; they did not recognise it; but who can
wonder? It belongs only to those who understood it.

At length, however, they have changed their opinion. They have found
it to be political and clever to speak as we do, and extol Christian
architecture. They have decked themselves out with their churches,
again invested themselves with this glorious cloak, and assumed in them
a triumphant posture. The crowd comes, looks, and admires. Truly, if
we are to judge of a well-dressed man by his coat, he who is invested
with the splendour of a Notre-Dame of Paris, or a Cologne cathedral, is
apparently the giant of the spiritual world. Alexander, on his
departure from India, wishing to deceive posterity as to the size of
his Macedonians, had a camp traced out on the ground in which a space
of ten feet was allotted to each of his soldiers. What an immense
place is this church, and what an immense host must inhabit this
wonderful dwelling! Optical delusion adds still more to the effect.
Every proportion changes. The eye is deceived and deceives itself, at
the same time, with these sublime lights and deepening shades, all
calculated to increase the illusion. The man whom in the street you
judged, by his surly look, to be a village schoolmaster, is here a
prophet. He is transformed by this majestic framework; his heaviness
becomes strength and majesty; his voice has formidable echoes. Women
and children tremble and are afraid.

When a woman returns home, she finds everything prosy and paltry. Had
she even Pierre Corneille for a husband, she would think him pitiful,
if he lived in the dull house they still show us. Intellectual
grandeur in a low apartment does not affect her. The comparison makes
her sad, bitterly quiet. The husband puts up with it, and smiles, or
pretends to do so; "Her director has turned her brain," says he aloud,
and adds, aside, "After all, she only sees him at church." But what
place, I ask, is more powerful over the imagination, richer in
illusions, and more fascinating than the church? It is precisely the
church that ennobles, raises, exaggerates, and sheds a poetical ray
upon this otherwise vulgar man.

Do you see that solemn figure, adorned with all the gold and purple of
his pontifical dress, ascending with the thought, the prayer of a
multitude of ten thousand men, the triumphal steps in the choir of St.
Denis? Do you see him still, above all that kneeling mass, hovering as
high as the vault