been replaced, may best be
described as possessing half the height of the Eiffel Tower with none
of the excuses for the Colonne de Juillet, of which M. Alavoine, its
architect, was also the designer. For the present I need only add that
both the western towers could actually be placed, all but their last
two metres, inside the nave of Beauvais. The nave of Rouen is but 28
metres high, and 136 in length, from the Portail to the apse of the
Chapelle de la Vierge; and as a matter of possible proportion it is
interesting to note that the old spire could just have lain down
inside it. At first it had no chapels, but these were built later on
between the buttresses, as was done at Notre Dame in Paris. The
transept measures 50 metres in breadth, which is just the height of
the great lantern above it, that is beneath the central tower.

[Footnote 27: In 1897 two men were still alive who saw it burn, and
all the gargoyles vomiting molten lead; they were M. Noel the
Librarian, and le pere Pepin, janitor of the Town Belfry.]

From here, as from the heart of Normandy, flowed the life blood of
Rouen through her arteries of traffic clustering round the great
Cathedral. Within its walls the noblest of her dead are gathered,
returning to the central shrine that gave them birth and being. With
the completion of the first main bulk of its design the story of the
town that built it is brought to a definite point of development. I
shall no longer be obliged to go even as deeply as I have hitherto
felt necessary into the details of the civic history, for Rouen is
henceforth a part of France, and the seal of her nationality is
stamped large upon her. Till now, she has been slowly growing out of
the mists of aboriginal antiquity, through Merovingian bloodshed, to
become the pirate's stronghold, and then the capital of the Northmen's
Duchy. When she had fulfilled her mission by carrying French arts and
Norman strength into the English kingdom, she lost a little of that
individuality of character which I have traced through former pages,
just as a mother loses the first bloom of her girlhood when her son is
born. Though Rouen once more passed for some years into the possession
of an English king, the days of her captivity--with its culminating
shame--are as little agreeable for us to hear, as for her citizens to
remember, and Englishmen will no longer take that vital interest in
her each year's growth, with which a grandson reads the memoirs o