Architect in the guise of Thomas-the-Apostle.

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If our Alchemist was pulling his beard,

it would be because he and the grotesques surrounding him

on the tower baulstrades of Notre-Dame, Paris,

were not actually mediaeval statuary at all,

but nineteenth-century restorations.

*

Charged with the task of renovation, in eighteen-hundred-and-forty-four,

Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, found only the stumps

of claws and talons on the tower corners

but with the help of a body of stonemasons

he set about re-envisioning the cathedral’s mediaeval past…

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