“To return to our starting point,” said the Abbe Gevresin:  “what was the birthplace of the Gothic?”

“France:  so Lecoy de la Marche emphatically asserts.  ’The buttress made its appearance as the essential basis of a style in the early years of Louis le Gros, in the district lying between the Seine and the Aisne.’  In his opinion the first practice of this form was in the Cathedral of Laon; other authorities regard it as merely supplementary to earlier basilicas, instancing Saint-Front at Perigueux, Vezelay, Saint-Denis, Noyon, and the ancient college chapel at Poissy; but no two agree.  One thing is certain, Gothic art is the art of the North; it made its way into Normandy, and from thence into England.  Then it spread to the Rhine in the twelfth century, and to Spain by the beginning of the thirteenth.  Gothic churches in the South are but an importation, evidently ill-assorted with the men and women who frequent them, and the merciless blue sky which spoils them.”

“And observe,” said Durtal, “that in our country that aspect of mysticism is discordant with the rest.”

“How is that?”

“Well, you see, in the distribution of the sacred arts France received architecture only.  Consider the pre-Raphaelite painters.  All the early painters were Italians, Spaniards, Flemings, or Germans.  Those whom some writers try to represent as our fellow-countrymen are Flemings transplanted to Burgundy, or docile Frenchmen whose imitative work bears an unmistakable Flemish stamp.  Look in the Louvre at our primitive artists; look at Dijon, especially at what remains from the time when northern art was introduced by Philippe le Hardi into his own province.  It is impossible to feel a doubt.  Everything came from Flanders—­Jean Perreal, Bourdichon, even Fouquet are whatever you please, only not the inventors of an original Gallic art.

“It is the same with the mystic writers.  Of what use would it be to mention the nationalities to which they belong?  They too are Spanish, Italian, German, Flemish—­not one is French.”

“I beg your pardon, our friend!” cried Madame Bavoil, “there was the Venerable Jeanne de Matel, who was born at Roanne.”

“Yes, but she was the daughter of an Italian father who was born at Florence,” said the Abbe Gevresin, who, hearing the bell ring for Nones, now folded up his table napkin.  They all stood up and said grace, and Durtal made an appointment with the Abbe Plomb to visit the Cathedral.  Then he went home, meditating, as he walked, on this strange division of art in the middle ages, and the supremacy given to France in architecture, when as yet she was so inferior in every other art.

“And it must be owned,” he concluded, “that she has now lost this superiority; for it is long indeed since she produced an architect.  The men who assume the name are mere thieving bunglers, builders devoid of all individuality and learning.  They are not even able to pilfer skilfully from their precursors.  What are they nowadays?  Patchers up of chapels, church cobblers, botchers and blunderers!”