Il n'y a pas seulement deux principes opposés dans l'homme. Il y en a trois. Car il y a trois vies et trois ordres de facultés. Il y a trois espèces de dispositions l'âme bien différentes: la première, celle de presque tous les hommes, consiste à vivre exclusivement dans le monde des phénomènes qu'on prend pour des réalités. La deuxième est celle des esprits les plus réfléchis qui cherchent longtemps la vérité en eux-mêmes ou dans la nature.... La troisième enfin est celle des âmes éclairées des lumières de la religion, les seules vrai et immuables. Ceux-là seuls ont trouvé un point d'appui fixe.--MAINE DE BIRAN (1766-1825; born in Périgord).
The Gothic of the southwest grew out of the meeting of the cupola church of Aquitaine with the intersecting ribbed vault of northern France. It rose and spread in a region then under Plantagenet rule, Anjou, Poitou, Maine, and Touraine. As the first known vault of the Angevin type was dated approximately 1150, and as the system died out about the middle of the XIII century, Plantagenet Gothic was but an incident of a hundred years in French architecture. However, it was a phase which produced monuments of such remarkable individuality and grace that the school deserves more notice than has hitherto been given it.
The dominant feature in Plantagenet Gothic is its cup-shaped vaulting. The French term "_bombé_" is more exact than such expressions as "domical" and "domed." The panels of an Angevin vault do not form parts of a spherical dome. The keystone of each section is raised higher than the four arches framing the section. Similar vaults were built during the first trials of diagonals by other Gothic schools, in districts where there were no cupola churches to serve as models. They were the result of inexperience in constructing ribbed-groined vaults, and their _bombé_ shape disappeared as soon as architects learned to raise their transverse and wall arches, by stilting and pointing them, to the level of the keystone. While the so-called domical vault in other schools had been a transitional step, in Plantagenet Gothic it was intentionally persisted in and became the most distinguishing characteristic of the school.
In principle and in construction, the Plantagenet school is truly Gothic. The cells are carried on the backs of diagonal ribs. The Angevin builders recognized at once the advantage of concentrating the thrust of the stone roof at fixed points and counterbutting and grounding the load at those points only, so they followed close on the northern architects in adopting the new system. At the same time they felt that the cupola tradition in their region was not to be wholly set aside. M. Anthyme Saint-Paul well expressed it when he said that southwestern France "_s'est conduit en nation tributaire et non soumise_."