Epitaphs on the walls of St. Quiriace recall two true shepherds of this church, one, who went daily into the hills to teach children and to tend on the sick poor in their homes, and the other, who opened up the forgotten crypt and left a school and presbytery to his parish. There is a quaintly worded tablet of the XVI century telling of the _haute et puissante dame_, the Marquise de Chenoise, who had "for God a tender solid piety; for her husband a submissive, respectful love; for her children a Christian and reasonable tenderness; for her friends a sincere and generous affection; for the poor charity without limit; and for the rest of the world _une bonté, une douceur, une honestété charmante_." One would not mind being the rest of the world for this gracious person. Both her sons were killed in one week, fighting under Turenne, so she passed the last years of her life in a retirement, which "she sanctified by prayer, and her prayer she nourished and sustained by good works." The robust piety of Bossuet's preaching breathes in such records. In St. Remi's abbatial at Rheims is the eulogy of another good lady of Champagne who was "Rachel in beauty, Rebecca in fidelity, Suzanna in purity, Tabitha in piety of heart, Ruth in sentiment, and Anna by good works." Paragons those old-time ladies seemed to be! ST. YVED AT BRAINE[69] I am just back from the battle line in that Royal Domain of Soissons, where the soul of ancient France seems more itself than in any other region, country of martyrs, and of kings, of Merovingian crypts, of the donjon of Coucy, of the five apses of St. Yved--realm of the first race of rulers bearing vestiges of the greatest history of France.--GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO, 1914. Strictly speaking, St. Yved at Braine is not so much a Primary Gothic monument as it is a link between that first tentative hour and the fuller development of the national art represented by Rheims and Amiens. In the same group as Braine, between Primary Gothic and the Era of the Great Cathedrals, are St. Leu d'Esserent, Montréal, Vézelay's choir, and the church of St. Laumer at Blois. Braine, on the ancient Roman highroad between Rheims and Soissons, had been a farm of the Frankish kings. In the VII century it belonged to the father of St. Ouen, and it was here that the future bishop of Rouen, as a child, was blessed by a passing guest, the Irish missionary St. Columbanus, whose Celtic rule of Luxeuil dominated, in Gaul, the century called of saints. Lady Agnes of Braine espoused a son of Louis VI, the turbulent Count of Dreux (d. 1188), and, from them came the funds for St. Yved, the second foundation of the new Order of Prémontré. The recorded date of the enterprise is from 1180 to 1216, but as the church is perfectly homogeneous, it must have been built in one campaign, probably in main part before the dedication of 1216.