But when the sun of the Middle Ages has wholly set, when the radiance of Gothic genius has faded forever from the horizon of art, architecture, too, grows slowly pale, wan and lifeless. The printed book, that gnawing worm, sucks the life-blood from her and devours her. She droops, she withers, she wastes away before the eye. She becomes mean and poor, of no account, conveying nothing to the mind—not even the memory of the art of other days. Reduced to her own exertions, deserted by the other arts because human thought has left her in the lurch, she has to employ the artisan in default of the artist. Plain glass replaces the glowing church window, the stone-mason the sculptor; farewell to vital force, to originality, life or intelligence; as a lamentabie beggar of the studios she drags herself from copy to copy. Michael Angelo, doubtless sensible of her approaching end, made one last despairing effort in her aid. That Titan of the world of art piled the Pantheon on the Parthenon and so made Saint-Peter’s of Rome—a gigantic work that deserved to remain unique, the last orginality of architecture, the signature of a mighty artist at the bottom of the colossal register of stone thus closed. But Michael Angelo once dead, what does this wretched architecture do, which only survives as a spectre, as a shade? She takes Saint-Peter’s and copies, parodies it. It becomes a mania with her, a thing to weep at: in the seventeenth century the Val-de-Grace, in the eighteenth, Sainte-Geneviève. Every country has its Saint-Peter’s. London has hers, St. Petersburg hers, Paris even two or three—a legacy of triviality, the last drivellings of a grand but decrepit art, fallen into second childhood before its final dissolution.
If, instead of the characteristic monuments like those of which we have spoken, we examine the general aspect of the art from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, we shall find everywhere the same evidences of decrepitude and decay. From the time of Francis II the form of the edifice lets the geometrical outline show through more and more, like the bony framework through the skin of an emaciated body. The generous curves of art give place to the cold and inexorable lines of geometry. An edifice is no longer an edifice, it is a polyhedron. Architecture, however, is at infinite pains to cover her nakedness, and hence the Greek pediment set in the Roman pediment and vice versa. It is always the Pantheon on the Parthenon, Saint-Peter’s at Rome. Such are the brick houses with stone corners of the time of Henri IV, the Place Royale, the Place Dauphine. Such are the churches of Louis XIII, heavy, squat, compressed, with a dome like a hump. Thus, too, is the Mazarin architecture, the poor Italian pasticcio of the Quatre-Nations, the palaces of Louis XIV, mere court barracks, endless, frigid, wearisome; and finally, the style of Louis XV with its chicory-leaf and vermicelli ornaments, and all the warts and growths disfiguring that aged, toothless, demoralized coquette. From Francis II to Louis XV the malady progressed in geometrical ratio. The art is reduced to skin and bone, her life ebbs miserably away.
Meanwhile, what of the art of printing? All the vital force taken from architecture streams to her. As architecture sinks, so printing rises and expands. The store of strength spent hitherto by human thought on edifices is now bestowed on books; till, by the sixteenth century, the press, grown now to the level of her shrunken rival, wrestles with her and prevails. In the seventeenth century she is already so absolute, so victorious, so firmly established on her throne, that she can afford to offer to the world the spectacle of a great literary era. In the eighteenth century, after long idleness at the Court of Louis XIV, she takes up again the ancient sword of Luther, thrusts it into Voltaire’s hand, and runs full tilt at that antiquated Europe whom she has already robbed of all architectural expression. Thus, as the eighteenth century ends she has accomplished her work of destruction; with the nineteenth century she begins to construct.
Now which of these two arts, we ask, represents in truth the course of human thought during three centuries; which of the two transmits, expresses, not only its fleeting literary and scholastic fashion, but its vast, profound, all-embracing tendencies? Which of the two has fitted itself like a skin, without a crease or gap, over that thousand-footed, never-resting monster, the human race? Architecture or Printing?
Printing. Let no one mistake: architecture is dead—dead beyond recall, killed by the printed book, killed because it is less durable, killed because it is more costly. Every Cathedral represents a million. Imagine now the sums necessary for the rewriting of that architectural tome; for those countless edifices to spread once more over the land; to return to the days when their abundance was such that from the testimony of an eye-witness “you would have thought that the world had cast off its old raiment and clad itself anew in a white raiment of churches.” Erat enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet, rejecta vetustate, candidam ecclesiarum vestem indueret. (Glaber Rudolphus.)
