CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE-DAME OF PARIS
Cathedral of Notre-Dame of Paris
LOCATION: 6, PARVIS NOTRE-DAME
HOURS: Mon–Sun, 8:00–6:45
MÉTRO: Cité; Hôtel de Ville
www.notredamedeparis.fr
“Lovers alone wear sunlight,” an American poet wrote.
I last entered Notre-Dame on a chilly gray afternoon in November 2018. It had been raining for days. There was no line outside, a rarity on the Parvis. Inside, the aisles were unclogged. I’ve been inside the cathedral many times since my first long-ago visit to Paris. As I stood now in the Crossing, at my back a statue of Jeanne d’Arc on her horse and just next to me the famous statue of the “Virgin of Paris”—“so overpoweringly lovely and inaccessible,” wrote the architectural critic Allan Temko—“an Empress of Heaven.… She is Notre-Dame of Paris, she was … medieval France”—all of a sudden, on that dull November day, the sun came out. Bright. Electric. Colored light shooting down from the high church’s high windows to hit statues and pillars and people.
“The sapphire I know is there,” wrote Denise Levertov.
It never crossed my mind that I would not be inside Notre-Dame again, would not lay eyes on la belle mère de Paris for years.
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When you’re inside Notre-Dame, standing in the Crossing, looking north at the Rose Window—the northern rose, with its stories from the Old Testament—there is sometimes, no matter what the weather outside, a dim light or glow flash flooding blue and rose upon massive gray stone pillars. That line from a poem by—the name now comes to me—e. e. cummings: “Lovers alone wear sunlight.”
The cathedral, with its high-to-the-sky windows—“medieval blue”—is the love object here. Beauty, the deep blue mother light, now touches the ancient church everywhere, through every window, in every corner, chapel, aisle. Notre-Dame, the mother of cathedrals all over Europe. “Tangled up in blue.”
Visitors, thirteen million a year, have mixed reactions to the “Virgin’s Church.” In the stillness, there’s a feeling of reverence. You might also sense a ho-hum indifference as you find yourself stuck inside swarms of tourists. “Disneyland,” sneered a bearded young man to his partner. Another tourist mecca, an exemplar of mass tourism. “Skip Notre-Dame, skip the whole Cité,” my friend Beryl, a child of the Bible Belt, had advised when I was planning my first trip to the City of Light. “It’s Times Square on the Seine.”
Visitors, most days, line up outside the cathedral on the Parvis, the large plaza in front of it and parallel to the equestrian statue of a heroic Charlemagne (who was, in fact, short, fat, ugly, and illiterate). Once admitted, they shuffle along in the direction of the high altar: distant—east, where in the Middle Ages, the rising sun was believed to offer life to all on this altar table of sacrifice and commemoration. Twelfth-century visitors—1163 was the year of the cathedral’s first groundbreaking—had never seen vaults this high. “The Cathedral is pure upward thrust, rising to God, nearly one hundred and ten feet to the main vault,” writes Allan Temko in his book Notre-Dame of Paris, which Lewis Mumford calls “the best introduction I know to help one enjoy what is left of medieval Paris today.”
The complicated history of Paris, from the prehistoric past to the present, haunts the cathedral, making it a living theater of horrors and glory. Druids performed human sacrifice here (their altar discovered beneath the cathedral’s altar by archaeologists in 1781). Centuries after the pagan druids and then Caesar’s Romans disappeared, the kings and queens of early royal families—the Merovingians, the Carolingians, the Capets—having seized the ancient Île de la Cité and its prosperous commercial ports for themselves for more than a millennium, considered themselves divine appointees of the gods, or centuries on, the one God whom most early medieval people would come to worship.
