Part 5 (1/2)

Though the filling up of the moat makes it look shorter than it really is, a great deal of the old masonry remains intact, and so carefully has the restoring work been done that in the embrasures and recesses on both first and second floors you may still see the scratches and inscriptions of prisoners or sentinels, much as they are preserved in our own Tower of London. On Wednesday, the 18th of February 1874, the work of reconstruction was finished by the placing of the iron vane with its great fleur-de-lys upon the summit of the conical roof. It is the fourth floor, just beneath this vane, that is the most interesting of all the new work, as it presents a complete and accurate picture of mediaeval defences, showing both the wooden h.o.a.rding which projected beyond the walls in order to give s.p.a.ce to hurl down stones and boiling lead, and the guard's chemin-de-ronde cut in the solid wall with its openings that communicate with each side. Its walls conjure up a flood of memories of the men and women who saw those solid cliffs of masonry before they fell into ruin and restoration:-- ”Berthe au grand pied, Bietris, Allys Harembourges, qui tint le Mayne, Et Jehanne la bonne Lorraine Qu'Anglois bruslerent a Rouen: Ou sont-ilz, Vierge Souveraine? Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?”

On the 10th of November 1449 Charles the Seventh of France was riding through his own good town of Rouen; by his side were Jacques Coeur, Rene d'Anjou, King of Sicily, and Pierre de Breze. The English had surrendered Rouen, and all of them were on their way home again who had not left their bones in France.

CHAPTER X.

A City of Churches.

Et concupiscet Rex decorem tuum quoniam ipse est Dominus Deus et adorabunt eum. Et filiae Tyri in muneribus vultum tuum deprecabuntur; omnes divites plebis. Omnis gloria ejus filiae regis ab intus, in fimbreis aureis, circ.u.mamicta varietatibus.

A walk from Rouen to St. Sever will leave you with the impression that Rouen has so many churches that she has to turn many of them into shops, while St. Sever has so many shops that several of them have had to masquerade as churches. But the many ”sacred buildings” you may see to-day are not much more than half of the churches and chapels of the sixteenth century which rose after the English garrison had disappeared. With the few exceptions I have already noted, Rouen has been almost entirely reconstructed since 1450, and in nothing can this be realised so well as in its churches. When Charles VII. first rode into Rouen, of the greater churches only the Cathedral was within a little of completion. St. Ouen hardly suggested yet the building that appears to-day.

As I have said, it was during the English occupation that the nave was begun. The beautiful central tower was only finished by Antoine Bohier, who did much to make perfect the building that we see to-day as the fifth church on the same site. It received its name from St. Ouen, who was buried in the second church in 689. The monastery which was added to the third church was under the rule of Nicolas de Normandie, son of the second Duke Richard, in 1042. This was destroyed by the usual fire, and the rebuilding was a.s.sisted by the Empress Matilda and Richard Coeur de Lion. The little remnant of beautiful Romanesque called the Tour aux Clercs, probably formed the northern apse of its transept. When this church in turn was burnt in the same fire that destroyed the original churches of St. G.o.dard and St. Laurent, the monks fled to Bih.o.r.el with what could be rescued of their archives and their ”treasure.” At last, Abbe Jean Roussel, called Marc d'Argent, started the n.o.ble fabric that, mutilated as it is, is still one of the finest monuments of later ”Gothic” in existence. His first meeting of architects and master-masons was called in 1321, and then was in all likelihood decided the outlines of that mighty plan which took a century and a half to approach completion--and well-nigh half a hundred architects.

