Rouen (France) -- Description and travel; Rouen (France) -- History
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 noblest 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 massive
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 Impasse Petit 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 balustrade is decorated
by a pattern of letters, which pathetically express their hope of
better treatment in the battered legend: "Post Tenebras Spero Lucem."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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