The southern porch is very curious on many accounts. It was built, as I have already said, in 1060, by Jean Cormier, physician to Henry I. This date is important, because it seems exceedingly well authenticated, and the addition of the porch proves the church, if not finished, yet to have been in a state of great forwardness at that period. There are openings, not arched, but square-headed, combining all the parts of this porch into a sort of open portico. It abounds with detached shafts, of which there are none within the church, with large and small figures, and with models of architecture, in some of which, as I have already remarked, the pointed arch is exhibited. The arches of the porch itself are all pointed. The footstools of the figures are usually themselves grotesque human figures, and many of them with crowns. These statues, and the canopies over them, are much better managed than in the western front. They are rudely finished, but the labour bestowed on the lace of some of the garments shews that this rudeness was the effect, not of negligence, but of want of skill. The foliage of the capital of the columns spreads over the underside of the canopy. Above the porch is a range of five windows, of equal size and height, and over these a rose window. In the transept at Amiens, the angular spaces between a similar range of arches, and a circle above them, are opened, and form additions to the rose window; here they are closed, and no attempt is made to unite them. There is, as usual, a gallery in front of the gable, and at each end of this gallery is a small octangular tower, surmounted by a spire. This seems to have been a common mode of finishing in the early French Gothic; it occurs at a church in Soissons, which bears all the marks of antiquity; and in other places. The general opening of the windows, both in the clerestory and aisles, in this church, is round-headed, but they are divided by a large plain mullion (such as I have never seen elsewhere) into two parts, each of which has a pointed arch, and over them is a rose.
It was, perhaps, part of the original design to have a tower on each side of each end of the transept, and one on each side of the choir, but the parts which are now exhibited of these towers, above the roofing of the church, seem to be of later date; none of them are finished, and what has been performed of the two latter does not correspond with the work of the other four. These are ornamented with numerous little shafts, extremely long and slender, most of which are united to the solid masonry, but those at the angles are detached, in order to give an exaggerated appearance of lightness. I imagine them to be posterior to those of Nôtre Dame, at Paris, but earlier than those at Rheims; but among the various efforts which ultimately completed the first mentioned of these churches, we cannot determine during which the towers were built, and the priority of date is left in great uncertainty, for the style of building is not decisive, or rather, I have not sufficient knowledge to be able to determine it from that character. The northern front of the cathedral at Chartres presents a similar style of ornament, but without the projecting porch, which makes so important and interesting a feature on the south.
