Part 15

It was an evening. He had just withdrawn after the service into his canonical cell in the cloister of Notre-Dame. This cell, except perhaps for a few glass vials relegated to a corner, filled with a rather equivocal powder that closely resembled projection powder, offered nothing strange or mysterious. There were here and there a few inscriptions on the wall, but they were pure sentences of science or piety drawn from the good authors. The archdeacon had just seated himself in the light of a brass three-branched candlestick before a vast chest loaded with manuscripts. He had rested his elbow upon the large open book of Honorius of Autun, _De prædestinatione et libero arbitrio_[55], and was turning over with profound reflection a printed folio that he had just brought in, the only product of the press contained in his cell. In the midst of his reverie, someone knocked at his door. “Who is there?” cried the scholar in the gracious tone of a hungry mastiff whose bone is disturbed. A voice answered from without. “Your friend, Jacques Coictier.” He went to open.

It was indeed the king’s physician; a man of some fifty years whose hard countenance was corrected only by a cunning glance. Another man accompanied him. Both wore a long slate-colored robe lined with squirrel fur, belted and closed, with a cap of the same stuff and color. Their hands disappeared under their sleeves, their feet under their robes, their eyes under their caps.

“God be my help, sirs!” said the archdeacon as he ushered them in, “I did not expect so honorable a visit at such an hour.” And while speaking in this courteous fashion, he cast from the physician to his companion an anxious and searching look.

“It is never too late to visit a scholar as considerable as dom Claude Frollo de Tirechappe,” answered Doctor Coictier, whose Franche-Comté accent drew out all his phrases with the majesty of a trailing robe.

Then began between the physician and the archdeacon one of those congratulatory prologues which at that epoch, according to custom, preceded every conversation between scholars and which did not prevent them from detesting one another most cordially in the world. Moreover, it is still the same today; every scholar’s mouth that compliments another scholar is a vessel of gall honeyed over.

The felicitations of Claude Frollo to Jacques Coictier bore especially upon the numerous temporal advantages that the worthy physician had known how to extract, in the course of his much-envied career, from every illness of the king, an operation of an alchemy better and surer than the pursuit of the philosopher’s stone.

“In truth! Master Doctor Coictier, I had great joy in learning the bishopric of your nephew, my reverend lord Pierre Versé. Is he not bishop of Amiens?”

“Yes, Monsieur the Archdeacon; it is a grace and mercy of God.”

“Do you know you cut a great figure, on Christmas day, at the head of your company of the Chamber of Accounts, Monsieur the President?”

“Vice-President, dom Claude. Alas! nothing more.”

“Where is your superb house in the rue Saint-André-des-Arcs? It is a Louvre. I much love the apricot tree carved on the door with that pleasant pun: À L’ABRI-COTIER.”

“Alas! Master Claude, all that masonry costs me dear. As the house is built, I am ruined.”

“Ho! have you not your revenues from the Geôle and the bailiwick of the Palais, and the rent of all the houses, stalls, lodges, shops of the Clôture? That is milking a fair udder.”

“My lordship of Poissy has brought me nothing this year.”

“But your tolls of Triel, of Saint-James, of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, are still good.”

“Six score pounds, not even parisis.”

“You have your office of counselor to the king. That is fixed income.”

“Yes, brother Claude, but that cursed lordship of Poligny, of which so much is said, yields me not sixty gold crowns, good year or bad.”

There was in the compliments that dom Claude addressed to Jacques Coictier that sardonic accent, sour and darkly mocking, that sad and cruel smile of a superior and unhappy man who amuses himself for a moment by distraction with the thick prosperity of a vulgar man. The other perceived it not.

“Upon my soul,” said Claude at last, pressing his hand, “I am glad to see you in such good health.”

“Thank you, Master Claude.”

“By the way,” cried dom Claude, “how fares your royal patient?”

“He does not pay his physician enough,” answered the doctor, casting a sidelong glance at his companion.

“You think so, gossip Coictier?” said the companion.

