15. It was the fifth cathedral, I count, then, that lay in 'ashes,' according to Mons. Gilbert--in ruin certainly--decheant;--and ruin of a very discouraging completeness it would have been, to less lively townspeople--in 1218. But it was rather of a stimulating completeness to Bishop Everard and his people--the ground well cleared for them, as it were: and lightning (feu de l'enfer, not du ciel, recognized for a diabolic plague, as in Egypt), was to be defied to the pit. They only took two years, you see, to pull themselves together; and to work they went, in 1220, they, and their bishop, and their king, and their Robert of Luzarches. And this, that roofs you, was what their hands found to do with their might. 16. Their king was 'a-donc,' 'at that time,' Louis VIII., who is especially further called the son of Philip of August, or Philip the Wise, because his father was not dead in 1220; but must have resigned the practical kingdom to his son, as his own father had done to him; the old and wise king retiring to his chamber, and thence silently guiding his son's hands, very gloriously, yet for three years. But, farther--and this is the point on which chiefly I would have desired the Abbe's judgment--Louis VIII. died of fever at Montpensier in 1226. And the entire conduct of the main labour of the cathedral, and the chief glory of its service, as we shall hear presently, was _Saint_ Louis's; for a time of forty-four years. And the inscription was put "a ce point ci" by the last architect, six years after St. Louis's death. How is it that the great and holy king is not named? 17. I must not, in this traveller's brief, lose time in conjectural answers to the questions which every step here will raise from the ravaged shrine. But this is a very solemn one; and must be kept in our hearts, till we may perhaps get clue to it. One thing only we are sure of,--that at least the _due_ honour--alike by the sons of Kings and sons of Craftsmen--is given always to their fathers; and that apparently the chief honour of all is given here to Philip the Wise. From whose house, not of parliament but of peace, came, in the years when this temple was first in building, an edict indeed of peace-making: "That it should be criminal for any man to take vengeance for an insult or injury till forty days after the commission of the offence--and then only with the approbation of the Bishop of the Diocese." Which was perhaps a wiser effort to end the Feudal system in its Saxon sense,[47] than any of our recent projects for ending it in the Norman one. [Footnote 47: Feud, Saxon faedh, low Latin Faida (Scottish 'fae,' English 'foe,' derivative), Johnson. Remember also that the root of Feud, in its Norman sense of land-allotment, is _foi_, not _fee_, which Johnson, old Tory as he was, did not observe--neither in general does the modern Antifeudalist.]