From the ancient refuge of his monks, the land on which their feudal justice was administered, from the slopes above Bih.o.r.el, Marc d'Argent looked down and watched the first walls and b.u.t.tresses of his Abbey rise from the soil. In that valley the quarries from which he drew his stone could still be seen scarce twenty years ago, with huge blocks of stone, rough-hewn nearly five centuries before, still resting upon mouldering rollers. He gathered funds from the Abbey Forests (which gave their timbers too) and from the generous donations of the pious. After twenty-one years of work, in which all his monks a.s.sisted the masons, he had spent about five million francs (in modern values), and by 1339 had finished the choir and chapels, the huge pillars beneath the central tower, and part of the transept. Of the first real ”Maitre d'oeuvre,” as so often happens in the tale of the Cathedrals, nothing is known. But the monks carved the clear keen features of his face upon the funeral stone, 7-1/2 feet high and 4 feet broad, that is in the Chapelle St. Cecile, and beside it is a detailed drawing of one of the arches of the choir. Jean de Bayeux went on with the work from 1378 to 1398, and his son Jean was Master Architect from 1411 to 1421. How intensely enthusiastic the monks were to complete their Abbey may be seen from their quarrel with the Town Authorities in 1412 and 1415, when every workman and every penny in the town was gathered to help strengthen the fortifications against the English. But the monks of St. Ouen refused a.s.sistance in money or in kind, lest by so doing they should cripple their beloved building. And their confidence was perhaps justified in that Alexandre de Berneval, who was the architect from 1422 to 1441, worked under the deliberate encouragement of the English garrison. His tomb is near that of the first unknown Master, and the plan of his famous Rose window for the south transept is carved as his most fitting epitaph.

The two Bayeux had done the interior of the south door of the transept, but it was Berneval who did the chapel of SS. Peter and Paul, and his son who, after 1441, worked at the central tower, the gem of the exterior. This younger Berneval lies buried near his father, and the plan of his octagonal ”drum” is set above his grave. To that first magnificent conception the crown was not added until Antoine Bohier's days, between 1490 and 1515, for whom Jacques Theroulde worked chiefly. The same Abbot completed the Sacristy, but the rest of his additions were not so fortunate in their execution, for the style of the end of the fifteenth century did not mate happily with the earlier work. The carvings and general style of the south portal, called ”des Marmousets,” is for instance a striking deterioration from the bold conceptions and brilliant handiwork upon the great transept gateways of the Cathedral. He added four more bays to the nave, using simple instead of double b.u.t.tresses, flamboyant work instead of rose windows, longer arches, and a lower line of capitals. Under Cibo, his successor, the last four bays of the nave were finished, and a splendid beginning made to the west front that has perished utterly, and been replaced by the miserable monstrosity of a frigid and ill-proportioned ”restoration.” Seldom has that much-abused word so richly deserved all the invective that could be heaped upon it. By Lelieur's plan we know that in 1525 the western front of Cibo scarcely can be said to have existed. But it cannot have been long after the reign of Francis I. that Cibo's architect carried his west front between 40 and 50 metres high, because the crest and devices of that monarch were preserved in the old work. In 1846 it will hardly be credited that so much of that old work still remained as may be seen in the drawing, copied from the sketch of a contemporary architect, which I have reproduced on page 236. From this it will be observed that one of the most ingenious and original devices of the Middle Ages at their close had been developed for the entrance to St. Ouen.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ORIGINAL WEST FRONT OF ST. OUEN WHICH WAS PULLED DOWN TO ERECT THE MODERN FAcADE]

A glance at the western facades of the Cathedral and of St. Maclou will make clearer what I have to say. For the Cathedral is in almost a straight line along its west front, though the two towers at each end give almost a suggestion of a retreating curve. St. Maclou, on the other hand, shaped like the eastern apse of most churches, has a bold curve forwards from north and south, meeting in the central door which projects some way beyond the side doors on its own facade, as may be seen from Miss James's particularly instructive drawing in the frontispiece. St. Ouen presented the only remaining third possibility, a curve inwards, in which the central door was pushed back, and at an angle on each side of it the arched portals of the aisles curved forwards, and above them rose two towers, each a reduced copy of that larger exquisite central tower which crowns the Abbey. Though the old masonry remained, and though a complete working drawing of the whole facade was discovered in the archives of the town, the job of pulling everything down and building the new and horrible spires was given to an architect who had already destroyed an old tower in the angle of the courtyard of the Palais de Justice, and had made a ”grille” for its facade filled with inconsequent anachronisms and errors.

