Though the magnificent workmanship of the dead man at whose head she kneels reminds me more of Germain Pilon's methods, I can well believe that Jean Goujon may have been responsible for the general design of the whole monument during the year we know he spent at Rouen in 1540, when he was twenty years of age. Men seem to have matured more quickly in those days than is possible in the slower generations that we know. But even if the graceful caryatides and every other carving is his work, I must still ascribe the strong treatment of the massive knight in armour on his war horse to the same artist who conceived the dead figure lying in its shroud beneath; and whether that artist were Pilon or Jean Cousin, it is most improbable that it should have been Goujon, for whom the work would have been just as much too early for his own age, as that of Pilon would have been too late for the suggested date of the entire monument. That the contrast of the dead and living Seneschal was more than a mere court fashion of the time, I have, of course, only advanced my own opinion; but even if it were not so, in this case and in that of the Balbiani monument and many others, the fact that so gruesome a custom should have prevailed at all is even more significant than if it were the result of the imagination of some few of the greatest sculptors. [Illustration: A MONK PRAYING, FROM THE TOMB OF CARDINAL D'AMBOISE IN ROUEN CATHEDRAL] In sketching the more sombre features of this extraordinary century, it is impossible to omit any reference to those religious troubles which may have been already suggested to you by the kneeling monks upon the tomb of Georges d'Amboise. They were as terrible in Rouen as in almost every other town in France; the violent deaths and tortures they made so common in the city cannot be omitted in any estimate of the horrors of the time; and if I do not dilate upon them as their importance in history might seem to demand, it is because they are chiefly responsible for the destruction or debasement of most of those great architectural monuments which it is my chief business to describe. They were also responsible for the next two sieges in the story of the town, and in the first of these there is a tale that I must tell you, if only to show that if these men had the realisation of death ever present before their eyes, they were also very hard to kill, and did not yield to the Arch-Enemy so easily as many of their descendants in an age which tries its hardest to forget him.