ANArKH

ANArKH is the enigmatic word engraved in a tower of Notre-Dame that the author names as the foundation of the book. Discovered in stone and later erased, it survives in the preface as both a trace of an unknown medieval hand and a sign of the losses that overtake the cathedral and its history.

Discovery and Appearance

A few years before writing the preface, the author found ANArKH in an obscure nook of one of Notre-Dame’s towers. The word was cut by hand into the wall in Greek capitals, black with age and deeply graven in the stone. Gothic calligraphic signs seemed to mark the letters and their forms as the work of a medieval hand. The inscription’s physical age and its placement within the ancient church made it more than an isolated word: it appeared to preserve the mark of someone long vanished.

The author describes the word’s meaning as fatal and melancholy, but does not identify the person who wrote it or explain the circumstances of its inscription. Instead, the inscription prompts the question of what troubled soul might have left such a mark of crime or unhappiness on the church. Its force in the preface rests partly on this unanswered question: the word remains legible as a sign, while the life behind it cannot be recovered.

Erasure and Loss

After the discovery, the wall was whitewashed or scraped down, and the inscription disappeared. The author places this erasure within a wider pattern of damage to medieval churches, coming from within as well as from without: priests whitewash, archdeacons scrape, and the populace demolishes. The word’s disappearance thus becomes one instance of the ongoing mutilation of Notre-Dame, not an isolated act of neglect.

The loss is layered. The medieval writer has disappeared from human generations; the inscription has been effaced from the church wall; and the author warns that the church itself may one day disappear from the earth. Only the author’s fragile written memory preserves ANArKH and the destiny it seemed to sum up. The book begins from that remnant, setting a surviving account against the successive erasures of person, inscription, and building.

Role in the Book

The preface explicitly declares that the book is founded upon ANArKH. The word therefore functions as its point of departure: a brief, material trace that opens onto questions of suffering, fate, memory, and the vulnerability of the historical monument. Its significance comes not from a solved mystery but from the persistence of the mystery after the physical evidence has been removed.

By recording the inscription after it has vanished, the preface makes the book itself a memorial to what the wall no longer bears. ANArKH is at once the mark that provokes the author’s inquiry and the fragile memory left when the original mark is gone.