closely analyze the elements of the edifice. They never make discords;
they never enfeeble the impression of grace, ease and perfection which
we experienced when we entered Notre Dame de Noyon.
*****
There has been much discussion about the date of the construction of
this church.
This question was not in the least embarrassing to Jacques Le Vasseur,
the dean of the chapter, who published in 1633 a volume of 1400 pages,
entitled _Annales de Véglise cathédrale de Noyon_. For him, the choir
where he went every day to sing the psalms had been built by Saint
Médard in the sixth century; Charlemagne had constructed the nave; then,
after the year 1000, "our choir was refreshed, our nave completed, our
belfries added, for the accomplishment of the work." Nevertheless he
added: "At least the experts judge that these works and manufactures are
of these times...." The excellent Le Vasseur was not, in any case, the
man to contradict them in their judgments, for he consecrated a chapter
of his book to demonstrating that the foundation of Noyon by Noah was
"probable"; and it is easy to guess the reasons which he extracted from
philology.
The "experts" of the nineteenth century looked a little closer. When
they had learned to distinguish Romanesque art from Gothic art, they
quickly succeeded in classifying the cathedral of Noyon among the
monuments of the transition. In a vital and eloquent study which he
published in 1845, in which in describing the cathedral of Noyon he
studied the origins and celebrated the beauties of Gothic art, Vitet
maintained that this cathedral was "conceived and entirely outlined from
1150 to 1170 and that it was entirely carved, finished off and completed
only toward the end of the century or perhaps even a little later."
These dates are not quite exact: M. Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis has
demonstrated this by the archives and by the archaeological examination
of the monument itself; he has proved that the choir was finished in
1157, the nave in 1220, that the vaultings fell in a fire at the close
of the thirteenth century and that the church was then repaired.... And
I refer you to his excellent _Histoire de la cathédrale de Noyon_. [20]
*****
The two arms of the transept are rounded in the form of an apse. This
plan is frequently met with in Romanesque cathedrals, and especially in
those of the lower Rhine. We find it also in the cathedral of Tournai,
and it was doubtless from the latter that the architects of Noyon
borrowed the idea of their transept, for until the middle of the twelfth
century the two dioceses were united under the same pastoral staff.
Besides, if I were an archæologist, I would study attentively the plans
of these two churches: perhaps this comparison would explain some of
the peculiarities of Noyon. Nothing can be more graceful than these two
circular arms, where the variety of the arches gives an additional charm
to the curved lines.... But here behold the malice of the restorers.
The north arm has not been restored. Several of its windows were
bricked up in the eighteenth century; the ground-floor windows have been
replaced by niches decorated with statues, and at the end of the apse
a little door has been opened to communicate with the sacristy. The men
who thus treated a venerable monument of the Middle Ages were vandals,
I admit. But there is, just the same, a very pleasing and very delicate
reminiscence of the Renaissance in the decoration which they plastered
over the twelfth-century walls. They diminished the light in this part
of their church; but is not this better than the crude daylight which
enters through the clear panes? In short, they altered the character of
the ancient edifice, but they left it accent and life.
Turn toward the opposite arm. It also had been modified in the course of
centuries, but it has recently been restored to its original condition.
A door gave communication with the bishop's garden; it has been
suppressed. Several openings had been blocked up, but have been
reopened. In short, it has been restored; and it is just for the purpose
of better restoring it that they have, as I have described, demolished
the little chapel of the bishopry. All this was accomplished with the
rarest skill and the most exact science. This apse now presents the
aspect of a perfect scheme of architecture. It is light, it is clean, it
is finished. But where is the accent? Where is the life? The most vandal
of the vandals are not always those we would suspect.
Under the crossing of the transept stands the chief altar of white
marble. Its table is a vast rounded console, supported by the uplifted
hands of six angels of gilded bronze and surmounted by a little circular
temple. The steps of the altar, the friezes and the capitals of
the little temple are ornamented with chiseled copper. It is a very
beautiful work of art of the style of Louis XVI. It was put in place in
1779.