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For believers, or for pilgrims searching out the beauty of Paris, or for people just wanting to sit down and rest, Notre-Dame has always been a sacred destination, a divine presence. Mary, the mother of Jesus, the Mystical Rose (rosa mystica) is present. The anonymous thirteenth-century writers of the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, perhaps monks from a Paris scriptorium, called her that. They also called her House of Gold (domus aurea), Morning Star (stella matutina), Virgin most merciful (virgo clemens), Mother most amiable (mater amabilis) to name a few of her other titles.
The Rose, rosa mystica, is everywhere. In the design of the windows, in the sculptured images on the capitals, on the choir stalls and the exterior façades which show scenes from the life of the Virgin. The standard explanation of her church’s origin as a cathedral is that the word cathedral comes from the Latin “cathedra,” meaning “chair”: the cathedral is the site of the bishop’s chair, where he sits in power and judgment. The bishop is the human stand-in for the hierarchical structure of the church. But in Notre-Dame, the Rose rules.
Parisians do not deny their mixed-up history: the mix of polarities, the brutal and the safe, the ugliness and tenderness, lights and shadows. Notre-Dame is perhaps the most powerful site of the city’s mixed collective memory: its double consciousness of love and repulsion, the place where “the historical consciousness of the French people has focused,” to quote Colin Jones in Paris: A Biography of a City. Without such a mix, the sense of irony that is everywhere in Paris might never have asserted its edgy presence.
It’s huge: 65,000 square feet in floor space, 130 meters in total length. The nave is flanked by double aisles; the double ambulatory flanks the five bays of the choir; 37 chapels in honor of 150 saints surround all these spaces. There is so much to look at above ground: high above the nave, light descends from the clerestory windows; the buttresses do seem to fly; visitors study and photograph the small carved details of the choir stalls, tombs, statues. There are devils, snakes, the angelic smiles of saints, acanthus, roses.
Hidden underneath this massive public monument are the layered remains of several earlier sites of worship discovered over the centuries: the fourth-century BC altar of the druids—the priesthood of the Celtic tribes named the Parisii by Julius Caesar; the traders, fishermen, and forest creatures who worshipped the water (the Seine was twice as wide then as it is now); a temple from 54 BC, when the Romans arrived, dedicating the temple to Jupiter; the church of Saint-Étienne (Stephen, the first martyr), founded in 528, after the Romans left; a smaller church, the Carolingian Notre-Dame of the 700s to 800s, built nearest to the Seine on the eastern tip of the Cité behind Saint-Étienne’s. The Normans (or Norsemen) invaded and destroyed the city throughout the ninth century, burning down the first Notre-Dame; rioters would tear down the episcopal palace on the southwest corner in 1831. The cathedral would always be a target. In time it represented the double power of the Church and the Monarchy. Today’s cathedral rises above all these layers of subterranean ruins and myth and horrors.
At times there’s a deep quiet here, despite the crowds. People sit and kneel and stand, their heads tilted back to look up into the vaults, at the roof and the blue windows, north, east, south, and west. I remember the character, Lambert Strether, a nineteenth-century visitor from New England, the protagonist of Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors, sitting alone in the shadows, slightly revolted by all the churchiness. Protestantism—the Puritans—brought none of Catholicism’s elaborate architecture across the ocean.
* * *
The medieval poet François Villon, born 1431 (the year Jeanne d’Arc was murdered), a notorious roistering student, thief, jailbird, street fighter, accused murderer of a priest, a famously bawdy and delicately lyric poet, beloved by Blake and Joyce—“Mais où sont les neiges d’antan”—Villon set many poems here, in what was one of his and his mother’s local churches (they lived nearby in the Latin Quarter). The poems include Ballade for Praying to Our Lady (written, perhaps, for his destitute and pious mother). A number of the ballades ring with a sweet undogmatic faith. “Our Lord, as such he do I confess / and wish in this faith to live and die.” His trusting faith as well as his delight in the pleasures of the body is the strongest motif in his Testament, ripe with sexy jokes and ambiguous puns, an irreverent laughter capturing the low and high life of Paris. Dominant in all his work is sympathy for the poor, for sinners like himself, for the oppressed. His comedy shows his contempt for the oppressors roaming Paris: lawyers, judges, clerical hierarchy. The enemy.
