NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS

PREFACE.

A few years ago, while visiting or, rather, rummaging about Notre-Dame, theauthor of this book found, in an obscure nook of one of the towers, thefollowing word, engraved by hand upon the wall:—

ἈΝÁΓΚΗ.

These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone,with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic caligraphy imprinted upon theirforms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that ithad been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, andespecially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck theauthor deeply.

He questioned himself; he sought to divine who could have been that soul intorment which had not been willing to quit this world without leaving thisstigma of crime or unhappiness upon the brow of the ancient church.

Afterwards, the wall was whitewashed or scraped down, I know not which, and theinscription disappeared. For it is thus that people have been in the habit ofproceeding with the marvellous churches of the Middle Ages for the last twohundred years. Mutilations come to them from every quarter, from within as wellas from without. The priest whitewashes them, the archdeacon scrapes them down;then the populace arrives and demolishes them.

Thus, with the exception of the fragile memory which the author of this bookhere consecrates to it, there remains to-day nothing whatever of the mysteriousword engraved within the gloomy tower of Notre-Dame,—nothing of the destinywhich it so sadly summed up. The man who wrote that word upon the walldisappeared from the midst of the generations of man many centuries ago; theword, in its turn, has been effaced from the wall of the church; the churchwill, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the face of the earth.

It is upon this word that this book is founded.

March, 1831.

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