The churches of the town are not particularly interesting. St. Marcel, a somewhat barrack-like building of the twelfth century, at the station end of the town has a good Clunisian clock-tower. The building is roofed with wood, because, having no buttresses, it would not stand the thrust of vaulting. The église Notre Dame, in the centre of the town, is more attractive; though its thirteenth-century façade is mutilated. Birds rest upon the backs of the gargoyles, and upon the ends of the broken shafting; and dirty children play, all day long, upon the steps of the porch. The interior, however, has some good work in the capitals, mouldings, and vaulting shafts of the nave. The engaged vaulting shafts of the aisles are probably remains of an older church, as they have squared plinths and clawed angles, transitional in style. If anyone cares to see to what a plight the lost art of making stained glass can come, let him look at the tympanum of the door of Notre Dame de Cluny. The building adjoining the church has a Renaissance door, and a thirteenth-century arcade on the upper floor. There are two other houses, at least, in Cluny, to which, I suppose, I should draw attention. The first of them is the Hotel Dieu, a seventeenth-century building on the site of the old hospital of Cluny, of which a few vestiges yet remain. Neither the architecture, nor the kindred arts of that period, have ever aroused much enthusiasm in me; consequently, I remember almost nothing of the fabric itself, and my general impression is little more than a blaze of garden flowers, tempered by delicious palm-leaves, and dotted here and there with pale invalids, chatting in groups, or walking or sitting beside the flowers. Within the entrance hall the frail voices of nuns earnestly intoning prayers in unison awakened the religious spirit within me far more effectively than had the deserted nave of Notre Dame, or of St. Marcel. Their solemn chant and the austere cleanliness that reigned everywhere, awed me so that I crept out on tip-toe into sunlight again, without more than a glance at the famous Bouillon statues that I had come there expressly to see. The Cardinal de Bouillon, abbot of Cluny from 1683 to 1715, had intended to erect, to the memory of his father and mother, at the southern end of the small transept of the abbey church--opposite to the Chappelle Bourbon--a monumental tomb that should be worthy of a family and individual so illustrious as that brother of Turenne, who had faced Richelieu, and played a leading part in the Fronde. But the cardinal had reckoned without Louis XIV. That monarch, hearing of the project, made further inquiries; and decided, as the report of d'Aguerriau, which preceded the royal veto, put it, "That every part of this design tended equally to preserve and immortalize, by the religion of an ever-durable tomb, the too-ambitious pretensions of its author towards the origin and grandeur of his house."