“And in any case a tower without a tapering spire never soars to heaven.  It always rises heavily, pants on the way, and falls asleep exhausted.  It is, as it were, an arm without a hand, a wrist without palm and fingers, a stump; or, again, a pencil uncut, having no point wherewith to write up beyond the clouds the prayers from below; in short, it is for ever inert.

“We must turn to the steeple, to the stone spire, to find the true symbol of prayers shot up to pierce the sky and reach the Heart of the Father, which is their target.

“And in this family of arrows what a variety we see; no two darts are alike!

“Some are set in a collar of turrets at their base, held in a circle of pinnacles, like the points of a Magian king’s diadem; this we see in the bell-tower of Senlis.

“Others seem to have about them the children born in their image, little spires, all round them; some are covered with bosses, knobs, and blisters; others pierced like colanders and strainers, in patterns of trefoils and quaterfoils that seem to have been punched out; here we find some that are covered with ornament, with teeth like a rasp, ridges of notches, or bristling with spines; others are imbricated with scales like a fish, as we see in the older spire at Chartres; and others again, like that at Caudebec, display the emblem of the Roman Church, the triple crown of the Pope.

“Out of this general outline, which was almost forced upon them, and which they hardly ever tried to avoid, this pyramid or pepper-caster, jelly-bag or extinguisher, the architects of the Middle Ages evolved the most ingenious combinations and varied their designs to infinity.

“How mysterious for the most part is the origin of our cathedrals!  Most of the artists who built them are unknown; nay, the age of the stones is rarely a matter of certainty, for the greater part of them have been wrought upon by the alluvium of ages.

“They almost all cover intervals of two, three, or four centuries each; they extend from the beginning, of the thirteenth century till the first years of the sixteenth.

“And on reflection that is very intelligible.

“It has been accurately remarked that the thirteenth century was the great period of cathedral-building.  It gave birth to almost every one of them; and then, being created, their growth was checked for nearly two hundred years.

“The fourteenth century was torn by frightful disasters.  It began with the ignoble quarrels between Philippe le Bel and the Pope; it saw the stake lighted for the Templars, made bonfires in Languedoc of the Begards and the Fraticelli, the lepers and the Jews; wallowed in blood under the defeats of Crecy and Poitiers, the furious excesses of the Jacquerie and of the Maillotins, and the ravages of the brigands known as the Tard-venus; and finally, having run so wild, its madness was reflected in the incurable insanity of the king.