A glance at the pleasing Renaissance façade of the church of Luzarches.... The automobile rolls along the edge of the forest.... Villas of horsebreeders and jockeys.... Some English cottages.... The immense greensward and the very uneven cobbled street of Chantilly.... A few more woods, and we behold the wide valley of the Oise. On the opposite hill rises the church of Saint-Leu-d'Esserent, on a large terrace, above the houses and the gardens of the town. The apse turned toward the Oise, the robust flying buttresses and the radiating chapels, two great square towers which flank the choir, the tower of the porch with its tapering steeple, the grand and harmonious mass of the edifice, all give to this church the aspect of a proud and gracious citadel. Saint-Leu-d'Esserent is one of the most moving types of the architecture of the twelfth century, of that architecture which is called transitional. The façade is still semi-Romanesque, but its openings are already finer and more numerous. Internally, the mixture of Romanesque and pointed gives to the monument an extraordinarily varied aspect; the arches which separate the nave from the low side aisles are broken; the full semicircle reappears in the triforium, and in the upper windows the arch is pointed again. The vaulting is formed by the intersection of pointed arches; but in the chapels of the apse there are trilobes inscribed in circular arches. And this diversity of styles is here the result neither of gropings nor of fresh starts; it results from a marvelously conceived plan in which the builders knew how to mingle and harmonize the beauties of tradition and the audacities of the new art. The Romanesque architecture had no period of decadence and, on the other hand, at the period when Saint-Leu-d'Esserent was built, the time of research and of trial whence emerged the pointed architecture was already past. It is the meeting of the two styles which renders so magnificent certain churches of the twelfth century, such as Saint-Leu-d'Esserent and Noyons. [Illustration: 0189] The ambulatory of the choir was enriched in a free and infinitely harmonious style; the columns and the capitals, even as early as this, show an admirable purity of style. Saint-Leu-d'Esserent was an important priory of the Cluniac order. Some arcades of the cloister still adhere to the wall of the church. Other remains of the monastery exist on private property. We would have been pleased to visit them. The proprietor answered us: "It is impossible; this is the day I dry my washing." An inhabitant of Saint-Leu-d'Esserent said to us a few moments later, in a mysterious tone: "The monks were rich. There is buried treasure there. That man is sifting all the soil on his land: he is looking for gold..." (Saint-Leu is sixty kilometers from Paris.) *****