Her father, an amateur student of Gothic art who had even written a private monograph on apsidal chapels, was in the habit of taking his large family with him on French ecclesiastical tours, and Clara at an early age had learned the names of all the saints who appeared in the niches and the symbols of their martyrdom and could even identify those apostles supposed to be grandsons of Saint Anne. But on that sunny afternoon before Amiens, waiting outside in the square while her indefatigable father paid a second visit to the crypt, it occurred to her that she had gone through Europe seeing more of guidebooks than of churches, and, looking up, she took in the cathedral for the first time. What she noted was something that she was later to recognize in Monet's studies of Rouen. The towering façade was high, cluttered, complicated, formidable, a looming, terrifying mass, like a mammoth breaker about to crash at sea. But then, even as she caught her breath in near terror, she saw that it was not about to crash.
