Notre-Dame: A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals by Ken Follett.
Title: Notre-Dame: A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals.
Author: Ken Follett.
Genre: Non-fiction, architecture, history.
Country: U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2019.
Summary: Written in aid of the crucial work to restore Paris’s great cathedral, this author describes the emotions that gripped him when he learned about the fire that threatened to destroy one of the greatest cathedrals in the world-the Notre-Dame de Paris. The author then tells the story of the cathedral, from its construction to the role it has played across time and history, and he reveals the influence that the Notre-Dame had on cathedrals around the world and on the writing of one of his most famous novels, The Pillars of the Earth.
My rating: 8/10
My review:
♥ I know the building well. One Christmas Barbara and I went to midnight Mass there. Thousands of people thronged the church. The dim lights cast deep shadows in the aisles, the carols echoed in the nave, and the vault high above us was cloaked in darkness. Most moving of all was the knowledge that our ancestors had been celebrating Christmas this way in this building for more than eight hundred years.
♥ As night fell on April 15, 2019, the people of Paris came out onto the streets, and the television cameras showed thousands of grief-stricken faces lit by the flames, some singing hymns, others just weeping as they watched their beloved cathedral burn. The tweet that got the most heartfelt response from my followers that night just said:
Francais, fancaises, nous partagons votre tristesse.
Frenchmen, Frenchwomen, we share your sadness.
♥ Notre-Dame had always seemed eternal, and the medieval builders certainly thought it would last until the Day of Judgment; but suddenly we saw that it could be destroyed. In the life of every boy there is a painful moment when he realizes that his father is not all-powerful and invulnerable. The old man has weaknesses, he may become ill, and one day he will die. The fall of the spire made me think of that moment.
♥ Notre-Dame is too close to my heart. I'm not a religious believer, yet despite that I go to church. I love the architecture, the music, the words of the Bible, and the sense of sharing something profound with other people. I have long found deep spiritual peace in the great cathedrals, as do many millions of people, believers and nonbelievers alike.
♥ ..French attachment to Notre-Dame is profound. It has been the stage for some of the key events in French history. Every road sign that tells you how far you are from Paris measures the distance to Kilometer Zero, a bronze start embedded in the pavement in front of Notre-Dame. The great bell called Emmanuel, in the south tower, can be heard all over the city when it rings its deep F sharp for joy or sorrow, the end of war or a tragedy, such as 9/11.
♥ The existing building was in the round-arched style we call Romanesque, but there was an exciting new architectural movement that used pointed arches, letting more light into the building; a look now called Gothic. This style had been pioneered only six miles from Notre-Dame, at the abbey church of St.-Denis-burial place of the French kings-which had brilliantly combined several technical and visual innovations: as well as the pointed arch it featured piers of clustered shafts sprouting ribs up into a high vault that was lighter in weight; a semicircular walkway at the east end to keep pilgrims moving past the relics of St. Denis; and, outside, graceful flying buttresses that facilitated larger windows and made the massive church look as if it were about to take flight.
♥ All of the above sounds straightforward, but in fact it is astonishing. The cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, and most of the great Gothic churches that are still the most beautiful buildings in the cities of Europe, were erected in the Middle Ages, a time marked by violence, famine, and plague.
The construction of a cathedral was a huge enterprise lasting decades. Chartres Cathedral was built in twenty-six years, and Salisbury in thirty-eight years, but they were unusually quick. Notre-Dame de Paris took almost one hundred years, and improvements continued after that.
It required hundreds of workers, and it cost a fortune. The modern equivalent would be a moon shot.
That huge building was erected by people who lived in wooden huts with straw roofs, people who slept on the floor because only the rich had beds. The towers are 223 feet high, yet the builders did not have the mathematics to calculate the stresses in such structures. They proceeded by trial and error, and they made mistakes. Sometimes their work collapsed: Beauvais Cathedral fell down twice.
♥ How did such majestic beauty arise out of the violence and filth of the Middle Ages?
The first part of the answer is something almost always left out of any history of cathedrals: the weather.
The years 950 to 1250 are known to climatologists as the medieval climactic anomaly. For three hundred years the weather in the North Atlantic region was better than usual. The evidence comes from tree rings, ice cores, and lake deposits, all of which tell us about long-term weather changes in the past. There were still occasional years of bad harvests and famine, but on average the temperature wads higher. Warm weather meant more crops and wealthier people. And so Europe emerged form the long depression known as the Dark Ages.