This word, pronounced in a tone of surprise and reproach, brought back upon that unknown person the attention of the archdeacon, who, to tell the truth, had not wholly turned away from him for a single moment since the stranger had crossed the threshold of the cell. He had even needed the thousand reasons he had to humor Doctor Jacques Coictier, the all-powerful physician of King Louis XI, to receive him thus accompanied. Also his manner had nothing very cordial when Jacques Coictier said to him:

“By the way, dom Claude, I bring you a brother scholar who wished to see you on your renown.”

“Is the gentleman of the science?” asked the archdeacon, fixing upon Coictier’s companion his penetrating eye. He found not, under the stranger’s brows, a glance less piercing and less distrustful than his own.

He was, as far as the faint lamplight permitted one to judge, an old man of about sixty and of middle height, who appeared rather sick and broken. His profile, though of a very bourgeois line, had something powerful and severe; his pupil sparkled beneath a very deep brow-arch like a light at the bottom of a cave; and under the pulled-down cap that fell upon his nose one felt moving the broad planes of a brow of genius.

He charged himself with answering the archdeacon’s question himself.

“Reverend master,” said he in a grave voice, “your renown has come to me, and I have wished to consult you. I am but a poor country gentleman who takes off his shoes before entering the houses of scholars. You must know my name. I am called gossip Tourangeau.”

“Singular name for a gentleman!” thought the archdeacon. Yet he felt himself before something strong and serious. The instinct of his high intelligence made him divine no less high an one beneath the furred cap of gossip Tourangeau; and in considering that grave face, the ironical grin which the presence of Jacques Coictier had brought forth upon his morose visage gradually vanished like the twilight at a night horizon. He had reseated himself, gloomy and silent, upon his great armchair; his elbow had resumed its accustomed place upon the table, and his brow upon his hand. After some moments of meditation, he made sign to the two visitors to be seated, and addressed himself to gossip Tourangeau.

“You come to consult me, master, and upon what science?”

“Reverend,” answered gossip Tourangeau, “I am sick, very sick. They tell me you are a great Aesculapius, and I have come to ask you a counsel of medicine.”

“Medicine!” said the archdeacon, shaking his head. He seemed to collect himself an instant and resumed: “Gossip Tourangeau, since that is your name, turn your head. You will find my answer written on the wall.”

Gossip Tourangeau obeyed, and read above his head this inscription graven on the wall: “_La médecine est fille des songes_.—JAMBLICUS.”

Meanwhile Doctor Jacques Coictier had heard his companion’s question with a vexation that the answer of dom Claude had redoubled. He leaned to the ear of gossip Tourangeau and said to him, low enough not to be heard by the archdeacon:

“I had warned you it was a madman. You would see him!”

“It might very well be that he is right, this madman, Doctor Jacques!” answered the gossip in the same tone, with a bitter smile.

“As you please!” replied Coictier dryly. Then, addressing the archdeacon: “You are quick in work, dom Claude, and you are no more embarrassed by Hippocrates than a monkey by a nut. Medicine a dream! I doubt the apothecaries and the master-surgeons[56] would refrain from stoning you if they were here. So you deny the influence of philters upon the blood, of ointments upon the flesh! You deny that eternal pharmacy of flowers and metals which is called the world, made on purpose for that eternal patient called man!”

“I deny neither the pharmacy nor the patient,” said dom Claude coldly.

“Then you do not believe in the physician.”

“I do not believe in the physician.”

“Then it is not true,” resumed Coictier with warmth, “that the gout is a breaking-out inward, that one cures a cannon-shot wound by the application of a roasted mouse, that a fitting young blood infused restores youth to old veins; it is not true that two and two make four, and that emprosthotonos succeeds opisthotonos!”

The archdeacon answered without emotion: “There are certain things of which I think in a certain way.”

Coictier grew red with anger.

“There, there, my good Coictier, let us not be angry,” said gossip Tourangeau. “Monsieur the archdeacon is our friend.”

Coictier calmed himself, grumbling half aloud: “After all, he is a madman!”

“Pasquedieu, Master Claude,” resumed gossip Tourangeau after a silence, “you trouble me greatly. I had two consultations to require of you, one touching my health, the other touching my star.”

