Notre-Dame — The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Notre-Dame, the narrator says, is still majestic, but time and men have scarred it, and men have done the worse. The façade is a symphony in stone, yet three things are gone: the eleven steps, swallowed as Paris rose; the portal statues; and the row of twenty-eight kings. Time repaid part of this with the dark colour of age. Men did not. They felled Saint Christopher and the inner statues, replaced the Gothic altar, swapped coloured glass for white, washed the walls the yellow of a condemned house, and in 1787 cut off the open-work bell tower.

He sorts the damage in three layers. Time only wrinkles the surface. Revolutions from Luther to Mirabeau strip and smash. Fashions since the Renaissance cut into the frame, then cover the wounds and call it good taste. The church is not one pure style. The pointed arch, come with the Crusade, was set on pillars built for the round arch. That graft keeps a shade of the art which pure types lose. Great buildings are a people's work across centuries. Time is the architect, and the nation is the builder. Inside, the basilica plan holds. The trunk stays still, and the foliage changes.