The ideologues of the French Revolution—Robespierre and his disciples—bear not a trace of the likes of Villon. Rigid, cruel, puritanical, their mobs tried to incinerate the Virgin’s church. They chopped away from the front façade the sculptured heads of the prophets; they either mistook them for the heads of kings or thought they were all part of a piece; the differences didn’t matter. (“Nothing is the same as anything else,” wrote Michael Walzer.) Notre-Dame was renamed Temple of Reason. Jesus Christ, the nobody from small-town Nazareth, was renamed the Supreme Being. Rosa mystica was reidentified as a “goddess,” the actress playing her in a triumphal tableau bedecked in red, white, and blue chiffon. The cult of abstraction signaled the stupidity of the regime.
Then came Napoleon, who returned the cathedral to its original Roman Catholic identity—hierarchical, monarchical—as he crowned himself emperor here, stealing the pope’s scene and reminding Paris that the cathedral always signified as a site of power. The Virgin’s love of the people, the powerless, anonymous poor, belonged to Notre-Dame’s identity as a site of mythology, a myth of the Middle Ages that is still embraced. “Marie,” said the composer and musician Francis Poulenc, “she understands everything.”
There was nothing fanciful about the Parisian poor in any era. They were as real as the mud that caked on everything in the medieval streets and then spattered the beggars who were everywhere in the centuries that followed. The Virgin’s church sheltered them.
In the early nineteenth century, Victor Hugo made the poor people of Paris the protagonists of his novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1837). Quasimodo, Hugo’s misshapen dwarf (“he was born one-eyed, humpbacked, and lame”) was the church’s bell ringer, who loved the bell “Marie” in the south tower. He loved the gypsy Esmeralda. Most of all he loved his cathedral, “his egg, his nest, his home, his country, the universe.” He was “perpetually subject to its mysterious influence.”
Paris rejoiced when the radical Commune of 1871 failed to burn down their church. The fire was set; rescuers from the nearby Hôtel-Dieu broke down the doors and put it out. A German bomb hit the cathedral’s roof in World War I. Notre-Dame escaped the Nazis: Hitler had given the order to mine all religious and historical monuments as well as the bridges of the Seine: he intended to leave the Allies a “smoking ruin” when they came from Normandy to take back Paris in August 1944. The story goes that the German general Dietrich von Choltitz refused to carry out his boss’s order: Choltitz, believing that Hitler had gone insane, allowed the mining of the monuments but then refused to order the lighting of the fuses.
These are a few of the historical “miracles” that have saved the life of Notre-Dame. The story of her blind organist, Louis Vierne (1870–1937), who wrote symphonies for the cathedral’s organ, a magnificent Cavaillé-Coll instrument, is another point of light along the complex continuum of the church’s history. He started out as a student of César Franck and was appointed to the Notre-Dame organ in 1901. His recitals were legendary, attracting large and faithful audiences. In 1937, Vierne had a heart attack while playing his organ. He died at the keyboard.
Contemporary Paris still gathers here in solidarity to celebrate the survival of church and city. In World War II, Charles de Gaulle led a parade of thousands inside Notre-Dame the day after the Liberation (August 25, 1944) to honor the Virgin, Mater Dei, and offer thanksgiving for the Liberation. Snipers hidden in the balcony, under the clerestory windows, tried to pick him off, but de Gaulle didn’t flinch though his companions dove beneath the kneelers.
These days, Paris comes to sing and remember their deliverance from the latest attacks by the terrorists of 2015.
Fluctuat nec mergitur is the motto of Paris: She is tossed by the waves but does not drown …
APRIL 15, 2019: 3:45 P.M.
A friend calls from Paris just as I’ve typed the words “Fluctuat nec mergitur.”