♥ Whenever human beings manage to produce more than they need to survive, someone comes along to take the surplus away from them. In medieval Europe there were two such groups, the aristocracy and the church. The noblemen fought wars and, between battles, went hunting to maintain their equestrian skills and their bloodthirsty spirit. The church built cathedrals.
♥ Masons drew their designs on a tracing floor. Mortar was spread on the ground and allowed to harden, then the plans were drawn with a sharply pointed iron instrument such as a nail. At first the scratch lines were white, but they faded over time, allowing new designs to be drawn on top of the old. Some tracing floors have survived, and I have studied them at York Minster and Wells Cathedral.
♥ The nave of Notre-Dame would be 108 feet high-the tallest in the world (though not for long: it was overtaken by Chartres a few years later).
♥ More stone was ordered. This was not the famous creamy-gray "Paris stone," technically Lutetian limestone, used for the Louvre, the Invalides, the Hollywood homes of movie millionaires, and for Giorgio Armani's stores all over the world today. That was not discovered until the seventeenth century and comes from quarries twenty-five miles north of Paris in the Department of the Oise. In the Middle Ages the cost of transporting stone could be prohibitive. Notre-Dame used limestone from numerous quarries close at hand, just outside the boundaries of Paris.
The master would have separated stones of different characteristics: harder ones were used for structural supports that needed to bear enormous weight; softer, more easily carved stones were kept for non-load-bearing decorative details.
♥ By this time the city of Paris must have had its own standard measures, on display near the quayside on the right bank of the Seine. Paris was already a commercial city, probably the largest in Europe, and it was important to such places that a yard of cloth, a pound of silver, or a gallon of wine should be the same size in every shop in town so that customers knew what they were buying. (No doubt there were also merchants who complained about too much government regulation!) So it's likely that the master mason of Notre-Dame made his yardstick the same as that of the merchants of Paris.
♥ There were women as well as men. Jean Gimpel read the thirteenth-century tax register of the municipality of Paris and found many female names on the list of craftspeople who paid taxes. Gimpel was the first historian to note the role of women in building our great cathedrals. The idea that women are too weak for this kind of work is nonsense, but it might be true that the structure of the male arm is better designed for hammering action. In any event, women were plasterers and mortar makers more often than hammer-and-chisel masons. They frequently worked as part of a family team, husband and wife and older children, and it is easy to imagine the man cutting stone, the woman making mortar, and the teenagers fetching and carrying sand, lime, and water.
Most cathedrals were built by an international effort. The designer of England's premier cathedral, Canterbury, was a Frenchman, Guillaume De Sens. Men and women of different nations worked side by side on these building sites, and foreigners are right to see Notre-Dame as their heritage as well as that of the French nation.
♥ It was twenty-six years before the high altar was consecrated.
♥ New styles emerged. The rose windows, perhaps the best-loved features of Notre-Dame, were a late addition, begun in the 1240s by the first mason whose name we know, Jean de Chelles. The stained glass was made late in the building process, when the structure was firmly established.
The twin towers were in place by 1250. Probably the last phase was the casting of the bells. As these were well-nigh impossible to transport over any distance they were cast on site, and the builders of Notre-Dame probably made a bell pit near the base of the west front so that the finished article could be hauled up directly into the tower.
The cathedral was more or less built by 1260. But Bishop Sully had died in 1196. He never saw his great cathedral finished.
♥ On September 1, 1830, [Victor Hugo] sat down to write chapter one. His wife recalled: "He bought himself a bottle of ink and a huge grey knitted shawl, which covered him from head to foot; locked away his formal clothes, so that he would not be tempted to go out; and entered his novel as if it were a prison." (Writers are often swathed in wool, by the way; we sit still all day, so we get cold.)
By the middle of January 1831 the book was, astonishingly, finished. He had written something like 180,000 words in four and a half months. And it was very, very good.
Set in the year 1482, it had the same name as the cathedral, Notre-Dame de Paris.
♥ In the twenty-first century we believe that people who are different from the average should not be defined by their difference, but seen in the round. Novelists have never worked that way: rather, they use difference to express personality. Shylock and Fagin are defined by their Jewishness; Captain Hook and Blind Pugh are defined by their disability; and the list of characters defined by their sexual orientation is very long-E.M. Forster's Maurice, Patricia Highsmith's Carol, George R.R. Martin's Renly Baratheon, Ian Fleming's Pussy Galore, and many more.
♥ The novel that Notre-Dame inspired Hugo to write has been made into at least thirteen films, five television series, five plays, fifteen stage musicals, five ballets, two BB radio serials, and a video game, according to Wikipedia. There may be many more versions. Probably the most distinguished film is the 1939 black-and-white version starring Charles Laighton as Quasimodo. I remember seeing it as a boy, on someone's tiny 1960s television set, and being scared stiff.
