
These include Notre-Dame’s famous grotesques, or chimeras –
not properly gargoyles, as they serve as decoration rather than waterspouts. A
dimpled, well-trodden spiral staircase leads to the Galerie des Chimeres. A
herd of grotesques perch on this balcony walkway between the west
towers-sinewy, bearded devils, but also
a pelican and even an elephant. They weren’t on the original blueprints, but
then again Notre-Dame never got the spires that were meant to top its twin
square towers. Perhaps a great cathedral is always a work in progress.
On the façade’s left-hand portal, look out the statue of St
Denis. The patron saint of France is said to have walked a few miles after
being decapitated, carrying his head in his arms.
