You already know the cathedral from the outside; now meet its less pious residents. Up there, between the towers, demons, birds of prey and impossible beasts peer down. Many people call them gargoyles, but they are not: gargoyles are waterspouts that spit out rainwater. These are chimeras, purely decorative.

1Nineteenth-century monsters

The chimeras are not medieval. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc designed them during the mid-nineteenth-century restoration, drawing on the Gothic imagination. The most famous, the Stryge, a winged demon resting its head in its hands as it gazes over Paris, became an icon thanks to an etching by Charles Meryon.

2The locksmith and the Devil

Now look at the ironwork on the side doors. Legend has it that a locksmith named Biscornet, desperate over an impossible commission, sold his soul to the Devil to finish it, and that the Devil could not forge the hinges for the central door, through which the Blessed Sacrament passed.

Much of the ironwork you see was remade in the nineteenth century from medieval models. The story of the pact is pure tradition.

In 1926, a mysterious author writing as Fulcanelli published ‘The Mystery of the Cathedrals’, reading the carvings of the central doorway as a treatise on alchemy in stone. And Victor Hugo claimed in the preface to his novel that he had found the Greek word ‘ANANKE’, fate, carved in one of the towers.

3What to look out for

  • The chimeras on the upper gallery, between the two towers.
  • The ironwork on the Saint Anne doorway, on the right.
  • The medallions at the base of the central doorway, which Fulcanelli read as alchemical code.
Ironwork and statue of Christ on Notre-Dame's central doorway
The door ironwork, largely remade in the nineteenth century.

Documented

The chimeras were created during Viollet-le-Duc's nineteenth-century restoration, and much of the present ironwork also dates from that period.

Oral tradition

The locksmith Biscornet's pact with the Devil and the alchemical reading of the façade belong to legend and esoteric interpretation, not to documented history.

Sources and credits

Official website of Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral; Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, ‘Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française’ (entry ‘Penture’); Fulcanelli, ‘Le Mystère des cathédrales’ (1926).

Photos:

  • The Stryge, Notre-Dame's chimera gazing over Paris: Julian Fong, CC BY-SA 2.0.
  • Notre-Dame's west façade lit up at night: Chabe01, CC BY-SA 4.0.
  • Ironwork and statue of Christ on Notre-Dame's central doorway: Chabe01, CC BY-SA 4.0.

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