A book takes so little time in the making, costs so little, and can reach so far. What wonder that human thought should choose that path? Though this is not to say that architecture will not, from time to time, put forth some splendid monument, some isolated master-piece. There is no reason why, under the reign of printing, we should not, some time or other, have an obelisk constructed, say, by an entire army out of melted cannon, as, under the reign of architecture, we had the Iliads, the Romants, the Mahabahratas, and the Nibelungen, built by whole nations with the welded fragments of a thousand epics. The great good fortune of possessing an architect of genius may befall the twentieth century, as Dante came to the thirteenth. But architecture will never again be the social, the collective, the dominant art. The great epic, the great monument, the great masterpiece of mankind will never again be built; it will be printed.
And even if, by some fortuitous accident, architecture should revive, she will never again be mistress. She will have to submit to those laws which she once imposed upon literature. The respective positions of the two arts will be reversed. Certainly, under the reign of architecture, the poems—rare, true—resemble the monuments of the time. The Indian Vyasa is strange, variegated, unfathomable, like the native pagoda. In Egypt the poetry shares the grand and tranquil lines of the edifices; in ancient Greece it has their beauty, serenity, and calm; in Christian Europe, the majesty of the Church, the simplicity of the people, the rich and luxuriant vegetation of a period of rebirth. The Bible corresponds to the Pyramids, the Iliad to the Parthenon, Homer to Phidias. Dante in the thirteenth century is the last Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth, the last Gothic minster.
Thus, to put it shortly, mankind has two books, two registers, two testaments: Architecture and Printing; the Bible of stone and the Bible of paper. Doubtless, in contemplating these two Bibles, spread open wide through the centuries, one is fain to regret the visible majesty of the granite writing, those gigantic alphabets in the shape of colonnades, porches, and obelisks; these mountains, as it were, the work of man’s hand spread over the whole world and filling the past, from the pyramid to the steeple, from Cheops to Strassburg. The past should be read in these marble pages; the books written by architecture can be read and reread, with never-diminishing interest; but one cannot deny the grandeur of the edifice which printing has raised in its turn.
That edifice is colossal. I do not know what statistician it was who calculated that by piling one upon another all the volumes issued from the press since Gutenberg, you would bridge the space between the earth and the moon—but it is not to that kind of greatness we allude. Nevertheless, if we try to form a collective picture of the combined results of printing down to our own times, does it not appear as a huge structure, having the whole world for foundation, and the whole human race for its ceaselessly active workmen, and whose pinnacles tower up into the impenetrable mist of the future? It is the swarming ant-hill of intellectual forces; the hive to which all the golden-winged messengers of the imagination return, laden with honey. This prodigious edifice has a thousand storeys, and remains forever incomplete. The press, that giant engine, incessantly absorbing all the intellectual forces of society, disgorges, as incessantly, new materials for its work. The entire human race is on the scaffolding; every mind is a mason. Even the humblest can fill up a gap, or lay another brick. Each day another layer is put on. Independently of the individual contribution, there are certain collective donations. The eighteenth century presents the Encyclopedia, the Revolution the Moniteur. Undoubtedly this, too, is a structure, growing and piling itself up in endless spiral lines; here, too, there is confusion of tongues, incessant activity, indefatigable labour, a furious contest between the whole of mankind, an ark of refuge for the intelligence against another deluge, against another influx of barbarism.
It is the second Tower of Babel.
