Some of the Primary Gothic Cathedrals: Noyon, Senlis, Sens, Laon,
Soissons
_C'est vers le Moyen Âge énorme et délicat,_
_Qu'il faudrait que mon coeur en panne naviguât._
_ ... Roi, politicien, moine, artisan, chimiste,_
_Architecte, soldat, médecin, avocat,_
_Quel temps! Oui, que mon coeur naufragé rembarquât._
_Pour toute cette force ardente, souple, artiste!..._
_Guidé par la folie unique de la Croix_
_Sur tes ailes de pierre, ô folle Cathédrale!_
--PAUL VERLAINE, _Sagesse_, IV.[40]
St. Denis' abbatial was an object lesson in the new art, and the bishops
returned to their dioceses to emulate it. Two of Suger's personal
friends, the bishops of Noyon and Senlis, were the first to rebuild
their cathedrals. Already during the Romanesque stage the cathedral of
Sens had been initiated; it now was to be carried on according to the
new system of building. At Laon was begun a splendid Gothic edifice. At
Soissons, a new cathedral was started by that masterpiece of Primary
Gothic, the transept's southern arm. And many a lesser church now rose:
the collegiate at Braine, the abbey church of St. Leu d'Esserent, and
two abbatials in Champagne as imposing as cathedrals, St. Remi at
Rheims, and Notre Dame at Châlons-sur-Marne. Also in Champagne is the
Primary Gothic church of St. Quiriace at Provins.
The cathedral of Paris was also begun in the primary stage of the
national art. But Notre Dame of Paris must have a chapter to itself.
Before its main parts were completed, Gothic architecture had reached
its culminating point. With it ended the primary group and opened what
we shall call the Era of the Great Cathedrals, though let it be
remembered that all such divisions are arbitrary and made use of merely
for clearness. From its first assured steps to its apogee, from the
middle of the XII century to the middle of the XIII, the sequence of
Gothic architecture is welded too logically to be defined by
cut-and-dried nomenclature.
During the XII century, the Gothic cathedrals retained Romanesque
features, such as deep tribunes over the side aisles, which gave them a
wall elevation in four stories--pier arcade, tribune, triforium (to veil
the lean-to roof over the tribune), and clearstory. At first it was
common usage to encircle the clustered shafts at intervals with stone
rings, but by the XIII century the desire for an unbroken ascending line
had grown stronger, and the employment of such horizontal bands died
out. The simultaneous use of both round and pointed arch is found in all
five of these Primary cathedrals; but after the opening of the XIII
century, semicircular and equilateral arches rarely were used at the
same time in a church. Slowly, as if with reluctance, the new
architecture dropped favorite traits of the old school. Sculpture
continued longest faithful to Romanesque traditions.
Noyon, Senlis, Sens, Laon, and Soissons--it seems rash to treat of such
a bevy of churches in one chapter, when students have made a single
cathedral their life work. The passing traveler is encouraged by one
fact: each big French church, once seen, remains a clear-cut memory, for
each possesses a distinct personality. To confuse one cathedral with
another is impossible.
It is an instinct deeper than mere fancy to choose a season æsthetically
right for a first visit to such sanctuaries. For these Primary
cathedrals the fitting occasion is that fugitive hour when the leaves
are multiple yet half transparent still, only partly veiling the virile
framework of the tree. In them is the evanescence of spring, the
slenderness of adolescence and its virginal restraint, that something of
youth's severity, that something of youth's radiance which is joy, but
not abandonment to joy.
There is something sacred in the modest sobriety of the earlier Gothic
churches.... But what words can express their unimaginable charm! If all
true art is but a symbol, a prefiguring of the mystery, these churches
veil and reveal the coming harmonies of the Beyond as it never before
was revealed and veiled. We speak of Chartres as a recollected holiness;
the stones of Rheims were made majestic for royal pageants; Amiens is a
_sursum corda_. And yet there is something in the first fugitive hour
when Romanesque and Gothic met that makes a deeper appeal to the soul.
