The impetuous Archdeacon would not let him finish. “And I—I have studied medicine, astrology, and hermetics. Here alone is truth” (and as he spoke he took up one of those phials of glass of which mention has been made), “here alone is light! Hippocrates—a dream; Urania—a dream; Hermes—a phantasm. Gold is the sun; to make gold is to be God. There is the one and only science. I have sounded medicine and astrology to their depths—null, I tell you—null and void! The human body—darkness! the stars—darkness!”
He sank into his chair with a compelling and inspired gesture. Tourangeau observed him in silence; Coictier forced a disdainful laugh, shrugging his shoulders imperceptibly while he repeated under his breath, “Madman.”
“Well,” said Tourangeau suddenly, “and the transcendental result—have you achieved it? Have you succeeded in making gold?”
“If I had,” answered the Archdeacon, dropping his words slowly like a man in a reverie, “the name of the King of France would be Claude and not Louis.”
Tourangeau bent his brow.
“Pah, what am I saying?” resumed Dom Claude with a disdainful smile. “What would the throne of France be to me when I could reconstruct the Empire of the East?”
“Well done!” exclaimed Tourangeau.
“Poor ass!” murmured Coictier.
“No,” the Archdeacon went on, as if in answer to his own thoughts, “I am still crawling, still bruising my face and my knees against the stones of the subterranean path. Fitful glimpses I catch, but nothing clear. I cannot read—I am but conning the alphabet.”
“And when you have learned to read, will you be able to make gold?”
“Who doubts it?” answered the Archdeacon.
“In that case—Our Lady knows I am in dire need of money—I would gladly learn to read in your books. Tell me, reverend master, is not your science inimical and displeasing to Our Lady, think you?”
To this question of Tourangeau’s Dom Claude contented himself by making answer with quiet dignity, “Whose priest am I?”
“True, true, master. Well, then, will it please you to initiate me? Let me learn to spell with you?”
Claude assumed the majestic and saceidotal attitude of a Samuel.
“Old man, it would require more years than yet remain to you to undertake this journey across the world of mystery. Your head is very gray! One emerges from the cave with white hair, but one must enter it with black. Science knows very well how to furrow and wither up the face of man without assistance; she has no need that age should bring to her faces that are already wrinkled. Nevertheless, if you are possessed by the desire to put yourself under tutelage at your age, and to decipher the awful alphabet of Wisdom, well and good, come to me, I will do what I can. I will not bid you, poor graybeard, go visit the sepulchral chambers of the Pyramids, of which the ancient Herodotus speaks, nor the brick tower of Babylon, nor the vast marble sanctuary of the Indian Temple of Eklinga. I have not seen, any more than you have, the Chaldean walls built in accordance with the sacred formula of Sikra, nor the Temple of Solomon which was destroyed, nor the stone doors of the sepulchres of the Kings of Israel which are broken in pieces. Such fragments of the Book of Hermes as we have here will suffice us. I will explain to you the statue of Saint-Christopher, the symbol of the Sower, and that of the two angels in the door of the Sainte-Chapelle, of whom one has his hand in a stone vessel, and the other in a cloud.”
Here Jacques Coictier, who had been quite confounded by the Archdeacon’s tempestuous flow of eloquence, recovered his composure and struck in with the triumphant tone of one scholar setting another right:
“Erras, amice Claudi—there you are in error. The symbol is not the numeral. You mistake Orpheus for Hermes.”
“It is you who are in error,” returned the Archdeacon with dignity; “D?dalus is the foundation; Orpheus is the wall; Hermes is the edifice—the whole structure. Come whenever it please you,” he continued, turning to Tourangeau. “I will show you the particles of gold left in the bottom of Nicolas Flamel’s crucible which you can compare with the gold of Guillaume de Paris. I will instruct you in the secret virtues of the Greek word peristera. But before all things, you shall read, one after another, the letters of the marble alphabet, the pages of the granite book. We will go from the doorway of Bishop Guillaume and of Saint-Jean le Rond to the Sainte-Chapelle, then to the house of Nicolas Flamel in the Rue Marivault, to his tomb in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, to his two hospices in the Rue de Montmorency. You shall read the hieroglyphics with which the four great iron bars in the porch of the Hospice of Saint-Gervais are covered. Together we will spell out the fa?ades of Saint-C?me, of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Ardents, Saint-Martin, Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie—”
For some time past, Tourangeau, with all his intelligence, appeared unable to follow Dom Claude. He broke in now:
“Pasque Dieu! but what are these books of yours?”
