failed to solve this particular church problem, and we-shall leave it behind us in leaving Normandy, although it is the most effective feature of any possible church.  “A clocher of that period (circa 1200), built over the croisee of a cathedral, following lines so happy, should be a monument of the greatest beauty; unfortunately we possess not a single one in France.  Fire, and the hand of man more than time, have destroyed them all, and we find on our greatest religious edifices no more than bases and fragments of these beautiful constructions.  The cathedral of Coutances alone has preserved its central clocher of the thirteenth century, and even there it is not complete; its stone fleche is wanting.  As for its style, it belongs to Norman architecture, and diverges widely from the character of French architecture.”  So says Viollet-le-Duc; but although the great churches for the most part never had central clochers, which, on the scale of Amiens, Bourges, or Beauvais, would have required an impossible mass, the smaller churches frequently carry them still, and they are, like the dome, the most effective features they can carry.  They were made to dominate the whole.

No doubt the fleche is wanting at Coutances, but you can supply it in imagination from the two fleches of the western tower, which are as simple and severe as the spear of a man-at-arms.  Supply the fleche, and the meaning of the tower cannot be mistaken; it is as military as the “Chanson de Roland”; it is the man-at-arms himself, mounted and ready for battle, spear in rest.  The mere seat of the central tower astride of the church, so firm, so fixed, so serious, so defiant, is Norman, like the seat of the Abbey Church on the Mount; and at Falaise, where William the Bastard was born, we shall see a central tower on the church which is William himself, in armour, on horseback, ready to fight for the Church, and perhaps, in his bad moods, against it.  Such militant churches were capable of forcing Heaven itself; all of them look as though they had fought at Hastings or stormed Jerusalem.  Wherever the Norman central clocher stands, the Church Militant of the eleventh century survives;—­not the Church of Mary Queen, but of Michael the Archangel;—­not the Church of Christ, but of God the Father—­Who never lied!

Taken together with the fleches of the facade, this clocher of Coutances forms a group such as one very seldom sees.  The two towers of the facade are something apart, quite by themselves among the innumerable church-towers of the Gothic time.  We have got a happy summer before us, merely in looking for these church-towers.  There is no livelier amusement for fine weather than in hunting them as though they were mushrooms, and no study in architecture nearly so delightful.  No work of man has life like the fleche.  One sees it for a greater distance and feels it for a longer time than is possible with any other human structure, unless it be the dome.  There is more play of light on the octagonal faces