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 t