No Greek, in portico or sepulchral tablet, conceived beauty of lovelier
proportion, of more heart-piercing simplicity, than some of the earlier
churches of the national genius.
When in the French towns the word passed from mouth to mouth, on a
tragic day of September, 1914, that Rheims Cathedral was in flames,
there were many who asked breathlessly: "And St. Remi? What of St.
Remi?" And when the invaders burst upon Senlis, many who knew the lovely
springtime Gothic church of St. Leu d'Esserent trembled for its fate.
Over the birthplace of the nation's unity of language and architecture
has poured a pitiless rain of iron and fire, a destruction akin to
desecration.[41] Cradle and necropolis!
The iron grip has held cloistral Noyon that was only too content to be
forgotten in its distinguished retirement. The proudest mediæval thing
in France, Laon set with feudal arrogance on its high hill, has been
long years in chained captivity. For seven centuries the faithful bulls
on Laon's towers have looked out, like sentinels, over the city. With
dread forebodings they stood in their captivity, aware that the angel
guard set about Rheims Cathedral had pleaded in vain, that the tower of
Senlis, pride of all the Valois country, had been selected as a target
by the invaders' guns. And Bamburg and Limburg, Halberstadt and
Magdeburg, had copied Laon Cathedral in the old days when the _opus
francigenum_ aroused emulation, not hate, across the Rhine.
Month after month, year after year, the shells rained on Soissons; town
and cathedral lie in ruins. The fair cities of this inmost heart of
France have been desolated, the loyal places that hastened to open their
gates to Jeanne d'Arc when she rode by with her king from the coronation
in Rheims--Senlis and Laon, Soissons and Compiègne,[42] and
Crespy-en-Valois, the countryside that greeted her with such love that
she said she hoped to be buried among such good folk, among these
_chiers et bons amis les loyaulx Franxois habitons les bonnes
villes_.[43] Always in the vanguard of battle were these ancient cities
of France, always the boulevard of the capital, yet the wars of
centuries had respected their churches. Future ages will read of the
glorification of brute force by the invaders who refused to take pity on
Soissons, Noyon, and Rheims, when they stand before the giant amorphous
1913 memorial at Leipzig. Therein speaks the Prussian purpose as
distinctly as, in Gothic cathedrals, speaks the idealism that sent the
old and young crusading, and spurred man on to "the bravest effort he
ever made to save his soul."
Tragic irreparable early churches of France! Like martyrs in the arena,
you have been laid low, one after the other.... But martyrs leave
undying memories. If loved before with an almost unfair preference, you
are sacred now. Rheims, Soissons, Noyon, and Senlis--your names have
become sacramental.
NOYON CATHEDRAL[44]
Vous entendrez rugir une de ces batailles
Où les peuples entiers se mordent aux entrailles,
Un combat formidable aux cris désespérés,
Dont parleront longtemps les hommes effarés;
Car nous saurons de moins, si notre France expire,
Lui creuser un tombeau plus large qu'un empire.
--LOUIS BOUILHET.
Most of the cathedrals of France have an early history following the
same general lines. Each may be said to have passed through a
Merovingian stage, and to have rebuilt itself larger and finer in
Carolingian times.[45] The inroads of the Northmen pirates and the
conflagration of timber roofs wrecked most of the cathedrals, so that a
third and often a fourth reconstruction went on during the Romanesque
era--the century and a half that followed the year 1000. When the
evolution of Gothic art was accomplished, there were few churches that
were not renewed. It has been said that never before had such a noble
frenzy of building seized on mankind.
In the short biography traced here of each cathedral, seldom will an
account be given of former edifices, but rather the story of each church
as it now stands. While some portion may be Romanesque, it is uncommon
to find any Carolingian vestige remaining.
