it when one enters the interior.  The Normans, as they slowly reveal themselves, disclose most unexpected qualities; one seems to sound subterranean caverns of feeling hidden behind their iron nasals.  No other cathedral in France or in Europe has an interior more refined—­one is tempted to use even the hard-worn adjective, more tender—­or more carefully studied.  One test is crucial here and everywhere.  The treatment of the apse and choir is the architect’s severest standard.  This is a subject not to be touched lightly; one to which we shall have to come back in a humble spirit, prepared for patient study, at Chartres; but the choir of Coutances is a cousin to that of Chartres, as the facades are cousins; Coutances like Chartres belongs to Notre Dame and is felt in the same spirit; the church is built for the choir and apse, rather than for the nave and transepts; for the Virgin rather than for the public.  In one respect Coutances is even more delicate in the feminine charm of the Virgin’s peculiar grace than Chartres, but this was an afterthought of the fourteenth century.  The system of chapels radiating about the apse was extended down the nave, in an arrangement “so beautiful and so rare,” according to Viollet-le-Duc, that one shall seek far before finding its equal.  Among the unexpected revelations of human nature that suddenly astonish historians, one of the least reasonable was the passionate outbreak of religious devotion to the ideal of feminine grace, charity, and love that took place here in Normandy while it was still a part of the English kingdom, and flamed up into almost fanatical frenzy among the most hard-hearted and hard-headed race in Europe.

So in this church, in the centre of this arrangement of apse and chapels with their quite unusual—­perhaps quite singular—­grace, the four huge piers which support the enormous central tower, offer a tour de force almost as exceptional as the refinement of the chapels.  At Mont-Saint-Michel, among the monks, the union of strength and grace was striking, but at Coutances it is exaggerated, like Tristram and Iseult,—­a roman of chivalry.  The four “enormous” columns of the croisee, carry, as Viollet-le-Duc says, the “enormous octagonal tower,”—­like Saint Christopher supporting the Christ-child, before the image of the Virgin, in her honour.  Nothing like this can be seen at Chartres, or at any of the later palaces which France built for the pleasure of the Queen of Heaven.  We are slipping into the thirteenth century again; the temptation is terrible to feeble minds and tourist natures; but a great mass of twelfth and eleventh-century work remains to be seen and felt.  To go back is not so easy as to begin with it; the heavy round arch is like old cognac compared with the champagne of the pointed and fretted spire; one must not quit Coutances without making an excursion to Lessayon the road to Cherbourg, where is a church of the twelfth century, with a square tower and almost