第05冊--《聖母院的駝背》有聲讀物，維克多-雨果著 (第1-2章) (Book 05 - The Hunchback of Notre Dame Audiobook by Victor Hugo (Chs 1-2))

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BOOK FIFTH. CHAPTER I.
ABBAS BEATI MARTINI.
Dom Claude's fame had spread far and wide. It procured for him, at about the epoch
when he refused to see Madame de Beaujeu, a visit which he long remembered.
It was in the evening.
He had just retired, after the office, to his canon's cell in the cloister of Notre-
Dame.
This cell, with the exception, possibly, of some glass phials, relegated to a corner,
and filled with a decidedly equivocal powder, which strongly resembled the
alchemist's "powder of projection," presented nothing strange or mysterious.
There were, indeed, here and there, some inscriptions on the walls, but they were
pure sentences of learning and piety, extracted from good authors.
The archdeacon had just seated himself, by the light of a three-jetted copper lamp,
before a vast coffer crammed with manuscripts.
He had rested his elbow upon the open volume of Honorius d'Autun, De
predestinatione et libero arbitrio, and he was turning over, in deep meditation, the
leaves of a printed folio which he had just
brought, the sole product of the press which his cell contained.
In the midst of his revery there came a knock at his door.
"Who's there?" cried the learned man, in the gracious tone of a famished dog,
disturbed over his bone. A voice without replied, "Your friend,
Jacques Coictier."
He went to open the door. It was, in fact, the king's physician; a
person about fifty years of age, whose harsh physiognomy was modified only by a
crafty eye.
Another man accompanied him. Both wore long slate-colored robes, furred
with minever, girded and closed, with caps of the same stuff and hue.
Their hands were concealed by their sleeves, their feet by their robes, their
eyes by their caps.
"God help me, messieurs!" said the archdeacon, showing them in; "I was not
expecting distinguished visitors at such an hour."
And while speaking in this courteous fashion he cast an uneasy and scrutinizing
glance from the physician to his companion.
"'Tis never too late to come and pay a visit to so considerable a learned man as
Dom Claude Frollo de Tirechappe," replied Doctor Coictier, whose Franche-Comte accent
made all his phrases drag along with the majesty of a train-robe.
There then ensued between the physician and the archdeacon one of those congratulatory
prologues which, in accordance with custom, at that epoch preceded all conversations
between learned men, and which did not
prevent them from detesting each other in the most cordial manner in the world.
However, it is the same nowadays; every wise man's mouth complimenting another wise
man is a vase of honeyed gall.
Claude Frollo's felicitations to Jacques Coictier bore reference principally to the
temporal advantages which the worthy physician had found means to extract, in
the course of his much envied career, from
each malady of the king, an operation of alchemy much better and more certain than
the pursuit of the philosopher's stone.
"In truth, Monsieur le Docteur Coictier, I felt great joy on learning of the bishopric
given your nephew, my reverend seigneur Pierre Verse.
Is he not Bishop of Amiens?"
"Yes, monsieur Archdeacon; it is a grace and mercy of God."
"Do you know that you made a great figure on Christmas Day at the bead of your
company of the chamber of accounts, Monsieur President?"
"Vice-President, Dom Claude.
Alas! nothing more." "How is your superb house in the Rue Saint-
Andre des Arcs coming on? 'Tis a Louvre.
I love greatly the apricot tree which is carved on the door, with this play of
words: 'A L'ABRI-COTIER--Sheltered from reefs.'"
"Alas!
Master Claude, all that masonry costeth me dear.
In proportion as the house is erected, I am ruined."
"Ho! have you not your revenues from the jail, and the bailiwick of the Palais, and
the rents of all the houses, sheds, stalls, and booths of the enclosure?
'Tis a fine breast to suck."
"My castellany of Poissy has brought me in nothing this year."
"But your tolls of Triel, of Saint-James, of Saint-Germainen-Laye are always good."
"Six score livres, and not even Parisian livres at that."
"You have your office of counsellor to the king.
That is fixed."
"Yes, brother Claude; but that accursed seigneury of Poligny, which people make so
much noise about, is worth not sixty gold crowns, year out and year in."
In the compliments which Dom Claude addressed to Jacques Coictier, there was
that sardonical, biting, and covertly mocking accent, and the sad cruel smile of
a superior and unhappy man who toys for a
moment, by way of distraction, with the dense prosperity of a vulgar man.
The other did not perceive it.
"Upon my soul," said Claude at length, pressing his hand, "I am glad to see you
and in such good health." "Thanks, Master Claude."
"By the way," exclaimed Dom Claude, "how is your royal patient?"
"He payeth not sufficiently his physician," replied the doctor, casting a side glance
at his companion.
"Think you so, Gossip Coictier," said the latter.
These words, uttered in a tone of surprise and reproach, drew upon this unknown
personage the attention of the archdeacon which, to tell the truth, had not been
diverted from him a single moment since the
stranger had set foot across the threshold of his cell.
It had even required all the thousand reasons which he had for handling tenderly
Doctor Jacques Coictier, the all-powerful physician of King Louis XI., to induce him
to receive the latter thus accompanied.
Hence, there was nothing very cordial in his manner when Jacques Coictier said to
him,--
"By the way, Dom Claude, I bring you a colleague who has desired to see you on
account of your reputation."
"Monsieur belongs to science?" asked the archdeacon, fixing his piercing eye upon
Coictier's companion.
He found beneath the brows of the stranger a glance no less piercing or less
distrustful than his own.
He was, so far as the feeble light of the lamp permitted one to judge, an old man
about sixty years of age and of medium stature, who appeared somewhat sickly and
broken in health.
His profile, although of a very ordinary outline, had something powerful and severe
about it; his eyes sparkled beneath a very deep superciliary arch, like a light in the
depths of a cave; and beneath his cap which
was well drawn down and fell upon his nose, one recognized the broad expanse of a brow
of genius. He took it upon himself to reply to the
archdeacon's question,--
"Reverend master," he said in a grave tone, "your renown has reached my ears, and I
wish to consult you.