After this, your only consolation will be to pa.s.s through the western gates as swiftly as may be to the interior. Its whole length is 416 feet 8 inches, and the vault is 100 feet high; the nave is 34 feet broad, and the aisles 22 feet. This magnificent fabric has had hard usage. After being sacked when it was scarce completed, by the Protestants in 1562, it was turned into a museum by the Revolution, and in 1793 was used as a blacksmith's shop for making arms. Yet nothing can efface that first breathless sense of soaring height and beauty which impresses you on your first entrance as you look up to the great windows of the clerestory, with the saints upon their silvery gla.s.s, set between the long slender shafts of columns that spring straight from the ground, and leap upwards like a fountain clear and undivided to the keystone of the roof. Though I was unwillingly bound to confess that even the old Rose windows disappointed me, the bunch of glaring cauliflowers which is the new western Rose is worse than anything in any building of this size and general beauty. But the other windows are an abiding joy, made of that exquisite moonlit gla.s.s, in which the colours s.h.i.+ne like jewels, and are set as rarely.

Nor is the Church without its claim to right of place in history as well as art. For the old Abbey of St. Ouen was one of the most considerable in Normandy. It held fiefs not only in the city, but in the Foret Verte outside, and lands all over the province, with the right of nomination to very many livings. From the Pope himself the Abbot held, since 1256, certain valuable privileges in conferring minor dignities, and in the list of those who held that splendid post after the uncle of the Conqueror, are the names of d'Estouteville, de Lorraine, de Bourbon, de Vendome, de la Tour d'Auvergne, and lastly etienne Charles de Lomenie de Brienne, who was found dead in his bed when the warrant had gone out for his arrest in 1794. In 1602 only was the ceremony of the ”Oison bride” given up, which commemorated the old privileges of the Abbot's Mills. Even longer lasted the ancient ceremony by which the monks received every archbishop on his entrance into Rouen, and on his death watched for the first night by his bier in their own abbey. In their cemetery you have already seen Jeanne d'Arc go through her mockery of ”abjuration.” Within it, too, her memory was ”rehabilitated.” In this church young Talbot was laid to rest, who fell in the English wars. In its cemetery was received James II. of Gt. Britain, who was escorted, on his flight from England, by armed citizens of Rouen from the Chartreuse of St. Julien to the Abbey.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE NAVE OF ST. OUEN]

And it may be that the old Sacristan, for your good fortune, will be living still to tell you of the greatest Englishman he has ever heard of, John Ruskin, who often looked into that quaint mirror of Holy Water, and watched the strange reflection of the arches soaring upwards in the nave.

It was in the Abbey of St. Ouen that on a May Day of 1485, Charles VIII. held a great a.s.sembly to deliberate over the concessions to the town after his famous entry into Rouen. To welcome him, poets, machinists, actors, tableaux vivants, marionettes, songs, comedies, and ”mysteries,” were gathered together regardless of expense. The Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon had arrived before him, and on the twelfth of April they were presented by the Chapterhouse with six gallons of wine of two sorts, and with loaves of the famous bread,[57] in return for which each gave a golden crown to the Cathedral Offertory. Two days afterwards arrived the King himself from Pont de l'Arche with a large and brilliant suite, including the second Louis de la Tremouille, who fought on every battlefield from St. Aubin du Cormier to Pavia, Philippe de Commines the historian, the ”Comte de Richemont,” soon to be King of England, and many others.

[Footnote 57: Perhaps it was in honour of these legendary loaves that the acrostic of SAC BLe was composed from the six dioceses dependent on the archbishopric of Rouen; Seez, Alencon, Coutances, Bayeux, Lisieux, Evreux.]

