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By day, one could admire the variety of its edifices, all sculptured in stone or wood, and already presenting complete specimens of the different domestic architectures of the Middle Ages, running back from the fifteenth to the eleventh century, from the casement which had begun to dethrone the arch, to the Roman semicircle, which had been supplanted by the ogive, and which still occupies, below it, the first story of that ancient house de la Tour Roland, at the corner of the Place upon the Seine, on the side of the street with the Tannerie.
To conclude: The mystic imagination, in its alluring freedom, its variety, and its richness, is second to no form, not even to esthetic invention, which, according to common prejudice, is the type par excellence. Following the most venturesome methods of analogy, it has constructed conceptions of the world made up almost wholly of feelings and images symbolic architectures.
Of ancient architectures in the place, there is a fine old Port de Halle, which has a tall, gloomy, bastille look; a most magnificent town-hall, that has been sketched a thousand of times, and opposite it, a building that I think would be the very model for a Conservative club-house in London.
In the Hindu, Egyptian, or Romanesque architecture, one feels the priest, nothing but the priest, whether he calls himself Brahmin, Magian, or Pope. It is not the same in the architectures of the people. They are richer and less sacred. In the Phoenician, one feels the merchant; in the Greek, the republican; in the Gothic, the citizen.
A city that should be a bazaar of all possible architectures, adding a multitude of new inventions to samples of every historical style, might have a certain interest; yet carnival can hardly be enjoyed all the year round and there is a certain latent hideousness in masquerades in spite of their glitter.
§ XXV. The reader will now begin to understand something of the importance of the study of the edifices of a city which includes, within the circuit of some seven or eight miles, the field of contest between the three pre-eminent architectures of the world: each architecture expressing a condition of religion; each an erroneous condition, yet necessary to the correction of the others, and corrected by them.
True architecture, perhaps, always springs out of vegetal nature, and each zone may have its own edifices as well as plants; in this way oriental architectures might be comprehended the vague idea of the slender palm and of its bouquet of leaves with the Arabs, and the vague idea of the colossal, prolific, dilated and bristling vegetation of India.
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