I am but a poor provincial gentleman, who removeth his shoes before entering the
dwellings of the learned. You must know my name.
I am called Gossip Tourangeau."
"Strange name for a gentleman," said the archdeacon to himself.
Nevertheless, he had a feeling that he was in the presence of a strong and earnest
character.
The instinct of his own lofty intellect made him recognize an intellect no less
lofty under Gossip Tourangeau's furred cap, and as he gazed at the solemn face, the
ironical smile which Jacques Coictier's
presence called forth on his gloomy face, gradually disappeared as twilight fades on
the horizon of night.
Stern and silent, he had resumed his seat in his great armchair; his elbow rested as
usual, on the table, and his brow on his hand.
After a few moments of reflection, he motioned his visitors to be seated, and,
turning to Gossip Tourangeau he said,-- "You come to consult me, master, and upon
what science?"
"Your reverence," replied Tourangeau, "I am ill, very ill.
You are said to be great AEsculapius, and I am come to ask your advice in medicine."
"Medicine!" said the archdeacon, tossing his head.
He seemed to meditate for a moment, and then resumed: "Gossip Tourangeau, since
that is your name, turn your head, you will find my reply already written on the wall."
Gossip Tourangeau obeyed, and read this inscription engraved above his head:
"Medicine is the daughter of dreams.-- JAMBLIQUE."
Meanwhile, Doctor Jacques Coictier had heard his companion's question with a
displeasure which Dom Claude's response had but redoubled.
He bent down to the ear of Gossip Tourangeau, and said to him, softly enough
not to be heard by the archdeacon: "I warned you that he was mad.
You insisted on seeing him."
"'Tis very possible that he is right, madman as he is, Doctor Jacques," replied
his comrade in the same low tone, and with a bitter smile.
"As you please," replied Coictier dryly.
Then, addressing the archdeacon: "You are clever at your trade, Dom Claude, and you
are no more at a loss over Hippocrates than a monkey is over a nut.
Medicine a dream!
I suspect that the pharmacopolists and the master physicians would insist upon stoning
you if they were here. So you deny the influence of philtres upon
the blood, and unguents on the skin!
You deny that eternal pharmacy of flowers and metals, which is called the world, made
expressly for that eternal invalid called man!"
"I deny," said Dom Claude coldly, "neither pharmacy nor the invalid.
I reject the physician."
"Then it is not true," resumed Coictier hotly, "that gout is an internal eruption;
that a wound caused by artillery is to be cured by the application of a young mouse
roasted; that young blood, properly
injected, restores youth to aged veins; it is not true that two and two make four, and
that emprostathonos follows opistathonos."
The archdeacon replied without perturbation: "There are certain things of
which I think in a certain fashion." Coictier became crimson with anger.
"There, there, my good Coictier, let us not get angry," said Gossip Tourangeau.
"Monsieur the archdeacon is our friend." Coictier calmed down, muttering in a low
tone,--
"After all, he's mad." "Pasque-dieu, Master Claude," resumed
Gossip Tourangeau, after a silence, "You embarrass me greatly.
I had two things to consult you upon, one touching my health and the other touching
my star."
"Monsieur," returned the archdeacon, "if that be your motive, you would have done as
well not to put yourself out of breath climbing my staircase.
I do not believe in Medicine.
I do not believe in Astrology." "Indeed!" said the man, with surprise.
Coictier gave a forced laugh. "You see that he is mad," he said, in a low
tone, to Gossip Tourangeau.
"He does not believe in astrology." "The idea of imagining," pursued Dom
Claude, "that every ray of a star is a thread which is fastened to the head of a
man!"
"And what then, do you believe in?" exclaimed Gossip Tourangeau.
The archdeacon hesitated for a moment, then he allowed a gloomy smile to escape, which
seemed to give the lie to his response: "Credo in Deum."
"Dominum nostrum," added Gossip Tourangeau, making the sign of the cross.
"Amen," said Coictier.
"Reverend master," resumed Tourangeau, "I am charmed in soul to see you in such a
religious frame of mind.
But have you reached the point, great savant as you are, of no longer believing
in science?"
"No," said the archdeacon, grasping the arm of Gossip Tourangeau, and a ray of
enthusiasm lighted up his gloomy eyes, "no, I do not reject science.
I have not crawled so long, flat on my belly, with my nails in the earth, through
the innumerable ramifications of its caverns, without perceiving far in front of
me, at the end of the obscure gallery, a
light, a flame, a something, the reflection, no doubt, of the dazzling
central laboratory where the patient and the wise have found out God."
"And in short," interrupted Tourangeau, "what do you hold to be true and certain?"
"Alchemy."
Coictier exclaimed, "Pardieu, Dom Claude, alchemy has its use, no doubt, but why
blaspheme medicine and astrology?"
"Naught is your science of man, naught is your science of the stars," said the
archdeacon, commandingly. "That's driving Epidaurus and Chaldea very
fast," replied the physician with a grin.
"Listen, Messire Jacques. This is said in good faith.
I am not the king's physician, and his majesty has not given me the Garden of
Daedalus in which to observe the constellations.
Don't get angry, but listen to me.
What truth have you deduced, I will not say from medicine, which is too foolish a
thing, but from astrology?
Cite to me the virtues of the vertical boustrophedon, the treasures of the number
ziruph and those of the number zephirod!"
"Will you deny," said Coictier, "the sympathetic force of the collar bone, and
the cabalistics which are derived from it?" "An error, Messire Jacques!
None of your formulas end in reality.
Alchemy on the other hand has its discoveries.
Will you contest results like this?
Ice confined beneath the earth for a thousand years is transformed into rock
crystals. Lead is the ancestor of all metals.
