e one
striking object. Of the castle we see nothing but the surrounding woods,
and in truth there is nothing more to see. The large brick house known
as _le vieux chateau_, standing a little to the east of the church,
marks, it is to be supposed, the site of the home of Richer and all the
rest of the brood of the eagle. But no site of any castle can well be
further from the eagle's nest which we came in search of. The town, as
distinguished from castle and church, has little or nothing to show;
like Flers, it has risen to some modern importance through manufactures.
The chief church, St Martin, has already struck us on our approach by
its stately tower of late Gothic such as in England we might have looked
to see crowned with battlement and pinnacles, but which here is finished
with a high roof bearing statues on its ridge. Beside the tower there is
something, one hardly knows what, a very high roof and a kind of spire.
When we come near, we find that the church, though very short, has two
western towers. The northern one is the rich piece of Flamboyant work
with which we have already got familiar--or rather not familiar, as its
narrow windows may in the distance be taken for a Romanesque arcade. Its
southern fellow is a real Romanesque tower with pilaster buttresses,
which bears the spire. It is very plain, of the eleventh century rather
than of the twelfth, so that the lord of Laigle, who awakens an interest
above the rest of his house, may have looked at it or even built it. The
same may be said of the apse which ends the central of the three
bodies--they are hardly to be called nave and aisles--which make up the
church of Laigle. But a Romanesque apse, rich or plain, is not improved
by first cutting pointed windows in it and then blocking them up. And
the apse, thus sadly mutilated, is further imprisoned. It barely peeps
out between the east ends of the northern and southern bodies, of which
the northern takes the form of a kind of transept. They are in the
worst style of the late French Gothic, with windows of the same wretched
Perpendicular as those of Almeneches. Whence came this strange taste?
Henry the Fifth and John Duke of Bedford might, somewhat earlier, have
taught their Norman subjects to build good Perpendicular, but not this
kind of stuff.

There is not much more to see in Laigle itself. Of the castle we can
hardly be said to have even seen the site. The house which represents it
has ceased to be a _chat