No. 5. [South aisle, east to west] gives a kind of rope-work, with volutes and human-headed dragons.
No. 6. Is much the same as No. 3.
No. 7. Flat applique leaves, volutes and ball-flowers; and in
No. 8. We return to the wild animals. Both aisles are arcaded on their outer walls; on the north we find arches ornamented with ball-flowers, on the south an arcade of some interest, as showing the immense variety of design in its capitals—dragons, fir-cones, arabesques, and, strangest of all, winged lions, with a most Assyrian air. Apart from the capitals, the architecture of the church is quite simple, and whoever rehandled it has done so much in keeping with the old work. The windows are round-headed: the clerestory consists of single lights, and the triforium is a blind arcade.
Notre Dame de la Coûture—the name originally referred to the Cultura Dei—is an old Benedictine foundation, dating from the sixth century, but destroyed during the Revolution; the church, however, remains, with most of the old work intact, the two square fourteenth-century towers rising in quaint contrast to the modern buildings around them. Between the towers a remarkable Last Judgment confronts the visitor from the west doorway. The central figure, Justice, weighs a sinner in the balance, and apparently finds him wanting, if one may judge by the angle of the scales and the expectantly gleeful attitude of a devil amongst the “goats” on the left hand. Of the interior, the choir is the oldest part, and here we find eleventh-century work, especially in the crypt, which contains the tomb of the founder, Saint Bertrand, and shows the rudely carved capitals and square-edged arches of an age before architects had blossomed out into beauty of sculpture and design. The same simplicity characterises the choir, which has four bays and a chevet of five-round arches, with massive piers, and the abacus square and voluted at the angles. The vaulting of the chevet is terminated by figures of saints, which rest upon the shafts of the clerestory windows. There is no triforium, its position being taken throughout the church by corbel tables in the form of human and animal faces. The nave consists of a single wide body without aisles, and set in the blank wall are three large bays of relieving arches, their space being filled in with curious old tapestry, in which appears a medley of Biblical subjects, pastoral and hunting scenes, and Chinese pagodas.
This quiet little church was in the very centre of the furious street fighting which followed the first rush into the city of the Prussian troops, and fulfilled its sacred mission of giving shelter to the wounded and comfort to the dying who lay stretched in the neighbouring streets of the town. “We entered,” says the war correspondent of The Times, “the picturesque old church of Notre Dame de la Coûture, interesting from its quaint mixed architecture, its old choir and vaulted walls, and were told by the meek-looking priest who sadly showed us over it, and was busy cleaning it as we entered, that no fewer than six hundred wounded had passed the night in it.”