Note 135 — Chapter VI · Six of the Lesser Great Cathedrals: Bourges, Beauvais, Troyes, Tours, Lyons, Le Mans

The chief piers of Orléans Cathedral were mined by Théodore de Bèze and blown up on the night of March 23, 1567. The portal, part of the choir, and the apse chapel escaped. The XII-century nave had double aisles with tribunes; the frontispiece also was XII century. The choir, begun in 1287, was finished by 1297, and a new Gothic nave was in progress at the time of the civil wars of religion. Henry IV undertook to rebuild Orléans Cathedral, and with his bride, Marie de Medici, laid the first stone in 1601. But a bastard-Gothic edifice is not compensation for earlier work. H. Havard, éd., La France artistique et monumentale, vol. 6, p. 122, “Orléans,” G. Lefenestre; Congrès Archéologique, 1854 and 1892; G. Rigault, Orléans et le val de Loire (Collection, Villes d’art célèbres), (Paris, H. Laurens); E. Lèfevre-Pontalis et Eugène Garry, on Orléans Cathedral, in Bulletin Monumental, 1904, vol. 68, p. 309.