♥ Both Hugo's eulogistic descriptions of the beauty of Notre-Dame and his outraged protests about its dereliction moved the readers of his book. A worldwide bestseller, it attracted tourists and pilgrims to the cathedral, and the half-ruined building they saw shamed the city of Paris. His indignation spread to others. The government decided to do something.
A competition was held to choose the expert who would supervise the renovation of the cathedral. Two young architects collaborated on the winning proposal. One of them died suddenly, but the other went on to do the work. His name was Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.
He was thirty when he won the job, and he wold be fifty before it was finished.
♥ The chapel of St. Joseph is halfway along the south side of the nave. In 1944 it contained a statue of Joseph holding the baby Jesus. On August 26, the morning after Paris was liberated, Mass was said in the chapel in English by a bespectacled American priest, Father Leonard Fries, wearing borrowed French robes.
The chapel is less that 130 square feet and contained an altar as well as the statue, but the service was attended by 300 men, mostly of the U.S. Army 12h Infantry Regiment, all carrying carbines or full-length rifles and holding their helmets in their hands. They overflowed into the aisle and the nave of the great cathedral. As the sun rose into a cloudless sky and shone through the stained glass of the east end, some of the men who had freed Paris knelt to remember the comrades they had left behind on the beaches of Normandy.
It was the first service that day, but later there would be another, much bigger. The radio that morning announced that General de Gaulle would lead a victory march along the Champs-Élysées at 2:00 P.M. and attend a thanksgiving service of Te Deum at 4:30 in the cathedral of Notre-Dame.
♥ [De Gaulle] was at odds with the Resistance leaders, who had stayed to fight the Germans here in France while he was living at the Connaught Hotel in London. Now he was determined to position himself as de factor president. When Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French on December 2, 1804, he did it at Notre-Dame. And de Gaulle knew that if he was going to make himself look like France's new ruler he needed to do it in Notre-Dame.
♥ Every year, millions of people visit Notre-Dame and other cathedrals. They are the oldest buildings in northwest Europe. There are even more ancient buildings elsewhere-Roman ruins, Greek temples, the Egyptian pyramids-but I think our cathedrals are the oldest still used for their original purpose.
♥ Notre-Dame is the fifth church built on the site.
♥ Readers sometimes ask: How do you know so much about the medieval builders? Some of our information comes from pictures. When medieval artists made illustrations for Bibles they often depicted the tower of Babel. The story, in the book of genesis, is that men decided to build a tower up to heaven, and their arrogance displeased God, who made them all speak different languages, so that in the resulting confusion the project was abandoned. Those illustrations, showing stone masons and mortar makers, scaffolding, and hoists, give us a lot of evidence about medieval building sites.
Other sources of information about cathedral builders include surviving contracts between the chapter and the builders, for example, and payroll records.
♥ For me, the cathedral is about what people can achieve when they work together.
Furthermore, this work of art could not be made unless thousands more people supported the project. It was the achievement of an entire community. In Pillars I wrote about how the building of the cathedral drew in people from every sector of medieval society: not just the clergy but also aristocrats, businesspeople, city dwellers, and rural agriculturalists. They gave support and money, a lot of money. Everyone benefited. Employment was created, commerce was strengthened, markets grew up, international migration was stimulated, and new technology was constantly being invented and spread. In my novel those who oppose the building do so only because they want it built somewhere else.
♥ Not long ago I was on the roof of Peterborough Cathedral. Some of the pinnacles had been replaced in the 1950s, and I noticed that the new ones were crude, lacking detail, by comparison with the highly decorated medieval features beside them. The difference was not visible from the ground, and evidently the craftsmen of the 1950s thought there was no point in carving details that no one could see. The medieval builders wold have disagreed. They made the unseen parts just as carefully as those on public view because, after all, God could see them.
♥ "Don't you hate all the tourists in their shorts with their cameras?" No. Cathedrals have always been full of tourists. In the Middle Ages they were not called tourists, they were pilgrims, but they traveled for many of the same reasons: to see the world and its marvels, to broaden their minds, to educate themselves, and perhaps to come in touch with something miraculous, otherworldly, eternal.
I believe that a novel is successful to the extent that it touches the emotions of the reader. And something similar may be true of all works of art. It is certainly true of cathedrals. Our encounters with them are emotional. When we see them we are awestruck. When we walk around we are enraptured by their grace and light. When we sit quietly we are possessed by a sense of peace.
And when one burns, we weep.