“Monsieur,” replied the archdeacon, “if that is your thought, you had as well not have breathless yourself upon the steps of my stair. I do not believe in medicine. I do not believe in astrology.”

“In truth!” said the gossip with surprise.

Coictier laughed a forced laugh.

“You see well he is mad,” said he quite low to gossip Tourangeau. “He does not believe in astrology!”

“How imagine,” pursued dom Claude, “that each ray of a star is a thread which holds to the head of a man!”

“And in what do you believe then?” cried gossip Tourangeau.

The archdeacon remained a moment uncertain, then let escape a somber smile which seemed to give the lie to his answer: “_Credo in Deum_.”

“_Dominum nostrum_[57],” added gossip Tourangeau with a sign of the cross.

“Amen,” said Coictier.

“Reverend master,” resumed gossip Tourangeau, “I am charmed in my soul to see you in such good religion. But, great scholar as you are, are you then so far as to believe no longer in science?”

“No,” said the archdeacon, seizing the arm of gossip Tourangeau, and a flash of enthusiasm rekindled in his dull pupil, “no, I do not deny science. I have not crawled so long flat upon my belly, nails in the earth, through the innumerable branches of the cavern, without perceiving, far before me, at the end of the dark gallery, a light, a flame, something, the reflection doubtless of the dazzling central laboratory where the patients and the sages have surprised God.”

“And finally,” interrupted Tourangeau, “what thing do you hold true and certain?”

“Alchemy.”

Coictier exclaimed: “Pardieu, dom Claude, alchemy has its reason doubtless, but why blaspheme medicine and astrology?”

“Naught, your science of man! naught, your science of the heavens!” said the archdeacon with authority.

“That is keeping high state, Epidaurus and Chaldea,” replied the physician with a sneer.

“Listen, messire Jacques. This is said in good faith. I am not the king’s physician, and His Majesty has not given me the garden of Dædalus wherein to observe the constellations.—Be not angry and listen to me.—What truth have you drawn, I say not from medicine, which is too foolish a thing, but from astrology? Cite me the virtues of the vertical boustrophedon, the findings of the number ziruph and the number zephirod.”

“Will you deny,” said Coictier, “the sympathetic force of the clavicle and that the cabal derives from it?”

“Error, messire Jacques! none of your formulas reaches reality. Whereas alchemy has its discoveries. Will you contest results such as these? Ice enclosed in the earth for a thousand years transforms into rock crystal.—Lead is the grandfather of all metals. (For gold is not a metal, gold is light.)—Lead needs but four periods of two hundred years each to pass successively from the state of lead to that of red arsenic, from red arsenic to tin, from tin to silver.—Are these facts? But to believe in the clavicle, in the full line and in the stars, is as ridiculous as to believe, with the inhabitants of Great Cathay, that the oriole changes into a mole and grains of wheat into a fish of the cyprin kind!”

“I have studied the hermetic art,” cried Coictier, “and I affirm…”

The fiery archdeacon let him not finish. “And I have studied medicine, astrology and the hermetic art. Here only is the truth (in speaking thus he had taken from the chest a vial full of that powder of which we have spoken above), here only is the light! Hippocrates is a dream, Urania is a dream, Hermes is a thought. Gold is the sun, to make gold is to be God. That is the only science. I have sounded medicine and astrology, I tell you! Naught, naught. The human body, darkness; the stars, darkness!”

And he fell back upon his armchair in a powerful and inspired attitude. Gossip Tourangeau observed him in silence. Coictier strove to sneer, shrugged his shoulders imperceptibly, and repeated in a low voice: “A madman!”

“And,” said Tourangeau suddenly, “the mirific end, have you touched it? have you made gold?”

“If I had made any,” answered the archdeacon, articulating his words slowly like a man who reflects, “the King of France would be called Claude and not Louis.”

The gossip frowned.

“What is it I say there?” resumed dom Claude with a smile of disdain. “What would the throne of France do for me when I could rebuild the empire of the East!”

“So be it!” said the gossip.

“Oh! the poor fool!” murmured Coictier.

