The world knows that there is the building of Notre Dame de Paris on the banks of the Seine, followed by Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris". For me, I first read Hugo's famous novel "Notre Dame de Paris", and then I saw the magnificent Notre Dame cathedral on the banks of the Seine River in Paris.
The first time I went to see Notre Dame was in 1988, and when I didn't see It with my own eyes, it was Hugo's novel that gave me a beautiful imagination of the cathedral, with a fixed image in my mind, lingering: "the wonders of architecture", "the symphony of huge stones", "the fantasies of the laborers expressed in thousands of forms". When I arrived at the scene, I was shocked that Notre Dame cathedral was even more beautiful, more magnificent, more majestic, and more spectacular than I thought.
From all sides, it makes me feel different, looking majestic like King Kong on the front, magical like an angel in the back, and from both sides, it is incomparably delicate and complicated, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it is ingenious... It's hard to put into words. Fortunately, today's photos, postcards, TV movies, and the Internet have no shortage of its tangible figures, which can avoid my self-defeating drawing here.
Notre Dame de Paris is a so-called "barbaric" Gothic building, built in the Middle Ages, its style has changed from the earlier Romanesque circular church to a high place to develop, the front into the general three doors, the middle of the direct access to the main hall, is the place to do Mass, there are cloisters, naves, chapels, ear halls ... There are many works of art, such as rose windows, statues of saints, paintings of Biblical stories... Later, several visits were made to see more carefully, and specially paid to visit the veranda and bell tower on the upper floor, as well as the treasure exhibition hall on the ground floor.
I was doing my phD thesis at the Sorbonne At the University of Paris, with the French poet Claudel as the subject of my research. Claudel was a devout Catholic poet who worked as a diplomat in China for more than a decade. On Christmas Night 1886, the young poet entered Notre Dame Cathedral to see mass, standing next to the second cross pillar on the right side of the hall, listening with great excitement to the majestic and tragic hymn played by the huge organ, and suddenly felt a kind of soul sublimation... I also attended mass ceremonies at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and I really felt the power of purifying the soul.
Or back to Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris.
Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris", written when he was 29 years old, is of course a famous book, and the portrayal of only four main characters can make it famous for eternity: the young, beautiful, lively and enthusiastic, naïve and straightforward gypsy girl Esmeralda, the ugly and fierce, kind and lonely bell ringer Quasimodo, the hypocritical, cunning, intelligent and erudite, and twisted-minded Auxiliary Bishop Claude, and the handsome, charming, and despicable Guard Captain Phobis... The story embodies Hugo's original principle of "contrast aesthetics", which is enough to make it a representative work of romantic novels.
When I was young, I only wanted to read fast, and I was eager to finish reading a thick book in three or four days, and I heard that the third and fifth volumes of "Notre Dame de Paris" could not be read, because it had nothing to do with the plot. That's what I did. Later, when I read Notre Dame many years later, I realized that I had missed an important part of the book.
Those chapters are indeed outside the storyline, but in them the author talks about his views on French culture, on Notre Dame, on architecture, on Parisian society, on the city of Paris as a whole. In my impression, many novelists will write the storyline, the love life of the hero and heroine and the heroic performance of the thrilling, suddenly will turn the pen sharply, a whole chapter jumps out of the plot to express the discussion, Hugo is such a typical, we read "Les Misérables" will find that he talked about Napoleon, ancient Greek society outside the story, may be eighty thousand miles off topic. However, if these chapters are skipped, they will be detrimental to our understanding of the work, that is, we may not be able to fully understand or read Hugo's thought.
That's probably why Hugo named the novel Notre Dame de Paris and nothing else, such as "The Bell Tower Freak" or something else. In my opinion, the fate of the protagonist of the novel, or by extension, the fate of people in that era is related to the fate of Paris and Notre Dame, and the cathedral is actually a protagonist in the work. Quasimodo rescued the gypsy girl and hid her in Notre Dame, with the strict rules of the "Holy Land", not to let anyone snatch her away; when Notre Dame was besieged, Quasimodo let the molten lead pour down from the top floor of Notre Dame, preventing the people from attacking; finally, Quasimodo saw through the hypocrisy of the vice-bishop, lifted him high, and fell from the height of Notre Dame...
Hugo once said that Notre Dame de Paris is "a magnificent symphony of stones, a brilliant masterpiece of mankind and a nation" "each stone fully demonstrates the perfect combination of the whimsy of the craftsman and the genius of the artist", "This is a creation of mankind, as powerful and colorful as the creation of God, as if stealing from God's creation the two characteristics of change and sacredness".
In addition to a detailed description of the notre dame building itself in his work, Hugo also criticized some of the decorative styles of notre-dame architecture, and pointed out that there were several factors in the damage to notre-dame. He completed Notre Dame de Paris in 1831, after the July Revolution. The following year, he wrote an article titled "Declaring War on Those Who Destroy Monuments." Who are the people who destroyed the monuments? In his view, it was the Paris authorities at that time. At that time, the Paris authorities wanted to plan the development of the city, disliked the old Paris and wanted to build a new Paris. To achieve this, Haussmann, the administrator of Paris at the time, proposed an overall plan adapted to modernization: the demolition of some buildings. Hugo's views clashed with the will of the governor at the time, and he felt that the monument should be preserved, not demolished. Thus, a writer put forward the issue of serious protection of Notre Dame and the like in particular.
