Climbing back

Another trip to the ER. This time I was feeling stable enough to risk going by Uber. It hit me Sunday night and I was feeling so sick I didn't dare close my eyes. Waited it out until dawn, called the Kaiser advice nurse, and could have saved myself the call because it is never "take two aspirin and your regular doc will call you back in 2-3 weeks."

After the ER released me I was finally, fitfully, able to sleep. For seventeen hours. Which also made this morning's breakfast the first food I'd had in 36.

Still feel horrible. Doctors are out of ideas. I am not sure how many more times I can go through this before I just give up.

Oddly, though, I managed to crawl through a draft of the first Notre-Dame de Paris scene. Up to the moment Penny fires the steampunk grappling gun. The current plan is for her to end up on the tower of one of the flying buttresses, creep up the drain, not be able to reach the edge of the roof but instead take a leap of faith to the scaffold around the spire, navigate a bit of that scaffolding at the transept and admire Viollet-le-Duc's face on one of the saints surrounding it, then teeter her way along the very peak of the lead roof (probably made easier by the stuff the contractors had set up for their work restoring the roof) to the gallery of chimeras. And, yes, my latest book (The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame) finally gave me firm data on the location of le Stryge (left buttress, north tower) and the date on which he was installed.

(I wanted to know because I wanted to know what you can see from that corner. Good spot to look towards Sacre-Couer. And the Louvre, although that is a bit hard to pick out. Damn Haussmann and his rank upon rank of far-too-similar buildings!

I've been reading the Victor Hugo, and at least in the translation I'm reading he certainly does mention fabulous creatures in stone, even comparing Quasimodo to one such as he parkours his way around the rooftops (that was not just a Disney invention). But those were removed during the French Revolution; one of the acts of turning the place into a Temple of Reason was, even, replacing the actual gargoyles (water spouts) with "rational" (and, it turned out, not quite as functional) lead pipes. So Hugo never saw them. Viollet never saw them, and had only scanty record of them. Alas, it remains unclear who the precise designer was of le Stryge...but perhaps if I read the entire book I'll learn if he was a Victorian romantic invention, or (since Viollet was very much a student of the real Gothic historical architecture) had some basis in actual 15th-century beastiaries.

And, yes, this does play a part in the book. When Penny confronts the treasure hunters, she first has to convince them that Napoleon could have had no part in that particular bit of stonework, clue or no clue.

But this isn't going to be like the Opera Garnier chapter, which wove elements of Phantom of the Opera in its many, many versions. Hunchback plays second fiddle to what Hugo was really writing about (and why he hated giving Quasimodo star billing on the English-language title of his book). Architecture. "This will be the death of that." Restoration and preservation and medievalism and neo-gothic romanticism and the loss of human connection to modern buildings (as Hugo, and many others, saw it). And the impact of tourism and the way people are still trying to come to grips with Paris, both the modern city and the historical. Which includes the snares that led Nathan to where he is, and why Penny has to argue eloquently to, well, keep from being tossed off the top of the building along with le Stryge.

(Just as Amelie's mom is passing below, no doubt.....)