The archdeacon pursued, seeming to answer no longer but to his own thoughts:

“But no, I still creep; I scrape my face and knees upon the pebbles of the underground way. I glimpse, I do not contemplate! I do not read, I spell!”

“And when you shall know how to read,” asked the gossip, “will you make gold?”

“Who doubts it?” said the archdeacon.

“In that case, Notre-Dame knows I have great need of money, and I should like much to learn to read in your books. Tell me, reverend master, is your science not enemy or displeasing to Notre-Dame?”

At this question of the gossip, dom Claude contented himself with answering with a tranquil haughtiness: “Whose archdeacon am I?”

“That is true, my master. Well! would it please you to initiate me? Make me spell with you.”

Claude took the majestic and pontifical attitude of a Samuel.

“Old man, it needs more years than remain to you to undertake that voyage through the mysterious things. Your head is very gray! One leaves the cavern only with white hairs, but one enters it only with black. Science knows well enough how to dig, blight and dry up human faces; she has no need that old age bring her faces all wrinkled. If nevertheless the desire possess you to put yourself in discipline at your age and to decipher the redoubtable alphabet of the sages, come to me, that is well, I will try. I will not tell you, poor old man, to go visit the sepulchral chambers of the pyramids of which ancient Herodotus speaks, nor the tower of bricks of Babylon, nor the immense sanctuary of white marble of the Indian temple of Eklinga. I have no more than you seen the Chaldean masonry built after the sacred form of the Sikra, nor the temple of Solomon which is destroyed, nor the stone doors of the sepulcher of the kings of Israel which are broken. We shall content ourselves with the fragments of the book of Hermes that we have here. I will explain to you the statue of Saint Christopher, the symbol of the Sower, and that of the two angels which are at the portal of the Sainte-Chapelle, and of whom one has his hand in a vase and the other in a cloud…”

Here Jacques Coictier, whom the fiery replies of the archdeacon had unhorsed, remounted and interrupted him in the triumphant tone of a scholar correcting another: “_Erras, amice Claudi_[58]. The symbol is not the number. You take Orpheus for Hermes.”

“It is you who err,” gravely replied the archdeacon. “Dædalus is the foundation; Orpheus is the wall; Hermes is the building. It is the whole.—You will come when you will,” he pursued, turning toward Tourangeau, “I will show you the particles of gold left at the bottom of the crucible of Nicolas Flamel, and you will compare them with the gold of Guillaume de Paris. I will teach you the secret virtues of the Greek word _peristera_. But first of all, I will make you read one after another the letters of marble of the alphabet, the pages of granite of the book. We will go from the portal of Bishop Guillaume and of Saint-Jean-le-Rond to the Sainte-Chapelle, then to the house of Nicolas Flamel, rue Marivault, to his tomb, which is at the Saints-Innocents, to his two hospitals in the rue de Montmorency. I will make you read the hieroglyphics wherewith are covered the four great iron firedogs of the portal of the hospital Saint-Gervais and of the rue de la Ferronnerie. We will spell together yet the façades of Saint-Côme, of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Ardents, of Saint-Martin, of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie…”

It was already long since Tourangeau, intelligent as his glance was, seemed to comprehend dom Claude no longer. He interrupted him.

“Pasquedieu! what then are your books?”

“Here is one,” said the archdeacon.

And opening the window of the cell, he pointed with his finger to the immense church of Notre-Dame, which, cutting against a starry sky the black silhouette of its two towers, of its stone ribs and its monstrous rump, seemed an enormous two-headed sphinx seated in the midst of the city.

The archdeacon considered the gigantic edifice some time in silence, then extending with a sigh his right hand toward the printed book which lay open on his table and his left hand toward Notre-Dame, and passing a sad glance from the book to the church:

“Alas!” said he, “this will kill that.”

Coictier, who had approached the book with eagerness, could not forbear crying: “Why, what is there so redoubtable in this: GLOSSA IN EPISTOLAS D. PAULI. _Norimbergæ, Antonius Koburger, 1474_. This is not new. It is a book of Pierre Lombard, the Master of the Sentences. Is it because it is printed?”