Until the eighteenth century, the cathedral had retained its old altar
of the thirteenth century: placed, according to the ancient custom, at
the very end of the apse, without candles, without crucifix, without
tabernacle, it was a simple table surrounded by curtains which were
opened only at the elevation of the host; the altar cloths varied
according to the office of the day; the altar screen was adorned with
precious shrines.
Now, in 1753, an architect and inspector of buildings of the King, who
resided at Compiègne, Louis Godot, proposed to the chapter of Noyon the
designing of an altar "_à la romaine_." His project pleased the chapter,
which accepted it, despite the violent opposition of Claude Bonne-dame
and several other canons, who were displeased with the proposed
destruction of the Gothic altar.
Godot, who proposed also to replace the ancient choir stalls, to
demolish the rood-loft and to surround the choir with gratings, prepared
a sketch. The chapter appropriated the sum necessary for the work. But
Bonnedame and his friends were not through; they addressed a request
to the lieutenant-general of the bailiwick, invoking the fathers of the
church, the liturgy and respect for ancient things. The intendant of the
province-ship came to Noyon to pacify the chapter. But Bonnedame became
more and more intractable. The King remitted the affair to the council
of state. The opposing parties again brought forward their liturgical
arguments, and added that the sum asked for the decoration of the choir
would be better employed if used to reconstruct the vaultings which
threatened to collapse. Experts were appointed to examine the condition
of the vaultings and declared it to be excellent. Bonnedame did not
wish to confess himself vanquished and reasserted his grievances. Godot
replied and set up the authority of Michelangelo: it should be quite
permissible to place the altar in the transept at Noyon, since it
was thus done at Saint Peter's in Rome! The council of state
finally ratified the first decision of the chapter and completed the
discomfiture of Bonnedame and his partisans.
M. Lefèvre-Pontalis, from whom I borrow this anecdote, cites with honor
the names of the canons who, under the leadership of Bonnedame, showed
themselves in these circumstances "the defenders of good archaeological
traditions." Let us therefore praise the canons Du Héron, Cuquigny,
Bertault, du Tombelle, Antoine de Caisnes, Pelleton, Mauroy and
Reneufve, who showed a meritorious zeal for the protection of an
altar of the thirteenth century. Such sentiments are not common among
churchmen, even in 1905; they were still more rare in 1754. Yes--for the
love of principle--let us celebrate this pious pigheadedness.
Only... only, when I look at the altar "à la romaine" conceived by
Godot, I ask myself, with all sorts of remorse and scruples, whether
Bonnedame or his adversaries were right. This Roman altar is a pure
marvel of elegance. The angels of gilded bronze which support the table,
and which are attributed to Gouthièze, are delightful statuettes; the
copper garlands and emblems which decorate the marble are of the finest
workmanship; the little temple elevated above the tabernacle is delicate
in taste, despite its Trianonesque appearance... And what an unexpected
harmony between this charming bibelot and the old cathedral of the
twelfth century! Yes, this altar is in its right place, in spite of
the liturgy, in spite of the proprieties, in spite of the respectable
prejudices of Bonnedame. An exquisite harmony exists between the curve
of the steps, the table and the tabernacle, and the rounded forms of the
choir and of the transept. What foolishness is this unity of style!
Then Bonnedame was wrong? I do not know, but, today, we must honor his
memory and recommend his example; for, if some one today decided to plan
to remove the Romanesque altar of the cathedral of Noyon, it would be
to substitute for it a Neo-Gothic altar, which would be abominable,
encumbering and out of place: on this point there is no doubt.
Godot's altar just escaped being treated by the Revolutionists as the
Gothic altar had been by the canons. A mason wished to break down this
monument of superstition. But a representative of the people interfered
and made this brute understand that what he thought were angels were
goddesses of love, that the bunches of grapes and the ears of wheat were
not the emblems of the Eucharist, but those of the cult of Ceres and of
Bacchus. The altar was spared and became that of the Goddess of Reason.
Persons who today still share the opinion of Bonnedame, will perhaps
find that the representative of the people did but reëstablish the
truth. Let us reprove such a manner of thought....
