described, we examine the general aspect of art from the sixteenth
to the eighteenth century, we notice the same phenomena of decay and
phthisis. Beginning with Francois II., the architectural form of the
edifice effaces itself more and more, and allows the geometrical form,
like the bony structure of an emaciated invalid, to become prominent.
The fine lines of art give way to the cold and inexorable lines of
geometry. An edifice is no longer an edifice; it is a polyhedron.
Meanwhile, architecture is tormented in her struggles to conceal this
nudity. Look at the Greek pediment inscribed upon the Roman pediment,
and vice versa. It is still the Pantheon on the Parthenon: Saint-Peter's
of Rome. Here are the brick houses of Henri IV., with their stone
corners; the Place Royale, the Place Dauphine. Here are the churches
of Louis XIII., heavy, squat, thickset, crowded together, loaded with a
dome like a hump. Here is the Mazarin architecture, the wretched Italian
pasticcio of the Four Nations. Here are the palaces of Louis XIV., long
barracks for courtiers, stiff, cold, tiresome. Here, finally, is Louis
XV., with chiccory leaves and vermicelli, and all the warts, and all
the fungi, which disfigure that decrepit, toothless, and coquettish old
architecture. From Francois II. to Louis XV., the evil has increased in
geometrical progression. Art has no longer anything but skin upon its
bones. It is miserably perishing.

Meanwhile what becomes of printing? All the life which is leaving
architecture comes to it. In proportion as architecture ebbs, printing
swells and grows. That capital of forces which human thought had been
expending in edifices, it henceforth expends in books. Thus, from the
sixteenth century onward, the press, raised to the level of decaying
architecture, contends with it and kills it. In the seventeenth century
it is already sufficiently the sovereign, sufficiently triumphant,
sufficiently established in its victory, to give to the world the feast
of a great literary century. In the eighteenth, having reposed for a
long time at the Court of Louis XIV., it seizes again the old sword of
Luther, puts it into the hand of Voltaire, and rushes impetuously to
the attack of that ancient Europe, whose architectural expression it has
already killed. At the moment when the eighteenth century comes to
an end, it has destroyed everything. In the nineteenth, it begins to
reconstruct.

Now, we ask, which of the three arts h