utline it and cause to
emerge from the fog the great heads of the towers; or take that black
silhouette again, enliven with shadow the thousand acute angles of the
spires and gables, and make it start out more toothed than a shark's jaw
against a copper-colored western sky,--and then compare.

And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which
the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb--on the morning of some
grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost--climb
upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be
present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from
heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver
simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church
to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin.
Then, all at once, behold!--for it seems at times, as though the ear
also possessed a sight of its own,--behold, rising from each bell
tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the
vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak,
isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little
by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each
other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything
but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the
numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city,
and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its
oscillations.

Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as
it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of
each group of notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the
dialogue, by turns grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can
see the octaves leap from one tower to another; you watch them spring
forth, winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall,
broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their midst the
rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bells
of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it,
executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like flashes
of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked
singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other
end, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The