Was Jeanne d’Arc a single manifestation of a new spirit that had entered society, or was this itself a continuation of what she had initiated under God? The answer does not really matter, the important fact is that a great regeneration took place, and a new type of art followed in its wake. Now the tendency was away from the proud efficiency of a glorified architectural engineering and toward the other element in architecture, beauty of form and splendour of ornament. It was almost as though the French had turned to religion and beauty as their only refuge from the miseries of their estate. In the very first years of the fifteenth century, at the darkest hours of France, Notre Dame de l’Epine, close by Châlons on the Marne, was built in 1419. Caudebec in 1426, St. Maclou, Rouen, in 1432, and after these for more than a century France abandoned herself to the creation of works of architectural art that, whatever they may lack of the splendid consistency and the divine serenity of the thirteenth century, are nevertheless amongst the loveliest works of man. Beauvais is an admirable example of the two tendencies; begun in 1225, its impossible choir was finished in 1272, only to collapse twelve years later, paying the penalty of its structural arrogance. For forty years it was in process of reconstruction, after a more conservative fashion though of its original dimensions, and in 1500 the transepts were begun and finished fifty years later. In beauty and in an almost riotous richness, they are the crowning work of this phase of design, while the choir itself, with its marvellously articulated system of buttresses, is a creation of sheer architectural power almost unrivalled. Ambitious and defiant, the canons now, in 1550, reared a vast spire over the crossing, nearly 450 feet high, and of the same sumptuous design as the transepts. The whole stupendous erection fell twenty-five years later, and has never been rebuilt, while the nave was never even begun; so Beauvais remains a vast fragment, and a living commentary on the excesses and the penalties of that pride of life that succeeded to the spiritual humility of the Middle Ages.