The church of S. Étienne[18] is, after the cathedral, the great architectural attraction of Beauvais. Its west front has a grand arched doorway, with a sculptured tympanum, containing the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, and the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin, and four rows of figures of angels and others in the arch. The jambs and central pier are completely denuded of all their shafts and statues, and the whole work is much mutilated in all its parts; nevertheless, it is the best thing remaining in the city, as far as goodness of sculpture and detail can make a work good. The gable of this porch runs back into a triplet, and the main gable has a cusped circular window, now blocked up. The date of the whole front is early in the thirteenth century. On the north side of the nave there is a fine doorway, of very ornate Romanesque; it has been carefully repaired. An arcade of semicircular arches above the doorway is diapered with a pattern sunk in the stone and marked at regular intervals by red tiles inlaid, and about two inches square. The effect is good, and it is, I suppose, a restoration. The circular window on the north side of the church is remarkable for the figures sculptured outside its label; it is evidently a Wheel of Fortune window.[19] The buttresses of the aisles are valuable examples of late Romanesque work. They have a fair projection, but are weathered off some five or six feet below the eaves’ corbel-table; and from their summit in some cases one, and in others two, shafts rise to support the corbel-table. The choir is lofty flamboyant work, but ugly. The nave, of early Transition character, internally has very heavy groining-shafts, and the far from admirable peculiarity of a triforium with arches formed of very flat segments of circles, and the string under the clerestory rising in the same line, and forming, as it were, a label to the arch below.
The gateway to the bishop’s palace, with its steep and picturesque roofs; the palace itself, with its valuable remains of Romanesque work at the back; a portion of a Romanesque house near it; and a fine fourteenth-century gabled house in the Rue S. Véronique, with three pointed and canopied windows in its first floor, are the principal features of interest after the cathedral and S. Étienne. There is, too, a great store of fine timber houses, one of which, in the Rue S. Thomas, is particularly noticeable for the elaborate filling in of encaustic tiles between all the timbers.