On his way from the Faubourg St. Sever to his lodgings in the Chateau de Bouvreuil, five stages greeted his progress with loyal allegories. Each bore its t.i.tle written above in letters of gold or blue or rose upon tin plates. The first was labelled ”Repos Pacificque,” and represented by means of seven personages an acrostic on the royal name of Charles. The second was ”Ordre Politique,” and was of a most amazing ingenuity, for no less than forty-four persons were shown on three stages one above the other which all turned round slowly on one piece of timber. On the lowest appeared John the Evangelist with a little angel by his side pointing him upwards to the splendours of the Apocalypse; in the middle twenty-four aged harpers sat and harped, with ”lutes and rebecqs” in their hands; at the top shone the ”Agnus Dei,” the lamb of Rouen from the civic arms, amidst a cloud of evangelists and rainbows. On the third stage, labelled ”Uncion des Rois,” was figured, with divers changes of scene, the coronation and anointing of David, all arranged by Master David Pinel in token of the joy of Rouen that Charles VIII. had been anointed with the holy oil at Reims which had given strength to Charles VII. to turn out the hated English. ”Espoir en la croix” was represented on the fourth by the victory of Constantine over Maxentius, with several ”tirements de courtines” or changes of scene. The fifth, styled ”Nouvelle Eau Celique,” showed the blessings of the new reign after the sufferings of the old one by a fountain which watered the Tree of the People, so that leaves by a marvellous device appeared to flourish naturally upon it, while wine was poured out from beneath for every pa.s.ser-by to drink, and five fair damsels sang harmoniously. That evening all the shepherds and shepherdesses and other characters in these moving ”histories” came down and played a ”mystery” before the King. But perhaps the thing that pleased the young Charles most of all, was that gay procession of young gentlemen of Rouen which caracoled before him on horseback, under the leaders.h.i.+p of no less a personage than his majesty the King of Yvetot, the captain of the City Bridge. (See footnote on page 36.) In the next days he promised to confirm the charters of the town, a.s.sured the canons in the exercise of the Privilege St. Romain, and asked that the procession of the prisoner might pa.s.s by his chateau, which was the more appropriate as the man released had been condemned to death for killing a groom attached to one of the royal suite, who had given wanton and continued provocation. Not till the seventeenth of May were the requests both of the ecclesiastical and the civic authorities fully granted at St. Ouen; the spokesman for each had been Maitre Michel Pet.i.t, the ”chantre” of the Chapterhouse, and by that one fact, if by no other, King Charles must have been properly impressed with the importance of the Church in Rouen.

Before he left the city, he could have seen the exquisite little shrine of St. Maclou in all the fresh untainted delicacy of its first achievement. ”The eldest daughter of the Archbishop of Rouen,” this marvellous church was the result of one perfect and harmonious plan, and inasmuch as the design of its originator has been faithfully completed, it is far more of an architectural unity than its larger rivals, the Cathedral or St. Ouen. Of these three either one would make the reputation of an English town alone, and the jewelled chiselling and admirable proportions of the smallest of them make a fitting complement to the heavy splendour of the Cathedral on the one hand, and to the dizzy alt.i.tudes of the Abbey on the other.

The first Maclou, as may be imagined, was a Scotchman. He fled to Brittany, became Bishop of Aleth, and died in the Saintonge in 561. Ever since the tenth century a shrine had been erected to his memory outside the earliest walls of Rouen, in that mora.s.s which gives its name to the Rue Malpalu in front of the present church. Twice burnt and twice rebuilt, it became a parish church within the walls by 1250. A larger building was soon necessary; even during the miseries of the English Occupation it was determined to make the new church worthy of the town that already held the Cathedral and part of St. Ouen; and before 1500 indulgences had been granted by Hugues, the Archbishop, by Cardinal d'Estouteville, and by twenty Cardinals of Rome, to raise sufficient sums of money. In 1437 Pierre Robin, one of the royal architects from Paris, was paid 43 livres 10 sols for a plan and work that must have been begun some eighteen months previously with stone quarried in Val des Leux and Vernon. In 1470 Ambroise Harel was ”Maitre de l'oeuvre,” and in 1480 the same Jacques le Roux finished it who worked in the Cathedral. Of individual bequests that of Jean de Grenouville, who was buried in the Chapelle de la St. Vierge in 1466, gave most help. From 1432, when the irreparable ruin of the old church was first recognised, until 1514, the accounts for only seven years have been preserved. In 1520 the spire of wood and lead above Gringoire's lantern was placed on Martin Duperrois' platform, to which a man might ascend without the help of any ladder. In 1735 this was removed, and in 1795 the lead was melted into bullets, and the six bells of 1529 were recast into cannon. In 1868 M. Barthelemy erected the stone Pyramid 83 metres high to hold the fine new bells.[58]

