architecture, the foundations gave way at last, and it fell in 1421,
in the midst of the English wars, and remained a ruin until 1450.
Then it was rebuilt, a monument of the last days of the Gothic, so
that now, standing at the western door, you can look down the
church, and see the two limits of mediaeval architecture married
together,--the earliest Norman and the latest French. Through the
Romanesque arches of 1058, you look into the exuberant choir of
latest Gothic, finished in 1521. Although the two structures are
some five hundred years apart, they live pleasantly together. The
Gothic died gracefully in France. The choir is charming,--far more
charming than the nave, as the beautiful woman is more charming than
the elderly man. One need not quarrel about styles of beauty, as
long as the man and woman are evidently satisfied and love and
admire each other still, with all the solidity of faith to hold them
up; but, at least, one cannot help seeing, as one looks from the
older to the younger style, that whatever the woman's sixteenth-
century charm may be, it is not the man's eleventh-century trait of
naivete;--far from it! The simple, serious, silent dignity and
energy of the eleventh century have gone. Something more complicated
stands in their place; graceful, self-conscious, rhetorical, and
beautiful as perfect rhetoric, with its clearness, light, and line,
and the wealth of tracery that verges on the florid.

The crypt of the same period, beneath, is almost finer still, and
even in seriousness stands up boldly by the side of the Romanesque;
but we have no time to run off into the sixteenth century: we have
still to learn the alphabet of art in France. One must live deep
into the eleventh century in order to understand the twelfth, and
even after passing years in the twelfth, we shall find the
thirteenth in many ways a world of its own, with a beauty not always