[12] Chateaubriand, La Vie de Rancé.
[13] Pliny xxxv. 15.
[14] Tac. Ann. xv. 44.
[15] See Rio.
[16] Arnold Boulin, master-joiner (menuisier) at Amiens, solicited the enterprise, and obtained it in the first months of the year 1508. A contract was drawn and an agreement made with him for the construction of one hundred and twenty stalls with historical subjects, high backings, crownings, and pyramidal canopies. It was agreed that the principal executor should have seven sous of Tournay (a little less than the son of France) a day, for himself and his apprentice, (threepence a day the two—say a shilling a week the master, and sixpence a week the man,) and for the superintendence of the whole work, twelve crowns a year, at the rate of twenty-four sous the crown; (i. e. twelve shillings a year). The salary of the simple workman was only to be three sous a day. For the sculptures and histories of the seats, the bargain was made separately with Antoine Avernier, image cutter, residing at Amiens, at the rate of thirty-two sous (sixteen pence), the piece. Most of the wood came from Clermont en Beauvoisis, near Amiens; the finest, for the bas-reliefs from Holland, by St. Valery and Abbeville.
[17] The ravages committed by the Calvinists throughout nearly the whole of the towns of Normandy, and especially in the Cathedrals towards the year 1560, afford a melancholy proof of the effects of religious animosity. But the Calvinists were bitter and ferocious persecutors. Pommeraye in his quarto volume Histoire de l’Église Cathedrale de Rouen (1686) has devoted nearly one hundred pages to an account of Calvinistic depredations.
[18] M. Licquet says each clustered pillar contains thirty-one columns.
[19] Within three years of writing it, the spire was consumed by lightning. The newspapers of both France and England were full of this melancholy event; and in the year 1823 M. Hyacinthe Langlois of Rouen, published an account of it, together with some views of the progress of the burning.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.