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.
It is a graft which shoots up, a sap which circulates, a vegetation which starts forth anew. The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort, without reaction,- following a natural and tranquil law. 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. Art often undergoes a transformation while they are pending, pendent opera interrupta they proceed quietly in accordance with the transformed art. Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. This description appears at the opening of Book Three of the novel, just after we meet Quasimodo the hunchback and Esmeralda the dancing girl, and it’s an evocation of what makes Notre Dame great:
It’s a pinnacle of a certain kind.Īnd so if Notre Dame is irrevocably damaged, it might be a good time to turn to one of the greatest celebrations of what the cathedral represents, which appears in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Notre Dame represents the most beautiful things that we as human beings can make if we pour unimaginable amounts of labor and wealth and resources and time into the effort. It survived the loss of its spire once before, in 1786, after the spire’s supporting structure was so weakened by centuries of weathering that restorers removed it and replaced it. And in the time since the cathedral was largely completed in 1260, it has survived war and weather and changing fashions.
It’s not the work of any one person, but of generations upon generations of labor. Notre Dame is a symbol of human accomplishment, and more than that, of social accomplishment. If we lose Notre Dame, we’re not losing only a sacred space, and not only an art treasure. “Paris is beheaded,” one man told the New York Times as the spire fell. Notre Dame is on fire, and its spire has fallen.Īs of Monday afternoon, we don’t know for sure how the fire began or how extensive the damage is, but the world has responded to the news with an outcry of horror and grief.
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