leg.

Hence the author attaches particular importance to the public knowing
for a certainty that the chapters here added have not been made
expressly for this reprint. They were not published in the preceding
editions of the book for a very simple reason. At the time when
"Notre-Dame-de-Paris" was printed the first time, the manuscript of
these three chapters had been mislaid. It was necessary to rewrite them
or to dispense with them. The author considered that the only two of
these chapters which were in the least important, owing to their extent,
were chapters on art and history which in no way interfered with the
groundwork of the drama and the romance, that the public would not
notice their loss, and that he, the author, would alone be in possession
of the secret. He decided to omit them, and then, if the whole truth
must be confessed, his indolence shrunk from the task of rewriting the
three lost chapters. He would have found it a shorter matter to make a
new romance.

Now the chapters have been found, and he avails himself of the first
opportunity to restore them to their place.

This now, is his entire work, such as he dreamed it, such as he made it,
good or bad, durable or fragile, but such as he wishes it.

These recovered chapters will possess no doubt, but little value in
the eyes of persons, otherwise very judicious, who have sought in
"Notre-Dame-de-Paris" only the drama, the romance. But there are
perchance, other readers, who have not found it useless to study the
aesthetic and philosophic thought concealed in this book, and who have
taken pleasure, while reading "Notre-Dame-de-Paris," in unravelling
beneath the romance something else than the romance, and in following
(may we be pardoned these rather ambitious expressions), the system
of the historian and the aim of the artist through the creation of the
poet.

For such people especially, the chapters added to this edition will
complete "Notre-Dame-de-Paris," if we admit that "Notre-Dame-de-Paris"
was worth the trouble of completing.

In one of these chapters on the present decadence of architecture, and
on the death (in his mind almost inevitable) of that king of arts, the
author expresses and develops an opinion unfortunately well rooted in
him, and well thought out. But he feels it necessary to say here that he
earnestly desires that the future may, some day, put him in the wrong.
He knows that art in all its forms has everything to hope from