The Autobiography of an Idea

at his desk, a candle at each side, and, pondering his books of history slowly he persuaded the peoples of the past to come forward to meet him until they seemed of his own day, and he of theirs, in a dramatic moving present, a spectacle, a processional of the races and the nations, whose separate deeds seemed to flow from their separate thoughts, and whose thoughts and deeds seemed, as he himself progressed, toward them, to coalesce into a mass movement of mankind, carrying the burden of a single thought. What was that thought? He did not know. He could not see. But he knew it was there, he could feel it in the atmospheric depths of the centuries, a single ever-present thought, which since the beginning had been the Lodestar of the Man of the past. Thus became vaguely outlined an image of Man as a vast personality, within which were gathered all the powers, all the thoughts of the races, all vicissitudes of the civilizations⁠—a presence which seemed to move steadily, silently, across the depths, onward into the modern day, indistinct but real, following the turn of each leaf of the Calendar. This strange presence he had evoked Louis could not banish, it seemed to be immense and to stir immediately behind the veil of appearances. He would some day locate this phantasm, he said, and meet it as real; for in it, he said, was that secret men called truth. Thus history became for Louis a moving drama, and he sole spectator. And it was in this sense that he studied the history of architecture⁠—not merely as a fixation here and there in time and place, but as a continuous outpouring never to end, from the infinite fertility of man’s imagination, evoked by his changing needs. These were hours of deepest contemplation, the beginning of his self-education.

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The Atelier Vaudremer gave on a courtyard, reached by a passageway leading from the Rue de Bac, about a mile west of where Louis lived. It was at the ground level, a rough affair, like a carpenter’s shop, large enough to accommodate about twenty young ruffians. Here it was the work was done amid a cross fire of insults, and it was also here that Monsieur Emil Vaudremer came to make his “criticisms.” He was one of the dark Frenchmen, of medium size, who carried a fine air of native distinction; a man toward whom one’s heart instantly went out in respectful esteem bordering on pride and affection. His personality was calm, deliberate yet magnetic, a sustained, quiet dignity bespeaking a finished product. His “criticisms” were, therefore, just what one might expect them to be, clear, clean-cut, constructive, and personal to each student, in each case, with that peculiar sympathy with the young which comes from remembrance of one’s own youth. Always, however, he was disciplinarian, and one felt the steady pressure. Louis thought the exigent condition that one hold to the original sketch in its essentials, to be discipline, of an inspired sort, in that it held one firmly to a thesis.

Monsieur Vaudremer⁠—otherwise Le Patron, had to his credit as executed works, the Church of the Sacred Heart, of Mont Rouge, and the Prison Mazzas. He was considered, therefore, a rising and highly promising young member of his profession⁠—he was forty-five. This condition may be better understood when it is made known that winners of the Grand Prix are usually close under thirty.

Louis entered heart and soul into the atelier life, with all its tumult and serious work, and its curious exacting etiquette at the times of arrival and departure. He now spoke French well enough to be treated en camarade, and the package of thieves’ slang, which he carried in his sleeve and sprinkled on occasions, raised his standing to one of esteem, to such extent that he no longer was required to carry wood for the stove or clean the drawing boards. The intimate life of the atelier with its free commingling of the younger and the older students seemed to Louis invaluable in its human aspects, so much so that he became rather more absorbed in the work of others than in his own, for he always felt himself to be in the position of observer. The Atelier, the School, came to be for him but part of a larger world called Paris, and Paris but a part of a larger world called France, and France but a part of a larger world called Europe, all in contradistinction to his native land; the continuously finished as against the raw or decadent. The sense of stable motion he noted everywhere. As time went on it became clearer and clearer to him what the power of culture meant. He began to realize that Paris was not of a day, but of busy and sad centuries. He studied carefully all its monuments and each seemed to speak to him of its own time. He attended unforgettable midnight masses at Notre Dame; he spent many hours in the museums; he followed closely the exhibits at the School, especially the exhibits of the second or higher class. He familiarized himself thoroughly with the theory of the School, which, in his mind, settled down to a theory of plan, yielding results of extraordinary brilliancy, but which, after all, was not the reality he sought, but an abstraction, a method, a state of mind, that was local and specific; not universal. Intellectual and aesthetic, it beautifully set forth a sense of order, of function, of highly skilled manipulation. Yet there was for him a fatal residuum of artificiality, which gave him a secret sense of misery where he wished but too tenderly to be happy. And there came the hovering conviction that this Great School, in its perfect flower of technique, lacked the profound animus of a primal inspiration. He felt that beneath the law of the School lay a law which it ignored unsuspectingly or with