but only a few yards from its end, two flat stones (the custode will show you them), one a little farther back than the other, are laid over the graves of the two great bishops, all whose strength of life was given, with the builder's, to raise this temple. Their actual graves have not been disturbed; but the tombs raised over them, once and again removed, are now set on your right and left hand as you look back to the apse, under the third arch between the nave and aisles.
23. Both are of bronze, cast at one flow—and with insuperable, in some respects inimitable, skill in the caster's art.
"Chef-d'œuvres de fonte,—le tout fondu d'un seul jet, et admirablement."[1] There are only two other such tombs left in France, those of the children of St. Louis. All others of their kind—and they were many in every great cathedral of France—were first torn from the graves they covered, to destroy the memory of France's dead; and then melted down into sous and centimes, to buy gunpowder and
- ↑ Viollet le Duc, vol. viii., p. 256. He adds: "L'une d'elles est comme art" (meaning general art of sculpture), "un monument du premier ordre;" but this is only partially true—also I find a note in M. Gilbert's account of them, p. 126: "Les deux doigts qui manquent, à la main droite de l'évêque Gaudefroi paraissent être un défaut survenu à la fonte." See further, on these monuments, and those of St. Louis' children, Viollet le Duc, vol. ix., pp. 61, 62.
