Notre Dame, because of interruptions in its construction, presents an irregular alignment, and it is easy to perceive, as one gazes along its vaulting, that its choir slopes toward the north. Archæologists have given up the poetic explanation that the slanting choir was symbolic of the droop of Christ's head on the cross. Nor can the symbol seeker now call the Porte Rouge (an extra door in the north wall of the choir) a souvenir of the spear wound of the Saviour, since if made with such intention it would have been placed below the extended arms of the transept. Three campaigns of work built Notre Dame, and each time that the work was resumed the axis deviated slightly. First rose the choir and a short transept. Then was done the nave, save its westernmost bays. And finally, at the beginning of the XIII century, they undertook the west façade and the two bays behind it. The carving on the pier's capitals shows the gradual advance in sculpture: in the choir they cut the large leaves of water plants which were the first nature models copied when the conventional Byzantine models were discarded. Then, in the nave, the foliage grew richer, and oak and vine and curled-up ferns appeared. Capital by capital should be studied, for their sculpture is masterly. The capitals of the nave's triforium are said to mark the culmination of Gothic art in foliate design. While unity was kept throughout the entire arcade, there was unceasing variation in details. When Bishop Maurice de Sully, the peasant, died, he was succeeded by Bishop Eudes de Sully, the feudal baron, descended from the reigning counts of Champagne, from Louis VII and Aliénor of Aquitaine, and in whose veins ran the blood of William the Conqueror through his daughter Adela. The ability to build was his by inheritance. He began the west façade, and probably at his death all three of the portals were in place. To him we owe that fairest of sculptured entrances, the Virgin's door, under the northwest tower, called "the most beautiful page of stone that the Middle Ages have left us." _Visibile palare_ are Dante's words for such art as this. In the carved tympanum, "Gothic art reached the simple perfection of Phidias." The draperies flow easily; only in the abrupt turning up of the edges of the robes lingers an archaic touch. Below are represented kings and prophets, the ancestors of Mary. Above them is a moving version of the Assumption; and in the upper triangle is the Coronation of the Queen of Heaven by her Divine Son--she, the mortal, turned toward Him, the divinity, with a gesture of adoration. The Christ is the Nazarene, a noble Oriental.