“Assuredly there are few finer pages of architecture than this façade, in which, successively and at once, the three receding pointed portals; the decorated and lace-like band of twenty-eight royal niches; the vast central rose window flanked by the two lateral ones, like the priest by the deacon and sub-deacon; the lofty yet slender gallery of trefoiled arcading, which supports a heavy platform upon its light and delicate columns; and lastly the two dark and massive towers with their eaves of slate,[9]--harmonious parts of an entirely magnificent whole,--rising one above another in five gigantic stories,--unfolding themselves to the eye combined and unconfused, with innumerable details of statuary and sculpture which powerfully emphasise the grandeur of the _ensemble_: a vast symphony in stone, if one may say so--the colossal work of a man and of a nation ... on each stone of which one sees, in a hundred varieties, the fancy of the craftsman disciplined by the artist: a kind of human creation, mighty and prolific as the Divine Creation itself of which it seems to have caught the double characteristics--variety, eternity.” In the last few phrases Victor Hugo has, perhaps, been guilty of the licence readily granted to so great a master of rhetoric; but the west front of Notre Dame was a monument certain to appeal to a writer to whom none deny the gift of eloquence. Even a specialist who scrupulously avoids rhapsody is compelled to use superlatives in his description of this façade: “This vast and superb design is not only the most elaborate that had been produced up to its time, but in point of architectural grandeur it has hardly ever been equalled.” Mr. C. H. Moore, in the book alluded to in a former chapter, rightly insists that the component elements of the front are so treated as to manifest the Gothic spirit not merely in the portals, the arcades, and the apertures, but even in so comparatively small a matter as the profiles of the mouldings. [Footnote 9: These have been removed.] [Illustration: STRING-COURSE ON THE WEST FRONT. [_From Viollet-le-Duc._]]