Notre Dame
More than 16 years of schooling. Nearly seven years of French language studies. A combined 45 years of life experiences and hard earned common sense. All of these factors in our favor and it still took an English-language announcement on the entrance to inform us that the Louvre, world famous museum extraordinaire, was closed.
We both knew—through extensive readings of travel books, watching travel shows and the like—that the Louvre pulls in about 37 thousand people a day but we still naively believed we had beat the crowd.
So, we turned our sights on a nearby attraction you may have heard of: Notre Dame.
Not Pictured: Hunchbacks
Located on “l’Isle de le Cité,” Notre Dame is the most impressive piece of architecture I have ever seen. The famous cathedral is 69 meters tall (about 225 feet) and nearly 1000 years old. Walking towards the entrance and ignoring the crush of people queuing up to enter, the eye is first drawn to the three western entrances housing 15-foot tall doors and flanked by ornate carvings of the 28 Kings of Israel, angels, saints, demons and worshippers. These carvings cover nearly every inch of the doorways, as if the sculptor was certain of committing mortal sinner if chisel did not carve stone.
Looming above the impressive doorways are the bell towers—narrower at the top to give the illusion of extra height— 92 meters (302 feet) tall and ringed by chimeras (technically speaking, Notre Dame, though famous for its gargoyles, has none; gargoyles are sculptures that function as waterspouts, otherwise, they are known as chimeras).
Entering the church is no mean feat. With no orderly fashion in place, the second-most effective way of insuring a spot in line is to force yourself into the thicket of human bodies and limbs nearest to the barricades at the church doors, while trying to prevent others doing the same. This tug of war lasts until you have successfully forced yourself forward past the barricade and reached the single file line leading into the hallowed cathedral.
The most successful way of entering the church, as shown to us ignorant savages pushing, shoving and grunting our way to salvation, was taken by a middle aged woman and she, in turn, forced it on her son. She bypassed the entire ordeal by moving the garishly colored barricade, slipping into the single file line directly, and ignoring the venomous stares of a hundred other tourists made angry because they didn’t think of it first (myself included).
But as angry as we felt, nothing compared to the look of shame on her young teenage son’s face.
At that age, shame comes in two forms; shame of self, an inability to look attractive to an object of desire, the awkward bumbling caused by arms and legs growing faster than the mind can learn to deal with them; and shame of others, cringing at a friends attempts at seduction, or the realization that parents are not always the pinnacle of perfection you once believed them to be. And for a teenager, even the shame caused the the hottest, wettest fart in the quietest classroom will forever pale in comparison to the shame caused by a parent’s unwillingness to conform to (the teenager’s view of) society’s norms.
Seeing his mother given the stink eye by no less than 200 tourists, the boy attempted to physically distance himself from her. At the edge of the crowd before the 10-foot no-man’s land in front of the barricades and the mob of people curling around to enter, he stood as still as a statue. The mother, halfway through the cathedral doorway, waved him to hurry up, oblivious to the struggle that played out in his features and his posture. He waited as long as he dared before he closed his eyes and took a single step forward, a modern-day Indiana Jones performing his leap of faith. His eyes glued to his shoes, he robotically placed each foot in front of the other, pausing between each step, no doubt wondering “If I were to turn and run away, how far could I go before the shame stopped?,” before disappearing into the darkness of the church.
Blaire and I hoped the boy found the salvation he was looking for and even gave a half-hearted search when we finally reached the cathedral ourselves, but we were quickly by the church itself. Notre Dame cathedral hums with reverence. Hundreds of people slowly make their way around the church, but hardly any of them speak. Instead, all one hears in the shuffling of hundreds of pairs of feet and the click of shutters as people photograph the 15-foot tall stain-glass windows, the eight-foot tall crucifix, or the gilded altar. Ceilings lost in shadow, air slightly murky with smoke and even chanting coming from the wings, it’s easy to feel the presence of an Almighty Creator dwelling within the stone walls and floors.
This presence makes people quiet. People don’t speak in Notre Dame; they whisper, they murmur, they improvise hand signals and dream of learning sign language. For once, no one tries to raise their voice to be heard. Halfway through our circuit of the stations and resting in the church pews, Blaire and I witnessed a remarkable event. The huddled mutterings of the visitors grew to a muted whisper and the priest came on the PA to shush them.
Never before have we ever heard so many people go so quiet so fast.
Victor Hugo is often given the distinction of creating a fervor and love for the cathedral with his 1831 novel “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” I believe this to be disingenuous. Hugo didn’t create the respect and admiration for the building, he merely reminded the people of it.
