St. Pierre, and enter into the market-place, affording an opening before the most beautiful church in all Normandy.  It is the church of St. Pierre de Darnetal of which I now speak, and from which the name of the street is derived.  The tower and spire are of the most admirable form and workmanship.[114] The extreme delicacy and picturesque effect of the stone tiles, with which the spire is covered, as well as the lightness and imposing consequence given to the tower upon which the spire rests, are of a character peculiar to itself.  The whole has a charming effect.  But severe criticism compels one to admit that the body of the church is defective in fine taste and unity of parts.  The style is not only florid Gothic, but it is luxuriant, even to rankness, if I may so speak.  The parts are capriciously put together:  filled, and even crammed, with ornaments of apparently all ages:  concluding with the Grecian mixture introduced in the reign of Francis I. The buttresses are, however, generally, lofty and airy.  In the midst of this complicated and corrupt style of architecture, the tower and spire rise like a structure built by preternatural hands; and I am not sure that, at this moment, I can recollect any thing of equal beauty and effect in the whole range of ecclesiastical edifices in our own country.  Look at this building, from any part of the town, and you must acknowledge that it has the strongest claims to unqualified admiration.[115] The body of the church is of very considerable dimensions.  I entered it on a Sunday morning, about eleven o’clock, and found it quite filled with a large congregation, in which the cauchoise, as usual, appeared like a broad white mass—­from one end to the other.  The priests were in procession.  One of the most magnificent organs imaginable was in full intonation, with every stop opened; the voices of the congregation were lustily exercised; and the offices of religion were carried on in a manner which would seem to indicate a warm sense of devotion among the worshippers.  There is a tolerably good set of modern paintings (the best which I have yet seen in the interior of a church) of the Life of Christ, in the side chapels.  The eastern extremity, or the further end of Our Lady’s Chapel, is horribly bedaubed and over-loaded with the most tasteless specimens of what is called Gothic art, perhaps ever witnessed!  The great bell of this church, which has an uncommonly deep and fine tone, is for ever

  Swinging slow with solemn roar!

that is to say:—­it is tolling from five in the morning till ten at night; so incessantly, in one side-chapel or another, are these offices carried on within this maternal parish church.[116]

I saw, with momentary astonishment, the leaning tower of a church in the Rue St. Jean,[117] which is one of the principal streets in the town:  and which is terminated by the Place des Cazernes, flanked by the river Orne.  In this street I was asked, by a bookseller, two pounds two shillings, for a thumbed and cropt copy of the Elzevir-Heinsius Horace of 1629; but with which demand I did not of course comply.  In fact, they have the most extravagant notions of the prices of Elzevirs, both here and at Rouen.