Of the cloister of the cathedral, there still remains only a single
gallery. The rest, very dilapidated, was tom down by the workmen of the
fabric of Notre Dame de Noyon in 1811.
On this gallery opens the great chapter hall, an admirable Gothic nave
where the restorers have done their work. In the cloister itself, their
zeal was more moderate and more discreet. They repaired the broken
roofs, bound with iron the falling columns, respected the breaches and
the breaks.
As the great walls on which the destroyed triforium rested still stand,
the aspect of the place has not changed, its intimate beauty has not
been violated. One may still enjoy there the eternal silence, shadow,
freshness and coolness.... One hears there only the droning of the
flies, while, in the midst of the area, a grand weeping willow shades an
old well with rusty iron fittings.
Under the cloister fragments of carving have been laid, and in this pile
of stones we discover with melancholy a few admirable fragments. Some
beautiful tombstones have been set up along the walls....
The afternoon is torrid. It is pleasant to linger under these arches
and deliver oneself to the pleasures of epigraphy. Let us decipher the
epitaphs.
Here is that of a Bishop of Noyon, M. Jean François de La Cropte de
Bourzac, who died January 23, 1766. Three distichs commemorate the
humility of the defunct, his piety, his devotion to the King. Below
these Latin verses, which are elegantly banal, we discover a name
which excites our curiosity: Gresset. It was, in fact, the author of
_Vert-Vert_ whom the canons retained to compose the epitaph of their
bishop. It is doubtful whether our Bonnedame, the enemy of Roman altars,
would have aided the poet in glorifying the virtues of M. Jean François
de La Cropte de Bourzac: for it was in fact under the rule of this
bishop that an abandoned architect undertook the new decoration of the
choir of the cathedral of Noyon.
Upon a great tombstone is represented the Last Judgment. We see there
the Great Judge, the angel who sounds the trumpet and declaims: Surgite,
mortui, venite, the defunct who rises from his tomb, hangs his shroud
on the arm of the cross and says to the Lord: Domine, jube ad me venire,
other open sepulchers and scattered bones. Below these images we read
these lines, which lack neither force nor savor [21]:
The body of Gilles Coquevil,
Were he rich or poor, noble or vile,
Before being laid to rot here,
Is without food and drink
Awaiting the Judgment
And the decree of the last day
Where we must all...
Render account of past evils.
May God give his soul promptly
Pardon, and so to all trespassers.
In the same church, beside the door of the cloister, a singular face
surmounts an interminable epitaph. It is the face of an old mandarin,
uniformly bald and symmetrically wrinkled. We see the man to the middle
of his body, his arms folded and his thumbs down. His mien, his pose,
the expression of his face, have something indescribably Chinese. On his
breast appears a mysterious object, in the shape of an ostrich egg,
on which is engraved a column with these words: _Ito fidens_.... It
is necessary to read the epitaph to find the key to the riddle. This
mandarin is Jacques Le Vasseur, canon and historian of the church
of Noyon, whose name I have already mentioned in connection with the
origins of the cathedral. The epitaph commences with a terrible pun
upon the Latin name of Le Vasseur, Vasserius. A golden vase, it is there
said, vas aureus, is hidden in this tomb, but it should not tempt the
cupidity of any one, for it contains only virtues. It is this symbolic
vase that is carved upon the stone. The*column is that which guided the
confident canon towards his eternal home: fidens ito... And we learn
also--in a delightful Latin which I translate clumsily,--that "this
man of good lived, in every place, niggardly for himself, generous
for others; that is why, dying, he left little except mingled rare and
precious books, preferable--by the declarations of the wise--to the
treasures of the Orient as much as to the magnificent and tinkling
adornments of the North...."
All these puerilities do not lack charm, especially when they keep us in
the cool shadow of a cathedral, at the hottest and most blinding hour of
the day....
*****
The day declines. It is the moment when all the beauty of the cathedral
is revealed. Now the contrasts of lights and shades become more moving.
