A glance at the western facades of the Cathedral and of St. Maclou will make clearer what I have to say. For the Cathedral is in almost a straight line along its west front, though the two towers at each end give almost a suggestion of a retreating curve. St. Maclou, on the other hand, shaped like the eastern apse of most churches, has a bold curve forwards from north and south, meeting in the central door which projects some way beyond the side doors on its own facade, as may be seen from Miss James's particularly instructive drawing in the frontispiece. St. Ouen presented the only remaining third possibility, a curve inwards, in which the central door was pushed back, and at an angle on each side of it the arched portals of the aisles curved forwards, and above them rose two towers, each a reduced copy of that larger exquisite central tower which crowns the Abbey. Though the old masonry remained, and though a complete working drawing of the whole facade was discovered in the archives of the town, the job of pulling everything down and building the new and horrible spires was given to an architect who had already destroyed an old tower in the angle of the courtyard of the Palais de Justice, and had made a "grille" for its facade filled with inconsequent anachronisms and errors. After this, your only consolation will be to pass through the western gates as swiftly as may be to the interior. Its whole length is 416 feet 8 inches, and the vault is 100 feet high; the nave is 34 feet broad, and the aisles 22 feet. This magnificent fabric has had hard usage. After being sacked when it was scarce completed, by the Protestants in 1562, it was turned into a museum by the Revolution, and in 1793 was used as a blacksmith's shop for making arms. Yet nothing can efface that first breathless sense of soaring height and beauty which impresses you on your first entrance as you look up to the great windows of the clerestory, with the saints upon their silvery glass, set between the long slender shafts of columns that spring straight from the ground, and leap upwards like a fountain clear and undivided to the keystone of the roof. Though I was unwillingly bound to confess that even the old Rose windows disappointed me, the bunch of glaring cauliflowers which is the new western Rose is worse than anything in any building of this size and general beauty. But the other windows are an abiding joy, made of that exquisite moonlit glass, in which the colours shine like jewels, and are set as rarely.