there are so many witches nowadays that I dare say they burn them without knowing their names.One might as well seek the name .After all, one may be tranquil. The good God keeps his register."Here the venerable dame rose and came to the window."Good Lord!you are right, phoebus," said she."The rabble is indeed great.There are people on all the roofs, blessed be God!Do you know, phoebus, this reminds me of my best days.The entrance of King Charles VII., when, also, there were many people.I no longer remember in what year that was.When I speak of this to you, it produces upon you the effect,--does it not?--the effect of something very old, and upon me of something very young.Oh! the crowd was far finer than at the present day. They even stood upon the machicolations of the porte Sainte- Antoine.The king had the queen on a pillion, and after their highnesses came all the ladies mounted behind all the lords.I remember that they laughed loudly, because beside Amanyon de Garlande, who was very short of stature, there rode the Sire Matefelon, a chevalier of gigantic size, who had killed heaps of English.It was very fine.A procession of all the gentlemen of France, with their oriflammes waving red before the eye.There were some with pennons and some with banners.How can I tell? the Sire de Calm with a pennon; Jean de Chateaumorant with a banner; the Sire de Courcy with a banner, and a more ample one than any of the others except the Duc de Bourbon.Alas ! 'tis a sad thing to think that all that has existed and exists no longer!"
The two lovers were not listening to the venerable dowager.phoebus had returned and was leaning on the back of his betrothed's chair, a charming post whence his libertine glance plunged into all the openings of Fleur-de-Lys's gorget. This gorget gaped so conveniently, and allowed him to see so many exquisite things and to divine so many more, that phoebus, dazzled by this skin with its gleams of satin, said to himself, "How can any one love anything but a fair skin?"
Both were silent.The young girl raised sweet, enraptured eyes to him from time to time, and their hair mingled in a ray of spring sunshine.
"phoebus," said Fleur-de-Lys suddenly, in a low voice, "we are to be married three months hence; swear to me that you have never loved any other woman than myself ."
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 .