A busker’s ode to Notre-Dame

I’m embarrassed by the thought of it now, nearly 30 years later: me busking in the shadow of Notre-Dame, guitar case open for donations as I belted out Bob Dylan and Neil Young songs. I was awful, yet another contributor to a particular strain of noise pollution that has degraded the quality of life in European city centers at least since Bob Marley’s “Exodus” came out. But back then you could make a lot of money in Paris if you sang with a bona fide American accent. So, that’s what I did night after night, planting myself at the edge of the cathedral’s tourist-choked parvis and parlaying an eight-song repertoire from the Liberal Arts College Songbook into a not-insignificant revenue stream.

If you were new to Paris, as I was, Notre-Dame is just where you ended up. It was a lodestar, a known center from which one’s understanding of the city crept tentatively outward. Indeed it was the center of the center, rising in its audacious immensity from the bedrock of the Île de la Cité, Paris’s historical nucleus, and exerting its gravity across the arrondissements with a force that no other structure — not even the Eiffel Tower — could summon. Really, where else was I going to go?

It’s been surmised that the stone carvers tasked with creating the hundreds of figures adorning the portals of the cathedral enlisted drunks and vagrants to sit as models. “Thus,” observes Luc Sante in “The Other Paris,” “the physical trace of the rabble is retained in the oldest, most august, most sanctified monument of the city.” I take comfort in that notion, wincing a little less when I recall the loud, quay side drinking sessions, usually with musicians similarly bereft of talent, into which my nightly balladeering typically descended. I’d seen the rabble, and the rabble was us.

Eventually I stopped busking in front of Notre-Dame and sought out trouble in other parts of Paris, the Île de la Cité becoming in my mind a blandly familiar, anodyne quarter that I’d traverse when traveling from Left Bank to Right Bank or vice versa. Hurrying along the Rue de la Cité, I’d glance at Notre-Dame’s gargoyle-studded towers without giving a thought to the sheer weight of the spiritual aspirations concentrated in those stones, which had been painstakingly placed one atop the other during more than a century of continuous construction by builders whose names were never recorded, in a testament to piety and what the historian William Manchester called “medieval man’s total lack of ego.”