Towers and Sculptures

Lift your eyes a little higher to the upper levels of the façade. Directly above the Portal of the Last Judgment, two 69-meter towers rise on either side. The left, or north, tower is taller, and 387 steps lead up to a viewing platform; check opening hours and booking requirements before you go. The bells hang in the right, or south, tower. Of its ten bells, the 13-ton Emmanuel is especially famous. Its ringing on the night of August 24, 1944, as the Allies and France were winning victory in World War II, was a moment that went down in history.

Between the two towers, just above the Gallery of Kings, you'll see a huge circular window nearly 10 meters across: the west rose window. It began as a stroke of genius by the anonymous craftsmen who built Notre-Dame and spread across Europe. It derives from the rose, long identified with the mystery of the Virgin Mary, and it is among the most important architectural and decorative elements of any Gothic cathedral. Notre-Dame has three rose windows: the west one you see now, and the north and south ones, whose stained glass you can see from inside. At the center of the west window are the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus and angels on either side, forming a small cosmos, a universe revolving around God. In the arched frames to the left and right of the window, you can see Adam and Eve.

Above it, a balcony linking the two towers holds a long row of kings: the Gallery of Kings. They represent 28 kings of Judah and Israel from the Old Testament, the ancestors of Jesus who link the Old Testament to the New, and they show the authority of Notre-Dame. But these kings have a strange tale. When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, excited citizens mistook them for the kings of France who had oppressed them rather than kings from the Bible. They dragged the giant statues down from on high and beheaded them. One story has it that the furious crowd threw the severed heads into a public toilet so everyone could relieve themselves on top. The kings you see today are 19th-century replicas. The original heads, unjustly beheaded, went missing for nearly 200 years, until workers digging at a nearby bank building stumbled upon them underground in 1977. The authentic heads are now kept in the nearby Musée de Cluny, the medieval museum, so why not drop in after your tour and lose yourself in the Middle Ages?

Finally, look at the monsters clustered along the edges and corners of the south spire, seen from the west façade. The gargoyle, with its wide-open mouth, takes its name from a word for throat. As mentioned earlier, it is a practical piece of medieval sculpture that catches rainwater from the roof and spits it far away. Spitting water with a hideous face also symbolized driving out evil. Gargoyles date from the 1200s, while chimeras, those figures that sit with chins in hand or mix several animals, were mostly destroyed between the 17th century and the Revolution. They were recreated in the 19th century by Viollet-le-Duc, reportedly drawing on sketches by the famed caricaturist Daumier, as purely decorative pieces. These imaginary monsters were added for a touch of medieval fantasy. The most famous is the Stryge, a bird-like monster with its chin in its hands, gazing wistfully over Paris.