For gold is not a metal, gold is light.
Lead requires only four periods of two hundred years each, to pass in succession
from the state of lead, to the state of red arsenic, from red arsenic to tin, from tin
to silver.
Are not these facts?
But to believe in the collar bone, in the full line and in the stars, is as
ridiculous as to believe with the inhabitants of Grand-Cathay that the golden
oriole turns into a mole, and that grains
of wheat turn into fish of the carp species."
"I have studied hermetic science!" exclaimed Coictier, "and I affirm--"
The fiery archdeacon did not allow him to finish: "And I have studied medicine,
astrology, and hermetics. Here alone is the truth."
(As he spoke thus, he took from the top of the coffer a phial filled with the powder
which we have mentioned above), "here alone is light!
Hippocrates is a dream; Urania is a dream; Hermes, a thought.
Gold is the sun; to make gold is to be God. Herein lies the one and only science.
I have sounded the depths of medicine and astrology, I tell you!
Naught, nothingness! The human body, shadows! the planets,
shadows!"
And he fell back in his armchair in a commanding and inspired attitude.
Gossip Touraugeau watched him in silence.
Coictier tried to grin, shrugged his shoulders imperceptibly, and repeated in a
low voice,-- "A madman!"
"And," said Tourangeau suddenly, "the wondrous result,--have you attained it,
have you made gold?"
"If I had made it," replied the archdeacon, articulating his words slowly, like a man
who is reflecting, "the king of France would be named Claude and not Louis."
The stranger frowned.
"What am I saying?" resumed Dom Claude, with a smile of disdain.
"What would the throne of France be to me when I could rebuild the empire of the
Orient?"
"Very good!" said the stranger. "Oh, the poor fool!" murmured Coictier.
The archdeacon went on, appearing to reply now only to his thoughts,--
"But no, I am still crawling; I am scratching my face and knees against the
pebbles of the subterranean pathway. I catch a glimpse, I do not contemplate!
I do not read, I spell out!"
"And when you know how to read!" demanded the stranger, "will you make gold?"
"Who doubts it?" said the archdeacon.
"In that case Our Lady knows that I am greatly in need of money, and I should much
desire to read in your books. Tell me, reverend master, is your science
inimical or displeasing to Our Lady?"
"Whose archdeacon I am?" Dom Claude contented himself with replying,
with tranquil hauteur. "That is true, my master.
Well! will it please you to initiate me?
Let me spell with you." Claude assumed the majestic and pontifical
attitude of a Samuel.
"Old man, it requires longer years than remain to you, to undertake this voyage
across mysterious things. Your head is very gray!
One comes forth from the cavern only with white hair, but only those with dark hair
enter it.
Science alone knows well how to hollow, wither, and dry up human faces; she needs
not to have old age bring her faces already furrowed.
Nevertheless, if the desire possesses you of putting yourself under discipline at
your age, and of deciphering the formidable alphabet of the sages, come to me; 'tis
well, I will make the effort.
I will not tell you, poor old man, to go and visit the sepulchral chambers of the
pyramids, of which ancient Herodotus speaks, nor the brick tower of Babylon, nor
the immense white marble sanctuary of the Indian temple of Eklinga.
I, no more than yourself, have seen the Chaldean masonry works constructed
according to the sacred form of the Sikra, nor the temple of Solomon, which is
destroyed, nor the stone doors of the
sepulchre of the kings of Israel, which are broken.
We will content ourselves with the fragments of the book of Hermes which we
have here.
I will explain to you the statue of Saint Christopher, the symbol of the sower, and
that of the two angels which are on the front of the Sainte-Chapelle, and one of
which holds in his hands a vase, the other, a cloud--"
Here Jacques Coictier, who had been unhorsed by the archdeacon's impetuous
replies, regained his saddle, and interrupted him with the triumphant tone of
one learned man correcting another,--"Erras amice Claudi.
The symbol is not the number. You take Orpheus for Hermes."
"'Tis you who are in error," replied the archdeacon, gravely.
"Daedalus is the base; Orpheus is the wall; Hermes is the edifice,--that is all.
You shall come when you will," he continued, turning to Tourangeau, "I will
show you the little parcels of gold which remained at the bottom of Nicholas Flamel's
alembic, and you shall compare them with the gold of Guillaume de Paris.
I will teach you the secret virtues of the Greek word, peristera.
But, first of all, I will make you read, one after the other, the marble letters of
the alphabet, the granite pages of the book.
We shall go to the portal of Bishop Guillaume and of Saint-Jean le Rond at the
Sainte-Chapelle, then to the house of Nicholas Flamel, Rue Manvault, to his tomb,
which is at the Saints-Innocents, to his two hospitals, Rue de Montmorency.
I will make you read the hieroglyphics which cover the four great iron cramps on
the portal of the hospital Saint-Gervais, and of the Rue de la Ferronnerie.
We will spell out in company, also, the facade of Saint-Come, of Sainte-Genevieve-
des-Ardents, of Saint Martin, of Saint- Jacques de la Boucherie--."
For a long time, Gossip Tourangeau, intelligent as was his glance, had appeared
not to understand Dom Claude. He interrupted.
"Pasque-dieu! what are your books, then?"
"Here is one of them," said the archdeacon.
And opening the window of his cell he pointed out with his finger the immense
church of Notre-Dame, which, outlining against the starry sky the black silhouette
of its two towers, its stone flanks, its
monstrous haunches, seemed an enormous two- headed sphinx, seated in the middle of the
city.
The archdeacon gazed at the gigantic edifice for some time in silence, then
extending his right hand, with a sigh, towards the printed book which lay open on
the table, and his left towards Notre-Dame,
and turning a sad glance from the book to the church,--"Alas," he said, "this will
kill that." Coictier, who had eagerly approached the
book, could not repress an exclamation.