[Footnote 58: M. de Beaurepaire has collected a few other names connected with the building. It was first dedicated when Arthur Fillon was the vicar, who was a friend of Cardinal d'Amboise and afterwards Bishop of Senlis. After the disappearance of Pierre Robin, the first architect mentioned, another stranger called Oudin de Mantes is given control, with lodgings provided for him in the Rue du Bac. In 1446 Simon Lenoir of Rouen (who took Berneval's place under the English) worked at this church.]

The famous carved doors have been attributed to Jean Goujon, though there is only one figure (the ”Caritas” on the left panel of the central porch) that I can believe to be his own workmans.h.i.+p. In all the idea of plan is much the same. There are two divisions, of which the lower contains the ”practicable entrance,” and is guarded by a caryatid on each side supporting two male figures. Along the lintel runs a line of brackets alternating with cherubs' heads supporting seven figures, four males in high relief with three females in low relief behind them. These figures in turn carry a square panel, carved in high relief above them, representing different scenes on each door, chiefly suggested by the story of the Good Shepherd which is so appropriate to the staple industry of the town. They were begun by 1527 and finished before 1560. Jean Goujon was born in 1520, and was killed during the Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew while carving on the Louvre. In 1540 he is known to have been at Rouen, and in the next year he worked both here and in the Cathedral. So that he may well have given the design for what he did not personally execute, though no doc.u.ments exist to prove either.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHURCH OF ST. MACLOU STAIRCASE TO THE ORGAN LOFT]

But if the doors are a trifle disappointing, though only so because of their great reputation, they certainly did not deserve to be mutilated by the Huguenots in 1562; and in 1793 when a barrelmaker's child was slas.h.i.+ng the heads of the statues with an axe, the crowd could think of no better comment than ”Celui-la sera un fameux patriote!” Of the facade they were intended to adorn, which was probably the work of Ambroise Harel, I have already spoken in describing the exactly reverse plan of the original west front of St. Ouen. It is one of the most delightful tours de force I know in architecture, and when Miss James was drawing for me the frontispiece which adorns this volume, she pointed out that the idea of the curve had been deliberately emphasised to the spectator's eye by building the side porches narrower, and crowning them with lower crests than is the case in the central entrance. The central tympanum represents the Last Judgment, with the Pelican above it that typifies the Resurrection. You may appreciate at once the delicate tracery of lacework in stone which covers this exterior and also the affection felt for its beauties by their guardians, if you will examine the model laboriously built up in wood and paper by an old vicar in the sixteenth century. His ten years of loving toil have been preserved in the Musee des Antiquites, and few better proofs exist of contemporary appreciation of the fine arts.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHURCH OF ST. MACLOU. CARVED OAK PANEL FROM THE CENTRAL DOORS]

The interior is scarcely less interesting, though it has suffered very much from modern religiosity. Only forty-seven and a half metres long, by scarcely twenty-five in width, its height is nearly twenty-three metres in the three bays of the nave, rising to thirty-nine at the lantern. Its greatest treasure now is the exquisite Escalier des Orgues, from which the staircase to the organ loft at Ely was imitated. This was built in 1519 for two hundred and five livres by Pierre Gringoire, ”Maistre Machon de Rouen.” In examining more closely that fragment of it, of which a plaster cast has been made for the Musee du Trocadero in Paris, I could not help being struck with the general resemblance of its plan to the more famous staircase which adorns the exterior of the wing of Francis I. at the great chateau of Blois in Touraine, which was built almost at the same time, from the designs (as I have attempted to prove elsewhere) of Leonardo da Vinci, and was decorated later on with statues by Jean Goujon. This sculptor was only born the year after St. Maclou's staircase was finished, but the main lines of the structure are so suggestive of the earlier work that I cannot but imagine this fine piece of French Renaissance to be a deliberate copy, by a master strong enough to retain his own originality of treatment, of the main design that appears in the courtyard of Blois.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TOUR ST. ANDRe]

