The nave, the choir and chevet, and chapels, are all of a bareness which only exaggerates the floridness of these other appendages. The nave itself is but one hundred and ten feet long, and perhaps a scant thirty wide, and dates from the fourteenth century. It contains good glass of the same period, which luckily escaped the spoliation of the Revolution.
The choir is more modern, and much plainer in treatment, and is but fifty-five feet in length and of the same width as the nave.
There are no transepts; in short, the chief and most interesting features of the church are the before mentioned details, which, unquestionably bordering upon the debasement of Gothic art, are in every way attractive, with lightness and colour, if such an expression may be applied to gray stone.
Certainly the play of sunlight on gracefully carven stone is indicative of a brilliancy which might be termed an effect of colour; and it is with respect to that quality that the west façade of Notre Dame d'Alençon appeals; more than as an otherwise grand or even highly interesting structure.
IV
ST. PIERRE DE LISIEUX
Lisieux, the city of the Lexavii, taken by Cæsar and besieged by Geoffrey Plantagenet; its old houses; its crooked streets and picturesque decay; with its former Cathedral of St. Pierre (M. H.), memorable as the marriage place of Henry III. and Eleanor of Guienne; all go to make up the formula of one of the stock sights of Normandy.
It is scarcely an attractive town, in spite of its picturesque sordidness, made the more so by the smoke arising from many belching factory chimneys. In fact, one has difficulty in thinking of it as a cathedral town at all; and, as such, it hardly claims more than a brief résumé of its important features. A much more interesting, impressive, and commanding church is that of St. Jacques, which at least has the stamp of a personality, which in the cathedral itself is entirely wanting, so far as one's latent sympathies are concerned. In spite of the purity of that which is Gothic in its fabric, it has little of that quality which arouses admiration, and which, regardless of the edict of a certain seer and prophet, is mostly that for which we revere a great monument,—its power to sway us impressively.