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Notre-Dame de Paris is, in particular, a curious specimen of this variety Each face, each stone of the venerable e 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 Prés One would suppose that six centuries separated these pillars from that door There is no one, not even the herrand portal a satisfactory compendium of their science, of which the Church of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie was so colyph Thus, the Roman abbey, the philosophers' church, the Gothic art, Saxon art, the heavy, round pillar, which recalls Gregory VII, the hermetic symbolism, hich Nicolas Flamel played the prelude to Luther, papal unity, schism, Saint-Gerled, coa the ancient churches of Paris, a sort of chimera; it has the head of one, the li of all

We repeat it, these hybrid constructions are not the least interesting for the artist, for the antiquarian, for the historian They ree architecture is a pri (what is also deypt, 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 enius; 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 s his stone Thus do the beavers, thus do the bees, thus do reat symbol of architecture, Babel, is a hive

Great edifices, like great oes a transfor, ~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, assi to its fancy, and finishes it if it can The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort, without reaction,--following a natural and tranquil law It is a graft which shoots up, a sap which circulates, a vegetation which starts forth anew Certainly there is e volumes, and often the universal history of hu of many arts at many levels, upon the same monument The reat ence is there summed up and totalized Time is the architect, the nation is the builder