The priest whitewashes them, the archdeacon scrapes them down then the populace arrives and demolishes them. Mutilations come to them from every quarter, from within as well as from without. For it is thus that people have been in the habit of proceeding with the marvellous churches of the Middle Ages for the last two hundred years. He questioned himself he sought to divine who could have been that soul in torment which had not been willing to quit this world without leaving this stigma of crime or unhappiness upon the brow of the ancient church.Īfterwards, the wall was whitewashed or scraped down, I know not which, and the inscription disappeared. 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 their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply. A few years ago, while visiting or, rather, rummaging about Notre-Dame, the author of this book found, in an obscure nook of one of the towers, the following word, engraved by hand upon the wall:.
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