The bishop of Noyon took the initiative set by Abbot Suger at St. Denis.
He was the first to start a cathedral in the new way just as Noyon can
boast that hers was the first communal charter of which there is record.
In 1109 the liberal Bishop Baudry granted the town its franchise,
without the turbulent scenes by which other cities were to wrench theirs
from their feudal proprietors. "Know then, all Christians, present and
future, that by advice of priests, knights, and townsman I have
established a commune in Noyon," begins the bishop's parchment. Many a
neighboring city modeled its charter on that of Noyon.
The quiet towns on the Oise played a precocious part in what Gratry
calls "the big historic effort at justice which occurred in the XII
century, the strong will to get out of barbaric chaos which began our
era, and which, eight hundred years ago, started the impulses of modern
progress." From city to city the communal movement quickened. France
began to be covered by associations for mutual aid, and the winning of
city charters and the creation of guilds went hand in hand with the
intellectual ferment in the schools and the creation of a national
architecture.
A second Carolingian cathedral of Noyon was replaced in the XI century
by a Romanesque one which was burned in 1131, when the city was laid in
ashes. At that time, Pope Innocent II was visiting a lord of the region,
a cousin of Louis VII, and the brother of the bishop of Noyon, Simon de
Vermandois. The pope wrote to various French prelates enjoining on them
to help Noyon in its disaster. Bishop Simon must have built part of the
walls of the present choir, but as he accompanied Louis VII on the
Second Crusade, and died in the East, it was his successor, Bishop
Baudouin II (1148-67), friend of Suger, friend, too, of St. Bernard, who
really inaugurated the present cathedral about 1150. He sacrificed in
large part what was already done of Bishop Simon's choir in order to put
it into character with the newly expounded principles of architecture.
The choir of St. Denis was his direct model, and he obtained from Abbot
Suger some of his masons; the profiles and ornamentation at Noyon are
identical with those of St. Denis.
In 1157, the relics of St. Eloi, Noyon's noted VII-century bishop, a
skilled goldsmith and prime minister for King Dagobert, were transferred
to the new sanctuary, probably because it was then completed. In the
time of Bishop Baudouin III, who died in 1174, the transept was
finished, as well as the bays of the nave near it. Noyon's western limb
rose during three campaigns of work, as is indicated by differences in
its details, but in main part the nave is a work of the final quarter of
the XII century.
The cathedral was finished by the westernmost bay of its nave, its
capacious porch, and the southwest tower, under Bishop Étienne de
Nemours (1188-1222), who had three brothers, also bishops and builders,
at Paris, at Meaux, and at Châlons, the sons, all four of them, of a
lord chancellor of France. In Noyon, Bishop Étienne was a sound
administrator; he was favorable to the municipality, regulated the
town's moneys, and built a hospital. Philippe-Auguste sent him to
Denmark to escort to France the unfortunate Princess Ingeborg, who was
to be his second wife. The bishop was buried as a benefactor in the
abbey of Ourscamp, four miles from Noyon, farther down the Oise, which
house was a foundation of Bishop Simon de Vermandois, though only
vestiges of its XII-century parts remain.[46]
During the last decade of the XIII century a terrible fire raged for two
days in Noyon Cathedral. The vaulting throughout the church, save in the
choir aisle, had to be reconstructed. For the sexpartite system, which
embraces two bays, and has six branches from the keystone of each vault
section, was now substituted the barlong plan, where diagonals cover
one bay. The early-Gothic architects took up with enthusiasm the
Normans' sexpartite plan, but after using it for half a century they
most sensibly returned to the quadripartite system as better suited to
their needs. The sexpartite vault calls for piers of alternating
strength, since on the heavier pier fall diagonals and transverse arch,
and only a transverse arch on the intermediate pier.