"He, but now, what is there so formidable in this: 'GLOSSA IN EPISTOLAS D. PAULI,
Norimbergoe, Antonius Koburger, 1474.' This is not new.
'Tis a book of Pierre Lombard, the Master of Sentences.
Is it because it is printed?"
"You have said it," replied Claude, who seemed absorbed in a profound meditation,
and stood resting, his forefinger bent backward on the folio which had come from
the famous press of Nuremberg.
Then he added these mysterious words: "Alas! alas! small things come at the end
of great things; a tooth triumphs over a mass.
The Nile rat kills the crocodile, the swordfish kills the whale, the book will
kill the edifice."
The curfew of the cloister sounded at the moment when Master Jacques was repeating to
his companion in low tones, his eternal refrain, "He is mad!"
To which his companion this time replied, "I believe that he is."
It was the hour when no stranger could remain in the cloister.
The two visitors withdrew.
"Master," said Gossip Tourangeau, as he took leave of the archdeacon, "I love wise
men and great minds, and I hold you in singular esteem.
Come to-morrow to the Palace des Tournelles, and inquire for the Abbe de
Sainte-Martin, of Tours."
The archdeacon returned to his chamber dumbfounded, comprehending at last who
Gossip Tourangeau was, and recalling that passage of the register of Sainte-Martin,
of Tours:--Abbas beati Martini, SCILICET
REX FRANCIAE, est canonicus de consuetudine et habet parvam proebendam quam habet
sanctus Venantius, et debet sedere in sede thesaurarii.
It is asserted that after that epoch the archdeacon had frequent conferences with
Louis XI., when his majesty came to Paris, and that Dom Claude's influence quite
overshadowed that of Olivier le Daim and
Jacques Coictier, who, as was his habit, rudely took the king to task on that
account.
-BOOK FIFTH. CHAPTER II.
THIS WILL KILL THAT.
Our lady readers will pardon us if we pause for a moment to seek what could have been
the thought concealed beneath those enigmatic words of the archdeacon: "This
will kill that.
The book will kill the edifice." To our mind, this thought had two faces.
In the first place, it was a priestly thought.
It was the affright of the priest in the presence of a new agent, the printing
press.
It was the terror and dazzled amazement of the men of the sanctuary, in the presence
of the luminous press of Gutenberg.
It was the pulpit and the manuscript taking the alarm at the printed word: something
similar to the stupor of a sparrow which should behold the angel Legion unfold his
six million wings.
It was the cry of the prophet who already hears emancipated humanity roaring and
swarming; who beholds in the future, intelligence sapping faith, opinion
dethroning belief, the world shaking off Rome.
It was the prognostication of the philosopher who sees human thought,
volatilized by the press, evaporating from the theocratic recipient.
It was the terror of the soldier who examines the brazen battering ram, and
says:--"The tower will crumble." It signified that one power was about to
succeed another power.
It meant, "The press will kill the church."
But underlying this thought, the first and most simple one, no doubt, there was in our
opinion another, newer one, a corollary of the first, less easy to perceive and more
easy to contest, a view as philosophical
and belonging no longer to the priest alone but to the savant and the artist.
It was a presentiment that human thought, in changing its form, was about to change
its mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would no longer be
written with the same matter, and in the
same manner; that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was about to make way
for the book of paper, more solid and still more durable.
In this connection the archdeacon's vague formula had a second sense.
It meant, "Printing will kill architecture."
In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era,
inclusive, architecture is the great book of humanity, the principal expression of
man in his different stages of development, either as a force or as an intelligence.
When the memory of the first races felt itself overloaded, when the mass of
reminiscences of the human race became so heavy and so confused that speech naked and
flying, ran the risk of losing them on the
way, men transcribed them on the soil in a manner which was at once the most visible,
most durable, and most natural. They sealed each tradition beneath a
monument.
The first monuments were simple masses of rock, "which the iron had not touched," as
Moses says. Architecture began like all writing.
It was first an alphabet.
Men planted a stone upright, it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph,
and upon each hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on the column.
This is what the earliest races did everywhere, at the same moment, on the
surface of the entire world. We find the "standing stones" of the Celts
in Asian Siberia; in the pampas of America.
Later on, they made words; they placed stone upon stone, they coupled those
syllables of granite, and attempted some combinations.
The Celtic dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are
words. Some, especially the tumulus, are proper
names.
Sometimes even, when men had a great deal of stone, and a vast plain, they wrote a
phrase. The immense pile of Karnac is a complete
sentence.
At last they made books.
Traditions had brought forth symbols, beneath which they disappeared like the
trunk of a tree beneath its foliage; all these symbols in which humanity placed
faith continued to grow, to multiply, to
intersect, to become more and more complicated; the first monuments no longer
sufficed to contain them, they were overflowing in every part; these monuments
hardly expressed now the primitive
tradition, simple like themselves, naked and prone upon the earth.
The symbol felt the need of expansion in the edifice.
Then architecture was developed in proportion with human thought; it became a
giant with a thousand heads and a thousand arms, and fixed all this floating symbolism
in an eternal, visible, palpable form.
While Daedalus, who is force, measured; while Orpheus, who is intelligence, sang;--
the pillar, which is a letter; the arcade, which is a syllable; the pyramid, which is
a word,--all set in movement at once by a
law of geometry and by a law of poetry, grouped themselves, combined, amalgamated,
descended, ascended, placed themselves side by side on the soil, ranged themselves in
stories in the sky, until they had written
under the dictation of the general idea of an epoch, those marvellous books which were
also marvellous edifices: the Pagoda of Eklinga, the Rhamseion of Egypt, the Temple
of Solomon.
The generating idea, the word, was not only at the foundation of all these edifices,
but also in the form.
The temple of Solomon, for example, was not alone the binding of the holy book; it was
the holy book itself.
