Senlis was the second begun of the Gothic cathedrals. The most fecund region for early essays in the nascent national art lay between Senlis and Noyon. Thibaut, bishop of Senlis, was present at Abbot Suger's deathbed in 1151. Filled with the ambition to replace his half-ruined church by a Gothic one, he began, about 1152, the new works, and once more the abbey church of St. Denis was the model. Some of Senlis' original vaults remain over side aisles, tribune, and apse chapels. Their intersecting ribs show a certain inexperience, and in places semicircular diagonals still are used. The framing arches of each section are lower than the keystone of the diagonals, which imparts a _bombé_ shape to the vault. As the masons acquired skill in the making of Gothic stone roofs, this domical form died out; by stilting, by depressing, and by pointing the arches was the difficulty solved. Like Noyon, Senlis played a part in the early history of France. The Merovingian and Carolingian kings and those of the House of Capet frequented the little city in order to hunt in the forests of the Oise. Louis VII made Senlis his favorite residence, and when the new cathedral was undertaken he allowed donations to be collected over the entire kingdom. When Bishop Thibaut died, the succeeding prelates, Henri and Geoffrey, continued to give largely of their revenues to the new works, but the progress was slow. Senlis was a small diocese for so big a monument. About the time that the choir was finished, 1180, the sculpture of the central-western portal was set up, a gem of Primary Gothic, though sadly damaged by time. It marks a date in French mediæval sculpture. On the lintel is related the Death of the Virgin and her Assumption, in the tympanum her Coronation. Senlis was the first to use this ordinance which the XIII century frequently repeated; we find it at Chartres' north portal, and at the entrance under the northwest tower of Notre Dame at Paris. M. Émile Mâle with his usual happy phrasing speaks of the lyric beauty of the lintel stone at Senlis.[50] It was partly inspired by the _Golden Legend_ of the good Bishop James of Genoa, which in its turn had used the apocryphal gospels freely.[51] The legend relates that at the deathbed of Our Lady, the Apostles gathered, and St. John cautioned them: "Be careful when she is dead that no one weeps, lest the people, seeing our tears, be troubled, and say, 'They fear death, who preach the Resurrection.'" For three days Our Lady rested in her tomb in the valley of Jehoshaphat, then came her Divine Son, with angels, singing the Canticle of Canticles, to escort her to Paradise. The old sculptor of Senlis has depicted the touching reverence with which the angels bend, to lift from the tomb their future Queen of Heaven. Their gesture of eager love is one of the exquisitely delicate conceptions of mediæval sculpture.