The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [63]
Gringoire ceased, awaiting the effect of this speech upon the young girl. Her eyes were bent on the floor.
“ ‘Phœbus,’ ” she said in an undertone. Then, turning to the poet, “ ‘Phœbus;’ what does that mean?”
Gringoire, scarcely comprehending the connection between his words and this question, was nothing loath to display his erudition. He answered, drawing himself up,—
“It is a Latin word signifying ‘sun.’ ”
“‘Sun’?” she repeated.
“It is the name of a certain handsome archer who was a god,” added Gringoire.
“A god!” repeated the gipsy; and there was something pensive and passionate in her tone.
At this moment, one of her bracelets became unfastened and fell. Gringoire stooped quickly to pick it up; when he rose, the girl and the goat had disappeared. He heard a bolt slide across a small door, doubtless communicating with a neighboring cell, which was fastened on the other side.
“At least, I hope she has left me a bed!” said our philosopher.
He walked around the room. There was nothing fit to sleep upon except a long wooden chest; and even that had a carved lid, which gave Gringoire a feeling, when he stretched himself out upon it, very like that experienced by Micromegasar when he slept at full length upon the Alps.
“Come,” said he, making himself as comfortable as he could, “I must submit to fate. But this is an odd wedding night. It is a pity; there was something simple and antediluvian about this marriage by a broken pitcher, which I liked.”
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER I
Notre-Dame
The Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris is doubtless still a sublime and majestic building. But, much beauty as it may retain in its old age, it is not easy to repress a sigh, to restrain our anger, when we mark the countless defacements and mutilations to which men and Time have subjected that venerable monument, without respect for Charlemagne, who laid its first stone, or Philip Augustus, who laid its last.
Upon the face of this aged queen of French cathedrals, beside every wrinkle we find a scar. “Tempus edax, homo edacior;” which I would fain translate thus: “Time is blind, but man is stupid.”
Had we leisure to study with the reader, one by one, the various marks of destruction graven upon the ancient church, the work of Time would be the lesser, the worse that of Men, especially of “men of art,” since there are persons who have styled themselves architects during the last two centuries.
And first of all, to cite but a few glaring instances, there are assuredly few finer pages in the history of architecture than that façade where the three receding portals with their pointed arches, the carved and denticulated plinth with its twenty-eight royal niches, the huge central rose-window flanked by its two lateral windows as is the priest by his deacon and subdeacon, the lofty airy gallery of trifoliated arcades supporting a heavy platform upon its slender columns, and lastly the two dark and massive towers with their pent-house roofs of slate, harmonious parts of a magnificent whole, one above the other, five gigantic stages, unfold themselves to the eye, clearly and as a whole, with their countless details of sculpture, statuary, and carving, powerfully contributing to the calm grandeur of the whole; as it were, a vast symphony in stone; the colossal work of one man and one nation, one and yet complex, like the Iliad and the old Romance epics, to which it is akin; the tremendous sum