envie,
Et souffrit mille fois la mort,
Avant que de perdre la vie.
Passant, ne fais icy de bruit,
Et garde bien qu'il ne s'eveille.
Car voicy la premiere nuit,
Que le pauvre Scarron sommeille."

There is rather a quiet, satisfactory _place_ in front of the cathedral,
with some good "bits" in it; notably a turret at the angle of one of the
towers and a very fine steep-roofed dwelling, behind low walls, which
it overlooks, with a tall iron gate. This house has two or three little
pointed towers, a big black, precipitous roof, and a general air of
having had a history. There are houses which are scenes, and there are
houses which are only houses. The trouble with the domestic architecture
of the United States is that it is not scenic, thank goodness, and the
characteristic of an old structure like the turreted mansion on the
hillside of Le Mans is that it is not simply a house. It is a person, as
it were, as well. It would be well, indeed, if it might have
communicated a little of its personality to the front of the cathedral,
which has none of its own. Shabby, rusty, unfinished, this front has a
romanesque portal, but nothing in the way of a tower. One sees from
without, at a glance, the peculiarity of the church--the disparity
between the romanesque nave, which is small and of the twelfth century,
and the immense and splendid transepts and choir, of a period a hundred
years later. Outside, this end of the church rises far above the nave,
which looks merely like a long porch leading to it, with a small and
curious romanesque porch in its own south flank. The transepts, shallow
but very lofty, display to the spectators in the _place_ the reach of
their two clere-storey windows, which occupy, above, the whole expanse
of the wall. The south transept terminates in a sort of tower, which is
the only one of which the cathedral can boast. Within, the effect of the
choir is superb; it is a church in itself, with the nave simply for a
point of view. As I stood there I read in my Murray that it has the
stamp of the date of the perfection of pointed Gothic, and I found
nothing to object to the remark. It suffers little by confrontation with
Bourges and, taken in itself, seems to me quite as fine. A passage of
double aisles surrounds it, with the arches that divide them supported
on very thick round columns, not clustered. There are twelve chapels in
this passage, and a charming little lady-chapel fill