Whether one enters through the dark magnificence of the great portals of the Chatelet; whether one mounts the fortified stairway, passing into the Salle des Gardes, passing onward from dungeon to fortified bridge to gain the abbatial residence; whether one leaves the vaulted splendor of oratories for aerial passageways, only to emerge beneath the majestic roof of the Cathedral—­that marvel of the Early Norman, ending in the Gothic choir of the fifteenth century; or, as one penetrates into the gloom of the mighty dungeons where heroes, and brothers of kings, and saints, and scientists have died their long death—­as one gropes through the black night of the crypt, where a faint, mysterious glint of light falls aslant the mystical face of the Black Virgin; as one climbs to the light beneath the ogive arches of the Aumonerie, through the wide-lit aisles of the Salle des Chevaliers, past the slender Gothic columns of the Refectory, up at last to the crowning glory of all the glories of La Merveille, to the exquisitely beautiful colonnades of the open Cloister—­the impressions and emotions excited by these ecclesiastical and military masterpieces are ever the same, however many times one may pass them in review.  A charm indefinable, but replete with subtle attractions, lurks in every one of these dungeons.

The great halls have a power to make one retraverse their space I have yet to find under other vaulted chambers.  The grass that is set, like a green jewel, in the arabesques of the cloister, is a bit of greensward the feet press with a different tread to that which skips lightly over other strips of turf.  And the world, that one looks out upon through prison bars, that is so gloriously arched in the arm of a flying buttress, or that lies prone at your feet from the dizzy heights of the rock clefts, is not the world in which you, daily, do your petty stretch of toil, in which you laugh and ache, sorrow, sigh, and go down to your grave.

The secret of this deep attraction may lie in the fact of one’s being in a world that is built on a height.  Much, doubtless, of the charm lies, also, in the reminders of all the human life that, since the early dawn of history, has peopled this hill.  One has the sense of living at a tremendously high mental pressure; of impressions, emotions, sensations crowding upon the mind; of one’s whole meager outfit of memory, of poetic equipment, and of imaginative furnishing being unequal to the demand made by even the most hurried tour of the great buildings, or the most flitting review of the noble massing of the clouds and the hilly seas.

The very emptiness and desolation of all the buildings on the hill help to accentuate their splendor.  The stage is magnificently set; the curtain, even, is lifted.  One waits for the coming on of kingly shapes, for the pomp of trumpets, for the pattering of a mighty host.  But, behold, all is still.  And one sits and sees only a shadowy company pass and repass across that glorious mise-en-scene.