“Thus it ended, as it had begun, writhing in the most horrible religious convulsions.  The Tiaras of Rome and Avignon clashed, and the Church, standing unsupported on these ruins, tottered on its base, for the Great Western Schism now shook it.

“The fifteenth century seemed to be born mad.  Charles VI.’s insanity seemed to be infectious; the English invasion was followed by the pillage of France, the frenzied contest of the Bourguignons and the Armagnacs, by plagues and famines, and the overthrow at Agincourt; then came Charles VII., Joan of Arc, the deliverance and the healing of the land by the energetic treatment of King Louis XI.

“All these events hindered the progress of the works in cathedrals.

“The fourteenth century on the whole restricted itself to carrying on the structures begun during the previous century.  We must wait till the end of the fifteenth, when France drew breath, to see architecture start into life once more.

“It must be added that frequent conflagrations at various times destroyed a whole church, and that it had to be rebuilt from the foundations; others, like Beauvais, fell down, and had to be reconstructed, or, if money was lacking, simply strengthened and the gaps repaired.

“With the exception of a very few—­Saint Ouen at Rouen for one, a rare example of a church almost entirely built during the fourteenth century (excepting the western towers and front, which are quite modern), and the Cathedral at Reims for another, which appears to have been constructed without much interruption, on the original plans of Hugues Libergier or Robert de Coucy—­not one of our cathedrals was erected throughout in accordance with the designs of the architect who began it, nor has one remained untouched.

“Most of them, consequently, represent the combined efforts of successive pious generations; still, this apparently improbable fact is true:  until the dawn of the Renaissance the genius of successive builders was singularly well matched.  If they made any alterations in their predecessors’ plans, they were able to introduce some touch of individuality, inventions of exquisite beauty that did not clash with the whole.  They engrafted their genius on that of their first masters; there was the perpetuated tradition of an admirable conception, a perennial breath of the Holy Spirit.  It was the interloper, the period of false and farcical Pagan art, that extinguished that pure flame, and annihilated the luminous truthfulness of the Mediaeval past, when God had dwelt intimately, at home, in souls; it substituted a merely earthly form of art for one that was divine.

“As soon as the sensuality of the Renaissance revealed itself, the Paraclete fled; the mortal sin of stone could display itself at will.  It contaminated the buildings that were finished, defiled the churches, debasing their purity of form; this, with the gross license of sculpture and painting, was the great stupration of the cathedrals.