skilful proportion of the different parts.  The transition, so hard to adjust, between the square base and the octagon of the fleche, is managed and carried out with an address which has not been surpassed in similar monuments.”  One stumbles a little at the word “adresse.”  One never caught one’s self using the word in Norman churches.  Your photographs of Bayeux or Boscherville or Secqueville will show you at a glance whether the term “adresse” applies to them.  Even Vendome would rather be praised for “droiture” than for “adresse.”—­Whether the word “adresse” means cleverness, dexterity, adroitness, or simple technical skill, the thing itself is something which the French have always admired more than the Normans ever did.  Viollet-le-Duc himself seems to be a little uncertain whether to lay most stress on the one or the other quality:  “If one tries to appreciate the conception of this tower,” quotes the Abbe Bulteau (11,84), “one will see that it is as frank as the execution is simple and skilful.  Starting from the bottom, one reaches the summit of the fleche without marked break; without anything to interrupt the general form of the building.  This clocher, whose base is broad (pleine), massive, and free from ornament, transforms itself, as it springs, into a sharp spire with eight faces, without its being possible to say where the massive construction ends and the light construction begins.”

Granting, as one must, that this concealment of the transition is a beauty, one would still like to be quite sure that the Chartres scheme is the best.  The Norman clochers being thrown out, and that at Vendome being admittedly simple, the Clocher de Saint-Jean on the Church of Saint-Germain at Auxerre seems to be thought among the next in importance, although it is only about one hundred and sixty feet in height (forty-nine metres), and therefore hardly in the same class with Chartres.  Any photograph shows that the Auxerre spire is also simple; and that at Etampes you have seen already to be of the Vendome rather than of the Chartres type.  The clocher at Senlis is more “habile”; it shows an effort to be clever, and offers a standard of comparison; but the mediaeval architects seem to have thought that none of them bore rivalry with Laon for technical skill.  One of these professional experts, named Villard de Honnecourt, who lived between 1200 and 1250, left a notebook which you can see in the vitrines of the Bibliotheque Nationale in the Rue Richelieu, and which is the source of most that is known about the practical ideas of mediaeval architects.  He came to Chartres, and, standing here before the doors, where we are standing, he made a rough drawing, not of the tower, but of the rose, which was then probably new, since it must have been planned between 1195 and 1200.  Apparently the tower did not impress him strongly, for he made no note of it; but on the other hand, when he went to Laon, he became vehement in praise of the cathedral tower there, which must