The grand poem, the grand edifice, the grand work of humanity will no longer be built: it will be printed.
And henceforth, if architecture should arise again accidentally, it will no longer be mistress.
It will be subservient to the law of literature, which formerly received the law from it.
The respective positions of the two arts will be inverted.
It is certain that in architectural epochs, the poems, rare it is true, resemble the monuments.
In India, Vyasa is branching, strange, impenetrable as a pagoda. In Egyptian Orient, poetry has like the edifices, grandeur and tranquillity of line; in antique Greece, beauty, serenity, calm; in Christian Europe, the Catholic majesty, the popular naivete, the rich and luxuriant vegetation of an epoch of renewal.
The Bible resembles the Pyramids; the Iliad, the Parthenon; Homer, Phidias.
Dante in the thirteenth century is the last Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth, the last Gothic cathedral.
Thus, to sum up what we have hitherto said, in a fashion which is necessarily incomplete and mutilated, the human race has two books, two registers, two testaments: masonry and printing; the Bible of stone and the Bible of paper.
No doubt, when one contemplates these two Bibles, laid so broadly open in the centuries, it is permissible to regret the visible majesty of the writing of granite, those gigantic alphabets formulated in colonnades, in pylons, in obelisks, those sorts of human mountains which cover the world and the past, from the pyramid to the bell tower, from Cheops to Strasburg.
The past must be reread upon these pages of marble.
This book, written by architecture, must be admired and perused incessantly; but the grandeur of the edifice which printing erects in its turn must not be denied.
That edifice is colossal.
Some compiler of statistics has calculated, that if all the volumes which have issued from the press since Gutenberg’s day were to be piled one upon another, they would fill the space between the earth and the moon; but it is not that sort of grandeur of which we wished to speak.
Nevertheless, when one tries to collect in one’s mind a comprehensive image of the total products of printing down to our own days, does not that total appear to us like an immense construction, resting upon the entire world, at which humanity toils without relaxation, and whose monstrous crest is lost in the profound mists of the future?
It is the anthill of intelligence.
It is the hive whither come all imaginations, those golden bees, with their honey.
The edifice has a thousand stories.
Here and there one beholds on its staircases the gloomy caverns of science which pierce its interior.
Everywhere upon its surface, art causes its arabesques, rosettes, and laces to thrive luxuriantly before the eyes.
There, every individual work, however capricious and isolated it may seem, has its place and its projection.
Harmony results from the whole. From the cathedral of Shakespeare to the mosque of Byron, a thousand tiny bell towers are piled pell-mell above this metropolis of universal thought.
At its base are written some ancient titles of humanity which architecture had not registered.
To the left of the entrance has been fixed the ancient bas-relief, in white marble, of Homer; to the right, the polyglot Bible rears its seven heads. The hydra of the Romancero and some other hybrid forms, the Vedas and the Nibelungen bristle further on.
Nevertheless, the prodigious edifice still remains incomplete.
The press, that giant machine, which incessantly pumps all the intellectual sap of society, belches forth without pause fresh materials for its work.
The whole human race is on the scaffoldings. Each mind is a mason.
The humblest fills his hole, or places his stone. Retif de le Bretonne brings his hod of plaster.
Every day a new course rises.
Independently of the original and individual contribution of each writer, there are collective contingents.
The eighteenth century gives the Encyclopedia, the revolution gives the Moniteur.
Assuredly, it is a construction which increases and piles up in endless spirals; there also are confusion of tongues, incessant activity, indefatigable labor, eager competition of all humanity, refuge promised to intelligence, a new Flood against an overflow of barbarians.
It is the second tower of Babel of the human race.
BOOK SIXTH.
CHAPTER I. AN IMPARTIAL GLANCE AT THE ANCIENT MAGISTRACY.
A very happy personage in the year of grace 1482, was the noble gentleman Robert d’Estouteville, chevalier, Sieur de Beyne, Baron d’Ivry and Saint Andry en la Marche, counsellor and chamberlain to the king, and guard of the provostship of Paris.
It was already nearly seventeen years since he had received from the king, on November 7, 1465, the comet year, that fine charge of the provostship of Paris, which was reputed rather a seigneury than an office. Dignitas, says Joannes Loemnoeus, quae cum non exigua potestate politiam concernente, atque proerogativis multis et juribus conjuncta est.
A marvellous thing in ‘82 was a gentleman bearing the king’s commission, and whose letters of institution ran back to the epoch of the marriage of the natural daughter of Louis XI. with Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon.
The same day on which Robert d’Estouteville took the place of Jacques de Villiers in the provostship of Paris, Master Jehan Dauvet replaced Messire Helye de Thorrettes in the first presidency of the Court of Parliament, Jehan Jouvenel des Ursins supplanted Pierre de Morvilliers in the office of chancellor of France, Regnault des Dormans ousted Pierre Puy from the charge of master of requests in ordinary of the king’s household.
Now, upon how many heads had the presidency, the chancellorship, the mastership passed since Robert d’Estouteville had held the provostship of Paris.
It had been “granted to him for safekeeping,” as the letters patent said; and certainly he kept it well.
He had clung to it, he had incorporated himself with it, he had so identified himself with it that he had escaped that fury for change which possessed Louis XI., a tormenting and industrious king, whose policy it was to maintain the elasticity of his power by frequent appointments and revocations.
More than this; the brave chevalier had obtained the reversion of the office for his son, and for two years already, the name of the noble man Jacques d’Estouteville, equerry, had figured beside his at the head of the register of the salary list of the provostship of Paris.
A rare and notable favor indeed!
It is true that Robert d’Estouteville was a good soldier, that he had loyally raised his pennon against “the league of public good,” and that he had presented to the queen a very marvellous stag in confectionery on the day of her entrance to Paris in 14...
Moreover, he possessed the good friendship of Messire Tristan l’Hermite, provost of the marshals of the king’s household.
Hence a very sweet and pleasant existence was that of Messire Robert.
In the first place, very good wages, to which were attached, and from which hung, like extra bunches of grapes on his vine, the revenues of the civil and criminal registries of the provostship, plus the civil and criminal revenues of the tribunals of Embas of the Chatelet, without reckoning some little toll from the bridges of Mantes and of Corbeil, and the profits on the craft of Shagreen-makers of Paris, on the corders of firewood and the measurers of salt.
Add to this the pleasure of displaying himself in rides about the city, and of making his fine military costume, which you may still admire sculptured on his tomb in the abbey of Valmont in Normandy, and his morion, all embossed at Montlhery, stand out a contrast against the parti-colored red and tawny robes of the aldermen and police.
And then, was it nothing to wield absolute supremacy over the sergeants of the police, the porter and watch of the Chatelet, the two auditors of the Chatelet, auditores castelleti, the sixteen commissioners of the sixteen quarters, the jailer of the Chatelet, the four enfeoffed sergeants, the hundred and twenty mounted sergeants, with maces, the chevalier of the watch with his watch, his sub-watch, his counter-watch and his rear-watch?