The nave of Noyon is a noble vessel, with an interior four-story elevation of happier proportions than was achieved in the transept. No longer do annulets bind the clustered shafts, thus breaking the ascending line as in the choir. Throughout the church is to be found the simultaneous use of round and pointed arches, and, curiously enough, it is the lower stories, pier arcade, and tribune, that used the pointed arch; in the triforium and clearstory the arches are semicircular. Everywhere the sculptured capitals are of rare beauty. The Romanesque acanthus leaf is found in juxtaposition with the Gothic crocket.
Noyon is exceptional in having retained its annexes: the treasure hall built by Bishop Baudouin II, the chapel of the episcopal palace, a half-timber library, and a beautiful chapter house (c. 1240). This latter, opening on a fragment of the cathedral cloister, is a hall divided into two aisles by a row of slender pillars, the type preferred by the French, whereas in England the circular hall whose vault ribs were gathered on a central pier was more popular. Noyon's chapter house was built by Bishop Pierre Chalot, who died at sea, off Cyprus, on St. Louis' crusade of 1248.
When in late-Gothic times Noyon was adding chapels and side aisles, her master-of-works was Jean Turpin, who at Péronne--pitiful Péronne la Pucelle entirely a ruin to-day--erected a Flamboyant Gothic church which was a veritable gem.
The battle of giants, foreseen in the poet's dream, twice engulfed Noyon during the World War. From the first occupation by the enemy the city escaped without serious injury. Then in March, 1918, began the Germans' desperate advance on Paris. At the end of the month the mayor of Noyon quitted the city, the last to leave. And in September he was the first to re-enter Noyon after the second battle of the Marne had driven back the invaders. He found his town a ruin. Not a single building had escaped injury, and only ten days earlier a photograph taken from a French airship had shown that the Renaissance Town Hall and Noyon's chief square were intact; few monuments had suffered from the occasional bombardments by the Allies. The Hôtel de Ville had been built in the dawn of the classic Renaissance, and its fine façades retained much of the Gothic spirit. Before their departure the invaders blew up the town; not even Calvin's birthplace was spared. Hardly 10 per cent of the houses of this amiable little city that asked only to be left unmolested by the fever and fret of new things are to-day worth reconstruction.