Name: 第03冊--《聖母院的駝背》有聲小說，維克多-雨果著（第1-2章）。 (Book 03 - The Hunchback of Notre Dame Audiobook by Victor Hugo (Chs 1-2))
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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

On the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals, by the side of a wrinkle, one

Tempus edax, homo edacior; which I should be glad to translate thus: time is blind,

If we had leisure to examine with the reader, one by one, the diverse traces of

destruction imprinted upon the old church, time's share would be the least, the share

of men the most, especially the men of art,

since there have been individuals who assumed the title of architects during the

And, in the first place, to cite only a few leading examples, there certainly are few

finer architectural pages than this facade, where, successively and at once, the three

broidered and dentated cordon of the eight and twenty royal niches; the immense

central rose window, flanked by its two lateral windows, like a priest by his

deacon and subdeacon; the frail and lofty

gallery of trefoil arcades, which supports a heavy platform above its fine, slender

columns; and lastly, the two black and massive towers with their slate penthouses,

superposed in five gigantic stories;-- develop themselves before the eye, in a

mass and without confusion, with their innumerable details of statuary, carving,

tranquil grandeur of the whole; a vast symphony in stone, so to speak; the

colossal work of one man and one people, all together one and complex, like the

Iliads and the Romanceros, whose sister it

is; prodigious product of the grouping together of all the forces of an epoch,

where, upon each stone, one sees the fancy of the workman disciplined by the genius of

fashions; a sort of human creation, in a word, powerful and fecund as the divine

creation of which it seems to have stolen the double character,--variety, eternity.

And what we here say of the facade must be said of the entire church; and what we say

of the cathedral church of Paris, must be said of all the churches of Christendom in

All things are in place in that art, self- created, logical, and well proportioned.

To measure the great toe of the foot is to measure the giant.

Let us return to the facade of Notre-Dame, as it still appears to us, when we go

piously to admire the grave and puissant cathedral, which inspires terror, so its

chronicles assert: quoe mole sua terrorem incutit spectantibus.

Three important things are to-day lacking in that facade: in the first place, the

staircase of eleven steps which formerly raised it above the soil; next, the lower

series of statues which occupied the niches

of the three portals; and lastly the upper series, of the twenty-eight most ancient

kings of France, which garnished the gallery of the first story, beginning with

Augustus, holding in his hand "the imperial apple."

Time has caused the staircase to disappear, by raising the soil of the city with a slow

and irresistible progress; but, while thus causing the eleven steps which added to the

devoured, one by one, by the rising tide of the pavements of Paris,--time has bestowed

upon the church perhaps more than it has taken away, for it is time which has spread

centuries which makes the old age of monuments the period of their beauty.

But who has thrown down the two rows of statues? who has left the niches empty? who

has cut, in the very middle of the central portal, that new and bastard arch? who has

dared to frame therein that commonplace and

heavy door of carved wood, a la Louis XV., beside the arabesques of Biscornette?

The men, the architects, the artists of our day.

And if we enter the interior of the edifice, who has overthrown that colossus

of Saint Christopher, proverbial for magnitude among statues, as the grand hall

of the Palais de Justice was among halls, as the spire of Strasbourg among spires?

And those myriads of statues, which peopled all the spaces between the columns of the

nave and the choir, kneeling, standing, equestrian, men, women, children, kings,

bishops, gendarmes, in stone, in marble, in

gold, in silver, in copper, in wax even,-- who has brutally swept them away?

And who substituted for the ancient gothic altar, splendidly encumbered with shrines

and reliquaries, that heavy marble sarcophagus, with angels' heads and clouds,

which seems a specimen pillaged from the Val-de-Grace or the Invalides?

Who stupidly sealed that heavy anachronism of stone in the Carlovingian pavement of

Was it not Louis XIV., fulfilling the request of Louis XIII.?

And who put the cold, white panes in the place of those windows, "high in color,"

which caused the astonished eyes of our fathers to hesitate between the rose of the

And what would a sub-chanter of the sixteenth century say, on beholding the

beautiful yellow wash, with which our archiepiscopal vandals have desmeared their

He would remember that it was the color with which the hangman smeared "accursed"

edifices; he would recall the Hotel du Petit-Bourbon, all smeared thus, on account

"Yellow, after all, of so good a quality," said Sauval, "and so well recommended, that

more than a century has not yet caused it to lose its color."

He would think that the sacred place had become infamous, and would flee.

And if we ascend the cathedral, without mentioning a thousand barbarisms of every

sort,--what has become of that charming little bell tower, which rested upon the

point of intersection of the cross-roofs,

and which, no less frail and no less bold than its neighbor (also destroyed), the

spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, buried itself in the sky, farther forward than the

towers, slender, pointed, sonorous, carved in open work.

An architect of good taste amputated it (1787), and considered it sufficient to

mask the wound with that large, leaden plaster, which resembles a pot cover.

'Tis thus that the marvellous art of the Middle Ages has been treated in nearly

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第03冊--《聖母院的駝背》有聲小說，維克多-雨果著（第1-2章）。 (Book 03 - The Hunchback of Notre Dame Audiobook by Victor Hugo (Chs 1-2))

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