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Let us return to the façade of Notre-Dao piously to adrave and puissant cathedral, which inspires terror, so its chronicles assert: ~quoe mole sua terrores are to-day lacking in that façade: in the first place, the staircase of eleven steps which formerly raised it above the soil; next, the lower series of statues which occupied the niches of the three portals; and lastly the upper series, of the twenty-eight allery of the first story, beginning with Childebert, and ending with Phillip Augustus, holding in his hand "the imperial apple"

Ti the soil of the city with a slow and irresistible progress; but, while thus causing the eleven steps which added to the ht of the edifice, to be devoured, one by one, by the rising tide of the pavements of Paris,--time has bestowed upon the church perhaps more than it has taken away, for it is time which has spread over the façade that soe of monuments the period of their beauty

But who has thron the ts of statues? who has left the niches empty? who has cut, in the very middle of the central portal, that new and bastard arch? who has dared to frame therein that commonplace and heavy door of carved wood, à la Louis XV, beside the arabesques of Biscornette? The men, the architects, the artists of our day

And if we enter the interior of the edifice, who has overthrown that colossus of Saint Christopher, proverbial for rand hall of the Palais de Justice was a spires? And those myriads of statues, which peopled all the spaces between the colu, equestrian, endarold, in silver, in copper, in wax even,--who has brutally swept them away? It is not tiothic altar, splendidly encumbered with shrines and reliquaries, that heavy els' heads and clouds, which seeed from the Val-de-Grâce or the Invalides? Who stupidly sealed that heavy anachronisian pave the request of Louis XIII?

And who put the cold, white panes in the place of those s," high in color, "which caused the astonished eyes of our fathers to hesitate between the rose of the grand portal and the arches of the apse? And ould a sub-chanter of the sixteenth century say, on beholding the beautiful yelloash, hich our archiepiscopal vandals have desmeared their cathedral? He would reman smeared "accursed" edifices; he would recall the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, all smeared thus, on account of the constable's treason "Yellow, after all, of so good a quality," said Sauval, "and so well recommended, that more than a century has not yet caused it to lose its color" He would think that the sacred place had become infamous, and would flee