“Here is one,” replied the Archdeacon; and opening the window of his cell, he pointed to the mighty Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the black silhouette of its two towers, its stone sides, and its huge roof sharply outlined against the starry sky, and looking like an enormous two-headed sphinx crouching in the midst of the city.
For some moments the Archdeacon contemplated the gigantic edifice in silence; then, sighing deeply, he pointed with his right hand to the printed book lying open on his table, and with his left to Notre-Dame, and casting a mournful glance from the book to the church:
“Alas!” he said. “This will destroy that.”
Coictier, who had bent eagerly over the book, could not repress an exclamation of disappointment. “Hé! but what is there so alarming in this? Glossa in Epistolas Pauli. Norimberg?, Antonius Koburger 1474. That is not new. It is a book of Petrus Lombardus, the Magister Sententiarum. Do you mean because it is printed?”
“You have said it,” returned Claude, who stood apparently absorbed in profound meditation, with his finger on the folio which had issued from the famous printing-press of Nuremberg. Presently he uttered these dark words: “Woe! woe! the small brings down the great; a tooth triumphs over a whole mass! The Nile rat destroys the crocodile, the sword-fish destroys the whale, the book will destroy the edifice!”
The curfew of the cloister rang at this moment as Doctor Jacques whispered to his companion his everlasting refrain of “He is mad!” To which the companion replied this time, “I believe he is.”
It was the hour after which no stranger might remain in the cloister. The two visitors prepared to retire.
“Ma?tre,” said Compère Tourangeau, as he took leave of the Archdeacon, “I have a great regard for scholars and great spirits, and I hold you in peculiar esteem. Come tomorrow to the Palais des Tournelles, and ask for the Abbot of Saint-Martin of Tours.”
The Archdeacon returned to his cell dumfounded, comprehending at last who the personage calling himself Compère Tourangeau really was: for he called to mind this passage in the Charter of Saint-Martin of Tours: Abbas, beati Martini, scilicet Rex Franci?, est canonicus de consuetudine et habet parvam pr?bendam quam habet sanctus Venantius, et debet sedere in sede thesaurii.4
It is asserted that from that time onward the Archdeacon conferred frequently with Louis XI, whenever his Majesty came to Paris, and that the King’s regard for Dom Claude put Olivier le Daim and Jacques Coictier quite in the shade, the latter of whom, as was his custom, rated the King soundly in consequence.
______________________
1 Of Predestination and Free-Will.
2 Goodman, gossip.
3 Writing from right to left and back again from left to right without breaking off the lines.
4 The Abbot of Saint-Martin, that is to say the King of France, is canon, according to custom, and has the small benefice which Saint-Venantis had, and shall sit in the seat of the treasurer.
Chapter 2 - This Will Destroy That
Our fair readers must forgive us if we halt a moment here and endeavour to unearth the idea hidden under the Archdeacon’s enigmatical words:
“This will destroy That. The Book will destroy the Edifice.”
To our mind, this thought has two aspects. In the first place it was a view pertaining to the priest—it was the terror of the ecclesiastic before a new force—printing. It was the servant of the dim sanctuary scared and dazzled by the light that streamed from Gutenberg’s press. It was the pulpit and the manuscript, the spoken and the written word quailing before the printed word—something of the stupefaction of the sparrow at beholding the Heavenly Host spread their six million wings. It was the cry of the prophet who already hears the far-off roar and tumult of emancipated humanity; who, gazing into the future, sees intelligence sapping the foundations of faith, opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking off the yoke of Rome; the prognostication of the philosopher who sees human thought volatilized by the press, evaporating out of the theocratic receiver; the terror of the besieged soldier gazing at the steel battering-ram and saying to himself, “The citadel must fall.” It signified that one great power was to supplant another great power. It meant, The Printing-Press will destroy the Church.
