The refectory, which has already served for a measure of the Abbot’s scale, is, in feeling, as different as possible from the hall.  Six charming columns run down the centre, dividing the room into two vaulted aisles, apparently about twenty-seven feet in height.  Wherever the hall was heavy and serious, the refectory was made light and graceful.  Hardly a trace of the Romanesque remains.  Only the slight, round columns are not yet grooved or fluted, and their round capitals are still slightly severe.  Every detail is lightened.  The great fireplaces are removed to each end of the room.  The most interesting change is in the windows.  When you reach Chartres, the great book of architecture will open on the word “Fenestration,”—­ Fenestre,—­a word as ugly as the thing was beautiful; and then, with pain and sorrow, you will have to toil till you see how the architects of 1200 subordinated every other problem to that of lighting their spaces.  Without feeling their lights, you can never feel their shadows.  These two halls at Mont-Saint-Michel are antechambers to the nave of Chartres; their fenestration, inside and out, controls the whole design.  The lighting of the refectory is superb, but one feels its value in art only when it is taken in relation to the lighting of the hall, and both serve as a simple preamble to the romance of the Chartres windows.

The refectory shows what the architect did when, to lighten his effects, he wanted to use every possible square centimetre of light.  He has made nine windows; six on the north, two on the east, and one on the south.  They are nearly five feet wide, and about twenty feet high.  They flood the room.  Probably they were intended for glass, and M. Corroyer’s volume contains wood-cuts of a few fragments of thirteenth-century glass discovered in his various excavations; but one may take for granted that with so much light, colour was the object intended.  The floors would be tiled in colour; the walls would be hung with colour; probably the vaults were painted in colour; one can see it all in scores of illuminated manuscripts.  The thirteenth century had a passion for colour, and made a colour-world of its own which we have got to explore.

The two halls remain almost the only monuments of what must be called secular architecture of the early and perfect period of Gothic art (1200-10).  Churches enough remain, with Chartres at their head, but all the great abbeys, palaces and chateaux of that day are ruins.  Arques, Gaillard, Montargis, Coucy, the old Louvre, Chinon, Angers, as well as Cluny, Clairvaux, Citeaux, Jumieges, Vezelay, Saint-Denis, Poissy, Fontevrault, and a score of other residences, royal or semi-royal, have disappeared wholly, or have lost their residential buildings.  When Viollet-le-Duc, under the Second Empire, was allowed to restore one great chateau, he chose the latest, Pierrefonds, built by Louis d’Orleans in 1390.  Vestiges of Saint Louis’s palace remain at the Conciergerie,