On this solid foundation the Abbot rested the chief weight of the church, which was the central tower, supported by the four great piers which still stand; but from the croisee in the centre westward to the parapet of the platform, the Abbot filled the whole space with masonry, and his successors built out still farther, until some two hundred feet of stonework ends now in a perpendicular wall of eighty feet or more.  In this space are several ranges of chambers, but the structure might perhaps have proved strong enough to support the light Romanesque front which was usual in the eleventh century, had not fashions in architecture changed in the great epoch of building, a hundred and fifty years later, when Abbot Robert de Torigny thought proper to reconstruct the west front, and build out two towers on its flanks.  The towers were no doubt beautiful, if one may judge from the towers of Bayeux and Coutances, but their weight broke down the vaulting beneath, and one of them fell in 1300.  In 1618 the whole facade began to give way, and in 1776 not only the facade but also three of the seven spans of the nave were pulled down.  Of Abbot Hildebert’s nave, only four arches remain.

Still, the overmastering strength of the eleventh century is stamped on a great scale here, not only in the four spans of the nave, and in the transepts, but chiefly in the triumphal columns of the croisee.  No one is likely to forget what Norman architecture was, who takes the trouble to pass once through this fragment of its earliest bloom.  The dimensions are not great, though greater than safe construction warranted.  Abbot Hildebert’s whole church did not exceed two hundred and thirty feet in length in the interior, and the span of the triumphal arch was only about twenty-three feet, if the books can be trusted.  The nave of the Abbaye-aux-Dames appears to have about the same width, and probably neither of them was meant to be vaulted.  The roof was of timber, and about sixty-three feet high at its apex.  Compared with the great churches of the thirteenth century, this building is modest, but its size is not what matters to us.  Its style is the starting-point of all our future travels.  Here is your first eleventh-century church!  How does it affect you?

Serious and simple to excess! is it not?  Young people rarely enjoy it.  They prefer the Gothic, even as you see it here, looking at us from the choir, through the great Norman arch.  No doubt they are right, since they are young:  but men and women who have lived long and are tired,—­who want rest,—­who have done with aspirations and ambition,—­whose life has been a broken arch,—­feel this repose and self-restraint as they feel nothing else.  The quiet strength of these curved lines, the solid support of these heavy columns, the moderate proportions, even the modified lights, the absence of display, of effort, of self-consciousness, satisfy them as no other art does.  They come back to it to rest, after a long circle of pilgrimage,—­the cradle of rest from which their ancestors started.  Even here they find the repose none too deep.