BY BEN ANTAO

The author came face to face with a childhood object of fascination when he visited the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

MY FASCINATION with the Cathedral of Notre Dame began in the 50s when, as a student, I was reading about Gothic architecture in the University library in Mumbai. From the photo it seemed there was something mystical yet mystifying about the façade of this cathedral. Fifty years later its strangeness may have been unravelled for me, but its mystique remains.

Our guide on the Paris city tour was a woman named Dominique who addressed the group in front of the cathedral with the façade facing west. One look at its enormous façade convinced me there was more to it than met my eye. Its two distinctive towers rising to 69 metres are connected by a grand gallery ornamented with gothic gargoyles. In the centre is a beautiful Rose window, ten metres in diameter, whose theme is human life, featuring symbolic scenes such as the Zodiacs and labours of the months. On the exterior, the façade is fronted by a statue of the Virgin and Child accompanied by angels. Below and across the Rose window is the King’s Gallery, a line of statues of the 28 kings of Judah and Israel, which was redesigned by Viollet-le-Duc to replace the statues destroyed during the French Revolution. The revolutionaries mistakenly believed the statues to be of French kings instead of biblical kings, so they decapitated them.

GOTHIC STYLE

COMMENTING on the three Gothic-style west portals, Dominique said they are magnificent examples of early Gothic art. Sculpted between 1200 and 1240, they depict scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary, the Last Judgment, and scenes from the life of St. Anne (the Virgin Mary’s mother). Many of the statues, especially the larger ones, were destroyed in the Revolution and remade in the 19th century. The central portal depicting the Last Judgement has statues of the Twelve Apostles. A curious bas relief on the left west portal of Virgin Mary shows St. John the Baptist holding a decapitated head in his hands. I was intrigued for a moment with the sculptor’s vision to depict the head in this fashion, then understood a possible reason may have been to separately identify this John from the other Johns in the Gospel.

We then entered the cathedral. Again the interior is awesome and immense, with five naves (the central one 12.5 metres wide, the other four 12 metres) 60 metres high and 80 metres long. The transept is 14 m long and 48 m wide. The side aisles are 12 m wide. The height under the vault is 33 m and 43 m under the roof.
The organ below the west Rose window has 7800 pipes, 109 stops, five 56-key manuals and a 32-key pedal board. In December 1992, work was completed on the organ that fully computerised the organ under three LANs (Local Area Networks). The choir section is 36 m long and 12 m wide.

There was a mass in progress (it was Sunday) in the middle of the central nave so the guide spoke to us softly in small clusters by the side altars. The three stained glass Rose windows (12.9 m in diameter) north, west and south dating from the thirteenth century looked ancient but rich in detail and colour. The south Rose window conveys the theme of the New Testament while the north Rose window features the Old Testament. At the rear of the high altar is an impressive white wooden replica of the cathedral kept in a glass enclosure.

RESTORATION WORK

WE learned that a lot of restoration work has been done on the cathedral, beginning from 1548 when rioting Huguenots vandalised parts of the building. Alterations were carried during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV. During the French Revolution, the cathedral was desecrated with art treasures stolen and precious sculptures destroyed, leading to major restoration work in the nineteenth century.

Walking by the north side, we saw flying buttresses supporting the walls from leaning outwards. These arched exterior supports were decorated with gargoyles that spat out water during rainfall as they were connected to the gutters on the roofs. The cathedral was built with limestone quarried from the nearby rocky hills. The range of Gothic designs and intricate details overpowered the eye when Filipe suggested that we walk into the garden to view the exterior of the apse and the east tower. Again the detail here was just magnificent, with striking pinnacles and flying buttresses. The spire rose 96 metres high.

There are five bells, four in the north tower but the grand one called Emmanuel, weighing 13 tons, is located in the south tower. It was this bell that tolled on the night of August 24, 1944 to announce the liberation of the city by Allied Forces.

The bell tower reminded me of Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame published in 1831, which I’d read in college in Mumbai. The story’s protagonist is the hunchback Quasimodo, the bell ringer who lives in the tower. Both he and his adoptive father, the celibate archdeacon Frollo, fall in love with a beautiful young gypsy dancer named Esmeralda, an earthy character. Hugo describes with consummate skill and artistry Quasimodo’s wanderings inside the cathedral’s cavernous towers and his attempt to kidnap Esmeralda and hide her in the sanctuary. The plot of the story set in the 1480s began to scratch the contours of my mind as I gazed at the buttresses and gargoyles and imagined the action of unrequited love, passion and jealousy unfolding there. The novel is narrated in the best literary tradition of French Romanticism.

DREAM PROJECT

THE construction of this magnificent Roman Catholic Cathedral, 127.5 metres long, began in 1163 and completed in 1345. It was the dream of Maurice de Sully, Bishop of Paris, to build a massive structure worthy of the kings of Europe. When the bishop died in 1196, his successors kept the torch alive until its completion.

The cathedral has witnessed several significant events over the centuries. On December 2, 1804 the coronation ceremony of Napoleon I as the Emperor of France and his wife Josephine as the Empress was held with Pope Pius VII officiating. On August 26, 1944 a Te Deum High Mass was celebrated to mark the liberation of Paris.

About 13 million people from all over the world are said to visit this cathedral every year, an average of 30,000 a day. Like the other tourist draw in Paris, The Louvre, you’d need more than a day to appreciate and imbibe the rich religious culture and art harboured in this cathedral whose architectural scale is simply staggering.

The above essay is from the author’s forthcoming travelogue Tour de France, which he visited in September 2009. Ben Antao, a Canadian Goan living in Toronto, is a journalist and novelist who has published five novels and several short stories and non-fiction. Blood & Nemesis, Penance, The Tailor’s Daughter, Living on the Market and The Priest and His Karma are his novels. His non-fiction includes the memoir, Images of the USA (2009) and travelogues Goa A Rediscovery and The Lands of Sicily. His email: ben.antao@rogers.com.