the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, (also destroyed), rose yet nearer heaven
than the towers, slender, sharp, sonorous, and daintily wrought?

An architect of good taste (1787) amputated it, and thought it quite
enough to cover the wound with that large leaden plaster which looks like
the lid of a stewpan. Thus was the marvelous art of the Middle Ages
treated in almost every land, but particularly in France. We find three
sorts of injury upon its ruins, these three marring it to different
depths; first, Time, which has made insensible breaches here and there,
mildewed and rusted the surface everywhere; then, political and religious
revolutions, which, blind and fierce by nature, fell furiously upon it,
rent its rich array of sculpture and carving, shivered its rose-windows,
shattered its necklaces of arabesques and quaint figures, tore down its
statues--sometimes because of their crown; lastly, changing fashion, even
more grotesque and absurd, from the anarchic and splendid deviations of
the Renaissance down to the necessary decline of architecture.

Fashion did more than revolutions. Fashion cut into the living flesh,
attacked the very skeleton and framework of art; it chopped and hewed,
dismembered, slew the edifice, in its form as well as in its symbolism, in
its logic no less than in its beauty. But fashion restored, a thing which
neither time nor revolution ever pretended to do. Fashion, on the plea of
"good taste," impudently adapted to the wounds of Gothic architecture the
paltry gewgaws of a day,--marble ribbons, metallic plumes, a veritable
leprosy of egg-shaped moldings, of volutes, wreaths, draperies, spirals,
fringes, stone flames, bronze clouds, lusty cupids, and bloated cherubs,
which began to ravage the face of art in the oratory of Catherine de
Medici, and destroyed it, two centuries later, tortured and distorted, in
the Dubarry's boudoir.