A wistful melody floats in my mind as I begin my latest meditation. It is the sound of a solo violin. As I fix my gaze on the candle beside me, the lilting tune seems to be curling around the flame itself, like a halo. The melody is a stately but sad, a sarabande from one of Bach’s cello suites and not originally written for the violin at all.
I am not playing one of the albums from my copious CD collection to soothe me as I write. The music is evoked by a memory of a recent short visit to Paris – a memory of my final night there. It was late, not long before midnight, but the summer’s evening twilight had extended so that the sky was still a deep indigo. A lone violinist, a thin, elegant busker, was playing a rock tune fused into an 18th Century gigue. He was a dancing shadow, gently swaying to and fro and gliding in and out of the light.
Although he was tall, he was dwarfed by his backdrop: the two towers of the facade of Notre Dame Cathedral, looming behind him and lit by floodlights. For he was playing his violin on the Parvis, the large square in front of the Cathedral. The shape of the great Rose window between the towers was still resplendent in the floodlights, even though, as its beautiful stained glass was not shot through by daylight, its face was blank.
Inevitably Victor Hugo’s novel ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ came to my mind as I stood there. The elegant busker might have been one of Esmeralda’s band of gypsies playing his fiddle in and out of the fire light while she danced round the campfire beside him. In the floodlights, the saints in their niches above the main door peered down oblivious to the busker’s performance and the gargoyles, high in the towers, were also deaf to his jaunty tune like Quasimodo himself.
I was eager to see Notre Dame on my visit. I wanted to see how the restoration was progressing after the tragic fire in April 2019. I was hoping that I could go inside and see some of the renovations as someone had told me that a part of the building was open. But that was not possible.
I have quite a connection with the Cathedral as, aside from being a Roman Catholic, I have written my own dramatisation of Victor Hugo’s novel. It has always been one of my favourite stories as is the 1939 film version with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo. My friend Phil was with me on my little trip a few weeks ago and he and I had produced my dramatisation at the school in 2006. In fact my last visit to Paris was in the Autumn before with Phil and his wife Anna, when we explored the cathedral to get inspiration for the script and the production.
It was also my last production at the school and in Budapest in February 2020. It was the tragic fire a year earlier that had inspired me to revise the script and produce it again. I added a special prologue set in the present and centred on the fire. In the prologue was a chorus of people who had rushed to the scene when they heard the news that Notre Dame was in flames.
Notre Dame is still a building site after three years and looks like it is barricaded in for a siege. How long it will remain so, I do not know. The modern steel scaffolding looks incongruous against the ancient walls of the cathedral as do the boards in front of the great main door with their ‘No Entry’ signs, the high cranes arched over the roof and the engineers’ temporary offices and builders’ huts in containers in their own little yard on the Parvis. The cathedral is so tall that the boards barely reach to half way up the great doors above the staircase of the main entrance. The whole edifice is surrounded by scaffolding as if it cannot stand up without it, although most of the building is secure despite the fire damage.
The lone violinist finished his gigue and there was a pattering of applause from his little audience seated on the stone wall near him. Keening with his bow, he began the sad sarabande by Bach, etching an elegy into the still night air. The lingering drift of the music made me raise my eyes to the sky, which had darkened to black pitch now. Little lights blazed out on the boards like stars and on the steel ribs of scaffolding illumining the ancient arches like votive lamps.
As the sad tune floated in the night air, time stood still. It was a moment of time and yet not of time. Like Notre Dame itself: of time and yet not of time.
‘Elegy’ – did I write ‘elegy’? No: the violinist’s melody wasn’t an elegy. For Notre Dame is still with us, still standing strong as if eager to push away the scaffolding supporting it. No, not an elegy but a lament, a lament for the tragedy, three years ago. And for our world at war.
Despite the apparatus of reconstruction surrounding it, the Cathedral was still beautiful.
It gives a lie to the adage ‘You’ve got to stand on your own two feet.’ We all need support, to be shored up, like Notre Dame, at times. For a moment let others take the weight, however strong our frame may be. Let others help us to rebuild, to renew ourselves.
Ave atque Vale – until the next blog.
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Neilus Aurelius
Meditations of Neilus Aurelius 