“Notre-Dame is on fire,” she shouts into the phone. We turn on the TV. My husband and I stand openmouthed, horrified. For hours we watch her burn, our eyes stuck on the towers and the north Rose window.
9:45 P.M.
The north window—the Rose—made of the original thirteenth-century glass—has held. And the towers.
President Macron declares the cathedral will be repaired and open to visitors in five years. Parisians gather in front of the smoking ruins until after midnight. Young, old, male, female, many join in singing the “Salve Regina.” Many are weeping.
* * *
In the months that follow, asbestos and lead from the smoldering cathedral blow poison over the Île de la Cité, its schools and bridges and apartments, the bistros and gardens. The repairs are going slowly. Liturgies are being held in Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois (see p. 127).
DECEMBER 24, 2019, “THERE WILL BE NO CHRISTMAS AT NOTRE-DAME”
From the New York Times:
[I]t is terribly sad for anyone who has ever been to Paris in winter.… It is a reminder of how great an emptiness the fire left in the heart of Paris and far beyond. Notre-Dame is more than a church,… more even than a symbol of one of the great cities of the world. Like many of the earth’s great cultural landmarks, it has a life of its own; it is a living character in art, literature, music and legend, and a place where a tired passer-by can drop in for some rest and quiet thought. It carries a message that every visitor can interpret in his or her own way.
MARCH 12, 2020
Now Charles de Gaulle Airport is closed because of the Covid-19 pandemic. No one knows for how long. Notre-Dame is still standing; the repairs continue.
Paris does not drown.
Nearby
ÎLE SAINT-LOUIS: Place Louis Aragon. The western tip of the Île Saint-Louis. Cross the bridge between the eastern tip of the Île de la Cité and the west end of the Île Saint-Louis. Take a short left to Place Louis Aragon. Look west, over one of the city’s loveliest views of the Seine. “Paris is the Seine,” the local saying goes. The surrealist poet Louis Aragon (1897–1982) lived on the île when he wrote the novel Aurélien: the Seine is a main character. A Communist, editor, essayist, member of the Académie Goncourt, Aragon was the résistant most hunted by the Gestapo during the Occupation.
ROBERT BRESSON (1901–1999): lived above the Place Louis Aragon at number 49, fifth floor. With Jean-Luc Godard, Bresson is considered France’s greatest filmmaker. “There is the feeling that God is everywhere,” he said in 1973, “and the more I live, the more I see that in nature, in the country. When I see a tree, I see that God exists. I try to catch and to convey the idea that we have a soul and that the soul is in contact with God. That’s the first thing I want to get in my films.” These include Diary of a Country Priest (based on Georges Bernanos’s novel of the same title), L’Argent (The Money), Pickpocket, A Man Escaped, and Au Hasard Balthazar.
COLLÈGE DES BERNARDINS: Leave the Île de la Cité, cross to the Left Bank on the Pont de l’Archevêché, turn left, walk east on the Quai de Montebello to the Quai de la Tournelle; turn right on rue de Poissy, into no. 20. From the Île Saint-Louis, cross to the Left Bank on the Pont de la Tournelle, then turn right on the rue de Poissy. (Open Mon–Sat, 10–6; Sun and hols, 2–6; closed Aug and Christmas). Founded in 1244, this Cistercian monastery, restored in 2008, is now part of the Cathedral School, a center for lectures, classes, research, concerts, and festivals. A magnificent large nave greets you on entrance. There’s a guided tour at www.collegedesberdardines.fr.
Related Readings
Louis Aragon, Aurélien, 2 vols., trans. Eithne Wilkins. Ranked 51 in Le Monde’s 100 Best Books of the Century.
Rollin Smith, Louis Vierne: Organist of Notre-Dame Cathedral
Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer
Copyright © 2022 by Susan Cahill. Photographs Copyright © 2022 by Marion Ranoux
