All this makes the absence of fleches at Paris and Mantes the more strange.  Want of money was certainly not the cause, since the Parisians had money enough to pull their whole cathedral to pieces at the very time when fleches were rising in half the towns within sight of them.  Possibly they were too ambitious, and could find no design that seemed to satisfy their ambition.  They took pride in their cathedral, and they tried hard to make their shrine of Our Lady rival the great shrine at Chartres.  Of course, one must study their beautiful church, but this can be done at leisure, for, as it stands, it is later than Chartres and more conventional.  Saint-Germain-des-Pres leads more directly to Chartres; but perhaps the church most useful to know is no longer a church at all, but a part of the Museum of Arts et Metiers,—­the desecrated Saint-Martin-des-Champs, a name which shows that it dates from a time when the present Porte-Saint-Martin was far out among fields.  The choir of Saint-Martin, which is all that needs noting, is said by M. Enlart to date from about 1150.  Hidden in a remnant of old Paris near the Pont Notre Dame, where the student life of the Middle Ages was to be most turbulent and the Latin Quarter most renowned, is the little church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, towards 1170.  On the whole, further search in Paris would not greatly help us.  If one is to pursue the early centuries, one must go farther afield, for the schools of Normandy and the Ile de France were only two among half a dozen which flourished in the various provinces that were to be united in the kingdom of Saint Louis and his successors.  We have not even looked to the south and east, whence the impulse came.  The old Carolingian school, with its centre at Aix-la-Chapelle, is quite beyond our horizon.  The Rhine had a great Romanesque architecture of its own.  One broad architectural tide swept up the Rhone and filled the Burgundian provinces as far as the watershed of the Seine.  Another lined the Mediterranean, with a centre at Arles.  Another spread up the western rivers, the Charente and the Loire, reaching to Le Mans and touching Chartres.  Two more lay in the centre of France, spreading from Perigord and Clermont in Auvergne.  All these schools had individual character, and all have charm; but we have set out to go from Mont-Saint-Michel to Chartres in three centuries, the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth, trying to get, on the way, not technical knowledge; not accurate information; not correct views either on history, art, or religion; not anything that can possibly be useful or instructive; but only a sense of what those centuries had to say, and a sympathy with their ways of saying it.  Let us go straight to Chartres!

CHAPTER V

TOWERS AND PORTALS

For a first visit to Chartres, choose some pleasant morning when the lights are soft, for one wants to be welcome, and the cathedral has moods, at times severe.  At best, the Beauce is a country none too gay.