Not all the churches of which Rouen is so full can boast even that measure of preservation which storm and time and the more devastating hands of man have spared to the three n.o.blest of her religious monuments. Of St. Andre, for instance, only the tower remains, that stands alone above the Rue Jeanne d'Arc, like the Tour St. Jacques in Paris, as an admirable specimen of the later Gothic architecture. A still finer relic of an older past is that old church of St. Pierre du Chastel, which is now turned into a stable and coach-house at No. 41 Rue Nationale. Unless you look for it, you will miss altogether the great statue of David and his harp, which is the one ma.s.sive decoration of its strong and simple tower, and the carvings which may still be traced through the neglect and mutilation of centuries upon its western door. More degraded still, to even baser uses, is the Church of St. Cande le Jeune, which has become some kind of an electric manufactory, and may now be chiefly traced by the huge chimney which obstructs the sky as you look up the Impa.s.se Pet.i.t Salut towards the Tour de Beurre of the Cathedral. Just opposite the entrance to the public library is another instance of barbarous neglect: the Church of St. Laurent. Once used as a magazine of shops of every kind, sometimes a lost home for decrepit carriages, sometimes a drying-house for laundry-women, these exquisite ruins of Renaissance architecture have at last been rescued by the civic authorities, if not from evident decay, at any rate from further mutilation. The tower alone--but one among so many in Rouen--would be the proudest possession of many a larger English town. The bal.u.s.trade is decorated by a pattern of letters, which pathetically express their hope of better treatment in the battered legend: ”Post Tenebras Spero Lucem.”

Close to these eloquent ruins is a church that has had a somewhat better fate, for if St. G.o.dard has been rather roughly treated, the beauty of its stained-gla.s.s windows has saved it from absolute destruction. In the chapel of St. Peter, due east at the end of the north aisle, is the great window that was made in 1555 to represent St. Romain, who is shown at the top, on the left hand, dragging the Gargouille of Rouen to destruction with his sacred stole (see p. 39). Lower down, on the right, you must look at the King seated in his royal chair, and the hounds at play before him on the carpet. In the south aisle the corresponding window to the east has a tree of Jesse in its upper part, and beneath is one of the finest examples of sixteenth century painting in Rouen, work that reminds you of the work of Rembrandt. Of these five figures of old men, the last two on the right are especially worthy of attentive study. They were done in 1535. To the right of this window in the same chapel, looking southwards, is another fine window of about the same date, said to be copied from a design by Raphael and his school, of the life and genealogy of the Blessed Virgin; but it is not so strong or original in treatment as the last. Beneath it are two kneeling figures carved upon the tomb of the family of Bec de Lievre.

[Ill.u.s.tration: eGLISE ST. LAURENT]

In the Rue Jeanne d'Arc is another church, St. Vincent, that must be visited. I have spoken already of the little labourer in tunic and breeches, with a sack of salt upon his back, who stands upon the outside of the b.u.t.tress to the south of the choir, and looks towards the river. It commemorates the fact that, by letters patent delivered by Charles VI. in 1409, the church (which was then much nearer to the river) was allowed to take toll of every cargo of salt which came into the port, a privilege which was exchanged in 1649 for an annual payment of 140 livres. Begun in 1511--or, as some say, 1480--after the plans of Guillaume Touchet, St. Vincent certainly comes after St. Maclou in order of merit. Its choir alone is a magnificent specimen of the architectural possibilities of the smaller churches, and must have been finished before 1530, when Touchet's supervision ended. The splendid flamboyant western porch is not shown in Lelieur's plan of 1525, and was probably a later addition. The name of Ambroise Harel has also been connected with the work, but I have been unable to satisfy myself of the exact portions for which he may have been responsible.

It is chiefly admired, and wrongly so to my mind, for the treasures of its interior. These consist not merely in the wonderful series of sixteenth century tapestries, of which M. Paul Lafond has published a detailed description, but in the stained-gla.s.s windows, of which the most celebrated represents the a.s.s of St. Anthony of Padua kneeling before the Holy Sacrament. The design is taken, it is said, from a drawing of Durer, to whom also is ascribed the original suggestion for the window at the west end of the first aisle, of the Virgin and Apostles. North of the choir is an interesting gla.s.s-painting of the buildings of Rouen.

