they live pleasantly together.  The Gothic died gracefully in France.  The choir is charming,—­far more charming than the nave, as the beautiful woman is more charming than the elderly man.  One need not quarrel about styles of beauty, as long as the man and woman are evidently satisfied and love and admire each other still, with all the solidity of faith to hold them up; but, at least, one cannot help seeing, as one looks from the older to the younger style, that whatever the woman’s sixteenth-century charm may be, it is not the man’s eleventh-century trait of naivete;—­far from it!  The simple, serious, silent dignity and energy of the eleventh century have gone.  Something more complicated stands in their place; graceful, self-conscious, rhetorical, and beautiful as perfect rhetoric, with its clearness, light, and line, and the wealth of tracery that verges on the florid.

The crypt of the same period, beneath, is almost finer still, and even in seriousness stands up boldly by the side of the Romanesque; but we have no time to run off into the sixteenth century:  we have still to learn the alphabet of art in France.  One must live deep into the eleventh century in order to understand the twelfth, and even after passing years in the twelfth, we shall find the thirteenth in many ways a world of its own, with a beauty not always inherited, and sometimes not bequeathed.  At the Mount we can go no farther into the eleventh as far as concerns architecture.  We shall have to follow the Romanesque to Caen and so up the Seine to the Ile de France, and across to the Loire and the Rhone, far to the South where its home lay.  All the other eleventh-century work has been destroyed here or built over, except at one point, on the level of the splendid crypt we just turned from, called the Gros Piliers, beneath the choir.

There, according to M. Corroyer, in a corner between great constructions of the twelfth century and the vast Merveille of the thirteenth, the old refectory of the eleventh was left as a passage from one group of buildings to the other.  Below it is the kitchen of Hildebert.  Above, on the level of the church, was the dormitory.  These eleventh-century abbatial buildings faced north and west, and are close to the present parvis, opposite the last arch of the nave.  The lower levels of Hildebert’s plan served as supports or buttresses to the church above, and must therefore be older than the nave; probably older than the triumphal piers of 1058.

Hildebert planned them in 1020, and died after carrying his plans out so far that they could be completed by Abbot Ralph de Beaumont, who was especially selected by Duke William in 1048, “more for his high birth than for his merits.”  Ralph de Beaumont died in 1060, and was succeeded by Abbot Ranulph, an especial favourite of Duchess Matilda, and held in high esteem by Duke William.  The list of names shows how much social importance was attributed to the place.  The Abbot’s duties included that of entertainment on a great scale.  The Mount was one of the most famous shrines of northern Europe.  We are free to take for granted that all the great people of Normandy slept at the Mount and, supposing M. Corroyer to be right, that they dined in this room, between 1050, when the building must have been in use, down to 1122 when the new abbatial quarters were built.