Architecturally the rooms might, to our untrained eyes, be of the same age with the Aquilon.  They are earliest Transition, as far as a tourist can see, or at least they belong to the class of crypts which has an architecture of its own.  The rooms that concern us are those immediately above:  the so-called Salle des Chevaliers at the west end; and the so-called refectory at the east.  Every writer gives these rooms different names, and assigns them different purposes, but whatever they were meant for, they are, as halls, the finest in France; the purest in thirteenth-century perfection.

The Salle des Chevaliers of the Order of Saint Michael created by Louis XI in 1469 was, or shall be for tourist purposes, the great hall that every palace and castle contained, and in which the life of the chateau centred.  Planned at about the same time with the Cathedral of Chartres (1195-1210), and before the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis, this hall and its neighbour the refectory, studied together with the cathedral and the abbey, are an exceedingly liberal education for anybody, tourist or engineer or architect, and would make the fortune of an intelligent historian, if such should happen to exist; but the last thing we ask from them is education or instruction.  We want only their poetry, and shall have to look for it elsewhere.  Here is only the shell—­the dead art—­and silence.  The hall is about ninety feet long, and sixty feet in its greatest width.  It has three ranges of columns making four vaulted aisles which seem to rise about twenty-two feet in height.  It is warmed by two huge and heavy cheminees or fireplaces in the outside wall, between the windows.  It is lighted beautifully, but mostly from above through round windows in the arching of the vaults.  The vaulting is a study for wiser men than we can ever be.  More than twenty strong round columns, free or engaged, with Romanesque capitals, support heavy ribs, or nervures, and while the two central aisles are eighteen feet wide, the outside aisle, into which the windows open, measures only ten feet in width, and has consequently one of the most sharply pointed vaults we shall ever meet.  The whole design is as beautiful a bit of early Gothic as exists, but what would take most time to study, if time were to spare, would be the instinct of the Archangel’s presence which has animated his architecture.  The masculine, military energy of Saint Michael lives still in every stone.  The genius that realized this warlike emotion has stamped his power everywhere, on every centimetre of his work; in every ray of light; on the mass of every shadow; wherever the eye falls; still more strongly on all that the eye divines, and in the shadows that are felt like the lights.  The architect intended it all.  Any one who doubts has only to step through the doorway in the corner into the refectory.  There the architect has undertaken to express the thirteenth-century idea of the Archangel; he has left the twelfth century behind him.