[Footnote 58: M. de Beaurepaire has collected a few other names connected with the building. It was first dedicated when Arthur Fillon was the vicar, who was a friend of Cardinal d'Amboise and afterwards Bishop of Senlis. After the disappearance of Pierre Robin, the first architect mentioned, another stranger called Oudin de Mantes is given control, with lodgings provided for him in the Rue du Bac. In 1446 Simon Lenoir of Rouen (who took Berneval's place under the English) worked at this church.]
The famous carved doors have been attributed to Jean Goujon, though there is only one figure (the "Caritas" on the left panel of the central porch) that I can believe to be his own workmanship. In all the idea of plan is much the same. There are two divisions, of which the lower contains the "practicable entrance," and is guarded by a caryatid on each side supporting two male figures. Along the lintel runs a line of brackets alternating with cherubs' heads supporting seven figures, four males in high relief with three females in low relief behind them. These figures in turn carry a square panel, carved in high relief above them, representing different scenes on each door, chiefly suggested by the story of the Good Shepherd which is so appropriate to the staple industry of the town. They were begun by 1527 and finished before 1560. Jean Goujon was born in 1520, and was killed during the Massacre of St. Bartholomew while carving on the Louvre. In 1540 he is known to have been at Rouen, and in the next year he worked both here and in the Cathedral. So that he may well have given the design for what he did not personally execute, though no documents exist to prove either.
But if the doors are a trifle disappointing, though only so because of their great reputation, they certainly did not deserve to be mutilated by the Huguenots in 1562; and in 1793 when a barrelmaker's child was slashing the heads of the statues with an axe, the crowd could think of no better comment than "Celui-là sera un fameux patriote!" Of the façade they were intended to adorn, which was probably the work of Ambroise Harel, I have already spoken in describing the exactly reverse plan of the original west front of St. Ouen. It is one of the most delightful tours de force I know in architecture, and when Miss James was drawing for me the frontispiece which adorns this volume, she pointed out that the idea of the curve had been deliberately emphasised to the spectator's eye by building the side porches narrower, and crowning them with lower crests than is the case in the central entrance. The central tympanum represents the Last Judgment, with the Pelican above it that typifies the Resurrection. You may appreciate at once the delicate tracery of lacework in stone which covers this exterior and also the affection felt for its beauties by their guardians, if you will examine the model laboriously built up in wood and paper by an old vicar in the sixteenth century. His ten years of loving toil have been preserved in the Musée des Antiquités, and few better proofs exist of contemporary appreciation of the fine arts.