The difference of sex is not imaginary.  In 1058, when the triumphal columns were building, and Taillefer sang to William the Bastard and Harold the Saxon, Roland still prayed his “mea culpa” to God the Father and gave not a thought to Alda his betrothed.  In the twelfth century Saint Bernard recited “Ave Stella Marts” in an ecstasy of miracle before the image of the Virgin, and the armies of France in battle cried, “Notre-Dame-Saint-Denis-Montjoie.”  What the Roman could not express flowered into the Gothic; what the masculine mind could not idealize in the warrior, it idealized in the woman; no architecture that ever grew on earth, except the Gothic, gave this effect of flinging its passion against the sky.

When men no longer felt the passion, they fell back on themselves, or lower.  The architect returned to the round arch, and even further to the flatness of the Greek colonnade; but this was not the fault of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries.  What they had to say they said; what they felt they expressed; and if the seventeenth century forgot it, the twentieth in turn has forgotten the seventeenth.  History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.  The eleventh century is no worse off than its neighbours.  The twelfth is, in architecture, rather better off than the nineteenth.  These two rooms, the Aquilon and promenoir, which mark the beginning of the Transition, are, on the whole, more modern than Saint-Sulpice, or Il Gesu at Rome.  In the same situation, for the same purposes, any architect would be proud to repeat them to-day.

The Aquilon, though a hall or gallery of importance in its day, seems to be classed among crypts.  M. Camille Enlart, in his “Manual of French Archaeology” (p. 252) gives a list of Romanesque and Transition crypts, about one hundred and twenty, to serve as examples for the study.  The Aquilon is not one of them, but the crypt of Saint-Denis and that of Chartres Cathedral would serve to teach any over-curious tourist all that he should want to know about such matters.

Photographs such as those of the Monuments Historiques answer all the just purposes of underground travel.  The Aquilon is one’s first lesson in Transition architecture because it is dated (1112); and the crypt of Saint-Denis serves almost equally well because the Abbe Suger must have begun his plans for it about 1122.  Both have the same arcs doubleaux and arcs-formerets, though in opposite arrangement.  Both show the first heavy hint at the broken arch.  There are no nervures—­no rib-vaulting,—­and hardly a suggestion of the Gothic as one sees it in the splendid crypt of the Gros Fillers close at hand, except the elaborately intersecting vaults and the heavy columns; but the promenoir above is an astonishing leap in time and art.  The promenoir has the same arrangement and columns as the Aquilon, but the vaults are beautifully arched and pointed, with ribs rising directly from the square capitals and intersecting the central spacings, in a spirit which neither you nor I know how to distinguish from the pure Gothic of the thirteenth century, unless it is that the arches are hardly pointed enough; they seem to the eye almost round.  The height appears to be about fourteen feet.