‘molten now in driving mist,
Now lulled with the incommunicable blue,’
was not completed till near the end of the twelfth century, for upon the soffit of the topmost window facing the Clocher Neuf you may read in great Roman letters the name of the master of the works, Harman, 1164. N.D.D. Such, at least, is the inference drawn, though it may well be only the weary vigil of a watchman who nightly gazed over the plains of La Beauce on the look out for beacon signals of alarm, or for the first evidence of a fire in the town, that is recorded in these deep-cut letters. The foundations of the old tower at any rate were laid as early as 1091, and both the square towers were finished by 1145. They carry the spires that are the pride of Chartres, and which have given rise to the popular saying that the perfect cathedral, if it could ever be built, would be composed of the spire of Chartres, the nave of Amiens, the choir of Beauvais, the porch of Reims.[56]
Of the two spires, the northern, Clocher Neuf, with its airy staircases and pierced traceries, built by Jean le Texier, called Jean de Beauce, in the sixteenth century, is the more popular, the Clocher Vieux the more beautiful. The former is flamboyant, decked out with delicate ornament, graceful, rich, and feminine; the latter sober, severe, robust, clad, you might fancy, like a man in armour. These giant towers, indeed, and their aerial pinnacles are not twin sisters, but rather, it might seem, sister and elder brother, with their points of resemblance and their points of difference; the one, weatherbeaten and grey, but still preserving, in spite of the wrinkles of old age, a noble, male and mellowed beauty; the other, the young sister, smiling through the lace of a wedding veil, comely as a bride, fair as the spouse of Christ.
The one, fashioned by the Byzantine chisel, sprang into complete being in the heroic ages of faith, in the days of war, and beheld at its feet Thomas, exiled from Canterbury, and Bernard, when preaching the second Crusade, hailed there by bishops and barons as generalissimo of that great enterprise. The other rose, after a long peace, under the hands of the still Christian architects of the Renaissance, when all dangers and difficulties had been surmounted. She arose in her smiling elegance, rose till it seemed that she would touch the stars, and her mantle shone with a thousand lights and sparkled with a thousand