Noyon Cathedral had from its start planned for a sexpartite vault by
building its ground supports of alternating strength. Its piers,
therefore, became illogical when a barlong vaulting was erected after
the fire of 1193. And one regrets that it has not its original stone
roof, since the correlations in this hardy first cathedral are elsewhere
very perfect. Throughout the church are details of subtle charm. There
is a slight bending out, like a horseshoe, of the archivolts of the pier
arcade, which archivolts are severely plain. Usually from the abacus of
a main pier rise five clustered shafts to the level of the
vault-springing, two to catch the diagonals, two for the longitudinal or
wall arches, and one for the transverse arch. Noyon showed constructive
agility in concentrating its wall ribs and diagonals on a single shaft,
which meant only three clustered colonnettes from main piers to
vault-springing.
Each cathedral in France possesses a few traits peculiar to itself.
Noyon is unique in having both ends of its transept terminate in
hemicycles, like a Rhenish church.[47] The Romanesque school of the
Rhine had derived the feature from the early chapels of Rome. Probably
Noyon's transept apses came from retaining the foundations of the
previous cathedral. A church which was long in the jurisdiction of
Noyon--the cathedral at Tournai--still possesses its Romanesque transept
with semicircular ends. Cambrai Cathedral, destroyed by the Revolution,
once had a similar pre-Gothic transept; its choir, built from 1220 to
1237 in the golden day of the national art, was an irreparable loss.
Noyon Cathedral showed another Germanic trait in what may be called a
western transept, made by the lower stories of the façade towers and the
middle section of the first bay.
The nave of Noyon is a noble vessel, with an interior four-story
elevation of happier proportions than was achieved in the transept. No
longer do annulets bind the clustered shafts, thus breaking the
ascending line as in the choir. Throughout the church is to be found the
simultaneous use of round and pointed arches, and, curiously enough, it
is the lower stories, pier arcade, and tribune, that used the pointed
arch; in the triforium and clearstory the arches are semicircular.
Everywhere the sculptured capitals are of rare beauty. The Romanesque
acanthus leaf is found in juxtaposition with the Gothic crocket.
Noyon is exceptional in having retained its annexes: the treasure hall
built by Bishop Baudouin II, the chapel of the episcopal palace, a
half-timber library, and a beautiful chapter house (c. 1240). This
latter, opening on a fragment of the cathedral cloister, is a hall
divided into two aisles by a row of slender pillars, the type preferred
by the French, whereas in England the circular hall whose vault ribs
were gathered on a central pier was more popular. Noyon's chapter house
was built by Bishop Pierre Chalot, who died at sea, off Cyprus, on St.
Louis' crusade of 1248.
When in late-Gothic times Noyon was adding chapels and side aisles, her
master-of-works was Jean Turpin, who at Péronne--pitiful Péronne la
Pucelle entirely a ruin to-day--erected a Flamboyant Gothic church which
was a veritable gem.
The battle of giants, foreseen in the poet's dream, twice engulfed Noyon
during the World War. From the first occupation by the enemy the city
escaped without serious injury. Then in March, 1918, began the Germans'
desperate advance on Paris. At the end of the month the mayor of Noyon
quitted the city, the last to leave. And in September he was the first
to re-enter Noyon after the second battle of the Marne had driven back
the invaders. He found his town a ruin. Not a single building had
escaped injury, and only ten days earlier a photograph taken from a
French airship had shown that the Renaissance Town Hall and Noyon's
chief square were intact; few monuments had suffered from the occasional
bombardments by the Allies. The Hôtel de Ville had been built in the
dawn of the classic Renaissance, and its fine façades retained much of
the Gothic spirit. Before their departure the invaders blew up the town;
not even Calvin's birthplace was spared. Hardly 10 per cent of the
houses of this amiable little city that asked only to be left unmolested
by the fever and fret of new things are to-day worth reconstruction.
