by Hugo, Victor
‘Quite wrong, Messire Jacques! None of your formulas gives any real results, whereas alchemy has made discoveries. Do you question such results as these? Ice enclosed underground for a thousand years turns into rock crystal; lead is the ancestor of all metals (for gold is not a metal, gold is light)—it takes lead only four periods, each of two hundred years, to pass successively from the state of lead to that of red arsenic, from red arsenic to tin, from tin to silver. Are those facts? But to believe in the Clavicula, the full line, and the stars is as ridiculous as believing, like the inhabitants of Grand Cathay, that the oriole changes into a mole and grains of corn into fish of the genus cyprinidae!’*
‘I have studied hermetics,’ exclaimed Coictier, ‘and I maintain …’
The hot-headed archdeacon did not let him finish: ‘And I have studied medicine, astrology, and hermetics. Here alone lies truth’ (as he spoke he had picked up from the chest a phial full of the powder mentioned earlier), ‘here alone is light! Hippocrates, a dream, Urania, a dream, Hermes, an idea. Gold is the sun, to make gold is to be God. That is the only science. I have probed into medicine and astrology, I tell you! Nothing, nothing. The human body, darkness; the stars, darkness!’
And he fell back into his chair in an attitude of one powerful and inspired. Compère Tourangeau watched him in silence. Coictier tried hard to give a mocking laugh, shrugged his shoulders imperceptibly, and repeated in an undertone: ‘A madman!’
‘And the wonderful goal,’ The Tourangeau said suddenly, ‘have you attained it? Have you made gold?’
‘If I had,’ the archdeacon replied, pronouncing the words slowly, like a man reflecting, ‘the King of France would be called Claude and not Louis.’
The compère frowned.
‘What am I saying?’ Dom Claude went on with a disdainful smile. ‘What would the throne of France mean to me when I could rebuild the empire of the Orient!’
‘And the best of luck!’ said the compère.
‘Oh, the poor fool!’ murmured Coictier.
The archdeacon continued, now seemingly answering only his own thoughts: ‘No, I am still crawling, scraping my face and knees on the stones of the underground path. I catch only a glimpse, I cannot gaze! I cannot read, only spell out the letters.’
‘And once you can read,’ asked the compère, ‘will you make gold?’
‘Who could doubt it?’ said the archdeacon.
‘In that case Our Lady knows that I badly need money, and I should very much like to learn how to read your books. Tell me, reverend master, is your science hostile or displeasing to Our Lady?’
To this question from the compère, Dom Claude was content to answer with lofty calm: ‘Whose archdeacon lam?’
‘That’s true, master. Very well! Would you care to initiate me? Have me spell out the letters with you.’
Claude assumed the majestic and pontifical attitude of a Samuel.
‘Old man, it would take more years than remain to you to undertake that journey through the things of mystery. Your head is very grey! One only comes out from the cavern with white hair, but only enters it with hair still black. Science all by itself is well able to emaciate, wither, and dry up human faces; it does not need old age to bring to it faces already wrinkled. However, if you are driven by a desire to put yourself to school at your age and decipher the fearsome alphabet of the sages, come to me, all right, I’ll try. I won’t tell you, poor old man that you are, to go and visit the burial chambers of the Pyramids, of which ancient Herodotus speaks, nor the brick tower of Babel, nor the immense white marble sanctuary of the Indian temple of Eklinga.* I have not seen, any more than you have, the Chaldean stone buildings constructed on the sacred model of the Sikra,* nor Solomon’s Temple, now destroyed, nor the stone doors of the sepulchre of the kings of Israel, now shattered. We shall content ourselves with the fragments of Hermes’ books that we have here. I shall explain the statue of St Christopher, the symbol of the Sower, and that of the two angels at the doorway of the Sainte-Chapelle, one of whom has his hand in a vase and the other in a cloud …’
At this point Jacques Coictier, who had been unseated by the archdeacon’s fiery replies, put himself back in the saddle, and interrupted him with the triumphant tone of one scholar correcting another: ‘Erras, amice Claudi [You are mistaken, friend Claude]. Symbols are not numbers. You are taking Orpheus for Hermes.’
