TOWERS AND  PORTALS                           65
is managed and carried out with an address which has not been sur-
passed in similar monuments." One stumbles a little at the word
"adresse." One never caught one's self using the word in Norman
churches. Your photographs of Bayeux or Boscherville or Secque-
ville will show you at a glance whether the term "adresse" applies
to them. Even Vendôme would rather be praised for "droiture" than
for "adresse."—Whether the word "adresse" means cleverness, dex-
terity, adroitness, or simple technical skill, the thing itself is some-
thing which the French have always admired more than the Normans
ever did. Viollet-le-Duc himself seems to be a little uncertain whether
to lay most stress on the one or the other quality: "If one tries to
appreciate the conception of this tower," quotes the Abbé Bulteau
(11, 84), "one will see that it is as frank as the execution is simple
and skilful. Starting from the bottom, one reaches the summit of the
flèche without marked break; without anything to interrupt the gen-
eral form of the building. This clocher, whose base is broad (pleine),
massive, and free from ornament, transforms itself, as it springs, into
a sharp spire with eight faces, without its being possible to say where
the massive construction ends and the light construction begins."
Granting, as one must, that this concealment of the transition is a
beauty, one would still like to be quite sure that the Chartres scheme is
the best. The Norman clochers being thrown out, and that at Ven-
dôme being admittedly simple, the Clocher de Saint-Jean on the
Church of Saint-Germain at Auxerre seems to be thought among the
next in importance, although it is only about one hundred and sixty
feet in height (forty-nine metres), and therefore hardly in the same
class with Chartres. Any photograph shows that the Auxerre spire is
also simple; and that at Étampes you have seen already to be of the
Vendôme rather than of the Chartres type. The clocher at Senlis is
more "habile"; it shows an effort to be clever, and offers a standard
of comparison ; but the mediaeval architects seem to have thought that
none of them bore rivalry with Laon for technical skill. One of these