On each one of its concentric walls, the priests could read the word translated and
manifested to the eye, and thus they followed its transformations from sanctuary
to sanctuary, until they seized it in its
last tabernacle, under its most concrete form, which still belonged to architecture:
the arch.
Thus the word was enclosed in an edifice, but its image was upon its envelope, like
the human form on the coffin of a mummy.
And not only the form of edifices, but the sites selected for them, revealed the
thought which they represented, according as the symbol to be expressed was graceful
or grave.
Greece crowned her mountains with a temple harmonious to the eye; India disembowelled
hers, to chisel therein those monstrous subterranean pagodas, borne up by gigantic
rows of granite elephants.
Thus, during the first six thousand years of the world, from the most immemorial
pagoda of Hindustan, to the cathedral of Cologne, architecture was the great
handwriting of the human race.
And this is so true, that not only every religious symbol, but every human thought,
has its page and its monument in that immense book.
All civilization begins in theocracy and ends in democracy.
This law of liberty following unity is written in architecture.
For, let us insist upon this point, masonry must not be thought to be powerful only in
erecting the temple and in expressing the myth and sacerdotal symbolism; in
inscribing in hieroglyphs upon its pages of stone the mysterious tables of the law.
If it were thus,--as there comes in all human society a moment when the sacred
symbol is worn out and becomes obliterated under freedom of thought, when man escapes
from the priest, when the excrescence of
philosophies and systems devour the face of religion,--architecture could not reproduce
this new state of human thought; its leaves, so crowded on the face, would be
empty on the back; its work would be mutilated; its book would be incomplete.
But no.
Let us take as an example the Middle Ages, where we see more clearly because it is
nearer to us.
During its first period, while theocracy is organizing Europe, while the Vatican is
rallying and reclassing about itself the elements of a Rome made from the Rome which
lies in ruins around the Capitol, while
Christianity is seeking all the stages of society amid the rubbish of anterior
civilization, and rebuilding with its ruins a new hierarchic universe, the keystone to
whose vault is the priest--one first hears
a dull echo from that chaos, and then, little by little, one sees, arising from
beneath the breath of Christianity, from beneath the hand of the barbarians, from
the fragments of the dead Greek and Roman
architectures, that mysterious Romanesque architecture, sister of the theocratic
masonry of Egypt and of India, inalterable emblem of pure catholicism, unchangeable
hieroglyph of the papal unity.
All the thought of that day is written, in fact, in this sombre, Romanesque style.
One feels everywhere in it authority, unity, the impenetrable, the absolute,
Gregory VII.; always the priest, never the man; everywhere caste, never the people.
But the Crusades arrive.
They are a great popular movement, and every great popular movement, whatever may
be its cause and object, always sets free the spirit of liberty from its final
precipitate.
New things spring into life every day. Here opens the stormy period of the
Jacqueries, Pragueries, and Leagues. Authority wavers, unity is divided.
Feudalism demands to share with theocracy, while awaiting the inevitable arrival of
the people, who will assume the part of the lion: Quia nominor leo.
Seignory pierces through sacerdotalism; the commonality, through seignory.
The face of Europe is changed. Well! the face of architecture is changed
also.
Like civilization, it has turned a page, and the new spirit of the time finds her
ready to write at its dictation.
It returns from the crusades with the pointed arch, like the nations with
liberty.
Then, while Rome is undergoing gradual dismemberment, Romanesque architecture
dies.
The hieroglyph deserts the cathedral, and betakes itself to blazoning the donjon
keep, in order to lend prestige to feudalism.
The cathedral itself, that edifice formerly so dogmatic, invaded henceforth by the
bourgeoisie, by the community, by liberty, escapes the priest and falls into the power
of the artist.
The artist builds it after his own fashion. Farewell to mystery, myth, law.
Fancy and caprice, welcome. Provided the priest has his basilica and
his altar, he has nothing to say.
The four walls belong to the artist. The architectural book belongs no longer to
the priest, to religion, to Rome; it is the property of poetry, of imagination, of the
people.
Hence the rapid and innumerable transformations of that architecture which
owns but three centuries, so striking after the stagnant immobility of the Romanesque
architecture, which owns six or seven.
Nevertheless, art marches on with giant strides.
Popular genius amid originality accomplish the task which the bishops formerly
fulfilled.
Each race writes its line upon the book, as it passes; it erases the ancient Romanesque
hieroglyphs on the frontispieces of cathedrals, and at the most one only sees
dogma cropping out here and there, beneath the new symbol which it has deposited.
The popular drapery hardly permits the religious skeleton to be suspected.
One cannot even form an idea of the liberties which the architects then take,
even toward the Church.
There are capitals knitted of nuns and monks, shamelessly coupled, as on the hall
of chimney pieces in the Palais de Justice, in Paris.
There is Noah's adventure carved to the last detail, as under the great portal of
Bourges.
There is a bacchanalian monk, with ass's ears and glass in hand, laughing in the
face of a whole community, as on the lavatory of the Abbey of Bocherville.
There exists at that epoch, for thought written in stone, a privilege exactly
comparable to our present liberty of the press.
It is the liberty of architecture.
This liberty goes very far. Sometimes a portal, a facade, an entire
church, presents a symbolical sense absolutely foreign to worship, or even
hostile to the Church.
In the thirteenth century, Guillaume de Paris, and Nicholas Flamel, in the
fifteenth, wrote such seditious pages. Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie was a whole
church of the opposition.
Thought was then free only in this manner; hence it never wrote itself out completely
except on the books called edifices.
Thought, under the form of edifice, could have beheld itself burned in the public
square by the hands of the executioner, in its manuscript form, if it had been
sufficiently imprudent to risk itself thus;
thought, as the door of a church, would have been a spectator of the punishment of
thought as a book.
Having thus only this resource, masonry, in order to make its way to the light, flung
itself upon it from all quarters.
Hence the immense quantity of cathedrals which have covered Europe--a number so
prodigious that one can hardly believe it even after having verified it.
