Lone Medievalist Challenge: Monstrous

I love this gargoyle (at Sacre Coeur, Montmartre, Paris; my photo from 2014) because you can see very clearly how he is really a water spout. Gargoyles and chimeras (those that aren’t part of the drainage system) are, in the words of the late art historian Michael Camille, the “monsters of modernity” left to us by the Middle Ages. To me gargoyles have always felt very present in difficult modern moments (such as this one: https://wp.nyu.edu/sjpearce/2015/11/18/as-a-medievalist-i-cant-help-you-maybe-nobody-can-or-what-im-not-going-to-tell-my-students-after-paris/), and with so much of Notre Dame now gone, they feel both closer and farther away, more of a help and perhaps more in need of help themselves.