Up ahead, I could already catch brief glimpses of the high slanting roof of the choir of Notre-Dame above even the tallest houses. We turned right and rode on for a hundred yards through a slightly less populated street that had once been the Jewish quarter, Matthew told us, until Philip had expelled the Jews fourteen years previously and confiscated their wealth. The street was now the preserve of the furriers, and rich pelts of sable, mink and fox – and skins of cat and squirrel, too – hung from the stalls we passed. Then we turned right again and came into a broad space, entirely cleared of shops and houses, and I checked my courser and stared, agog at what lay before me.
There were huge piles of creamy limestone blocks, both dressed and rough hewn; groups of men clustered around the great stones, sometimes drawing on them with lead, carefully, precisely, sometimes a lone man chinking away delicately with his chisel or a muscular pair laboriously sawing the larger blocks into smaller ones. Dust puffed and plumed in the air, occupying it in dense clouds along with workmen’s cries, the shouts of the overseers and the harsh creak of a giant windlass as a finished block was winched ponderously via a network of pulleys and ropes towards the sky. Rough, very dirty workmen bustled hither and yon, some burdened with heavy bags of sand and rare earths on their shoulders, bundles of wood, or long, well-cared-for cutting tools. A scaffolding of logs and tree branches, lashed together with rawhide, crawled up the half-finished north wall of the nave like a sprawl of brown ivy or the veins on an old man’s hand.
It was noisy, filthy, chaotic, and yet breath-stealing – the exquisite beauty of the finished part of the cathedral, the choir at the eastern end with its huge columns, standing like stone trees, their branches curving out impossibly high to meet and support the vaulting roof; the round apse, dim and cool beyond the choir, lit only by the slim candles of pilgrims; the transepts, which gave the building the holy shape of the cross, had their spreading masonry worked and carved in wonderful designs; the vast windows along each side of the church, filled with coloured glass and glowing like jewels in the shafts of summer sunlight; even the half-built nave before me so majestic and elegant, gigantic and yet delicate – its buttresses outside the walls sprawling like massive spiders’ legs supporting the tall thin body of the cathedral itself … The sight of it all, the bustle and the ethereal beauty, the squalor of the building yard and the soaring wonder of Notre-Dame, made my head spin. I felt tiny in comparison to that wondrous, enormous, heavenly building – as if I were an ant in the presence of a mighty bull; and humble, just as one should feel in the presence of God. And I felt His presence then; as surely as I now feel this smooth parchment under my calloused fingertips.
I was gawping, transfixed, as I gazed upon a grand project that had already been in the building for more than thirty years. The men I saw, those grubby workmen, the shouting overseers, the burly middle-aged masons, those folk would never see their cathedral completed, not if they lived to be three score and ten. It was a staggering, awesome monument to man’s skill and sweat, his perseverance and ingenuity – a most fitting offering to the divine creator of the Universe himself.
‘Big, isn’t it?’ said a voice at my elbow; it was Matthew. ‘And it must cost a king’s ransom to keep all these workmen on, year after year – but I am afraid, Sir Alan, that we may not tarry. We need to be at the widow’s house before the dinner hour. You can come back and gawp at this dusty madhouse anytime you care to. But for now, sir, we need to keep moving along, if you please.’
I suppressed my irritation at Matthew’s interruption: he was right, I would be in Paris for some time, and I would come here again, at my leisure, to gaze at this miraculous House of God. Right now it was more important to secure suitable lodgings for myself and my men.
* * *
The Widow Barbette’s house stood at the beginning of the Rue Garlande on the Left Bank of the Seine, a hundred yards from the Petit-Pont that connected the Île de la Cité with the southern portion of Paris. The house was close to the church of St Julien-le-Pauvre, where I went to hear Mass as often as I could over the next few weeks. Matthew had a connection of some kind with the widow; I believe his family in England were involved in some sort of commerce with hers, and while he and two of his fellow students took one large room on the second floor of her big timber-framed house, Hanno, Thomas and I took another and we all shared a common salle, where we took our meals, and which had a big fireplace and a single scribe’s chair and desk for the students. Two of the students, Luke and Henry, would also sleep in the salle at night on light, low beds that they dismantled each morning.