“What I ought to do I know very well; I ought to put the article into shape on Angelico’s picture in the Louvre.  I promised the paper at least four months ago to the magazine which clamours for it every morning by letter.  It is disgraceful!  Since I left Paris I have ceased to work; and I have no excuse, for the subject interests me, since it affords me an opportunity for studying the complete system of the symbolism of colour in the Middle Ages.  ’The Early Painters, and Prayer in Colour as seen in their Works.’  What a subject for thought!  However, that is not the immediate matter.  I must not sit dreaming, but go to join the Abbe Plomb; and the weather is clouding over again!  I certainly have no luck.”

As he crossed the square he was lost again in meditations, captivated once more by the haunting thought of the Cathedral, and saying to himself as he looked up at the spires,—­

“How many varieties there are in the immense family of the Gothic; and what dissimilarities.  No two churches are alike.”

The towers and belfries of those he knew rose before him as in those diagrams on which, irrespective of distance, the buildings are placed all close together at the same point of view to show their relative height.

“It is quite true,” thought he, “the towers vary like the basilicas.  Those of Notre Dame de Paris are thick-set and gloomy, almost elephantine; cleft almost from top to bottom by deep bays, they seem to mount slowly and with difficulty, and stop short, crushed as it were by the burden of sins, dragged down to earth by the wickedness of the city; we feel the effort with which they rise, and we are saddened as we contemplate those captive masses, all the more depressing by reason of the dismal hue of the louvre-boards.  At Reims, on the contrary, they are open from top to bottom, pierced as with needles’ eyes, long narrow windows of which the opening seems filled with a herring-bone of enormous size, or a gigantic comb with teeth on each side.  They spring into the air, as light as filigree; and the sky gets into the mouldings, plays between the mullions, peeps through the tracery and the innumerable lancets, in strips of blue, is focussed and reflected in the little carved trefoils above.  These towers are mighty, expansive, immense, and yet light.  They are as speaking, as much alive, as those in Paris are stern and mute.

“At Laon they are more especially strange.  With their light columns, here thrust forward and there standing back, they suggest a series of shelves piled up in a hurry, crowned merely by a platform, over which lowing oxen look down.

“The two towers at Amiens, built, like those of the Cathedrals at Rouen and at Bourges, at different periods, do not match.  They are of different heights, lame against the sky; another that is really magnificent in its solitude, and putting to shame the mediocrity of the two belfries lately erected on each side of the west front, is the Norman tower of Saint Ouen, its summit encircled by a crown.  This is the patrician tower among so many that preserve a peasant air, with bare heads, or coifs made narrow and square at the top, sloped somewhat like the mouthpiece of a whistle, such as that of Saint Romain at Rouen, or rustic, pointed caps like that worn by the church of Saint Benigne at Dijon, or the queer sort of awning which shades the Cathedral of Saint Jean at Lyon.