THE APPLE MAN
Then the apse is pure and beautiful Gothic of the fourteenth century, with very tall and fluted windows like single prayers. The ambulatory is perfectly modern, Gothic also, and in the manner that Viollet le Duc in France and Pugin in England have introduced to bring us back to our origins and to remind us of the place whence all we Europeans came. Again, this apse and ambulatory are not perpendicular to the transept, but set askew, a thing known in small churches and said to be a symbol, but surely very rare in large ones. The western door is purely Romanesque, and has Byzantine ornaments and a great deep round door. To match it there is a northern door still deeper, with rows and rows of inner arches full of saints, angels, devils, and flowers; and this again is not straight, but so built that the arches go aslant, as you sometimes see railway bridges when they cross roads at an angle. Finally, there is a central tower which is neither Gothic nor Romanesque but pure Italian, a loggia, with splendid round airy windows taking up all its walls, and with a flat roof and eaves. This some one straight from the south must have put on as a memory of his wanderings.
The barn-transept is crumbling old grey stone, the Romanesque porches are red, like Strasburg, the Gothic apse is old white as our cathedrals are, the modern ambulatory is of pure white stone just quarried, and thus colours as well as shapes are mingled up and different in this astonishing building.
I drew it from that point of view in the market-place to the north-east which shows most of these contrasts at once, and you must excuse the extreme shakiness of the sketch, for it was taken as best I could on an apple-cart with my book resting on the apples--there was no other desk. Nor did the apple-seller mind my doing it, but on the contrary gave me advice and praise saying such things as--
'Excellent; you have caught the angle of the apse ... Come now, darken the edge of that pillar ... I fear you have made the tower a little confused,' and so forth.
I offered to buy a few apples off him, but he gave me three instead, and these, as they incommoded me, I gave later to a little child.
Indeed the people of Épinal, not taking me for a traveller but simply for a wandering poor man, were very genial to me, and the best good they did me was curing my lameness. For, seeing an apothecary's shop as I was leaving the town, I went in and said to the apothecary -
'My knee has swelled and is very painful, and I have to walk far; perhaps you can tell me how to cure it, or give me something that will.'