‘It is you who are mistaken,’ the archdeacon gravely replied. ‘Daedalus is the foundations, Orpheus the walls, Hermes the building. That is, the whole. You can come when you like,’ he went on, turning to the Tourangeau, ‘I’ll show you the particles of gold left in the bottom of Nicolas Flamel’s crucible, and you can compare them with the gold of Guillaume de Paris. I will teach you the occult virtues of the Greek word peristera* But first of all I will make you read one by one the marble letters of the alphabet, the granite pages of the book. We’ll go from Bishop Guillaume’s doorway and Saint-Jean-le-Rond to the Sainte-Chapelle, then to Nicolas Flamel’s house, in the rue Marivault, to his tomb, in the Holy Innocents’ cemetery, to his two hospitals in the rue de Montmorency. I will make you read the hieroglyphs covering the four great andirons in the doorway of the Saint-Gervais hospital and in the rue de la Ferronnerie. We’ll go on together to spell out the façades of Saint-Côme, Sainte-Geneviève-des-Ardents, Saint-Martin and Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie …’
The Tourangeau, despite the intelligence in his eyes, had seemed for some time now no longer able to understand Dom Claude. He interrupted him.
‘Pasquedieu! What are these books of yours then?’
‘Here’s one,’ said the archdeacon.
And opening the window of his cell he pointed to the huge church of Notre-Dame which, with its twin towers standing out in silhouette against the starry sky, its stone ribs and monstrous crupper, looked like an enormous two-headed sphinx sitting there in the middle of the town.
The archdeacon silently contemplated the gigantic building for a while, then sighed as he stretched out his right hand towards the printed book lying open on his table and his left hand towards Notre-Dame, and looked sadly from the book to the church.
‘Alas! he said, ‘this will kill that.’
Coictier, who had eagerly come closer to the book, could not help exclaiming it: ‘Well! but what is so awesome about this: GLOSSA IN EPISTOLAS D. PAULI. Norimbergae. Antonius Koburger, 1474 [Gloss on St Paul’s Epistles, Nuremberg]. That’s not new. It’s a book of Peter Lombard, the Master of the Sentences. Is it because it’s printed?’
‘That’s right,’ Claude answered, apparently absorbed in some profound reflection, standing with his index finger bent against the folio volume from the celebrated presses of Nuremberg. Then he added these mysterious words: ‘Alas! alas! little things overcome great ones; a tooth triumphs over a whole body. The Nile rat kills the crocodile, the swordfish kills the whale, the book will kill the building.’
Curfew rang in the cloister just as Doctor Jacques was repeating to his companion in a very low voice his eternal refrain: ‘He’s mad.’ To which his companion this time replied: ‘Yes, I think so.’
It was the hour after which no stranger might remain in the cloister. The two visitors withdrew. ‘Master,’ said Compère Tourangeau as he took leave of the archdeacon, ‘I like scholars and great minds, and I hold you in particular esteem. Come to the Palace of the Tournelles tomorrow and ask for the abbot of Saint-Martin of Tours.’
The archdeacon returned to his cell dumbfounded, finally realizing the identity of Compère Tourangeau, and recalling this passage from the cartulary of Saint-Martin of Tours:
Abbas beati Martini, SCILICET REX FRANCIAE, est canonicus de consuetudine et habet parvam prebendam quam habet sanctus Venantius et debet sedere in sede thesaurarii.
[The abbot of Saint-Martin, that is the King of France, is by custom a canon and holds the minor prebend held by Saint Venantius and should sit in the treasurer’s seat].
It was asserted that from that time on t
he archdeacon frequently conferred with Louis XI when His Majesty came to Paris, and that Dom Claude’s credit caused umbrage to Olivier le Daim and Jacques Coictier who, as was his wont, gave the King a piece of his mind on the subject.
II
THIS WILL KILL THAT
OUR lady readers will forgive us if we stop for a moment to look for what thought might Îie hidden behind the archdeacon’s enigmatic words: ‘This will kill that, the book will kill the building.’
