There are people who can remember when the town was surrounded
by two walls; now only a few remnants of the fortifications remain. The
church is exceedingly interesting. There are details indicating a very
early origin--they may possibly have come down from the foundation; but the
structure in the main belongs to the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. The
east end--the oldest portion--has more the character of a stronghold than
of a church. It has no apse, and the terminating wall, which is carried far
above the roof, has a row of machicolations, and the massive buttresses by
which it is flanked are really towers pierced with loopholes. At the foot
of the wall is a deep pool of water, which serves as the horse-pond for the
town; but it may originally have been part of a moat.
In the tympanum of the twelfth-century portal is one of those bas-reliefs
representing the Last Judgment upon which the artistic ambition of the
early Gothic period appears to have been chiefly directed in this region.
The fourteenth-century Senechaussee, with its embattled belfry, its little
turrets or bartizans hanging high at the angles of the wall, its dim old
court, with a deep well in the centre, speaks with a ghostly voice of
ancient Martel.
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