“Again, it must be clearly stated that the pointed equilateral arch, which some persons still suppose to be the distinctive characteristic of an era in architecture, is not so in fact, as Quicherat has very clearly demonstrated, and, since him, Lecoy de la Marche.  The study of archives has, on this point, completely overset the hobbies of architects, and demolished the twaddle of the Bonzes.  Besides, there is abundant evidence of the employment of the pointed arch side by side with the round arch in a perfectly systematic design, in the construction of many Romanesque churches; in the Cathedrals of Avignon and Frejus, in Notre Dame at Aries, in Saint Front at Perigueux, at Saint Martin d’Ainay, at Lyon, in Saint Martin des Champs in Paris, in Saint Etienne at Beauvais, in the Cathedral of Le Mans; and in Burgundy, at Vezelay, at Beaune, in Saint Philibert at Dijon, at La Charite-sur-Loire, in Saint Ladre at Autun, and in most of the basilicas erected by the monastic school of Cluny.

“Still, all this throws no light on the lineage of the Gothic, which remains obscure—­possibly because it is perfectly clear; setting aside the theory which restricts itself to discerning in this question a merely material and technical problem of stability and resistance, solved by monks who discovered one fine day that the strength of their roofs would be increased by the adoption of the mitre-shaped vaulting of the pointed arch instead of the semicircular arch, would it not seem that the romantic hypothesis—­Chateaubriand’s explanation—­which was so much laughed at, and which is nevertheless the simplest and the most natural, may really be the most obvious and the true one?

“To me,” thought Durtal, “it is almost certain that it was in the forest that man found the prototype of the nave and the pointed arch.  The most amazing cathedral constructed by Nature herself, with lavish outlay of the pointed aisle of branches, is at Jumieges.  There, close to the splendid ruins of the Abbey, where the two towers are still intact, while the roofless nave, carpeted with flowers, ends in a chancel of foliage shut in by an apse of trees, three vast aisles of centenary boles extend in parallel lines; one in the middle, very wide, the two others, one on each side, somewhat narrower; they exactly represent a church nave with its two side aisles, upheld by black columns and roofed with verdure.  The ribs of the arches are accurately represented by the branches which meet above, as the columns which support them are simulated by the great shafts.  It must be seen in winter, with the groining outlined and powdered with snow, and the pillars as white as the trunks of birch-trees, to understand the primitive idea, the seed of art which could give rise in the mind of an architect to the conception of similar arcades, and lead to the gradual refining of the Romanesque till the pointed arch had entirely superseded the round.