The cathedral is curious and fascinating. Set out in 1155 on enormous lines, it was curtailed both in height and length through the failure of adequate funds. It has been rebuilt, extended, supplemented, century after century, until it has become almost an epitome of French architecture from the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the sixteenth century. The southwest tower (its mate is unfinished) is of the thirteenth-century culmination, and surpassed by no other spire in France for subtlety of composition and perfection of detail. One of its crocketed pinnacles has already been shot away, but apparently further danger is well removed, and will become progressively less threatening as the Prussian lines are driven back. It is, of course, quite impossible even to note all the architectural monuments between the Seine and the frontiers of Belgium. Paris must be wholly left out, for St. Denis, St. Germain l’Auxerois, Notre Dame, and the Ste. Chapelle would justly require a volume to themselves. Rouen, with its cathedral, St. Ouen, St. Maclou, the Palais de Justice, rich with all the lace and embroidery of the flamboyant period, lies now well beyond danger, and so does Beauvais, where the nemesis of worldly pride overtook the lagging spiritual impulse that had made the Middle Ages the climax of Christian civilisation. Châlons-sur-Marne, once threatened, is now reprieved, and its [Illustration: BEAUVAIS] cathedral, its churches of St. Jean and St. Loup, and its noble and distinguished Church of Our Lady are safe for another period. Apart from the great architectural monuments are numberless others invaluable in archæology, and forming links in the great Gothic development: St. Etienne of Beauvais, St. Leu d’Esserent, Morienval, Bury, St. Germer, and St. Remi of Reims--the last valuable beyond estimate, with an apse that was unparalleled as a masterpiece of transitional work when Gothic was in its first and finest estate, now wrecked and desecrated by shells that have burst its vaults into crumbled fragments and hurled its perfect windows in showers of splintered glass to the pavements heaped high with the wreck of masonry and of dismembered altars.