[Illustration: _Noyon's Chapter House (1240-1250)_]
As if by a miracle, the cathedral and a side street named for the old
goldsmith bishop, St. Eloi, were preserved. The cathedral roof is
pierced by shells in a dozen places and the northern tower and the porch
between the towers are smashed, but the interior is but slightly
damaged. In one of the side chapels a vandal fired his pistol many times
at a picture of the Saviour. Perhaps it was the memory that Noyon's
rounded transept ends and forechurch were Germanic which saved the
cathedral. Better is it to remember by a Radegund, by a Charlemagne,
than by Odin and Thor.
THE CATHEDRAL OF SENLIS[48]
To-day analysis has seized on all things, and it is leading us to
death. Man, we must not forget, lives intellectually by
synthesis.... If archæology is to make known the monuments of the
past, it ought, before all else, to try to make them loved, for,
given the uncertitude of the future, it is in that love that they
will find their only chance of safety.
--ÉMILE LAMBIN.[49]
Senlis was the second begun of the Gothic cathedrals. The most fecund
region for early essays in the nascent national art lay between Senlis
and Noyon. Thibaut, bishop of Senlis, was present at Abbot Suger's
deathbed in 1151. Filled with the ambition to replace his half-ruined
church by a Gothic one, he began, about 1152, the new works, and once
more the abbey church of St. Denis was the model. Some of Senlis'
original vaults remain over side aisles, tribune, and apse chapels.
Their intersecting ribs show a certain inexperience, and in places
semicircular diagonals still are used. The framing arches of each
section are lower than the keystone of the diagonals, which imparts a
_bombé_ shape to the vault. As the masons acquired skill in the making
of Gothic stone roofs, this domical form died out; by stilting, by
depressing, and by pointing the arches was the difficulty solved. Like
Noyon, Senlis played a part in the early history of France. The
Merovingian and Carolingian kings and those of the House of Capet
frequented the little city in order to hunt in the forests of the Oise.
Louis VII made Senlis his favorite residence, and when the new
cathedral was undertaken he allowed donations to be collected over the
entire kingdom.
When Bishop Thibaut died, the succeeding prelates, Henri and Geoffrey,
continued to give largely of their revenues to the new works, but the
progress was slow. Senlis was a small diocese for so big a monument.
About the time that the choir was finished, 1180, the sculpture of the
central-western portal was set up, a gem of Primary Gothic, though sadly
damaged by time. It marks a date in French mediæval sculpture. On the
lintel is related the Death of the Virgin and her Assumption, in the
tympanum her Coronation. Senlis was the first to use this ordinance
which the XIII century frequently repeated; we find it at Chartres'
north portal, and at the entrance under the northwest tower of Notre
Dame at Paris.
M. Émile Mâle with his usual happy phrasing speaks of the lyric beauty
of the lintel stone at Senlis.[50] It was partly inspired by the _Golden
Legend_ of the good Bishop James of Genoa, which in its turn had used
the apocryphal gospels freely.[51] The legend relates that at the
deathbed of Our Lady, the Apostles gathered, and St. John cautioned
them: "Be careful when she is dead that no one weeps, lest the people,
seeing our tears, be troubled, and say, 'They fear death, who preach the
Resurrection.'" For three days Our Lady rested in her tomb in the valley
of Jehoshaphat, then came her Divine Son, with angels, singing the
Canticle of Canticles, to escort her to Paradise. The old sculptor of
Senlis has depicted the touching reverence with which the angels bend,
to lift from the tomb their future Queen of Heaven. Their gesture of
eager love is one of the exquisitely delicate conceptions of mediæval
sculpture.
While they were carving the west portal there came to Senlis a touching
figure, the young mother of the future Louis VIII, Isabelle, daughter of
Baudouin V of Flanders, who claimed direct descent from Charlemagne;
through her the blood of the Carolingian line passed into the third
dynasty of France. She was to die, at nineteen, almost repudiated by
Philippe-Auguste, because her people declined to support one of his
projects. In Senlis Cathedral this gentle grandmother of St. Louis
walked barefooted, candle in hand, beseeching assistance from the Mother
of God with such humility that the beholders wept. She founded a chapel
in the cathedral.
