us that you may still see. To reach it you go up the Rue
Cauchoise, along the Rue St. Gervais, past the Abbey of St. Gervais,
where the Conqueror died, and where the old crypt of St. Mellon still
exists, then up a long and steep hill, on whose very summit is a
village street with a broad iron railing that opens to your right into
a pretty avenue of limes, with the worn steps of an old stone cross or
fountain to the left of the church inside. At first you will be
shocked and disappointed by the hideous modern restoration of the west
front, with its side aisles, that are but poor specimens of pointed
architecture. But go boldly inside and you will see the church of
good, plain Norman work, dedicated by King Henry to the memory of the
murdered English archbishop, and built by his chamberlain, Roscelin.
The original building had the simple nave with its apse beyond, that
we shall see on the other side of the town of St. Julien. There is a
further disappointment in store when you find the incongruous windows
inserted in the chancel and the aisles that were added later on to the
original nave. To understand what has happened you must go to the
outside of the east end, and there you will see how the old round
Norman apse was cut off, and a squared end was stuck on instead with a
large pointed window, and how a new outside roof was clumsily fitted
on to cover both the aisles and the nave as well, a job so badly
calculated that the tops of the eastern aisle-windows on both sides
show above the line of roof, and the openings themselves are blocked.
When I saw it in 1897 the church was in process of being joined on to
the religious buildings which surround it, and the closed eastern
openings had been altered, in the north aisle to a round-headed
recess, and in the south aisle to the altar of a chapel. But the five
round-headed Norman arches of the nave remain, with the four smaller
ones in the choir. Above the nave arches are five narrow round-arched
windows which do not correspond with the pillars beneath, but are
merely holes in a thick wall instead of spaces between vaulting-shafts,
as they are in the perfect Gothic of St. Ouen. But even so these
windows are far better than the incongruous pointed work in the newer
aisles. There is no transept, and the roof is a plain vault. The round
columns, too, are quite plain, with slight carving here and there upon
the capitals. And this is all that is left of the church which Henry
II. or