All the material forces, all the intellectual forces of society converged
towards the same point: architecture.
In this manner, under the pretext of building churches to God, art was developed
in its magnificent proportions. Then whoever was born a poet became an
architect.
Genius, scattered in the masses, repressed in every quarter under feudalism as under a
testudo of brazen bucklers, finding no issue except in the direction of
architecture,--gushed forth through that
art, and its Iliads assumed the form of cathedrals.
All other arts obeyed, and placed themselves under the discipline of
architecture.
They were the workmen of the great work.
The architect, the poet, the master, summed up in his person the sculpture which carved
his facades, painting which illuminated his windows, music which set his bells to
pealing, and breathed into his organs.
There was nothing down to poor poetry,-- properly speaking, that which persisted in
vegetating in manuscripts,--which was not forced, in order to make something of
itself, to come and frame itself in the
edifice in the shape of a hymn or of prose; the same part, after all, which the
tragedies of AEschylus had played in the sacerdotal festivals of Greece; Genesis, in
the temple of Solomon.
Thus, down to the time of Gutenberg, architecture is the principal writing, the
universal writing.
In that granite book, begun by the Orient, continued by Greek and Roman antiquity, the
Middle Ages wrote the last page.
Moreover, this phenomenon of an architecture of the people following an
architecture of caste, which we have just been observing in the Middle Ages, is
reproduced with every analogous movement in
the human intelligence at the other great epochs of history.
Thus, in order to enunciate here only summarily, a law which it would require
volumes to develop: in the high Orient, the cradle of primitive times, after Hindoo
architecture came Phoenician architecture,
that opulent mother of Arabian architecture; in antiquity, after Egyptian
architecture, of which Etruscan style and cyclopean monuments are but one variety,
came Greek architecture (of which the Roman
style is only a continuation), surcharged with the Carthaginian dome; in modern
times, after Romanesque architecture came Gothic architecture.
And by separating there three series into their component parts, we shall find in the
three eldest sisters, Hindoo architecture, Egyptian architecture, Romanesque
architecture, the same symbol; that is to
say, theocracy, caste, unity, dogma, myth, God: and for the three younger sisters,
Phoenician architecture, Greek architecture, Gothic architecture,
whatever, nevertheless, may be the
diversity of form inherent in their nature, the same signification also; that is to
say, liberty, the people, man.
In the Hindu, Egyptian, or Romanesque architecture, one feels the priest, nothing
but the priest, whether he calls himself Brahmin, Magian, or Pope.
It is not the same in the architectures of the people.
They are richer and less sacred.
In the Phoenician, one feels the merchant; in the Greek, the republican; in the
Gothic, the citizen.
The general characteristics of all theocratic architecture are immutability,
horror of progress, the preservation of traditional lines, the consecration of the
primitive types, the constant bending of
all the forms of men and of nature to the incomprehensible caprices of the symbol.
These are dark books, which the initiated alone understand how to decipher.
Moreover, every form, every deformity even, has there a sense which renders it
inviolable.
Do not ask of Hindoo, Egyptian, Romanesque masonry to reform their design, or to
improve their statuary. Every attempt at perfecting is an impiety
to them.
In these architectures it seems as though the rigidity of the dogma had spread over
the stone like a sort of second petrifaction.
The general characteristics of popular masonry, on the contrary, are progress,
originality, opulence, perpetual movement.
They are already sufficiently detached from religion to think of their beauty, to take
care of it, to correct without relaxation their parure of statues or arabesques.
They are of the age.
They have something human, which they mingle incessantly with the divine symbol
under which they still produce.
Hence, edifices comprehensible to every soul, to every intelligence, to every
imagination, symbolical still, but as easy to understand as nature.
Between theocratic architecture and this there is the difference that lies between a
sacred language and a vulgar language, between hieroglyphics and art, between
Solomon and Phidias.
If the reader will sum up what we have hitherto briefly, very briefly, indicated,
neglecting a thousand proofs and also a thousand objections of detail, he will be
led to this: that architecture was, down to
the fifteenth century, the chief register of humanity; that in that interval not a
thought which is in any degree complicated made its appearance in the world, which has
not been worked into an edifice; that every
popular idea, and every religious law, has had its monumental records; that the human
race has, in short, had no important thought which it has not written in stone.
And why?
Because every thought, either philosophical or religious, is interested in perpetuating
itself; because the idea which has moved one generation wishes to move others also,
and leave a trace.
Now, what a precarious immortality is that of the manuscript!
How much more solid, durable, unyielding, is a book of stone!
In order to destroy the written word, a torch and a Turk are sufficient.
To demolish the constructed word, a social revolution, a terrestrial revolution are
required.
The barbarians passed over the Coliseum; the deluge, perhaps, passed over the
Pyramids. In the fifteenth century everything
changes.
Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself, not only more durable
and more resisting than architecture, but still more simple and easy.
Architecture is dethroned.
Gutenberg's letters of lead are about to supersede Orpheus's letters of stone.
The invention of printing is the greatest event in history.
It is the mother of revolution.
It is the mode of expression of humanity which is totally renewed; it is human
thought stripping off one form and donning another; it is the complete and definitive
change of skin of that symbolical serpent
which since the days of Adam has represented intelligence.
In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile,
irresistible, indestructible.
It is mingled with the air. In the days of architecture it made a
mountain of itself, and took powerful possession of a century and a place.
Now it converts itself into a flock of birds, scatters itself to the four winds,
and occupies all points of air and space at once.
We repeat, who does not perceive that in this form it is far more indelible?
It was solid, it has become alive. It passes from duration in time to
immortality.
One can demolish a mass; how can one extirpate ubiquity?
If a flood comes, the mountains will have long disappeared beneath the waves, while
the birds will still be flying about; and if a single ark floats on the surface of
the cataclysm, they will alight upon it,
will float with it, will be present with it at the ebbing of the waters; and the new
world which emerges from this chaos will behold, on its awakening, the thought of
the world which has been submerged soaring above it, winged and living.
