The carvings in the west front of the cathedral are examples of the beginning of French sculpture, as it emerges from the severity and rigidity of Byzantine types. The human figures are long, slender, and swathed almost like mummies in their drapery. The faces are strongly individualized and seem to be portraits. While these statues must be attributed to a period previous to the middle of the twelfth century, we see in them the originality of French genius struggling to break away from the fetters of Eastern precedent. Viollet-de-Duc thinks that these faces belong to the type of the ancient Gaul; the flat forehead and raised arch of the eyebrows, the projecting eyes, the long jaws, the peaked and drooping nose, the long upper lip, the wide, closed mouth, the square chin, the long wavy hair are neither German, Roman, or French. There is a blending of firmness, grandeur and refinement in these wonderful countenances, each of them apparently copied from a different model. They are crowned and nimbused as the kings and saints of antique France. A more impressive gallery of illustrious personages is nowhere else to be found. Rheims By Epiphanius Wilson [Footnote: From "The Cathedrals of France." By permission of the author. Copyright, 1900.] French cathedrals have, as it were, a royal character, and this is emphasized especially in the history and architecture of Rheims cathedral, which became, from the time of Philippe Auguste, the church at whose altar the kings of France were crowned. The origin of the Church at Rheims dates from the third century; when we are told Pope Fabian sent into Gaul a band of bishops and teachers. Rheims was chosen as the seat of an episcopal primacy, and it was in the church built by St. Nicaise, or Nicasius, in 401, that Clovis was baptized and crowned in 496. This ancient building, doubtless of simple Roman proportions, was rebuilt in the reign of Louis the Debonair in 822, when Ebon was archbishop. It was completed with a magnificence which vied with the churches of Constantinople, Ravenna and Rome. It was considered in its day the most splendid church in France. Its roof and walls blazed with gilding and many-tinted paintings. Its floors were of marble mosaic. Rich tapestries hung round the choir, and its treasury was filled with masterpieces of the goldsmith and the jeweler. This church continued to be the wonder of Gallic Christianity until the beginning of the thirteenth century, when it was destroyed by fire. It is remarkable to notice in the history of French cathedrals how many of them were rebuilt just at the time when the pointed style, which may be called preeminently the Christian style of architecture, had come to birth almost simultaneously in various countries of Europe.