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OUTSIDE
Around the church

 

Imagine we are actually (not virtually ) visiting this church...
Let us begin by walking around the building, starting on the right as we exit the church.

On the first buttress on the corner, are engraved these lines : L'an mil six centz cinquante huict Ce dernier jour de Febvrier, L'eau à Vernon, le pont rompit et vint au pied de ce pilier (In the year 1658, this last day of February in Vernon, water swept the bridge away and came to the foot of this pillar.) This recalls the the level of the river flood at that time.

As a matter of fact, the flood was the consequence of both autumn and winter heavy rains and of the breaking up of drift-ice. This winter had been very cold and the Seine had frozen as it often did before modern times when heavy barges ply the river and prevent the ice from setting. In late February, the weather became milder with very heavy rains. When the ice began thawing, ice drifts piled up behind the bridge into a kind of dam. The water level rose to exceptional height (flooding large parts of the town) until the bridge 'burst' because of the combined pressure of water and ice.

The 1658 flood


A narrow street along the church
 Once in Rue Saint Sauveur (St Saviour St), notice how narrow the passageway is between the 15th century house in the corner and the church. We are now used to seeing churches standing isolated in the middle of squares. Indeed, one or two centuries ago, people began destroying medieval streets around churches in order to isolate them in the middle of large squares, whereas in medieval towns, churches used to be in the middle of a labyrinth of streets, alleys and lanes. For instance, the church square in front of Notre-Dame in Paris was hardly thirty metres wide (and people then thought is was quite wide!), so much smaller than today's enormous square. Similarly, in Vernon, there was no square in front of the church as today, the parvis itself being only three or four metres wide.


Gargoyles

Look up to the gargoyles. They are for spouting rain water away from the foot of the walls, in order to avoid their being damaged. But like all 15th century gargoyles, their intriguing shapes are those of demons and other monsters. This may be a symbolic protection of the church, kinds of sacred scarecrows: just as rain water is evacuated far from the foot of the wall, evil forces , that are present everywhere, are also evacuated off, away from the church.

According to a legend, gargoyles owe their monstrous shape to a 5th century dragon named Gargoyle that lived in the Seine valley not very far fromVernon!
The legend of the Gargoyle

 

North Porch

Built in Flamboyant Gothic, it takes the place of the third chapel and reminds us of the one in St Martin's in Harfleur (a little town, near Le Havre)
It features a pointed arch, the jambs of which have niches for receiving statues, which unfortunately disappeared during the Revolution. At the same time the statues of the archivolt were beheaded. They represented the Elders of the Apocalypse and various angels. It was unfortunately all too usual to behead statues at the time :beheading everyone and everything seems to have been one of those new fads of the early 1790s!

 
North porch. Detail from the outer archivolt (photo on the right)

 

The portal itself is divided into two by a now empty trumeau and is topped by an arch similar to the outer one. Two parallel friezes decorate this arch:

one is carved with a string of pine-cones, vine-leaves and bunches of grapes;

 

the other is decorated with eight angels - they have been beheaded too. Among them you can see two musicien angels, one playing the lute, the other a kind of bagpipe.

Why bunches of grapes in Vernon? Musician angels

 


North porch. One can see the stone seat on the right

Like every porch, this one was a place halfway between the church proper and the outside world. This is where certain ceremonies used to take place, for catechumens or penitents, who did not fully belong to the congregation of the faithful and who therefore could not fully mix with them : they were not allowed to attend the whole mass and had to leave the church during the Consecration. They could find shelter against bad weather under the porch and this is why a stone seat had been built inside the porch.

This porch is also were exorcisms were performed (we are sure of this because of a note dated 1658 saying that an exorcism could not be carried out there because of a flood and had to be exceptionally performed at the main porch.)

 

Let us walk on along the North transept to the apse.


North transept

Apse

The Lady chapel is the retrochoir, the eastern end of the church. It is an elegant construction in the purest style of the second half of the 14th century.

On either side of the chapel and on the South side, unused building stones are the beginning of radiating chapels and other major structural changes, in view of a projected total reconstruction that was never completed (on the left of the picture).


Lady chapel and South end

Chevet

When the visitor walks a few steps back from the church, he admires the picturesque vertical arrangement of the chevet or apse rising from the five-sided Lady chapel to the hipped choir and finally up to the tower.

 

This is where the visitor better understands the rather unusual aspect of the inside with a high nave and a low choir, due to different building periods. (See the Inside page). This photograph of the church hidden behind the remnants of the medieval city walls shows the older part on the right, with the tower and the roofs of the South transept and of the choir, the tops of which being hardly visible behind the wall and, on the left, the 15th c. nave rising as high as the tower and much higher than the rest of the older constructions.


South aisle

Still walking around the church, the visitor observes Renaissance mullioned windows protected by strong iron bars: this is the vestry and above the former Treasure room or also Canons' room.

At transept level, a visitor can read on one of the buttresses:
"L'an Mil six centz Cinquante huict, huict degredz des poissons, la Seine brisant le pont, O triste bruit ! estendit ici son domain."
(In the year 1658, eight days into the sign of the Fishes, the Seine breaking the bridge, O terrible sound! spread here its domain.)
[If you are keen on having your horoscope cast, you are likely to know that 'Eight days into the sign of the Fishes' refers to February 28th.]

That was the level reached by the river Seine during the 1658 floods, the one that is already mentioned on the North-west buttress.

 

Opposite the street, an early 17th century half timbered house is the only remain of the former Canons' houses. Here again, one can easily see how narrow medieval streets used to be.

 

 

 

 

Copyright 2005