And when one observes that this mode of expression is not only the most
conservative, but also the most simple, the most convenient, the most practicable for
all; when one reflects that it does not
drag after it bulky baggage, and does not set in motion a heavy apparatus; when one
compares thought forced, in order to transform itself into an edifice, to put in
motion four or five other arts and tons of
gold, a whole mountain of stones, a whole forest of timber-work, a whole nation of
workmen; when one compares it to the thought which becomes a book, and for which
a little paper, a little ink, and a pen
suffice,--how can one be surprised that human intelligence should have quitted
architecture for printing?
Cut the primitive bed of a river abruptly with a canal hollowed out below its level,
and the river will desert its bed.
Behold how, beginning with the discovery of printing, architecture withers away little
by little, becomes lifeless and bare.
How one feels the water sinking, the sap departing, the thought of the times and of
the people withdrawing from it!
The chill is almost imperceptible in the fifteenth century; the press is, as yet,
too weak, and, at the most, draws from powerful architecture a superabundance of
life.
But practically beginning with the sixteenth century, the malady of
architecture is visible; it is no longer the expression of society; it becomes
classic art in a miserable manner; from
being Gallic, European, indigenous, it becomes Greek and Roman; from being true
and modern, it becomes pseudo-classic. It is this decadence which is called the
Renaissance.
A magnificent decadence, however, for the ancient Gothic genius, that sun which sets
behind the gigantic press of Mayence, still penetrates for a while longer with its rays
that whole hybrid pile of Latin arcades and Corinthian columns.
It is that setting sun which we mistake for the dawn.
Nevertheless, from the moment when architecture is no longer anything but an
art like any other; as soon as it is no longer the total art, the sovereign art,
the tyrant art,--it has no longer the power to retain the other arts.
So they emancipate themselves, break the yoke of the architect, and take themselves
off, each one in its own direction.
Each one of them gains by this divorce. Isolation aggrandizes everything.
Sculpture becomes statuary, the image trade becomes painting, the canon becomes music.
One would pronounce it an empire dismembered at the death of its Alexander,
and whose provinces become kingdoms.
Hence Raphael, Michael Angelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina, those splendors of the dazzling
sixteenth century. Thought emancipates itself in all
directions at the same time as the arts.
The arch-heretics of the Middle Ages had already made large incisions into
Catholicism. The sixteenth century breaks religious
unity.
Before the invention of printing, reform would have been merely a schism; printing
converted it into a revolution. Take away the press; heresy is enervated.
Whether it be Providence or Fate, Gutenburg is the precursor of Luther.
Nevertheless, when the sun of the Middle Ages is completely set, when the Gothic
genius is forever extinct upon the horizon, architecture grows dim, loses its color,
becomes more and more effaced.
The printed book, the gnawing worm of the edifice, sucks and devours it.
It becomes bare, denuded of its foliage, and grows visibly emaciated.
It is petty, it is poor, it is nothing.
It no longer expresses anything, not even the memory of the art of another time.
Reduced to itself, abandoned by the other arts, because human thought is abandoning
it, it summons bunglers in place of artists.
Glass replaces the painted windows.
The stone-cutter succeeds the sculptor. Farewell all sap, all originality, all
life, all intelligence. It drags along, a lamentable workshop
mendicant, from copy to copy.
Michael Angelo, who, no doubt, felt even in the sixteenth century that it was dying,
had a last idea, an idea of despair. That Titan of art piled the Pantheon on the
Parthenon, and made Saint-Peter's at Rome.
A great work, which deserved to remain unique, the last originality of
architecture, the signature of a giant artist at the bottom of the colossal
register of stone which was closed forever.
With Michael Angelo dead, what does this miserable architecture, which survived
itself in the state of a spectre, do? It takes Saint-Peter in Rome, copies it and
parodies it.
It is a mania. It is a pity.
Each century has its Saint-Peter's of Rome; in the seventeenth century, the Val-de-
Grace; in the eighteenth, Sainte-Genevieve.
Each country has its Saint-Peter's of Rome. London has one; Petersburg has another;
Paris has two or three.
The insignificant testament, the last dotage of a decrepit grand art falling back
into infancy before it dies.
If, in place of the characteristic monuments which we have just described, we
examine the general aspect of art from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, we
notice the same phenomena of decay and phthisis.
Beginning with Francois II., the architectural form of the edifice effaces
itself more and more, and allows the geometrical form, like the bony structure
of an emaciated invalid, to become prominent.
The fine lines of art give way to the cold and inexorable lines of geometry.
An edifice is no longer an edifice; it is a polyhedron.
Meanwhile, architecture is tormented in her struggles to conceal this nudity.
Look at the Greek pediment inscribed upon the Roman pediment, and vice versa.
It is still the Pantheon on the Parthenon: Saint-Peter's of Rome.
Here are the brick houses of Henri IV., with their stone corners; the Place Royale,
the Place Dauphine.
Here are the churches of Louis XIII., heavy, squat, thickset, crowded together,
loaded with a dome like a hump.
Here is the Mazarin architecture, the wretched Italian pasticcio of the Four
Nations.
Here are the palaces of Louis XIV., long barracks for courtiers, stiff, cold,
tiresome.
Here, finally, is Louis XV., with chiccory leaves and vermicelli, and all the warts,
and all the fungi, which disfigure that decrepit, toothless, and coquettish old
architecture.
From Francois II. to Louis XV., the evil has increased in geometrical progression.
Art has no longer anything but skin upon its bones.
It is miserably perishing.
Meanwhile what becomes of printing? All the life which is leaving architecture
comes to it. In proportion as architecture ebbs,
printing swells and grows.
That capital of forces which human thought had been expending in edifices, it
henceforth expends in books.
