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On the Alyscamp is the venerable church of S. Honore, half ruinous, in which, underground in the crypt is the ancient baptistery that had served the first Christians when the church was young. It was furnished with a large porphyry circular vessel for immersing adults. Louis XIV. saw it, coveted it for some water-works, and got the Arelois to give it him.
The present structure is 600 years old, and more than 200 years were occupied in the building of it. They show you, in the crypt, some fine remains of the Norman church that preceded it on the same site, together with traces of the still older Saxon church that preceded the Norman. The first one was of wood, and was totally destroyed.
Shaded by a group of these was the ancient well, of huge circuit, and with a low arch opening out of its wall about ten feet below the surface, whether the door of a crypt for the concealment of treasure, or of a subterranean passage, or merely of a vault for keeping provisions cool in hot weather, opinions differed.
He was mistaken; he could not interest himself in monuments to the dead; he was too closely pursued by a living phantom. He walked through the aisles, the chapels, the crypt, with as much indifference as he had wandered through Hyde Park, and Kensington Gardens, and Hampton Court.
Cut in the rock, the crypt formed two narrow passages, parted by a massive block of stone which upheld the nave, and conducting to a subterranean chapel under the apse, where some little lamps remained burning both day and night. A dim forest of pillars rose up there, a mystic terror reigned in that semi-obscurity where the mystery ever quivered.
Within the cathedral the cupola has a diameter of one hundred and eight feet, and rises two hundred and twenty-eight feet above the pavement; around it runs the famous Whispering Gallery. Beneath the centre of the pavement lie the remains of Lord Nelson in the crypt, for St. Paul's has been made the mausoleum of British heroes on sea and land.
"Aren't you coming," called Heywood, "to sit with us awhile?" "Can't, thanks," she replied, without looking up. "I'm too busy." "That's no excuse. Rest a little." She moved away, carrying her medicines, but paused in the door, smiled back at him as from a crypt, and said: "Have you been hurt?" "Only my feelings." "I've no time," she laughed, "for lazy able-bodied persons."
Between the eastern ends of the choir aisles, and beneath the eastern end of the presbytery, is the #Crypt#. This is a vaulted chamber, the vaulting being supported on two pairs of pillars, thus forming three aisles, as it were, running east and west, each containing three bays.
"The Marquise de Montespan has a memory." "Her influence may soon be nothing more." "Do not rely too much upon it, my friend. When the Fontanges came up from Provence, with her blue eyes and her copper hair, it was in every man's mouth that Montespan had had her day. Yet Fontanges is six feet under a church crypt, and the marquise spent two hours with the king last week.
But its chief interest attaches to the two ancient cellars known as the crypt and the dungeon: the crypt is about twelve feet square, excavated in the limestone rock, and having a Gothic vaulted ceiling, with a single small window; the dungeon is eighteen feet long, half as wide, and six feet high, without any windows, and with a roof formed of massive stones.
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