A few years later, in 1191, the cathedral of Senlis was consecrated by
that archbishop of Sens who was Philippe-Auguste's uncle, Guillaume of
Champagne, William of the White Hands, the prelate who had completed the
cathedral at Sens. And there came to the dedication Bishop Nivelon de
Chérisy, just starting Soissons' Cathedral; Bishop Étienne de Nemours,
at work on Noyon's; the prelate of Meaux, who was raising that
cathedral; and many another expert in the new art. Sometime later,
Bishop Geoffrey resigned his see, and in his place was elected Pierre
Guérin, chancellor of France under three kings, a figure worthy to stand
beside those Gallo-Roman bishops who remained as bulwarks of society
when the Roman Empire fell in pieces around them.
Bishop Guérin was a man possessed by a passion for the public weal. His
prudence and firmness caused Philippe-Auguste and Louis VIII to name him
executor of their testaments. One of his enterprises was the organizing
of the royal archives. It was he who came to Blanche of Castile to break
the news of her husband's death as she rode out from Paris to meet Louis
VIII returning from the southern war. For Louis IX during his minority
he showed a father's affection. "He governed marvelously well the
kingdom's needs," says the old chronicler, and when he died, on his
grave they inscribed, "Here lies Guérin, whose life was an untiring
work."
In early life Guérin had, in Palestine, become a Knight Hospitalier of
St. John of Jerusalem, and, as bishop, continued to wear the white habit
of that military order. At the battle of Bouvines, though not an actual
combatant, he exhorted the troops and directed maneuvers, for he was
skilled in the strategy of war. A survey of the enemy's position made
him urge Philippe-Auguste to attack at once, and the king, who knew
Guérin to be _sages homs et de parfont conseil_, obeyed, thus winning
the greatest victory of the century. "On that day French unity received
its baptism."
The king had vowed, were his arms successful, to endow an abbey. Bishop
Guérin laid for him the first stone of the Abbaye de la Victoire, near
his episcopal city.[52] Before this greatest of the bishops of Senlis
died, his cathedral had begun to crown its southwest tower by the
octagon and spire which are the boast of all the Valois country. St.
Louis must have contributed to Senlis' famous tower, which places in
foremost rank, this, the smallest cathedral in France. The unknown
architect gathered features from many a beacon to unite them here in a
masterpiece. He may be said to have created a new type, since his belfry
at Senlis made a school in the region.[53]
The graduation of the upright shaft into the inclined plane, which in
every tower is the crucial point, has here been accomplished with such
address, such rhythm, that precisely at what instant the fusion takes
place is not to be determined. It has been said that the shaft of the
tower is too high in proportion to its spire; at a distance perhaps the
criticism may seem justified, but not on closer view. Some have thought
that Senlis' belfry was a trifle too conscious of its charms, that it
had not the calm poise of Chartres' tower. So it may be; there is more
of the woman than the archangel in it. Its personal graciousness has
become so wedded with the lives of Senlis' townspeople that they wish it
good morning as they pass. The voyager will not find himself many hours
in Senlis without pausing at every coign of vantage to gain some new
silhouette effect of the slender beacon. It is charming when viewed in
the same group as the Gallo-Roman ramparts. And from the open door of
the church of St. Frambourg,[54] it can be studied at leisure.
In the original plan of Senlis' Cathedral there was only an indication
of a transept--two small lateral chapels that open, to-day, from the
choir aisle. When, about 1240, the radiant tower was finished they
undertook to make a real transept. To insert one they had to do away
with four bays of the nave; some ancient columns in the west piers of
the transept witness to this change. In its present form the transept of
Senlis belongs to the XIII century only in its lower walls.
