e in the slower generations that we know.
But even if the graceful caryatides and every other carving is his
work, I must still ascribe the strong treatment of the massive knight
in armour on his war horse to the same artist who conceived the dead
figure lying in its shroud beneath; and whether that artist were
Pilon or Jean Cousin, it is most improbable that it should have been
Goujon, for whom the work would have been just as much too early for
his own age, as that of Pilon would have been too late for the
suggested date of the entire monument. That the contrast of the dead
and living Seneschal was more than a mere court fashion of the time, I
have, of course, only advanced my own opinion; but even if it were not
so, in this case and in that of the Balbiani monument and many others,
the fact that so gruesome a custom should have prevailed at all is
even more significant than if it were the result of the imagination of
some few of the greatest sculptors.

[Illustration: A MONK PRAYING, FROM THE TOMB OF CARDINAL D'AMBOISE IN
ROUEN CATHEDRAL]

In sketching the more sombre features of this extraordinary century,
it is impossible to omit any reference to those religious troubles
which may have been already suggested to you by the kneeling monks
upon the tomb of Georges d'Amboise. They were as terrible in Rouen as
in almost every other town in France; the violent deaths and tortures
they made so common in the city cannot be omitted in any estimate of
the horrors of the time; and if I do not dilate upon them as their
importance in history might seem to demand, it is because they are
chiefly responsible for the destruction or debasement of most of those
great architectural monuments which it is my chief business to
describe. They were also responsible for the next two sieges in the
story of the town, and in the first of these there is a tale that I
must tell you, if only to show that if these men had the realisation
of death ever present before their eyes, they were also very hard to
kill, and did not yield to the Arch-Enemy so easily as many of their
descendants in an age which tries its hardest to forget him.

Encouraged by the news of the horrible massacre of Vassy, the
Huguenots under the Prince of Conde seized Rouen on the night of April
15, 1562, pillaged the churches, and stopped the services of the
Catholic religion. A few months afterwards the royal army marched to
the rescue under the Constable Anne de Montmorenc