BOOK VI
Chapter 1 - An Impartial Glance at the Ancient Magistracy
A Mighty fortunate personage in the year of grace 1482, was the noble knight, Robert d’Estouteville, Sieur of Beyne, Baron of Ivry and Saint-Andry in the March, Councillor and Chamberlain to the King, and Warden of the Provostry of Paris. It was well-nigh seventeen years ago since he had received from the King, on November 7, 1465—the year of the comet1—this fine appointment of Provost of Paris, reputed rather a seigneurie than an office. Dignitas, says Joannes L?mn?us, qu?, cum non exigua potestate politiam concernente, atque pr?rogativis multis et juribus conjuncta est.2 It was indeed a thing to marvel at that in 1482 a gentleman should be holding the King’s commission, whose letters of appointment dated back to the date of the marriage of a natural daughter of Louis XI with Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon. On the same day on which Robert d’Estouteville had replaced Jacques de Villiers in the Provostry of Paris, Ma?tre Jehan Dauvet superseded Messire Hélye de Thorrettes as Chief President of the Court of Parliament, Jehan Jouvenel des Ursins supplanted Pierre de Morvilliers in the office of Chancellor of France, and Regnault des Dormans turned Pierre Puy out of the post of Master of Common Pleas to the royal palace. But over how many heads had that Presidency, that Chancellorship, and that Mastership passed since Robert d’Estouteville held the Provostship of Paris! It had been “given unto his keeping,” said the letters patent; and well indeed had he kept the same. He had clung to it, incorporated himself into it, had so identified himself with it that he had managed to escape that mania for change which so possessed Louis XI, a close-fisted, scheming king, who sought to maintain, by frequent appointments and dismissals, the elasticity of his power. Furthermore, the worthy knight had procured the reversion of his post for his son, and for two years now the name of the noble M. Jacques d’Estouteville, Knight, had figured beside that of his father at the head of the roll of the Provostry of Paris—in truth, a rare and signal favour! To be sure, Robert d’Estouteville was a good soldier, had loyally raised his banner for the King against the “League of the Public Weal,” and on the entry of the Queen into Paris in 14— had presented her with a wonderful stag composed of confectionery. Besides this, he was on a very friendly footing with Messire Tristan l’Hermite, Provost-Marshal of the King’s palace. So Messire Robert’s existence was an easy and pleasant one. First of all, he enjoyed very good pay, to which were attached and hanging like extra grapes on his vine, the revenues from the civil and criminal registries of the Provostry, the revenues, civil and criminal, accruing from the auditory courts of the Chatelet, not to speak of many a comfortable little toll-due from the bridges of Mantes and Corbeil, and the profits from the taxes levied on the grain-dealers, as on the measurers of wood and salt. Add to this, the pleasure of displaying on his official rides through the city—in shining contrast to the party-coloured gowns, half red, half tan, of the sheriffs and district officers—his fine military accoutrements, which you may admire to this day, sculptured on his tomb in the Valmont Abbey in Normandy, and his morion with all the bruises in it got at Montlhéry. Then, it was no mean thing to have authority over the constables of the Palais de Justice, over the warder and the Commandant of the Chatelet, the two auditors of the Chatelet (auditores Castelleti), the sixteen commissioners of the sixteen districts, the jailer of the Chatelet, the four enfeoffed officers of the peace, the hundred and twenty mounted officers of the peace, the hundred and twenty officers of the rod, the captain of the watch with his patrol, his under-patrol, his counter-and-night-patrol. Was it nothing to exercise supreme and secondary jurisdiction, to have the right of pillory, hanging, and dragging at the cart’s tail, besides minor jurisdiction in the first resort (in prima instantia, as the old charters have it) over the whole viscomty of Paris, so gloriously endowed with the revenues of seven noble bailiwicks? Can you conceive of anything more gratifying than to mete out judgment and sentence, as Messire Robert d’Estouteville did every day in the Grand Chatelet, under the wide, low-pitched Gothic arches of Philip Augustus; and to retire, as he was wont, every evening to that charming house in Rue Galilée, within the purlieus of the Palais Royal, which he held by right of his wife, Dame Ambroise de Loré, where he could rest from the fatigues of having sent some poor devil to pass the night on his part in that “little cell of the Rue de l’Escorcherie, which the provosts and sheriffs of Paris frequently used as a prison—the same measuring eleven feet in length, seven feet and four inches in width, and eleven feet in height?”3
And not only had Messire Robert d’Estouteville his special jurisdictional offices as Provost of Paris, but also he had his seat, with power over life and death, in the King’s Supreme Court. There was no head of any account but had passed through his hands before falling to the executioner. It was he who had fetched the Comte de Nemours from the Bastille Saint-Antoine, to convey him to the Halles; he who had escorted the Comte de Saint-Pol to the Place de Grève, who stormed and wept, to the huge delight of Monsieur the Provost, who bore no love to Monsieur the Constable.
Here, assuredly, was more than sufficient to make a man’s life happy and illustrious and to merit some day a noteworthy page in that interesting chronicle of the Provosts of Paris, from which we learn that Oudard de Villeneuve owned a house in the Rue des Boucherie, that Guillaume de Hangast bought the great and the little Savoie mansion, that Guillaume Thiboust gave his houses in the Rue Clopin to the Sisters of Sainte-Geneviève, that Hugues Aubriot lived in the H?tel du Porc-epic, and other facts of a domestic character.
