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Victor Hugo
Variety, Eternity, Proportion : Time was the architect - Europe was the builder

From: Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris

Em. Macron, Rediscovering the Path to Europe

Page 6

Reviewing here only Christo-European architecture, that younger sister of the great Masonic movements of the East, it presents the aspect of a huge formation divided into three sharply defined superincumbent zones: the Roman, [This is also known, according to situation, race, or style, as Lombard, Saxon, or Byzantine: four sister and parallel architectures, each having its own peculiar characteristics, but all deriving from the same principle--the circular arch. Facies non omnibus una, non diversa tamen, qualem, etc.--Author's Note] the Greek, and that of the Renaissance, which we would prefer to call the Greco-Romanesque. The Roman stratum, the oldest and the lowest of the three, is occupied by the circular arch, which reappears, supported by the Greek column, in the modern and upper stratum of the Renaissance. Between the two comes the pointed arch. The edifices which belong exclusively to one or other of these three strata are perfectly distinct, uniform, and complete in themselves. The Abbey of Jumièges is one, the Cathedral of Reims another, the Sainte-Croix of Orleans is a third. But the three zones mingle and overlap one another at the edges, like the colours of the solar spectrum; hence these complex buildings, these edifices of the gradational, transitional period. One of them will be Roman as to its feet, Greek as to its body, and Greco-Romanesque as to its head. That happens when it has taken six hundred years in the building. But that variety is rare: the castle-keep of Etampes is a specimen. Edifices of two styles are more frequent. Such is Notre Dame of Paris, a Gothic structure, rooted by its earliest pillars in that Roman zone in which the portal of Saint-Denis and the nave of Saint-Germain-des-Prés are entirely sunk. Such again is the semi-Gothic Chapter Hall of Bocherville, in which the Roman layer reaches half-way up. Such is the Cathedral at Rouen, which would be wholly Gothic had not the point of its central spire reached up into the Renaissance. [This part of the spire, which was of timber, was destroyed by lightning in 1823.--Author's Note]

For the rest, all these gradations, these differences, do but affect the surface of the building. Art has changed its skin, but the actual conformation of the Christian Church has remained untouched. It has ever the same internal structure, the same logical disposition of the parts. Be the sculptured and decorated envelope of a cathedral as it will, underneath, at least, as germ or rudiment, we invariably find the Roman basilica. It develops itself unswervingly on this foundation and following the same rules. There are invariably two naves crossing each other at right angles, the upper end of which, rounded off in a half circle, forms the choir; there are always two lower-pitched side-aisles for the processions--the chapels--sort of lateral passages communicating with the nave by its intercolumnar spaces. These conditions once fulfilled, the number of chapels, doorways, steeples, spires, may be varied to infinity, according to the fancy of the age, the nation, or the art. The proper observances of worship once provided for and insured, architecture is free to do as she pleases. Statues, stained glass, rose-windows, arabesques, flutings, capitals, bas-reliefs--all these flowers of fancy she distributes as best suits her particular scheme of the moment. Hence the prodigious variety in the exterior of these edifices, in the underlying structure of which there rules so much order and uniformity. The trunk of the tree is unchanging; its vegetation only is variable. 

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    Cf.  Pictures of Notre Dame by Kostas Katsiyiannis. Cf. by V. Hugo: In a grand parliament of intelligence, My Revenge is Fraternity! (margin: the Enlargement of Civilization) * R. Scruton, Architecture needs a Grammar * Giannopoulos, The Greek line & the Greek color

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