But underlying this thought—the first and no doubt the less complex of the two—there was, in our opinion, a second, a more modern—a corollary to the former idea, less on the surface and more likely to be contested; a view fully as philosophic, but pertaining no longer exclusively to the priest, but to the scholar and the artist likewise. It was a premonition that human thought, in changing its outward form, was also about to change its outward mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would, in future, be embodied in a new material, a new fashion; that the book of stone, so solid and so enduring, was to give way to the book of paper, more solid and more enduring still. In this respect the vague formula of the Archdeacon had a second meaning—that one Art would dethrone another Art: Printing will destroy Architecture.
In effect, from the very beginning of things down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era inclusive, architecture is the great book of the human race, man’s chief means of expressing the various stages of his development, whether physical or mental.
When the memory of the primitive races began to be surcharged, when the load of tradition carried about by the human family grew so heavy and disordered that the word, naked and fleeting, ran danger of being lost by the way, they transcribed it on the ground by the most visible, the most lasting, and at the same time most natural means. They enclosed each tradition in a monument.
The first monuments were simply squares of rock “which had not been touched by iron,” as says Moses. Architecture began like all writing. It was first an alphabet. A stone was planted upright and it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and on every hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on the column. Thus did the primitive races act at the same moment over the entire face of the globe. One finds the “upright stone” of the Celts in Asiatic Siberia and on the pampas of America.
Presently they constructed words. Stone was laid upon stone, these granite syllables were coupled together, the word essayed some combinations. The Celtic dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words—some of them, the tumulus in particular, are proper names. Occasionally, when there were many stones and a vast expanse of ground, they wrote a sentence. The immense mass of stones at Karnac is already a complete formula.
of all they made books. Traditions had ended by bringing forth symbols, under which they disappeared like the trunk of a tree under its foliage. These symbols, in which all humanity believed, continued to grow and multiply, becoming more and more complex; the primitive monuments—themselves scarcely expressing the original traditions, and, like them, simple, rough-hewn, and planted in the soil—no longer sufficed to contain them: they overflowed at every point. Of necessity the symbol must expand into the edifice. Architecture followed the development of human thought; it became a giant with a thousand heads, a thousand arms, and caught and concentrated in one eternal, visible, tangible form all this floating symbolism. While D?dalus, who is strength, was measuring; while Orpheus, who is intelligence, was singing—the pillar, which is a letter; the arch, which is a syllable; the pyramid, which is a word, set in motion at once by a law of geometry and a law of poetry, began to group themselves together, to combine, to blend, to sink, to rise, stood side by side on the ground, piled themselves up into the sky, till, to the dictation of the prevailing idea of the epoch, they had written these marvellous books which are equally marvellous edifices: the Pagoda of Eklinga, the Pyramids of Egypt, and the Temple of Solomon.
The parent idea, the Word, was not only contained in the foundation of these edifices, but in their structure. Solomon’s Temple, for example, was not simply the cover of the sacred book, it was the sacred book itself. On each of its concentric enclosures the priest might read the Word translated and made manifest to the eye, might follow its transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary, till at last he could lay hold upon it in its final tabernacle, under its most concrete form, which yet was architecture—the Ark. Thus the Word was enclosed in the edifice, but its image was visible on its outer covering, like the human figure depicted on the coffin of a mummy.
Again, not only the structure of the edifice but its situation revealed the idea it embodied. According as the thought to be expressed was gracious or sombre, Greece crowned her mountains with temples harmonious to the eye; India disembowelled herself to hew out those massive subterranean pagodas which are supported by rows of gigantic granite elephants.
Thus, during the first six thousand years of the world—from the most immemorial temple of Hindustan to the Cathedral at Cologne—architecture has been the great manuscript of the human race. And this is true to such a degree, that not only every religious symbol, but every human thought, has its page and its memorial in that vast book.
Every civilization begins with theocracy and ends with democracy.
The reign of many masters succeeding the reign of one is written in architecture. For—and this point we must emphasize—it must not be supposed that it is only capable of building temples, of expressing only the sacerdotal myth and symbolism, of transcribing in hieroglyphics on its stone pages the mysterious Tables of the Law. Were this the case, then—seeing that in every human society there comes a moment when the sacred symbol is worn out, and is obliterated by the free thought, when the man breaks away from the priest, when the growth of philosophies and systems eats away the face of religion—architecture would be unable to reproduce this new phase of the human mind: its leaves, written upon the right side, would be blank on the reverse; its work would be cut short; its book incomplete. But that is not the case.