In our view, that thought was twofold. First of all it was a priest’s way of thinking. It was priestly dread in the face of a new agent: printing. It was the terror and confusion of the man of the sanctuary dazzled by the light shining from Gutenberg’s press. It was the pulpit and the manuscript, the spoken and the written word, taking fright at the printed word; something like the stupefaction of a sparrow seeing the angel Legion spreading his six million wings. It was the cry of the prophet who already hears the clamorous swarming of emancipated mankind, who foresees intelligence undermining faith, opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking off Rome. The philosopher’s forecast, as he sees human thought, volatilized by the printing press, evaporate out of its theological container. The soldier’s terror as he examines the bronze battering ram and says: ‘The tower will crumble.’ It meant that one power would succeed another. It meant: the printing press will kill the Church.
But beneath that thought, no doubt the first and simplest one, there was in our view another, newer one, less easily perceived and more easily challenged, a view just as philosophical, no longer that of the priest alone, but of the scholar and the artist. It was the presentiment that in changing its form human thought was going to change its mode of expression, that the most important idea of each generation would no longer be written in the same material and in the same way, that the book of stone, so solid and durable, would give way to the book of paper, even more solid and durable. In that connection the archdeacon’s vague formula had a second meaning; it signified that one art would dethrone another. It meant: printing will kill architecture.
In fact, from the origin of things up to the fifteenth century of the Christian era inclusive, architecture was the great book of mankind, the principal expression of man at his different stages of development, whether as strength or as intelligence.
When the memory of the earliest peoples felt overloaded, when mankind’s store of memories became so heavy and confused that speech, bare and fleeting, risked losing some on the way, they were transcribed on the ground in what was at once the most visible, the most durable, and the most natural fashion. Each tradition was sealed beneath a monument.
The first monuments were simply chunks of rock ‘which iron had not touched’, as Moses puts it.* Architecture began like any system of writing. First it was an alphabet. A stone was set upright, and that was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and each hieroglyph carried a group of ideas like the capital on a column. That was what the earliest peoples did, everywhere, all at the same time, over the surface of the entire world. The ‘standing stone’ of the Celts is to be found in Asiatic Siberia, in the pampas of America.
Later on words were formed. Stone was laid upon stone, these granite syllables were joined, language tried out a few combinations. The Celtic dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words. Some, especially the tumulus, are proper names. Sometimes even, when there was plenty of stone and a wide level area, they wrote a sentence. The immense accumulation at Carnac is already a completed formula.
Finally they produced books. Traditions had given birth to symbols beneath which they disappeared like a tree trunk beneath its foliage; all these symbols, in which mankind put its faith, grew, multiplied, intersected, becoming more and more complex, so that the early monuments were no longer adequate to contain them and overflowed everywhere; these monuments scarcely still expressed the primitive tradition, which like them was simple, unadorned and rested on the ground. Symbolism needed to expand into a building. Architecture thus developed along with human thought; it became a giant with countless heads and arms, and fixed all this drifting symbolism in an eternal, visible, palpable form. While Daedalus, who is strength, took measurements, while Orpheus, who is intelligence, sang, the pillar, which is a letter, the arcade, which is a syllable, the pyramid, which is a word, set in motion at once by a geometrical and a poetic law, were grouping, combining, blending, rising, descending, lying in juxtaposition on the ground, rising in tiers into the sky, until they had written at the dictation of the general idea of an epoch those wonderful books which were also wonderful buildings: the pagodas of Eklinga, the Ramesseum of Egypt, the Temple of Solomon.
The idea that gave them birth, the word, was not merely in the foundations of all these buildings, but also in their form. Solomon’s Temple, for instance, was not simply the binding of the sacred book, it was the sacred book itself. On each of its concentric enclosures the priests could read the word translated and made manifest to the eye, and could thus follow its transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary until in the final tabernacle they grasped it in its most concrete form, which was still architectural: the ark. Thus the word was enclosed in the building, but its image was on the envelope like the human figure on a mummy’s coffin.
And not only the form of the buildings, but also the site chosen for them reveals the thought they represented. According to whether the symbol to be expressed was smiling or sombre, Greece crowned her mountains with a temple harmonious to the eye, India ripped open hers to carve out within them those shapeless underground pagodas borne by gigantic rows of granite elephants.
