Under this church is a crypt, where we are shewn the tombs of Clothaire the First, and of Sigismond, king of Burgundy. The former died in 561, probably at Soissons; the latter was thrown with his wife and family into a well at Orleans, and we should not certainly expect to find him in the same chapel with one of his principal enemies at Rheims. A simple vault, or succession of vaults of small dimensions, can give us no internal evidence of the time of its construction.
And now, in order to preserve something of a chronological order, let me transport you from Rheims to Mantes, where I have since seen a church which is a puzzle for the antiquaries. Whittington says that it was built by Eudes de Montreuil, and I understand him to quote Millin for the assertion; but I cannot find the passage in that writer. On the contrary, Millin tells us that it was built by the same architect who built Royaumont. Now, Royaumont was finished in 1228, sixty-one years before the death of E. de Montreuil, which took place in 1289. The first church which was erected at Mantes is said to have been built in 865, but it was destroyed by William the Conqueror; and we certainly see at present no remains of any edifice of that date, yet Millin seems inclined to consider the northern doorway of the western portal as part of the original construction. Altogether this church has the appearance of a building that has undergone considerable alterations at different periods. In what I take to be the original work, the nave has two stories of aisles, the end of the choir is round, and the windows are without tracery. In the clerestory and in the lower aisles the windows are pointed; in the upper aisles they are entire circles; all have Saxon ornaments externally, and are quite plain within. All these circumstances indicate a style prior to that existing at the beginning of the thirteenth century, which is the date generally assigned to the edifice, under the auspices of Blanche of Castille, mother to Louis the Ninth. Two towers have been added at the west end. The southern, which is said to be the most ancient, is a very strange composition of slender Gothic. The upper story but one is surrounded by a colonnade, if the expression be admissible, of two ranges of columns, one above another, without either arch or architrave between them, but merely connected with the wall by a stone slab on each capital of the lower range. The upper range supports arches, on which rest several unconnected slabs, steeply sloping, wrought into scales, and conducing neither to the beauty, the strength, nor the shelter of the edifice. The north-west tower, built, according to the tradition of the place, three hundred years after the other, is much less light in its construction, and not much more handsome. It would rather appear more ancient than posterior to the first, if there were any difference, but the summit is comparatively modern, and this has probably given birth to the opinion that its date is so much posterior.