of the fleche as the sun moves around them than can be got out of the square or the cone or any other combination of surfaces.  For some reason, the facets of the hexagon or octagon are more pleasing than the rounded surfaces of the cone, and Normandy is said to be peculiarly the home of this particularly Gothic church ornament; yet clochers and fleches are scattered all over France until one gets to look for them on the horizon as though every church in every hamlet were an architectural monument.  Hundreds of them literally are so,—­Monuments Historiques, -protected by the Government; but when you undertake to compare them, or to decide whether they are more beautiful in Normandy than in the Ile de France, or in Burgundy, or on the Loire or the Charente, you are lost, Even the superiority of the octagon is not evident to every one.  Over the little church at Fenioux on the Charente, not very far from La Rochelle, is a conical steeple that an infidel might adore; and if you have to decide between provinces, you must reckon with the decision of architects and amateurs, who seem to be agreed that the first of all filches is at Chartres, the second at Vendome, not far from Blois in Touraine, and the third at Auxerre in Burgundy.  The towers of Coutances are not in the list, nor are those at Bayeux nor those at Caen.  France is rich in art.  Yet the towers of Coutances are in some ways as interesting, if not as beautiful, as the best.

The two stone fleches here, with their octagon faces, do not descend, as in other churches, to their resting-place on a square tower, with the plan of junction more or less disguised; they throw out nests of smaller fleches, and these cover buttressing corner towers, with lines that go directly to the ground.  Whether the artist consciously intended it or not, the effect is to broaden the facade and lift it into the air.  The facade itself has a distinctly military look, as though a fortress had been altered into a church.  A charming arcade at the top has the air of being thrown across in order to disguise the alteration, and perhaps owes much of its charm to the contrast it makes with the severity of military lines.  Even the great west window looks like an afterthought; one’s instinct asks for a blank wall.  Yet, from the ground up to the cross on the spire, one feels the Norman nature throughout, animating the whole, uniting it all, and crowding into it an intelligent variety of original motives that would build a dozen churches of late Gothic.  Nothing about it is stereotyped or conventional,—­not even the conventionality.

If you have any doubts about this, you have only to compare the photograph of Coutances with the photograph of Chartres; and yet, surely, the facade of Chartres is severe enough to satisfy Saint Bernard himself.  With the later fronts of Rheims and Amiens, there is no field for comparison; they have next to nothing in common; yet Coutances is said to be of the same date with Rheims, or nearly so, and one can believe