Happily Notre Dame has better withstood the attacks of time and all the accidents of fire, plunder, and desecration. Five years or so after the completion of the western façade a fire broke out, and in the restoration the double-arched buttresses of the former apse disappeared, and the windows were enlarged in accordance with the growing love of light which was being manifested in other cathedrals all through France. In more modern times--towards the middle of the eighteenth century--the extraordinary taste of the late Renaissance period ordered the removal of all the stained glass both of nave and choir--leaving, however, the western rose window and the two in the transepts--and this is, of course, a loss that can never be repaired, although the restorations of Viollet-le-Duc have probably, as Mr. Hamerton says, gone some way towards bringing back the original effect of light in the interior of the church. The exterior of the nave likewise suffered not a little from the doubtless well-meaning zeal of an unarchitectural age, which had literally stripped it bare of all ornament: “One after another the architects had suppressed the advancing parts of the buttresses between the chapels, the gables, the friezes, the balustrades--in one word, the entire ornamentation of these same chapels, the pinnacles which decorated the tops of the buttresses, with the statues which accompanied them and their flowering spires, the picturesque gargoyles which rendered the services of throwing the rain-water to a distance from the walls.”