Thus, from the sixteenth century onward, the press, raised to the level of decaying
architecture, contends with it and kills it.
In the seventeenth century it is already sufficiently the sovereign, sufficiently
triumphant, sufficiently established in its victory, to give to the world the feast of
a great literary century.
In the eighteenth, having reposed for a long time at the Court of Louis XIV., it
seizes again the old sword of Luther, puts it into the hand of Voltaire, and rushes
impetuously to the attack of that ancient
Europe, whose architectural expression it has already killed.
At the moment when the eighteenth century comes to an end, it has destroyed
everything.
In the nineteenth, it begins to reconstruct.
Now, we ask, which of the three arts has really represented human thought for the
last three centuries? which translates it? which expresses not only its literary and
scholastic vagaries, but its vast,
profound, universal movement? which constantly superposes itself, without a
break, without a gap, upon the human race, which walks a monster with a thousand
legs?--Architecture or printing?
It is printing.
Let the reader make no mistake; architecture is dead; irretrievably slain
by the printed book,--slain because it endures for a shorter time,--slain because
it costs more.
Every cathedral represents millions.
Let the reader now imagine what an investment of funds it would require to
rewrite the architectural book; to cause thousands of edifices to swarm once more
upon the soil; to return to those epochs
when the throng of monuments was such, according to the statement of an eye
witness, "that one would have said that the world in shaking itself, had cast off its
old garments in order to cover itself with a white vesture of churches."
Erat enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet, rejecta vetustate, candida
ecclesiarum vestem indueret.
(GLABER RADOLPHUS.) A book is so soon made, costs so little,
and can go so far! How can it surprise us that all human
thought flows in this channel?
This does not mean that architecture will not still have a fine monument, an isolated
masterpiece, here and there.
We may still have from time to time, under the reign of printing, a column made I
suppose, by a whole army from melted cannon, as we had under the reign of
architecture, Iliads and Romanceros,
Mahabahrata, and Nibelungen Lieds, made by a whole people, with rhapsodies piled up
and melted together.
The great accident of an architect of genius may happen in the twentieth century,
like that of Dante in the thirteenth.
But architecture will no longer be the social art, the collective art, the
dominating art.
The grand poem, the grand edifice, the grand work of humanity will no longer be
built: it will be printed.
And henceforth, if architecture should arise again accidentally, it will no longer
be mistress.
It will be subservient to the law of literature, which formerly received the law
from it. The respective positions of the two arts
will be inverted.
It is certain that in architectural epochs, the poems, rare it is true, resemble the
monuments. In India, Vyasa is branching, strange,
impenetrable as a pagoda.
In Egyptian Orient, poetry has like the edifices, grandeur and tranquillity of
line; in antique Greece, beauty, serenity, calm; in Christian Europe, the Catholic
majesty, the popular naivete, the rich and
luxuriant vegetation of an epoch of renewal.
The Bible resembles the Pyramids; the Iliad, the Parthenon; Homer, Phidias.
Dante in the thirteenth century is the last Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the
sixteenth, the last Gothic cathedral.
Thus, to sum up what we have hitherto said, in a fashion which is necessarily
incomplete and mutilated, the human race has two books, two registers, two
testaments: masonry and printing; the Bible of stone and the Bible of paper.
No doubt, when one contemplates these two Bibles, laid so broadly open in the
centuries, it is permissible to regret the visible majesty of the writing of granite,
those gigantic alphabets formulated in
colonnades, in pylons, in obelisks, those sorts of human mountains which cover the
world and the past, from the pyramid to the bell tower, from Cheops to Strasburg.
The past must be reread upon these pages of marble.
This book, written by architecture, must be admired and perused incessantly; but the
grandeur of the edifice which printing erects in its turn must not be denied.
That edifice is colossal.
Some compiler of statistics has calculated, that if all the volumes which have issued
from the press since Gutenberg's day were to be piled one upon another, they would
fill the space between the earth and the
moon; but it is not that sort of grandeur of which we wished to speak.
Nevertheless, when one tries to collect in one's mind a comprehensive image of the
total products of printing down to our own days, does not that total appear to us like
an immense construction, resting upon the
entire world, at which humanity toils without relaxation, and whose monstrous
crest is lost in the profound mists of the future?
It is the anthill of intelligence.
It is the hive whither come all imaginations, those golden bees, with their
honey. The edifice has a thousand stories.
Here and there one beholds on its staircases the gloomy caverns of science
which pierce its interior.
Everywhere upon its surface, art causes its arabesques, rosettes, and laces to thrive
luxuriantly before the eyes.
There, every individual work, however capricious and isolated it may seem, has
its place and its projection. Harmony results from the whole.
From the cathedral of Shakespeare to the mosque of Byron, a thousand tiny bell
towers are piled pell-mell above this metropolis of universal thought.
At its base are written some ancient titles of humanity which architecture had not
registered.
To the left of the entrance has been fixed the ancient bas-relief, in white marble, of
Homer; to the right, the polyglot Bible rears its seven heads.
The hydra of the Romancero and some other hybrid forms, the Vedas and the Nibelungen
bristle further on. Nevertheless, the prodigious edifice still
remains incomplete.
The press, that giant machine, which incessantly pumps all the intellectual sap
of society, belches forth without pause fresh materials for its work.
The whole human race is on the scaffoldings.
Each mind is a mason. The humblest fills his hole, or places his
stone.
Retif de le Bretonne brings his hod of plaster.
Every day a new course rises.
Independently of the original and individual contribution of each writer,
there are collective contingents.
The eighteenth century gives the Encyclopedia, the revolution gives the
Moniteur.
Assuredly, it is a construction which increases and piles up in endless spirals;
there also are confusion of tongues, incessant activity, indefatigable labor,
eager competition of all humanity, refuge
promised to intelligence, a new Flood against an overflow of barbarians.
It is the second tower of Babel of the human race.