Thus, during the first six thousand years of the world’s existence, from the most immemorial pagoda of Hindustan down to Cologne cathedral, architecture was the great script of the human race. And so true is this that not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in this immense book and its monument.
Every civilization begins with theocracy and ends up with democracy. This law of liberty succeeding unity is written in architecture. For, let us stress the point, it must not be thought that masonry’s power is limited to building the temple, to expressing myth and priestly symbolism, to transcribing in hieroglyphs on its stone pages the mysterious tables of the law. If that were the case, as there comes a moment in every human society when the sacred symbol is worn out and obliterated by free thought, when the man eludes the priest, when the outgrowth of philosophies and systems erodes the face of religion, then architecture would be unable to reproduce this new state of the human mind; its leaves, full on the recto side, would be empty on the verso, its work would be cut short, its book would be incomplete. But it is not so.
Take for example the Middle Ages, where we can see more clearly because they are closer to us. During the early medieval period, while theocracy was organizing Europe, while the Vatican was rallying and regarding around itself the elements of a Rome made from the Rome lying in ruins around the Capitol, while Christianity was busy searching through the debris of the earlier civilization for all the stages of society and rebuilding from the ruins a new hierarchical universe with the priesthood as its keystone; first you can hear welling up amid the chaos, then see rising bit by bit under the inspiration of Christianity, under the hand of barbarians, from the rubble of the dead architecture, Greek and Roman, that mysterious Romanesque architecture, sister to the theocratic masonries of Egypt and India, unalterable emblem of pure Catholicism, immutable hieroglyph of papal unity. All the thought of that time is in fact written in that sombre Romanesque style. Everywhere in it you can feel authority, unity, the impenetrable, the absolute, Gregory VII;* everywhere the priest, never the man; everywhere the caste, never the people. But then came the Crusades. It was a great popular movement, and every great popular movement, whatever its cause and its aim, always releases the spirit of freedom from its final precipitate. A new day was dawning. It was the beginning of the stormy period of Jacqueries, Pragueries, Leagues.* Authority tott
ered, unity was split. Feudalism demanded to share with theocracy, pending the inevitable arrival of the people who would, as always, take the lion’s share. Quia nominor leo [because I am called lion].* The nobility thus breaks through beneath the priesthood, the commune beneath the nobility. The face of Europe has changed. Very well! The face of architecture changes too. Like civilization it has turned the page, and the new spirit of the times finds it ready to write at its dictation. Architecture came back from the Crusades with the pointed arch, as the nations did with their freedom. Then, while Rome gradually fell apart, Romanesque architecture died. The hieroglyphs deserted the cathedral and went off to add prestige to the feudal nobility by emblazoning the castle keep. The cathedral itself, once so dogmatic a building, from now on invaded by the citizens, by the commons, by liberty, escaped from the priest and fell into the artist’s power. The artist builds in his own way. Farewell to mystery, myth, law. Enter fancy and caprice. Provided the priest had his basilica and his altar, he had no more say. Four walls belong to the artist. The book of architecture belonged no more to the priesthood, religion, Rome, but to imagination, poetry, the people. Whence the countless swift transformations of this architecture, only three centuries old, so striking after the stagnating immobility of Romanesque architecture, which was six or seven centuries old. Art, however, took giant strides. Popular genius and originality took on the task the bishops used to perform. Each race as it passed by wrote its line in the book; it erased the old Romanesque hieroglyphs on the frontispieces of the cathedrals, and at the very most the dogma remains still visible here and there through the new symbolism overlaying it. Popular drapery gives scarcely a hint of the religious skeleton underneath. It is impossible to imagine the liberties taken by architects of that time, even towards the Church. There are capitals interwoven with monks and nuns shamelessly coupling, as in the Hall of Chimneys of the Palais de Justice in Paris. There is Noah’s misadventure carved in explicit detail, as in the great doorway at Bourges. There is the Bacchic monk with ass’s ears and glass in hand laughing in the face of a whole community, as over the lavabo at the abbey of Boscherville. At that time there existed for ideas written in stone a privilege fully comparable with our present freedom of the press. It was freedom of architecture.
