The eleventh century, filled by the reigns of Robert, his son, Henry I (1031-1060) and his grandson Philip I (1060-1108), was made terrible by famines and wonderful by the opening of the great adventure of the Crusades. The famine brought to thousands a lingering death beside which the sudden departure attending the end of the world would have been peaceful translation. The Crusades, begun (1096) in exaltation but in a pitiful ignorance of ways and means, ended a hundred and seventy-five years later in selfishness and an accession of knowledge. The ignorance cost a waste of human life horrible to think of; the knowledge moved western Europe to expression in all forms of art, and brought about a feeling of unity which, in France, produced a nation bound by common interests. Beyond any calculation was the impetus given to commerce and to the intellectual life. The ordering of society, the institution of chivalry, the awakening to the vividness of mental activity and of beauty--these three influences touched life under the early Capetians until it grew and ripened into the simple, beauty-loving, God-fearing temper of the thirteenth century, the soul of the Middle Ages. Henry I (1031-1060), no weakling but not a man of administrative ability, followed his father’s example as a builder. One of his benefactions was the Priory of Saint Martin-des-Champs which was begun in the last year of his reign on the site of a former establishment which had been destroyed by the Normans. It lay well out of the city on the old Roman road leading to the north and was a huge place, a fortified village in itself and quite independent of Paris. A wall of considerable size furnished with round towers surrounded an enclosure in which were a church, a refectory, a cloister, a chapter-house, an archive tower, a field for the pasturing of cattle, gardens for the raising of vegetables, and a cemetery for the burial of the dead. The wall has gone to-day except for one of the round towers which was preserved and rebuilt through the intercession of Victor Hugo when the straightening of a street called for its destruction. The field and gardens and the cemetery are now hidden beneath houses and pavements, but the church, whose erection lasted from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, and the refectory, finished in the thirteenth century, have been preserved as parts of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, established by the Convention in 1794 as a technical school and museum of machines and scientific instruments. The church, secularized, serves as an exhibition hall for machinery, an incongruous and somewhat shocking combination. The refectory is put to the more suitable use of housing the technical library. Both are exquisite examples, and the church is the oldest existing instance in the city, of that Gothic architecture which sprang into being in the twelfth century as if to symbolize with its stretching height and its soaring spires, its