The architecture is therefore in the style of the Renaissance, though the main entrance belongs to the fourteenth century. The small entrance on the left of the façade is pleasing. The church was sacked during the Revolution and all its artistic treasures stolen. The building itself was used as a magazine, a prison and a military hospital till 1822, when it was restored to religious use by private generosity. The painfully unsuccessful polychrome decorations perpetrated by M. Boeswilwald make it impossible to remember the interior with any pleasure. Perched, as it seems, in the air, the exterior, beheld from the boulevards and bridges south-west of the town, forms, with S. Père and the Cathedral, one of the most prominent features of the most unforgettable view of Chartres. But the tower is destitute of grace, and the building, as a whole, devoid of any beauty of form.
If the nave were worthy of the apse and crypt, it would be another matter, and S. Aignan would be worthy of its place between S. Père and Notre-Dame. Approach it from the Rue Saint-Pierre by the steps of Saint-François, and the east end of the church with the enormous buttresses which support it, and the massive buttressed walls of the street which hold up the old parish cemetery, now the garden of the _Presbytère_, give you the impression of a mighty fortress frowning above you. But seen from a distance this effect is lost.
There is a legend in connection with this church worth recounting.
A poor tailor of Chartres, the story runs, made a contract to deliver himself body and soul to the Devil at the end of the year if his daughter should recover her health and make the fine marriage on which she had set her heart. At the date fixed when the tailor must fulfil his part of the bargain Satan appeared. It was evening. The man’s wife threw herself on her knees, and by her prayers and entreaties obtained the concession that the infernal treaty should not be enforced so long as the candle burning in the cottage should last. Then the cunning wife rose from her knees, blew out the candle and ran full speed with it to the Church of S. Aignan, where she hid it near the present stoup, in the first pier on the left at which the masons were then working. Wonderful to relate, the pier was immediately completed, and the candle hidden within it safe from the clutches of the Evil One.