A soft green clarity fills the choir, and lends to its architecture a
more subtle and airy grace; it filters through the high openings of the
nave, illuminates the pointed arches of the vaulting, accentuates the
ramifications of the arches; the whole structure appears lighter and
more triumphal.
We return toward the great open doors, and, after the magnificence of
the church, savor the delicate and peaceful intimacy of the town. In
the triple bay of the portal is framed the little square of the parvis
where, ranged like canons in the choir, the houses of the chapter seem
to slumber in the twilight, and... at the end of a narrow street, roofs,
gables and dark clumps of verdure outline themselves against a rosy
sky....
XII. SOISSONS
|SOISSONS is a white, peaceable and smiling city whose tower and pointed
spires rise from the bank of a lazy river, in the midst of a circle of
green hills: town and countryside call to mind the little pictures which
the illuminators of our old manuscripts painted with loving care. Here
is France, pure France: nothing of that Flemish air assumed by the
little towns of the valley of the Oise, with their brick houses, such as
exquisite Noyon, like a great _béguinage_. Precious monuments relate the
whole history of the French monarchy, from the Merovingian crypts of
the abbey of Saint Médard to the beautiful hotel built on the eve of
the Revolution for the intendants of the provinces. In the midst of the
narrow streets and the little gardens, a magnificent cathedral extends
the two arms of its great transept; on the north a fiat wall and an
immense expanse of glass; on the south, that marvelous apse where the
pointed and the rounded arch mingle in so delicate a fashion.
One cannot omit a malediction in passing on the architect who, to the
dishonor of the interior of this monument, marked off each stone with
black joints, checkering it in such an exasperating manner that all the
lines of the architecture are lost.
A promenade through the streets of this lovable town is charming. Today,
I would like to entertain you with the most celebrated of the monuments
of Soissons, the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes.
Of this monastery, which was one of the most beautiful and richest in
France, there remains only the façade of the church, the remains of
a cloister of the fourteenth century, traces of a cloister of the
Renaissance, a few buildings of the seventeenth century, and a
magnificent Gothic hall, the refectory of the convent.
How the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes was reduced to a state of ruin is
an interesting chapter of the history of vandalism, which I will briefly
relate to you. Then we will see what steps would be necessary to save
the refectory building.
*****
Founded in the eleventh century, the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes
followed the rule of Saint Augustine. Its monks were Joannist canons.
Their duty consisted in celebrating mass within the monastery and in
acting as curates in the forty parishes which belonged to the community
in the dioceses of Soissons and of Meaux. Ninety canons remained
encloistered; fifty priests served the parishes. Because of their
holiness and their knowledge, the Joannists had acquired such renown
during the Middle Ages that Cardinal Jean de Dormans confided to
the monks of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes the direction of the college of
Dormans-Beauvais founded by him at Paris.
The gifts of kings, nobles and citizens gave the canons means wherewith
to undertake the construction of a great church. About 1335 they laid
the foundations of the nave and the towers. At the end of the fourteenth
century the walls of the nave were finished, and the towers had risen
to the level of the great rose window. The plunderings of the Abbé
Remy d'Orbais, and later the wars of the Armagnacs and the Burgundians,
interrupted the work, and it was not until about the end of the
fifteenth century that the vaultings and the tiles were put in place.
The two towers were not finished until later, the smaller in the last
years of the fifteenth century, the greater in 1520. The construction of
the church had occupied more than two hundred years. [22]
In 1567, two years after the death of the last canon regular of
Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, the Protestants devastated the abbey: the library
and the treasury were plundered, the stained glass and the statues
were broken, the carvings were burned and the fountains demolished. The
commendatory monks took little pains to repair the damages.
At the beginning of the Revolution, there were no more than thirty monks
in the monastery. They were expelled, and the nave of the church was
used as a military bakeshop.
There is a widely believed legend that the church was demolished during
the Revolution. This is absolutely false. At this time, as the roofs
were not well looked after, a bay of the vaulting fell; but, under the
Consulate, the monument was still solid and a few repairs would have
sufficed to preserve it. It was torn down by a bishop of Soissons, Msr.
Leblanc de Beaulieu.
