Capitolo 10
and everywhere in the lead of their age. We was a serious run. If
You want the other test of it, besides our record in war and in
politics, you have to only look at our art. Religious art is the
measure of human depth and the sincerity; some frivolity, some weakness,
to whine to tall voice. If this church on the Mountain is not test enough of
Norman character, we will stop to Coutances for a wider sight. Then
we will go to Caen and Bayeux. From there it would be worth,,
our while to jump immediately to Palermo. It was of year 1131 or
in the proximities that Roger it started the Cathedral to Cefalu and the Chapel
Real to Palermo; it was around the year 1174 that his/her nephew
William started the Cathedral of Monreale. Any art--or Greek or
Byzantine, Italian or Arab--you/he/she has ever created two religious types this way
beautiful, so serious, so impressive, and still so different, as Mont-
Saint-Michel looking on his/her northern ocean and Monreale looking,
down on his/her forests of orange and lemon, on Palermo and the
Sicilian seas.
Down almost at the end of the twelfth century the Norman one was fairly
master of the world in architecture as in arm, even if the
thirteenth century belonged to France, and we have to look for his
glories on the Seine and Marne and Loire; but for the present we am
in the eleventh century,--tenants of the Duke or the Church or of
small feudal gentlemen that take their names from the neighbourhood,--
Beaumont, Carteret, Greville, Percy, Pierpont,--who, to the Duke
offering, desire every call out his/her tenants, perhaps ten man-to-arm
with their companions, to fight in Brittany, or in the Vexin I pour
Paris, or on the great country for the conquest of England that is
to come inside ten years,--the greatest military effort that has
is done in western Europe from when Charlemagne and Roland were
defeated to Roncesvalles three hundred years ago. For the time being, us
you/he/she is helping to dig granite for the Church of Abbey, and to throw him/it
to the Mountain or the position on our boat. We never succeed in doing ours