In the planning of these charitable institutions mediæval architects exhibited the same skill and ingenuity which distinguished their treatment of religious monuments. Viollet-le-Duc has pointed out the strange illogicality of such a theory as that which would make artists who showed extraordinary subtlety in religious buildings responsible for so much coarseness in civil structures. We must not hold them accountable for the destruction of their well-planned hospitals from the sixteenth century onwards, and the substitution of buildings, the main preoccupation of whose architects was to provide accommodation for as many patients as possible. Louis XIV. endowed the hospitals built in his reign with the revenues of the lazar-houses and maladreries, for which there was no further occasion, leprosy having disappeared from his dominions. But his hospitals leave much to be desired from the hygienic point of view; the mediæval hospitals, on the other hand, have a monumental simplicity of appearance, and offer a liberal supply of light, air, and space to their patients. We do not assert the superiority of the cellular system commonly adopted in hospitals from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, over that of the open wards of our own times, but we may be permitted to point out its great moral advantages. And, as our learned authority remarks, the system owed its adoption to a noble delicacy of charitable feeling in the mediæval founders and builders of our maisons dieu.
Houses and Hôtels, or Town-Houses of the Nobility.—The history of human habitations is a subject of such interest that to treat it adequately a special work would be necessary. Such an undertaking has, moreover, been admirably carried out by a famous architect.[71]
[71] Ch. Garnier, Member of the Institute, whose picturesque embodiment of research, in his reconstruction of human habitations from the lacustrine period to our own times, attracted so much attention at the Exhibition of 1889.
We must refrain from discussion of prehistoric or Merovingian dwellings, or of those rural hovels, the typical variations of which, in different countries and climates, offers so wide a field for study. To keep within the limits assigned us by the arbitrary term Gothic Architecture, we must confine our rapid sketch to the architectural period which dates from the middle of the twelfth to the close of the fifteenth century.
208. HOUSE AT CLUNY (TWELFTH CENTURY)
Nothing remains of habitations constructed in France before the twelfth century, save the vague and scanty records of ancient texts, manuscripts, and bas-reliefs. But we may reasonably infer that the houses of the period were built of wood, as was natural in a country containing great tracts of forest. We know that most of the important buildings were timber structures, which explains the fact that numbers of twelfth-century churches were founded on the sites of earlier buildings destroyed by fire.
Roman, Gallo-Roman, and Merovingian houses were arranged to suit the habits of the times; they were lighted by windows opening upon an inner courtyard, in accordance with the ancient custom of separating the women's apartments from the rest of the habitation.