“You have said it,” answered Claude, who seemed absorbed in a profound meditation and stood, resting his bent index upon the folio from the famous presses of Nuremberg. Then he added these mysterious words: “Alas! alas! little things bring great ones to naught; a tooth triumphs over a mass. The rat of the Nile kills the crocodile, the swordfish kills the whale, the book will kill the edifice!”

The curfew of the cloister sounded at the moment when Doctor Jacques repeated low to his companion his eternal refrain: “_He is mad_.” Whereto the companion answered this time: “I believe he is.”

It was the hour when no stranger could remain in the cloister. The two visitors withdrew. “Master,” said gossip Tourangeau, taking leave of the archdeacon, “I love scholars and great minds, and hold you in singular esteem. Come tomorrow to the palace of the Tournelles, and ask for the abbot of Saint-Martin of Tours.”

The archdeacon went home stupefied, understanding at last what person it was that gossip Tourangeau; and recalling this passage from the cartulary of Saint-Martin of Tours: _Abbas beati Martini_, SCILICET REX FRANCIÆ, _est canonicus de consuetudine et habet parvam præbendam quam habet sanctus Venantius et debet sedere in sede thesaurarii_[59].

It was affirmed that from that epoch the archdeacon had frequent conferences with Louis XI, when His Majesty came to Paris, and that the credit of dom Claude cast into shadow Olivier le Daim and Jacques Coictier, who, according to his manner, rudely bullied the king therefor.

II

THIS WILL KILL THAT

Our lady readers will pardon us for stopping a moment to seek what might be the thought that hid itself beneath these enigmatic words of the archdeacon: _This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice_.

In our sense, this thought had two faces. It was, first, a thought of a priest. It was the dread of the priesthood before a new agent, printing. It was the terror and the dazzlement of the man of the sanctuary before the luminous press of Gutenberg. It was the pulpit and the manuscript, the spoken word and the written word, taking alarm at the printed word; something like the stupor of a sparrow who should see the angel Legion unfold his six million wings. It was the cry of the prophet who already hears the emancipated humanity buzzing and swarming, who sees in the future intelligence sapping faith, opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking off Rome. The prognosis of the philosopher who sees human thought, volatilized by the press, evaporate from the theocratic vessel. The terror of the soldier who examines the brazen ram and says: The tower will crumble. That signified that one power was to succeed another power. That meant: The press will kill the church.

But beneath this thought, the first and most simple doubtless, there was in our view another, newer, a corollary of the first less easy to perceive and easier to contest, a view, quite as philosophical, no longer of the priest only, but of the scholar and the artist. It was a presentiment that human thought, in changing form, was about to change its mode of expression, that the capital idea of each generation would no longer be written with the same matter and in the same way, that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was about to give place to the book of paper, more solid and more durable still. In this regard, the vague formula of the archdeacon had a second sense; it signified that one art was about to dethrone another art. It meant: Printing will kill architecture.

In fact, from the origin of things to the fifteenth century of the Christian era inclusively, architecture is the great book of humanity, the principal expression of man in his diverse states of development, whether as force or as intelligence.

When the memory of the first races felt itself overcharged, when the baggage of the remembrances of the human kind became so heavy and so confused that the word, naked and flying, risked losing some of it by the way, they transcribed them upon the soil in the most visible, the most durable, and the most natural manner at once. They sealed each tradition beneath a monument.

The first monuments were simple blocks of rock _which iron had not touched_, says Moses[60]. Architecture began like all writing. It was first an alphabet. One planted a stone upright, and that was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and upon each hieroglyph rested a group of ideas as the capital upon the column. Thus did the first races, everywhere, at the same moment, upon the surface of the whole world. One finds the _standing stone_ of the Celts in the Siberia of Asia, in the pampas of America.

Later one made words. One superimposed stone upon stone, one coupled those syllables of granite, the verb tried some combinations. The Celtic dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words. Some, the tumulus above all, are proper names. Sometimes even, when one had much stone and a vast beach, one wrote a sentence. The immense heap of Karnac is already a whole formula.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”