"More Middle Ages, nothing but the Middle Ages! who will deliver me from the Middle Ages, from the Middle Ages which are not the Middle Ages?--Paste-board and terra-cotta Middle Ages, which have nothing of the Middle Ages save the name!--Oh! these iron barons, in their iron armor, with iron hearts in their iron breasts! Oh! the cathedrals with their rose-work always in bloom and their stained glass in flower, with their lace-work of granite, with their open-work trefoils, their toothed gables, their chasubles of stone embroidered like a bride's veil, with their tapers, their psalms, their glittering priests, with their people on their knees, their rumbling organ, and their angels soaring aloft and flapping their wings under the arches!--how they have spoiled my Middle Ages, my refined, brightly-colored Middle Ages!--how they have blotted it from sight under a layer of coarse plaster!--what discordant colors!--Ah! ignorant daubers, who fancy you have created an effect by splashing red upon blue, white upon black, and green upon yellow, you have seen only the outer shell of the Middle Ages, you have not divined the true meaning of the Middle Ages, the blood does not circulate beneath the skin in which you have clothed your phantoms, there is no heart in your steel corselets, there are no legs in your tricot trousers, no stomach or breast behind your emblazoned skirts; they are clothes that have the shape of men and that is all.--So, down with the Middle Ages as they are presented to us by the _fabricators_"--the great word is out, the _fabricators_!--"The Middle Ages meet no need of the present day, we must have something else." And the public, seeing how the _feuilletonistes_ snarled at the Middle Ages, was seized with an ardent passion for the Middle Ages, which they claim to have killed at a single blow. The Middle Ages invaded everything, assisted by the obstruction of the newspapers:--dramas, melodramas, novels, tales, poetry--there were even Middle-Age vaudevilles, and Momus recited feudal mummeries. Beside the romance of the Middle Ages flourished the carrion romance, a very pleasing variety, which nervous _petites-maîtresses_ and blasé cooks consumed in great numbers.