Let us enter. I tremble. The beauty is terrible. I am plunged into night, a living night in which I do not know what mysteries are being enacted--the cruel mysteries of the ancient religions? There are shimmering rays from the long windows, the rose windows. Hope enters my heart: there is light here, then? I am no longer alone. My eyes grow accustomed to this populous obscurity. There is a world about me, a world of columns. It seems terrible, it _is_ terrible because of its power, but this power has its _raison d'être_. It seems frightening to me but it is only necessary. It is distributed power; therefore it is beneficent. It holds the vault in the air, the prodigious weight of stone that it maintains aloft, above my head, as lightly as the canvas of a tent. Marvel of equilibrium, calculation of the intelligence, how is it possible not to adore you? It is you that one comes here to worship under the name of God. The darkness grows lighter; it becomes chiaroscuro. We are in a picture by Rembrandt, that great Gothic of the sixteenth century. The forest of pillars divides the nave into spaces of shadow and light. It is the order of nature which knows nothing of disorder. This I rediscover with joy: the eye does not love chaos. I familiarize myself with the people of the columns. I recognize them: they are Romans. It is the Roman, the Romance, hardly altered, that comes to receive the Gothic arch. The immense nave which I thought a forest full of hidden dangers I see, I understand, I read like a sacred book. The mystery is not that of cruelty; it is only that of beauty. It grows lighter gradually in order to allow the spirit to approach slowly the joy of a perfect interior. This solemnity of the nave, this immense void, is like the bed of a great river; the columns range themselves respectfully on each side in order to give free passage to the flood of human piety. It flows like a majestic river; it bears onward toward the tabernacle, about which it spreads itself like a lake of love under the rays of the thought of God. Amid the stones the architect has known how to play the part of the apostle: he has created faith. Art and religion are the same thing; they are love. SAINT-EUSTACHE It is the interior of this church that should be admired. Here I do not experience the same commotion of the spirit as in Notre Dame. I am bathed in the fine light of the sixteenth century. At Notre Dame it was the shadow of Rembrandt; here, it is the clear tonality of French painting, of a Clouët. Admirable is the _élan_ of this Renaissance nave; it is as bold as, and even perhaps bolder than that of the Gothic buildings. It proceeds on the same plan. The skyward lift is only to be found in the Gothic; it is of the very spirit of the race. Are the vaults round and no longer pointed? What does it matter if they are equally elegant, if they have the same aërial grace as the ogive?