Notre-Dame de Paris

The gothic, as it was said without understanding, is the free genre. I say free, and not arbitrary. If he had kept himself to the same type, if he had remained submissive by geometric harmony, he would have died of languor. [...] How to count our beautiful churches in the third century? I wanted to speak at least of Notre-Dame de Paris. But someone marked this monument with such a lion's claw, that no one would ever risk touching it. It is his thing from now on, it is his fief, it is the majorate of Quasimodo. He built, next to the old cathedral, a cathedral of poetry, as firm as the foundations of the other, as high as its towers. If I looked at this church, it would be as a book of history, as the great register of the destinies of the monarchy. [...] The great and heavy church, every flordelysed, belongs to history more than to religion. It has little momentum, little of this movement of ascension so striking in the churches of Strasbourg. It has little momentum, little of this movement of ascension, and so much in the churches of Strasbourg.