ows
on the cornices, have been peeled, as it were, by the fire; they no
longer have faces or fingers, and, with their human forms, which still
persist, they look like the dead drawn up in files, their contours
vaguely indicated under a sort of reddish grave-clothes.

We make the circuit of the square without meeting anyone, and the
barrier which isolates the fragile and still admirable phantom is
everywhere solidly closed. As for the old palace adjoining the
basilica, the episcopal palace where the kings of France came to rest
on the day of their consecration, it is no longer anything more than a
ruin, without windows or roof, everywhere licked and blackened by the
flame.

What a peerless jewel it was, this cathedral, still more beautiful
than Notre Dame in Paris. More open and lighter, more slender also,
with its columns like long reeds, wonderful to be so fragile, and yet
to hold firm; a wonder of our French religious art, a masterpiece
which the faith of our ancestors had caused to blossom there in its
mystic purity, before they came to us from Italy, to materialize and
spoil everything, the sensual heaviness of what we have agreed to call
the Renaissance....

Oh! the coarse and cowardly and imbecile brutality of those bundles of
iron, launched in full flight against the lace-work, so delicate, that
had risen confidently in the air for centuries, and which so many
battles, invasions, scourges have never dared to touch!...

That great closed house, there, on the square, must be the
Archbishop's residence. I try ringing the bell at the entrance to ask
the favor of admission to the cathedral. "His Eminence," I am told,
"is at mass, but will soon return." If I am willing to wait.... And,
while I wait, the priest who receives me relates to me the burning of
the episcopal palace: "Beforehand, they had sprinkled the roofs with I
know not what diabolical substance; when they then threw their
incendiary bombs, the timbers burned like straw, and you saw
everywhere jets of green flame, which spread with the noise of
fireworks."

In fact, the barbarians had premeditated this sacrilege, and prepared
it long ago; in spite of their foolishly absurd pretexts, in spite of
their shameless denials, what they wished to destroy here was the very
heart of old France; some superstitious fancy drove them to it, as
much as their instinct of savages, and this is the task they plunged
into desperately, when nothing else in the city, or