In 1504 a conflagration lasting several days destroyed the cathedral's
upper vaulting and necessitated the total reconstruction of the
clearstory. In consequence, the exterior appearance of this very early
Gothic church is most decidedly Flamboyant. Only the apse and the west
façade have retained their Primary Gothic aspect. Chapels with
complicated pendant vaults were built, aisles were added, and
balustrades put before the tribune opening. Thick coats of whitewash
coarsened the lines; in fact, restorations have been so radical, and
many of them so over-ornate, that this cathedral has been called the
Gothic of bad taste. An extreme criticism, for if some of the changes
are distressing, Senlis' transept façades, which also are later
additions, are to be reckoned among the best work of the final phase of
the national art.
After the fire of 1504 the cathedral chapter sought assistance from the
king: "_Plaise au Roy d'avoir pitié et compassion de la paoure église de
Senlis ... laquelle, par fortune et inconvénient de feu a été bruslée,
les cloches fondues, et le clocher qui est grant, magnifique et l'un des
singuliers du royaume, au moyen du dit feu tellement endommagé qu'il est
en danger de tomber_." Royalty responded generously as the sculpture
shows; at the transept's portals are to be seen the porcupine of Louis
XII, the ermine of Anne of Brittany, and the salamander of Francis I.
Under the learned Bishop Guillaume Parvi, confessor to Francis I, was
laid the first stone of the transept's elaborate south façade in 1521.
On it worked Pierre de Chambiges, son of the noted maker of late-Gothic
frontispieces, and Jean Dixieult. And when it was nearing completion in
1560 the north façade was begun, and finished by the latter master.
Effective, vivid, alertly handsome are Senlis' transept fronts. The wise
traveler, even if he infinitely prefers the purer lines of early Gothic,
will learn to value this florid final expansion of the national art. The
renewal of builders' energy in the XV and XVI centuries was a sumptuous
phase worthy of admiration. Those who are partial to English Gothic do
not need to be warned against depreciating French Flamboyant work. The
advice to be eclectic in travel, so as not to lose any source of
artistic pleasure, is for those whose ideal of the builders' art is that
of the Ile-de-France, comprised between 1150 and 1250. For such the
chief interest of Senlis will be the cathedral's apse, its main façade,
and the splendid tower. Let them widen their sympathies and take in the
effective transept-fronts of the Flamboyant rebirth.
Senlis of the towers, of the silent squares, of the quaint names--rue
des Fromages, rue du Puits-Tiphane, rue des Pigeons Blancs--a charming
aristocratic little city, set in an undulating Corot-like landscape,
dotted with country houses, was the very epitome of well-conditioned
provincial life. Before the summer of 1914 no spot on earth seemed
farther removed from violence and crime. Then came the invading hordes
over the Valois land. On September 2, 1914, the Germans surrounded
Senlis, which, _ville ouverte_ though it was, they proceeded to bombard.
One third of the obus that fell hit the cathedral. That the guns, three
miles away, were pointed on the famous tower would seem to be proved by
the fact that only those houses were damaged which lay in the direct
line between the German battery and Notre Dame.
When the enemy entered the city the mayor (shot later in reprisal) met
them at the Hôtel de Ville. He had scarcely assured them that no troops
remained in Senlis when shots rang out: by ill luck some colonial
colored troops, on retiring, fired a salute. Thereupon followed the
usual accusation that civilians were the combatants, and the usual
tragic scenes of reprisal. Down the main street of the little city
passed the trained wreckers of peaceful homes, prying open the doors to
throw in incendiary bombs. Before night a whole section of Senlis lay an
unsightly blackened ruin.... Then came the victory of the Marne and the
invaders retreated. The havoc done to the cathedral can be repaired,
though, in the process, must be lost the exquisite golden lichen stain
which long ages had achieved. The preservation of Senlis' tower was due
to a curé of the cathedral who fearlessly pleaded for his church before
the German commandant.