It is a painful story. I have before me the administrative documents
of this abominable destruction, documents which were brought to my
attention by M. Max Sainsaulieu, the architect of the historic monuments
of Soissons. These documents are instructive.
On August 1, 1804, the churchwardens of the cathedral and parish church
of Soissons address themselves to the mayor of the city and disclose
to him that their church is in great need of repairs and that these
indispensable works will cost 23,786 francs. "The desire," they write,
"to lighten as much as possible this charge upon our town, has suggested
to us a means which would totally free us from it, at least for several
years. This means consists in obtaining from the government the right to
dispose of the former church of the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, in
order to employ the products of its demolition for the conservation and
repair of the cathedral. It will not be difficult for you, Monsieur
le Maire, to convince the government by a description of the present
condition of this church, and by a relation of the accidents which
almost happened two years ago and again recently, by the falling of
various parts of it, that the total demolition of this structure
will produce no real disadvantage to the national treasury and will
contribute advantageously to public safety...."
Behind the churchwardens, it is really the bishop who demands the
demolition of the church. As a matter of fact, on April 25, 1805, by
a decree given at the Stapinigi Palace, the Emperor orders that the
prefect of the department of the Aisne, at the instance of the Bishop of
Soissons, shall put at his disposal the church of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes,
"in order that the materials coming from the church may be used in the
repair of the cathedral": the inhabitants of Soissons must merely, in
exchange for this concession, consolidate the walls of the other parts
of the abbey which have been granted to the Administration of Powder and
Saltpeter.
Mgr. Leblanc de Beaulieu receives his decree. Meanwhile the inhabitants
of Soissons are alarmed at this project of demolition, protest against
the plan of the prelate and take their grievances to the prefect. It
is often assumed that before the advent of romanticism no one in France
cared for the monuments of the Middle Ages. Now, as early as 1805, the
news that the church of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes is about to be destroyed
excites the indignation of the people of Soissons. The archaeologists
make ready for battle. The prefect writes to the bishop (June 26, 1805):
"Monsieur, I am receiving a great number of complaints against the
approaching demolition of the church of Saint-Jean: the inhabitants of
Soissons appear to be extremely attached to this edifice, which they
regard as a precious monument of the arts. I have the honor to forward
to you a copy of a historical summary which has been forwarded to me. As
it belongs to you, Monsieur, to decide the fate of this church, which
is at your disposal, I can only confide in what your good sense and your
enlightened love for the arts will suggest to you."
His "enlightened love for the arts" does not in the least inspire the
bishop with a desire to save the church; but the complaints of his flock
embarrass him, and he explains to the prefect that he himself cannot
proceed in a regular manner, that it is unsuitable that a bishop should
have "personal connection with the demolition of a church." And, for
four years, matters remain at this stage.
Finally, in 1807, disdaining the protests and triumphing over his own
scruples, the bishop awards the glass and the ironwork to a certain
Archin. In 1809 he empowers his notary to treat in his name with the
contractors for demolition. All that he accords to the inhabitants of
Soissons is the preservation of the façade.
The bargain is concluded between "Antoine Isidore Petit de Reimpré,
imperial notary, domiciled at Soissons, in the name and endowed with
the powers of Mgr. Jean Claude Leblanc-Beaulieu, Bishop of Soissons
and Laon, baron of the Empire and member of the Legion of Honor, of the
first part; and Leonard Wallot, building contractor, and Pierre-Joseph
Delacroix père, carpenter...." By the terms of the agreement, the two
towers and the portals must remain intact, and the contractors are even
obliged to do certain work of consolidation. But nothing will remain of
the nave and the choir of the church: "All the parts to be demolished
shall be demolished down to and including the foundations. The rubbish
caused by the demolition shall at first be thrown into the vaults of
the church; consequently the ceilings of the aforesaid vaults shall be
demolished, the ground shall be perfectly leveled and the surplus of
the rubbish shall be transported into the fields." This is not all. The
bishop reserves for his own share a hundred and sixty cubic meters of
ashlar! The price of the sale was fixed at three thousand francs.