But who pulled down the two rows of statues? Who left those empty niches?
Who carved that new and bastard pointed arch in the very center of the
middle door? Who dared to insert that clumsy, tasteless, wooden door,
carved in the style of Louis XV., side by side with the arabesques of
Biscornette? Who but men, architects, the artists of our day?
And if we step into the interior of the edifice, who overthrew that
colossal figure of Saint Christopher, proverbial among statues by the same
right as the great hall of the palace among halls, as the spire of
Strasburg among steeples? And those myriad statues which peopled every
space between the columns of the choir and the nave, kneeling, standing,
on horseback, men, women, children, kings, bishops, men-at-arms--of stone,
of marble, of gold, of silver, of copper, nay even of wax--who brutally
swept them away? It was not the hand of Time.
And who replaced the old Gothic altar, with its splendid burden of shrines
and reliquaries, by that heavy marble sarcophagus adorned with clouds and
cherubs, looking like a poor copy of the Val-de-Grace or the Hotel des
Invalides? Who was stupid enough to fasten that clumsy stone anachronism
into the Carlovingian pavement of Hercandus? Was it not Louis XIV.
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