Let us not forget, by the way, to mention the city of "sappers" (we no longer speak of architects), whose speciality is to work out the plans for excavating and repairing all our crypts and to direct the carrying out of the work by our machines. Quitting the hackneyed paths of former architecture, they have created in every detail our modern architecture so profoundly original of which nothing could give an idea to our forefathers. The public building of the ancient architect was a kind of massive and voluminous work of art. It was entirely a thing by itself. Its exterior, and especially its front, occupied his attention far more than the inside. For the modern architect the interior alone exists, and each work is linked on to those which have gone before. None stands by itself. They are only an extension and ramification, one of another, an endless continuation like the epics of the East. The work of the ancient architect with its misplaced individuality, with its symmetry, which gave it a mock air of being a living thing, yet only rendered it more out of keeping with the surrounding landscape, the more symmetrical and more skilfully designed it was, produced the effect of a verse in prose, or of a hackneyed theme in a fantasia. Its special function was to represent correctness, coldness, and stiffness amid the luxuriant disorder of nature and the freedom of the other arts. But to-day, instead of being the most tight-laced of the arts, architecture is the freest and most wanton of them all. It is the chief element of picturesqueness in our life, its artificial and veritably artistic scenery lends to all the masterpieces of our painters and sculptors the horizon of its perspective, the sky of its vaults, the tangled vegetation of its innumerable colonnades, whose shafts are a copy of the idealised trunk of all the antique essence of tree-life, whose capitals imitate the idealised form of all the antique flowers. Here is nature winnowed and perfected, which has become human in order to delight humanity, and which humanity has deified in order to shelter love beneath its shade. This perfection has only been, however, attained after much groping in the dark. Many falls of rock, occasioned by foolhardy excavations, which unduly reduced the number of supports, swallowed up whole towns during the first two centuries. They will serve for our descendants as Pompeii to rediscover. At the least shock produced by earthquakes (the only natural plague which engages our attention), a few cases of crushing to death still occur here and there, but such accidents are very rare.