s. All things are in place
in that art, self-created, logical, and well proportioned. To measure
the great toe of the foot is to measure the giant.

Let us return to the facade of Notre-Dame, as it still appears to us,
when we go piously to admire the grave and puissant cathedral, which
inspires terror, so its chronicles assert: _quoe mole sua terrorem
incutit spectantibus_.

Three important things are to-day lacking in that facade: in the first
place, the staircase of eleven steps which formerly raised it above the
soil; next, the lower series of statues which occupied the niches of
the three portals; and lastly the upper series, of the twenty-eight most
ancient kings of France, which garnished the gallery of the first story,
beginning with Childebert, and ending with Phillip Augustus, holding in
his hand "the imperial apple."

Time has caused the staircase to disappear, by raising the soil of the
city with a slow and irresistible progress; but, while thus causing the
eleven steps which added to the majestic height of the edifice, to
be devoured, one by one, by the rising tide of the pavements of
Paris,--time has bestowed upon the church perhaps more than it has taken
away, for it is time which has spread over the facade that sombre hue of
the centuries which makes the old age of monuments the period of their
beauty.

But who has thrown down the two rows of statues? who has left the niches
empty? who has cut, in the very middle of the central portal, that new
and bastard arch? who has dared to frame therein that commonplace and
heavy door of carved wood, a la Louis XV., beside the arabesques of
Biscornette? The men, the architects, the artists of our day.

And if we enter the interior of the edifice, who has overthrown that
colossus of Saint Christopher, proverbial for magnitude among statues,
as the grand hall of the Palais de Justice was among halls, as the spire
of Strasbourg among spires? And those myriads of statues, which peopled
all the spaces between the columns of the nave and the choir, kneeling,
standing, equestrian, men, women, children, kings, bishops, gendarmes,
in stone, in marble, in gold, in silver, in copper, in wax even,--who
has brutally swept them away? It is not time.

And who substituted for the ancient gothic altar, splendidly encumbered
with shrines and reliquaries, that heavy marble sarcophagus, with
angels' heads and clouds, which seems a specimen pillaged from
the Val-de-Grace or the