I have said enough, I trust, to induce others to examine carefully this very interesting church; it is valuable as being a little in advance of the most perfect period of the French pointed style, and as being much more instructive, therefore, than a building which, like the cathedral at Rheims, is in the main a little after the most perfect period, and full, therefore, of symptoms of decline, instead of promise of advance.
From Notre Dame to the cathedral it is a descent from the finest early first-pointed to commonplace middle-pointed, full of German character in its detail. The west front and the whole of the apse have been much modernized, and the finest remaining portion of the exterior is the north transept front. The windows are geometrical middle-pointed of four lights, and the flying buttresses on a large scale, double, and surmounted by pinnacles. There is some good stained glass of late date in some of the aisle windows.
Another church, dedicated, I think, to S. Alpin, has a nave and aisles of six bays groined, without a triforium, and of the same date as Notre Dame. There are transepts and a central tower, and a choir in flamboyant style, and of a most unusual plan; the two arches east of the tower diverge from each other, so that the width of the choir gradually increases up to the point at which it is finished with an apse of three sides. An aisle surrounds the whole, the windows of which retain some very rich stained glass. This choir is the most remarkable example that I have met with of a very late revival of, perhaps, the earliest type of chevet. There are a great many altars in this church, pews throughout with doors, and no sign whatever of any improvement. In Notre Dame, where pews had disappeared and everything was being restored, all the side altars had disappeared, and there was only one altar left besides the principal altar in the choir.
And here I might well conclude these notes of French architecture. From Châlons I went to Toul, and thence by Metz to Trèves, and I found, as might be expected, nothing but German work. At Toul there are two churches, the cathedral and S. Gengoult, both of some interest, and with good cloisters; but it is very remarkable how we find here, not only German detail, but the favourite German ground-plans also; S. Gengoult is a cruciform church, with an apsidal chancel, and a small apsidal chapel on each side opening into the transepts; whilst the cathedral has an apsidal choir without aisles, and a square-ended chapel on each side opening from the transepts. The window tracery in S. Gengoult is perhaps the ugliest ever devised even by German ingenuity, and yet of early geometrical character (_circa_ A.D. 1300), and still retaining much very beautiful glass of the same date. The nave of the cathedral has been recently seated with very smart fixed open seats, of the kind which might have been erected fifteen or twenty years ago in England.