At the foot of the flight of steps which leads up to the picturesque entrance of this little chapel are the remains of a small detached building, probably a residence for a sacristan or priest.
Very near the Aiguille of S. Michel is a curious chapel. It is an octagon, with an apse projecting from the eastern face, the octagon covered with an octagonal domical vault, and the apse with a semi-dome. The walls are arcaded inside and out below the vault, the internal arches springing from engaged shafts in the angles. Some of the arches outside are cusped in the usual way, the cusping not starting from the cap with a quarter-circle, but with a half-circle, the same as all the rest. There are doors in the west and north sides, with tympana filled in with mosaic, and the wall in the spandrels between the arches outside is also inlaid. The exterior of the apse is not visible, but I found, on making my way into the cottage and barn built against it, that it is perfect and undamaged. The popular opinion at Le Puy is that the chapel is an ancient temple of Diana, a fiction which a minute’s examination destroys. M. Didron maintains that it was a mortuary chapel, and he refers to the chapel of S. Croix, at Montmajour, as an example akin to this. M. Mérimée, on the other hand, says that the Templars had property in the Faubourg de l’Aiguille, and compares it to the similar oratory of the Templars at Metz, and he might have added the curious Templars’ church at Laon as another case in point.[50]
This concludes my notice of early buildings in Le Puy, and I have no more than time to catalogue the church of S. Laurent, famous for the monument of the Constable Duguesclin, a large second-pointed building of poor character, and very Italian in its plan and design,[51] and with an enormous sham front; the gabled end of the hospital chapel, with its fifteenth-century bell-turret; a pretty little fountain, and a large number of picturesque houses of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and a very scanty remnant of a gateway at the bottom of the town, called, I think, the Porte de Panessac, against the proposed destruction of which I find M. Aymard protesting only a few years back in the _Bulletin Monumental_.