Now, first of all and very briefly, here is the history of this abbey. Upon the ruins of an oratory constructed in this very place by the indefatigable Saint Victrice about 535, Clotaire erected a large church dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Paul. In the last years of the Seventh Century, Saint Ouen restored it and wished it to be his sepulchre. According to the _Life_ of that great bishop attributed to Fridegode, a monk of Canterbury, it was a building of noble appearance, constructed of square stones in the _Gothic style_. It is useless to discuss these words, quoted on account of their curiosity, but which might well be accounted for by some alteration in the text, and, in any case, have but little meaning for us. After the appearance of the Northmen, the abbey experienced varied fortunes: it was sacked and demolished in 841, repaired in 1046 by the Abbé Nicholas of Normandy, son of Duke Richard III., and it was burned to the ground several times. A fragment of Nicholas’s apsis at the end of the nave is preserved under the name of _Chambre aux clercs_: a portion of the hemicycle arched cul-de-four is ornamented very coarsely, but it is strongly built. But to resume: there was no glory for the monks of Saint Benoît here until the beginning of the Fourteenth Century and the advent of the Abbé Jean Roussel. This Jean Roussel, born in Quincampoix, near Rouen, and known, nobody knows why, by the nick-name of Marc d’ Argent, was a very original personage. Active, discreet, prudent, energetic, and devoted to everything under his charge, he re-established the monastic discipline and by the wisdom of his administration doubled the revenues; and, as Suger did before him at Saint Denis, he resolved to rebuild his abbey according to the latest developments in architecture. We do not know who was his master in this work; but certainly it must have been some clever man who had carefully studied Amiens, Beauvais, Troyes and Séez. Within a few years, the work was sufficiently advanced for his conception to have become definitive. His successors had nothing more to do than to follow out his ideas. Materials were not stinted. The quarries of Chaumont, Vernon and Saint-Leu furnished their magnificent calcareous stone, of fine grain mixed with silex. As the Abbé was never at a loss for funds, it was popularly imagined that he coined gold, and many a legend exists upon this subject. The truth is, he knew how to economize with large sums, obtained from the King important rights regarding the cutting of wood in the forest Verte and created disinterested good-will around him. In the year 1318, the first stone was laid, and in the year 1339, when he died, more than 79,936 livres (2,600,000 francs of our money) were paid to the stone-cutters. The inscription placed on his tomb, destroyed in 1562 by the Calvinists, described the state in which he left the church, the choir and the eleven transept chapels comprising the large terminal chapel