stone of the venerable monument, is a page not
only of the history of the country, but of the history of science and
art as well. Thus, in order to indicate here only the principal details,
while the little Red Door almost attains to the limits of the Gothic
delicacy of the fifteenth century, the pillars of the nave, by their
size and weight, go back to the Carlovingian Abbey of Saint-Germain des
Pres. One would suppose that six centuries separated these pillars from
that door. There is no one, not even the hermetics, who does not find
in the symbols of the grand portal a satisfactory compendium of their
science, of which the Church of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie was so
complete a hieroglyph. Thus, the Roman abbey, the philosophers' church,
the Gothic art, Saxon art, the heavy, round pillar, which recalls
Gregory VII., the hermetic symbolism, with which Nicolas Flamel played
the prelude to Luther, papal unity, schism, Saint-Germain des Pres,
Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie,--all are mingled, combined, amalgamated
in Notre-Dame. This central mother church is, among the ancient churches
of Paris, a sort of chimera; it has the head of one, the limbs of
another, the haunches of another, something of all.

We repeat it, these hybrid constructions are not the least interesting
for the artist, for the antiquarian, for the historian. They make
one feel to what a degree architecture is a primitive thing, by
demonstrating (what is also demonstrated by the cyclopean vestiges,
the pyramids of Egypt, the gigantic Hindoo pagodas) that the greatest
products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of
society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired
flash of a man of genius; the deposit left by a whole people; the heaps
accumulated by centuries; the residue of successive evaporations of
human society,--in a word, species of formations. Each wave of time
contributes its alluvium, each race deposits its layer on the monument,
each individual brings his stone. Thus do the beavers, thus do the bees,
thus do men. The great symbol of architecture, Babel, is a hive.

Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Art
often undergoes a transformation while they are pending, _pendent opera
interrupta_; they proceed quietly in accordance with the transformed
art. The new art takes the monument where it finds it, incrusts itself
there, assimilates it to itself, develops it according to its fanc