been more offensive had they been turned into those
lath-like crosses which are seen elsewhere. Its tower is a monstrosity,
with an egg-shaped protuberance which is neither shapely nor impressive,
while the southern range of the nave and aisle, when viewed laterally,
shows a bareness and poverty of design unusual and painful. The
ensemble, from this point, is one of a certain impressiveness. It could
hardly be otherwise, with the situation which it commands, even were it
the grossest thing that ever took shape in architecture. Its
irregularities and inconsistencies, and the great variety of outline
shown by the roof-tops of the town, perhaps, make up in a measure for
the lack of individual beauties in the church itself.

There is this much to be said, however, for the functions which this
church performs. If all were as much made use of by the market-day
peasants, streaming in from the surrounding country, who, with their
jugs, market-baskets, and what not, in their hands, enter the building,
say a short prayer or two, and toddle out again, there would doubtless
be fewer churches with a poverty-stricken air and more of a better and
more prosperous class.

The greater part of the cathedral which originally stood on this site
was destroyed during the Revolution, and that which was afterward reared
here was merely a restoration by Mansard, who, it is to be presumed,
made such use as was possible of what remained.

The interior, most will agree, is no more remarkable than the exterior
adornments; in fact the same paucity of plan and of detail appears from
one end to the other, inside and out. The aisles are astonishingly low;
the choir and nave, each unusually short. There are no transepts, and
there is no triforium whatever, no chapels of any remarkable beauty, and
little glass that is even passable. On the walls of the nave, beneath
the low clerestory windows, are a series of four carven Renaissance
marble panels, with other blanks suggesting the ultimate addition of
similar sepulchral-looking ornaments. Such, in brief, is a resume of the
attractions, or rather the lack of them, as it will strike the average
person. It is perhaps no small wonder that the traveller who desires to
study architectural forms, or to sketch them, should prefer the less
holy precincts of the chateau, where every facility is offered for the
pursuance thereof, to that more "blessed ground," covered by the
cathedral, which offers little enough in