You shall come when you will,” he continued, turning to Tourangeau, “I will show you the little parcels of gold which remained at the bottom of Nicholas Flamel’s alembic, and you shall compare them with the gold of Guillaume de Paris.
I will teach you the secret virtues of the Greek word, peristera. But, first of all, I will make you read, one after the other, the marble letters of the alphabet, the granite pages of the book.
We shall go to the portal of Bishop Guillaume and of Saint-Jean le Rond at the Sainte-Chapelle, then to the house of Nicholas Flamel, Rue Manvault, to his tomb, which is at the Saints-Innocents, to his two hospitals, Rue de Montmorency.
I will make you read the hieroglyphics which cover the four great iron cramps on the portal of the hospital Saint-Gervais, and of the Rue de la Ferronnerie.
We will spell out in company, also, the facade of Saint-Come, of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Ardents, of Saint Martin, of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie—.”
For a long time, Gossip Tourangeau, intelligent as was his glance, had appeared not to understand Dom Claude.
He interrupted.
“Pasque-dieu! what are your books, then?”
“Here is one of them,” said the archdeacon.
And opening the window of his cell he pointed out with his finger the immense church of Notre-Dame, which, outlining against the starry sky the black silhouette of its two towers, its stone flanks, its monstrous haunches, seemed an enormous two-headed sphinx, seated in the middle of the city.
The archdeacon gazed at the gigantic edifice for some time in silence, then extending his right hand, with a sigh, towards the printed book which lay open on the table, and his left towards Notre-Dame, and turning a sad glance from the book to the church,—“Alas,” he said, “this will kill that.”
Coictier, who had eagerly approached the book, could not repress an exclamation.
“He, but now, what is there so formidable in this: ‘GLOSSA IN EPISTOLAS D. PAULI, Norimbergoe, Antonius Koburger, 1474.’
This is not new.
‘Tis a book of Pierre Lombard, the Master of Sentences.
Is it because it is printed?”
“You have said it,” replied Claude, who seemed absorbed in a profound meditation, and stood resting, his forefinger bent backward on the folio which had come from the famous press of Nuremberg.
Then he added these mysterious words:
“Alas! alas! small things come at the end of great things; a tooth triumphs over a mass.
The Nile rat kills the crocodile, the swordfish kills the whale, the book will kill the edifice.”
The curfew of the cloister sounded at the moment when Master Jacques was repeating to his companion in low tones, his eternal refrain,
“He is mad!”
To which his companion this time replied,
“I believe that he is.”
It was the hour when no stranger could remain in the cloister.
The two visitors withdrew.
“Master,” said Gossip Tourangeau, as he took leave of the archdeacon, “I love wise men and great minds, and I hold you in singular esteem.
Come to-morrow to the Palace des Tournelles, and inquire for the Abbe de Sainte-Martin, of Tours.”
The archdeacon returned to his chamber dumbfounded, comprehending at last who Gossip Tourangeau was, and recalling that passage of the register of Sainte-Martin, of Tours:—Abbas beati Martini, SCILICET REX FRANCIAE, est canonicus de consuetudine et habet parvam proebendam quam habet sanctus Venantius, et debet sedere in sede thesaurarii.
It is asserted that after that epoch the archdeacon had frequent conferences with Louis XI., when his majesty came to Paris, and that Dom Claude’s influence quite overshadowed that of Olivier le Daim and Jacques Coictier, who, as was his habit, rudely took the king to task on that account.
CHAPTER II. THIS WILL KILL THAT.
Our lady readers will pardon us if we pause for a moment to seek what could have been the thought concealed beneath those enigmatic words of the archdeacon:
“This will kill that.
The book will kill the edifice.”
To our mind, this thought had two faces.
In the first place, it was a priestly thought.
It was the affright of the priest in the presence of a new agent, the printing press.
It was the terror and dazzled amazement of the men of the sanctuary, in the presence of the luminous press of Gutenberg.
It was the pulpit and the manuscript taking the alarm at the printed word: something similar to the stupor of a sparrow which should behold the angel Legion unfold his six million wings.
It was the cry of the prophet who already hears emancipated humanity roaring and swarming; who beholds in the future, intelligence sapping faith, opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking off Rome.
It was the prognostication of the philosopher who sees human thought, volatilized by the press, evaporating from the theocratic recipient.
It was the terror of the soldier who examines the brazen battering ram, and says:—“The tower will crumble.”
It signified that one power was about to succeed another power. It meant, “The press will kill the church.”
But underlying this thought, the first and most simple one, no doubt, there was in our opinion another, newer one, a corollary of the first, less easy to perceive and more easy to contest, a view as philosophical and belonging no longer to the priest alone but to the savant and the artist.
It was a presentiment that human thought, in changing its form, was about to change its mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would no longer be written with the same matter, and in the same manner; that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was about to make way for the book of paper, more solid and still more durable.
In this connection the archdeacon’s vague formula had a second sense.
It meant, “Printing will kill architecture.”
In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era, inclusive, architecture is the great book of humanity, the principal expression of man in his different stages of development, either as a force or as an intelligence.
When the memory of the first races felt itself overloaded, when the mass of reminiscences of the human race became so heavy and so confused that speech naked and flying, ran the risk of losing them on the way, men transcribed them on the soil in a manner which was at once the most visible, most durable, and most natural.
They sealed each tradition beneath a monument.