The north and south porches, which were not part of the original plan, as is evident from the manner in which they have been applied to the walls and the buttresses cut away to admit them, would appear to have been begun in this same year 1210.
But the dedication of the Cathedral was long deferred. It did not take place till 1260, when S. Louis himself, the devoted benefactor of the Cathedral, whose personality has filled the north transept, the Rose of France and the north porch, attended with all his family, and with multitudes of people from every side, princes and dukes and peasants, and the bishop, surrounded by his seventy canons, joined in the solemn dedication of the temple.
By the fire of 1194 the whole of the upper church had been destroyed. The narthex, with the western porch and its three twelfth-century windows, alone remained. Beyond the church stood the two towers still, but their bells and woodwork were all gone, and the masonry was so charred that traces of the fire may be seen to this day.
Briefly, the steps that were now taken to give us the Cathedral which we have may be summarised as follows. Four apsidal chapels were added in the crypt, completing thus the favourite Gothic number of seven; all the soil of the crypt (except the martyrium) was levelled up to that of Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre; aisles were constructed over the corridors of the crypt; a vast transept was added; an enormous choir, with double aisles and apsidal chapels, was erected over new vaulting of the crypt; the narthex was displaced and made room for two new bays in the nave; whilst the west porch was moved skilfully westwards, with the same object, and set in a line flush with the two towers. Traces of this latter process will be found in the fact that the three doorways, having existed before the present nave and aisles, do not now correspond with them, and traces of what was once exterior masonry of the towers may also be seen _inside_ the present church, between the Chapel of the Seven Sorrows and that of the Calvary.
At the same time, above the triplet window, in a severe quadrangular framework, was inserted the splendid Rose window, which is a masterpiece of masonry, a superb creation, recalling at once to mind the magnificent circular window of Lincoln, which, however, was a good score years later, and also--for the thick radii of the circle still suggest the spokes of a wheel quite as much as the petals of a rose--the rather earlier Wheel of Barfreston (Kent, 1180). It is 46 feet in diameter, and has been set, designedly, not in the exact centre of its flat stone frame, in order to counterbalance the inequality noticeable in the breadth of the two towers. There, with its double row of sculptured spokes, which radiate from its centre, it looks, to borrow Mr. Henry James’s fine phrase, on its lofty field of stone, as expansive and symbolic as if it were the wheel of Time itself.