have been then quite new:  “I have been in many countries, as you can find in this book.  In no place have I ever such a tower seen as that of Laon.—­J’ai este en mult de tieres, si cum vus pores trover en cest livre.  En aucun liu onques tel tor ne vi com est cele de Loon.”  The reason for this admiration is the same that Viollet-le-Duc gives for admiring the tower of Chartres—­the “adresse” with which the square is changed into the octagon.  Not only is the tower itself changed into the fleche without visible junction, under cover of four corner tourelles, of open work, on slender columns, which start as squares; but the tourelles also convert themselves into octagons in the very act of rising, and end in octagon fleches that carry up—­or once carried up—­the lines of profile to the central fleche that soared above them.  Clearly this device far surpassed in cleverness the scheme of Chartres, which was comparatively heavy and structural, the weights being adjusted for their intended work, while the transformation at Laon takes place in the air, and challenges discovery in defiance of one’s keenest eyesight.  “Regard... how the tourelles pass from one disposition to another, in rising!  Meditate on it!”

The fleche of Laon is gone, but the tower and tourelles are still there to show what the architects of the thirteenth century thought their most brilliant achievement.  One cannot compare Chartres directly with any of its contemporary rivals, but one can at least compare the old spire with the new one which stands opposite and rises above it.  Perhaps you will like the new best.  Built at a time which is commonly agreed to have had the highest standard of taste, it does not encourage tourist or artist to insist on setting up standards of his own against it.  Begun in 1507, it was finished in 1517.  The dome of Saint Peter’s at Rome, over which Bramante and Raphael and Michael Angelo toiled, was building at the same time; Leonardo da Vinci was working at Amboise; Jean Bullant, Pierre Lescot, and their patron, Francis I, were beginning their architectural careers.  Four hundred years, or thereabouts, separated the old spire from the new one; and four hundred more separate the new one from us.  If Viollet-le-Duc, who himself built Gothic spires, had cared to compare his fleches at Clermont-Ferrand with the new fleche at Chartres, he might perhaps have given us a rule where “adresse” ceases to have charm, and where detail becomes tiresome; but in the want of a schoolmaster to lay down a law of taste, you can admire the new fleche as much as you please.  Of course, one sees that the lines of the new tower are not clean, like those of the old; the devices that cover the transition from the square to the octagon are rather too obvious; the proportion of the fleche to the tower quite alters the values of the parts; a rigid classical taste might even go so far as to hint that the new tower, in comparison with the old, showed signs of a certain tendency toward