About seventy years after this we come to the choir of St. Ouen, and to another beautiful little church, Ste. Marie de l’Épine (Woodcut No. 644), near Châlons sur Marne, commenced apparently about 1329, though not completed till long afterwards.[42] It is small—a miniature cathedral in fact—like our St. Mary Redcliffe, which in many respects it resembles, and is a perfect bijou of its class. One western spire remains—the other was destroyed to make room for a telegraph—and is not only beautiful in itself, but interesting as almost the only example of an open-work spire in France. The church of St. Ouen, at Rouen, was beyond comparison the most beautiful and perfect of the abbey edifices of France. This was commenced by Marc d’Argent in the year 1318, and was carried on uninterruptedly for twenty-one years, and at his death the choir and transept were completed, or very nearly so. The English wars interrupted at this time the progress of this, as of many other buildings, and the works of the nave were not seemingly resumed till about 1490, and twenty-five years later the beautiful western front was commenced. Except that of Limoges, the choir is almost the only perfect building of its age, and being nearly contemporary with the choir at Cologne (1276 to 1321), affords a means of comparison between the two styles of Germany and France at that age, entirely to the advantage of the French example, which, though very much smaller, avoids all the more glaring faults of the other. [Illustration: 645. Plan of Church of St. Ouen at Rouen. (From Peyrée’s ‘Manuel.’) Scale 100 ft. to 1 in.] [Illustration: 646. Church of St. Ouen at Rouen, from the S.E. (From Chapuy.)]