By Justin Isherwood

In round amounts, I’d like about 114 million dollars. Please, drop off the money at the Gazette office, large denominations appreciated. The money is for a love letter, a nice big love letter from our community and other hometowns like ours, to Paris, France. Not just because we love Paris, but because we love the Dame of Paris. Specifically Notre Dame.

Once was a white pine tree in the farm’s back forty that as a kid I called Notre Dame. It, one of the first pines to grow back from that era of Pine. This tree in my childhood was pushing 70 years. Not at all that grand, not a soaring white pine a hundred feet tall with 2500 board feet of lumber, instead a wide-hipped dowager of a pine, an orphan growing up in the vacancy of what had been. She busily reseeding the realm, the daughter trees already crowded around her, this the tree I called Notre Dame.

Notre Dame, the Paris kind, is 855 years old, made of the stuff that gave Paris its name to civilization, by none other than Julius Caesar during the last of the Gallic Wars. This in 52 B.C. as the Romans crushed the last of the Gauls to take over a region Julius called Lutetia. The word of Celtic origin meaning swamp/marsh, a condition that befits many of the world’s capitals, they too being former swamps.

When a walled garrison arose four centuries later it was called after J. Caesar’s observation, Lutetia, the garrison walls fashioned of the limestone underlying the region. Geologically known as Lutetian limestone of a discerning creamy grey color, from this resource the city of Paris grew, its catacombs, and in the period 1163-1345, a church anointed with the name Notre Dame. Whose eastern façade neatly flanks the bend in the Seine, such that at sunrise from up-river, what you see rise is this mountain of God, 420 feet long, 157 feet wide, 226 feet high, ten bells. The reliquary of Notre Dame reportedly holds the Crown of Thorns, a fragment of the True Cross and one of the True nails. Not to forget Julius Caesar’s ghost.

Notre Dame being of limestone is holistically flawed, the earth’s atmosphere is naturally and slowly dissolving the edifice, recently aided by motor cars and power plants. To the end the solution rate of limestone has accelerated, Notre Dame it seems is soluble.

As an English major, Notre Dame has a place in my heart due to Victor Hugo, circa 1831, and his tale of a hunch-backed bell-ringer named Quasimodo and the gypsy sorceress Esmeralda. Never mind in the story the Archdeacon Claude Frollo is the real sorcerer and despite his clergical vows has a thing for Esmeralda. As described by Hugo, who can but fail to love Esmeralda. The cathedral, Notre Dame, is the scene of the story.

It is said, at least among English majors, that the intent of Victor Hugo’s story was to focus public attention on the value of Gothic architecture, not on Esmeralda. By the 19th century gothic architecture was thought old hat, grotesque, ugly. Add to this list hard to maintain, too big, too impractical.

The book, The Hunchback of Notre Dame is commonly cited as the origin of the modern novel, where a broad range of human society is reflected. Novels explore the details, from sewer rats to the value of the King’s crown, the weight of the bell rope, the hours of their ringing, and the number of steps to the bell ringer’s room. As I recall, Esmeralda’s bust-size was also mentioned. Through Victor Hugo’s effort, and his novel, came the impulse for a preservation movement in France, including renovations of Notre Dame before the close of the 19th century.

Notre Dame needs our help again, that estimated 114 million dollars to rebuild and replace the decayed limestone, those gargoyles, those flying buttresses. To think Portage County (a French word) just south of DuBay (another French word) and the Big Eau Pleine (French word), not to forget déjà vu, champagne, facade, pot-pourri, and what would life be like in Plover without hors d’oeuvres at a little cul-de-sac restaurant after a cinema of a risqué avant-garde manage a trois. As for French things, some of us love lingerie, cognac, the Louvre, the type 35 Bugatti, the 24-hour Le Mans and French toast. Just saying … maybe we owe France something, and Notre Dame, and Victor Hugo, the first novelist buried at the Pantheon in Paris, author of Les Misérables. It is so said in English major circles, to speed his progress on Les Misérables Hugo wrote in a small cold room, naked. Victor Hugo was French.
Notre Dame is terminal.

Failure of its buttresses will lead to the building’s collapse, this the place that has been critical to our collective humanity. Which is why I’m asking readers for two bucks each, sent to the Gazette office. Yah I know, postage is 50¢. OK, a buck. Why? Because I’d like Paris to know a place called Portage County, Ouicousin cares. The way I see it we all own Notre Dame and we all owe Notre Dame.

The Gazette office is: P.O. Box 146, Stevens Point.