Each French cathedral and each minster makes its own special plea. Lyons reminds us, in windows of apocalyptic radiance, that her first bishops came from John the Apostle, that Christian blood flowed in her forum as generously as in Rome's Coliseum. Of the very stones of the Amphitheater, hallowed by her martyrs, is her cathedral built, and the architectural methods of the north and the south are welded here in the ancient central city of Gaul whence rayed out the linking highroads of Rome. At Tours, the charity of Martin to a beggar is recorded many a time, for it civilized middle Europe. Slow, steady, and deep were the accumulations of culture by the Loire of measured horizons and classic restraint. A tower named of Charlemagne recalls that Saxon Alcuin filled the schoolrooms of St. Martin's Abbey. A chiseled tomb reminds us that here worked the last sculptor of the Middle Ages (loyal to its humble and profound Christian traditions), as well as the first artists of the imported pagan Renaissance. At Le Mans and Angers, at Fontevrault, with its tomb of Henry Plantagenet, who gave us our jury system, speak those fighting progressives, the Angevin rulers; and all their love of the arts and of adventure endures in the exotically beautiful development which we call Plantagenet Gothic. An unlettered king is an uncrowned ass, said a X-century count of Anjou. At Poitiers, city of St. Hilaire who fought the Arians, is the most glorious window in the world--Christ triumphant on the Cross, and again we walk in procession to the strain of Bishop Fortunatus' hymn, and we read the Church Fathers in Greek and Hebrew in Queen Radegund's cloister. Aquitaine's line of troubadour dukes, passionate sinners, and prodigious repenters lives in every church in the old hill city, from the cathedral wherein Aliénor blended the indigenous art of her own Poitou with the Plantagenet suppleness of her Angevin husband, to the cupola-covered abbatial of St. Hilaire, where her son, Richard the Lion-hearted, was installed as duke.