I took yesterday off from work so I could join Ashley on a tour of Notre Dame organized by the American Women's Group of Paris (which kindly welcomed me and two other male spouses). I'm glad I did. Our guide, Rebecca Defraites, is the only American guide currently giving tours, and she knows, and clearly loves, of what she speaks. We spent ten minutes alone on the three sets of doors to the cathedral, but it was clear that we could have spent an hour more with them and still not done them full justice, or exhausted Rebecca's knowledge. At the same time, the wind was whipping across the square, and we were wet from the rainy walk over, so we were ready to head indoors.
Notre Dame is on the Île de la Cité, at the literal and historical center of Paris. The Île is the site of the first settlement was that would become Paris, and the Place du Parvis de Notre Dame, where we stood wet and shivering, is kilometre zero for the French road system. Construction on the cathedral began in 1163 but took almost two more centuries to fully complete. From afar, and even up close before you get to know it better, it's monolithic -- large, Gothic and imposing. Up close, with an able guide like Rebecca, it resolves into innumerable details and features -- each, it seems, with a story behind it. For example, the heads of all 28 statues above the entrance were lopped off during the fever of the Revolution, but were later re-attached. The vertical axis of the north Rose window is angled 15 degrees to the right, while the axis of the south window is perfectly vertical, because it was actually reoriented that way a few centuries back because of structural problems. There are numerous other stained glass windows, but not all were installed at the same time; some were done as late as the 20th century. The colors of these newest windows are consistent with the older ones, but if you look closer, you see that, unlike the older ones, the design is abstract. Had Rebecca not pointed this out, I wouldn't have noticed, but as soon as she did, the differences were almost glaringly apparent.
It's said that cities are living things -- "[b]uilding, breaking, rebuilding," as Carl Sandburg said of Chicago. My biggest takeaway from our tour of Notre Dame -- and it is a big takeaway, for the myriad small details of the cathedral are dazzling but also, ultimately, overwhelming -- is that this also true even of some buildings.
-- MBB
The details above the middle set of doors.
The north Rose window.
Making our exit.
No comments:
Post a Comment