Now it seems that The Hugo of that year was quite wise. He proposed: "From the relics of medieval art, three types of trauma of different depths can be distinguished. "The first, time, this easy to understand, time will unconsciously leave damage to the building, the surface will be cracked and rusty. The second was political revolution or religious reform, france underwent many revolutions, the destruction of cultural relics during the Great Revolution was also quite severe, and during the Paris Commune, many monasteries were burned down. These blind and violent destructions, raging, shredded the ornate appearance of ancient buildings: demolishing the round flower windows, smashing the figurines... The third is fashion. Hugo believed that fashion was becoming more and more stupid and ridiculous, starting with the chaotic and ostentatious fashion of the Renaissance era, and architecture was bound to decline. Hugo even pointed out sharply: "The destruction of fashion is deep, it can attack the skeleton of art, break its bones, cut, cut, dismember and kill buildings." The advent of new fashion will transform buildings, but time and revolution do not have this luxury. ”
In the novel "Notre Dame de Paris", there is a very pithy sentence: "One kills the other", which is "Ceci tuera cela" in French. What does it mean? Hugo believed that books could kill buildings, that is, the gothic buildings of the past could be killed by the books that appeared in later generations. Because, the birth of books, the invention of gutenberg printing, the revival of literature and art, the creation of society. And the representative cultural carrier of society, books, will completely replace the church built of stone.
"This kills that" is a question that all generations have to consider, each era has a representative cultural carrier, the earliest, probably the church of stone, followed by books, then newspapers, magazines, and then film and television, and now of course mobile phones, the Internet, etc., will one kill the other? Hugo's question, in order today, we need to mention it again: books destroy buildings, so will movies, radio, television, the Internet, and mobile phones kill books? In a sense, they have greatly weakened books and killed reading. So, will the phone kill everything?
In fact, Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris" did not kill the stone building of Notre Dame de Paris, we now go to visit Notre Dame de Paris, often associated with Hugo's work, if you have not read, before or after seeing Notre Dame de Paris, you may do your homework to read it, that is, famous literary works will also promote our visit and association with monuments as tourists.
This "one kills the other" is Hugo's alarm bell for the world in advance. With the long sound of this alarm bell, people will probably do a much wiser job of nurturing another, this promoting another, this motivating another, this prospering another. We want to see such a world, and we should be able to see such a world.
Buildings with historical representations should be left behind, and every era may have architectural masterpieces of each era, and their survival will make future generations realize that the pulse of history beats in those stone, wood, steel, glass buildings. Notre Dame de Paris summarizes the historical architecture of Paris: in the past, in the time of Caterina de Medici there was the Tuileries Palace (later burned down); in the time of Henry II there was the Town Hall (which was burned down and is still there after reconstruction); in the time of Henry IV it left the Palace Square; Louis XIII left the Convent of the Valley of Grace (now the General Hospital of the Army); in the time of Louis XIV there was the Musée des Armées (now the Military Museum); in the era of Louis XV there was the Church of St. Joseph ; the Panthéon was left in the era of Louis XVI (a cemetery for the great men of the Republic, where Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Zola, Marie Curie were buried); in the Napoleonic period there was Place Vendôme.
The above is Hugo's summary, he will later, we may wish to summarize it for him. The July Dynasty began to build the Arc de Triomphe; the Second Empire built an opera house; the Third Republic had the Eiffel Tower, an iron tower, symbolizing a steel age; in the 20th century, there were grand palaces and small royal palaces; in the Charles de Gaulle era, the central market was overhauled, and the lively scene of the vegetable market in the past can only be relived in Zola's works; the Pompidou cultural center (which looks like a chemical factory) is a representative of modernist architectural art; the Destan and Chirac era should be the arch of La Défense. It extends the central axis of the city from the Arc de Triomphe to the Arch of arc de Triomphe; the Mitterrand era was a new national library in the shape of a "four books"...
It occurred to me that many years ago, I had translated into Chinese a poem by Hugo's contemporary, Neval, "Notre Dame de Paris."
The translation is as follows:
"Notre Dame is old enough, maybe people will see it
One day bury Paris, which it once watched was born;
But after a thousand years, time will make that bulky skeleton
Committing a transgression is like a wolf that makes a Newton lose its front hoof,
Twist its steel nerves to a pair of dim sharp teeth,
Melancholy gnawing at its ancient bone ridge made of rocks!
Many people from all the countries of the earth
Will come here to look upon this majestic ruin,
And re-read Victor's book without thinking about it;
You will think that you have seen the ancient cathedral again,
So long and square, majestic, majestic, majestic spirit,
Standing before them like a shadow barrier of a dead man! ”
I translated this poem in the 1990s. After the 2019 Notre Dame fire, someone found this translation and posted it on the Internet and told me, Teacher Yu, your translation many years ago was quite good. I think, really well, it answers the question "this one kills that one" very appropriately.
I always think that one day we may not see Notre Dame as it was, some parts will collapse, some parts will be unrecognizable. But when we stand in front of it, we always think that there is a copy of Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris" in it. Notre Dame is still there, its soul is still there, and that's fine.
Author: Yu Zhongxian
Editor: Xu Luming
Planner: Chen Xihan
Editor-in-Charge: Fan Xin
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.