country. A small church of this date, St. Pierre aux Bœufs, stood, till within six or seven years, in a street close to Nôtre Dame. It had been desecrated during the Revolution, and was taken down to allow of the street being widened. The best portions of the western front were then transferred to the western front of St. Séverin, which is in part of the same epoch, under the superintendance of one of the most able architects of France, M. Lassus. Before quitting this period we must again remind our readers that its principal existing specimens are in St. Denis, Nôtre Dame, and the Sainte Chapelle.
third period.
We now come to the buildings erected in the fourteenth century and the beginning of the following one, previously to the introduction of the flamboyant style. This period corresponds in date to that of the Decorated style with us,—that style which flourished under the second and third Edwards, but began, even so early as the reign of Richard II., to shew symptoms of perpendicular stiffness and ultimate decay. To the flowing osculating curve of our Decorated style, France, and Paris in particular, offers no contemporaneous analogy. The architecture of the fourteenth century was characterized there by a style differing but little from that of the thirteenth, though always tending to a gradual opening and softening down of mouldings, as well as ultimately to an interflowing and intersecting of tracery. The examples of the earlier portion of this century are hardly to be distinguished from those of the preceding, except by an experienced eye, and the period may be designated as one of comparative plainness and even poverty. The cause of this stop in the progress of French architecture may perhaps be found in the dreadful wars and civil troubles which desolated the country throughout that period, and exhausted the resources of the kings as well as the nobles. One of the earliest buildings of this style extant in Paris is
The Chapel of St. John the Evangelist, in the Collège de Beauvais. In plan it resembles the Sainte Chapelle, though it has no under chapel, and has not a vaulting of stone, but merely a king-post and coved roofing. The windows have lost their stained glass, and the building is at present desecrated. Its details and plan are pure, and it is a model that might well serve for a plain, and yet very effective, chapel for any collegiate edifice.