But slightly west of the northern end of the same street you will find windows in the Church of St. Patrice which I think infinitely preferable, of their kind, to those which are the especial pride of St. Vincent. They are very justly placed in the first cla.s.s of the ”monuments historiques” de France. As you enter the transept, turn due south, and the first window on your right is the ”Woman taken in Adultery,” which was moved here from the old church of St. G.o.dard. The inscription on it is ”Honorable homme maitre Nicole Leroux licentie es loix advocant et Marie Bunel sa feme ont donne ceste vitreau moys de may lan de grace 1549 priez dieu pour eulx.” In the right hand corner you may see the good William praying with his son behind him, and his wife in black is further off to the left with her six daughters behind her, two of them in ”cramoisy taffetas, trimmed with northern peltry.” In the Chapel of the Virgin in the north transept, the left hand window of the three over the altar depicts the life of St. Fiacre and St. Firmin, and was put up in 1540 in the days when Pierre Deforestier was in office, and Francois Baudoin was prevot. Of the three you see when looking due north, the farthest to the right in the transept was placed there in 1583, ”a l'honneur du grand roy des roys de St. Louis roy de France;” the middle window shows St. Eustace suffering martyrdom in the brazen bull which is being heated red hot, while above St. Hubert meets his miraculous stag. The farthest window to the left is dated 1538; it is the best, and Jean Cousin has been suggested as its designer. The donor prays in the right hand corner, and his wife with a daughter behind her is in the left. A well-drawn figure of an angel announces his message to the Blessed Virgin who is reading, and in the middle of the composition, near the bottom, lies a corpse in a winding-sheet.

The large window at the extreme end of the north aisle is also very fine. At the top is a woman in a car triumphing. Below, on the left, are Adam and Eve. Next to them is the Devil, and Death, whose swarthy skin is wrapped in a winding-sheet that seems to belly in the blasts of h.e.l.l. The story of Job that is painted in the first window on the left in the north aisle, also came from old St. G.o.dard. And all this wealth of stained gla.s.s is shown off wonderfully well in a church that is not too large to lose its full effect, and is planned with only a few light columns in the interior to impede the view of all of them from the centre of the nave.

To three other of the many ecclesiastical buildings of Rouen can I direct you before closing this Chapter of Churches with the Cathedral that is mother of them all: St. Eloi, St. Vivien, and the Abbaye de St. Amand. As you walk northwards from the river into the town up the Rue St. Eloi, the church from which it takes its name shows a fine south door that closes the perspective of the street. The design of the west entrance is bold and good, but the queerly mathematical plan of the Rose window above it, with its three triangles crossing in the circle, has not a very happy effect. The church now is little but the ruins of what was once a magnificent building and is used as the ”Protestant Temple.” The whole of the Place St. Eloi is worthy of a closer inspection than can be gained by merely walking through it, which you will be tempted to do at much too fast a pace on learning that the Rue du Panneret at its north-east angle leads directly to the Maison Bourgtheroulde in the Place de la Pucelle. Another characteristic little square is the Place St. Vivien which cuts the Rue Eau de Robec in two portions. If you are lucky enough to be there on a twenty-ninth of August you will see the famous Fete St. Vivien in full blast, with booths and merry-go-rounds, and travelling theatres, even a ”Theatre Garric a 8 heures, Nouveau Spectacle!” But do not go on into the further recesses of the Eau de Robec without looking at the church, and give your keenest glances to the fine square tower with its octagonal spire that is cla.s.sed among the Monuments Historiques. Of the ancient Abbaye de St. Amand there is perhaps less left than of any of the ecclesiastical buildings in this chapter. Its origin has been described already (see p. 71), and the gable with its b.u.t.tressed wall that you can see best in the Rue St. Amand from the Place des Carmes are almost the only stones remaining of an inst.i.tution that once took a very prominent part in the ecclesiastical ceremonies of Rouen.