HOUSE DATING BACK TO THE REIGN OF HENRI IV. (1589-1610) AT NO. 3 RUE DU MARC
The Hôtel Nicolas Le Vergeur
The interior building, which has a 17th century carriage entrance, offers two fine examples of 15th and 16th century architecture. It is the finest Renaissance structure in Rheims. The main front, incomparably the most graceful, was but little damaged by the bombardments (photo below).
On the ground-floor the great arched doorway is divided by a wooden post into two delicately carved compartments. Pilasters decorated with heads, flowers, birds, and horns of plenty frame the three stone-mullioned windows. Above these runs a frieze of trophies and medallions, with portraits of noble lords with upturned moustaches and pointed beards, and of great ladies with collerettes and high head-dresses, gracious or haughty, standing well out in relief.
HÔTEL NICOLAS LE VERGEUR
On the first storey, carved panels above the window form a sort of broad frieze of bas-reliefs representing men-at-arms or knights of the time of François I. and Henri II. fighting at tournaments with lance, sword, or pike.
In one of the rooms overlooking the Rue Pluche were, a fine stone mantelpiece decorated with graceful delicate foliage; a timber-work ceiling with large and small beams, carrying panels decorated with scrolls, and 15th century tile-flooring of terra-cotta, varnished and painted green and yellow.
At the back of the courtyard, a building, supposed by some to be an old chapel, had been transformed into vast cellars and store-rooms. The oaken ceiling of the latter, about fifty feet long and twenty-one broad, destroyed in 1918, was one of the most beautiful in the world. The beams, whose extremities carried grotesque figures, were carved on all their sides with foliage, dragons, birds, and fruits. The beams were connected by joists resting on stems, which represented apes, dragons, persons, and foliage. Between the joists the panels had the appearance of scrolls.