Early on the first morning of our stay, we left the little Hotel de Bourgogne, which stands on the site of the nave, in the very shadow of the last remaining gaunt tower of Cluny. The entrance to the alley is through the façade of the ancient "Palace of the Pope Gélase," as it is called, a fine, fourteenth-century building, restored--rebuilt one might say--in 1783, and fronting on the old courtyard of the monastery, now known as the Place de la Grenelle, or the Place du Marché, on the opposite side of which is a building that was once the monastic stable. The upper story of the façade has fine Gothic windows, forming almost an arcade. The trefoiled tracery is satisfactory, and exquisitely carved faces look down upon you from the corbels of the drip-stones. It was to Cluny, during the abbacy of Pons, that Gélase II., ill-treated and threatened by the partisans of Henry V., fled for rest and refuge; and here, a few days afterwards, lying upon ashes, clothed in the robe of the Benedictine order, and surrounded by his cardinals and the monks of the community, says a contemporary, he died "as in his own house."[90] This palais du pape Gélase is now the principal building of the secondary school, the "Ecole nationale des Arts et Métiers," established in the precincts of the abbey. We wandered for an hour about the building, endeavouring to fashion again, in our minds, Cluny as it was. Standing in that echoing transept, the sole relic of the great Mother Church of Western Christendom, following the noble shafting up to where, above the mutilated capitals, sculptured with all the naive skill and courage of the time, the eye can reach the lofty vault, and follow round the fluted pilasters of the triforium arcades, I felt that, of all the thousand acts of Vandalism that the incredible, immeasurable folly and ignorance of man have inflicted upon a long-suffering world, this is the most insufferable, the most unpardonable. I can understand, I can almost forgive, a Puritan Cromwell, blinded by a fanaticism, that, though savage and ignorant, was yet, in intention, religious, battering down the statues of Mary from their niches, and shattering with fusilades the glass that, for hundreds of years, had bathed in loveliest colours the sunlit aisles of our Gothic cathedrals; but this I can neither understand nor pardon--that those who, discarding all other religions, have bowed the knee to Reason, as the most divine attribute of man, should have found, in her name, a warrant to drive a street through the abbey's cloister garth, and blast, with the dynamiter's bomb, the hoary arches of Cluny. [Illustration: ·CLUNY·]