, 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 Augustus, who laid the last.

On the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals, by the side of a
wrinkle, one always finds a scar. _Tempus edax, homo edacior*_; which I
should be glad to translate thus: time is blind, man is stupid.

* Time is a devourer; man, more so.

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 last two centuries.

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 portals hollowed out in an arch; the
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, harmonious parts of a magnificent whole, superposed in five
gigantic stories;--develop themselves before the eye, in a mass and
without confusion, with their innumerable details of statuary, carving,
and sculpture, joined powerfully to the 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 the artist start
forth in a hundred 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 the Middle Age