THE CATHEDRAL OF SENS[55]
What were Rheims and Soissons before their martyrdom but the
transfiguring of stone and metal and wood; dead matter delved from
the ground or hewn out of the forest, through the labor of man
exalted into forms of absolute beauty, and, because of this
loving labor, transformed ... into a mysterious creation that, in
the words of Suger of St. Denis, was neither wholly of earth nor
wholly of Heaven, but a mysterious blending of both.
--RALPH ADAMS CRAM.[56]
[Illustration: _Senlis' Tower (c. 1230-1250)_]
Sens was a chief Celtic city at the intersecting of the Roman roads from
Lyons to Paris, from Orléans to Troyes. Long did it dispute the title of
primate of Gaul with Lyons and Rheims; even down to the XVI century
Paris was within its jurisdiction. To-day as the express trains rush by
from Paris to Marseilles, many a traveler looks out on a cathedral that
seems to over-tower and overpower a flat, sleepy little town whose name
he scarcely knows. When the cathedral was building in the XII century
Sens was a center of the nation's life, and under a succession of
noteworthy archbishops reached its zenith.
Here at the Council of Sens, in 1140, was scheduled to take place a
final contest between St. Bernard and Abélard, and in that hour of
enthusiasm over abstract controversy, the king with his court and people
of every degree flocked to Sens for the schoolmen's debate on the
Trinity. At the last moment Abélard, the inexhaustible arguer who had
himself called for the test, quitted the combat. Some twenty years later
Pope Alexander III spent a year and a half in Sens, and hither came
Thomas Becket to seek papal indorsement for his opposition to Henry II's
interference in church affairs. Between these two events, 1140 to 1164,
lies the building of Sens Cathedral. At the time of Abélard's and St.
Bernard's visit the present edifice had been started. During the
residence here of Alexander III and the archbishop of Canterbury it was
nearing completion. The pope is recorded as dedicating an altar.
For a time Sens usurped the claim to be the oldest of the Gothic
cathedrals. Its choir was started as Romanesque, but the walls rose
slowly, and before a stone roof crowned the ambulatory the new system of
building had conquered public opinion. The choir-aisle walls, intended
to carry a groin vault, were rearranged to bear one with diagonals. On
the outer wall the diagonals were caught on corbels placed above the
capitals, and though such an arrangement shows maladroitness, the ribs
themselves were made by no novice hand. Sens was a pioneer in the use of
the broken rib to avoid the curving of diagonals: from each keystone,
set precisely in the center of each section, branched the four ribs.
The walls of the procession path and an apsidal chapel opening on the
transept's north arm, are the oldest parts of Sens Cathedral. It is true
that they antedate the dedication of St. Denis, but not by a few
Romanesque vestiges can Sens substantiate its claim to be the first
built of Gothic cathedrals. In its main parts it belongs to the third
quarter of the XII century. It was a distinct advance on Noyon and
Senlis, because it eliminated the deep tribunes over the side aisles.
One of the striking characteristics of Sens is the way that light floods
it from the aisle windows, which are on a noble scale. Because the
church was built during a tentative hour its deficiency lies in the
height of the central nave. For right proportion, when flanked by such
lofty aisles, the nave should have been made considerably higher.
Sens Cathedral was begun by Archbishop Henri-le-Sanglier (1122-43) to
replace a church dedicated at the end of the X century. Such strides has
mediæval archaeology taken in France during the last generations, it is
hard to believe that serious students, during the Congrès Archéologique
held at Sens in 1840, could have considered the present edifice to be
the one dedicated before 1000.
Henri-le-Sanglier had been appointed by Louis VI to the see of Sens
before he had received holy orders, and in the lax spiritual standards
of the day, he saw no harm in living like the feudal lord he was by
birth. He had not Thomas of Canterbury's unbending consistency. When his
worldliness was censured by St. Bernard he changed his way of life, and
ultimately proved himself a loyal and humane pastor.
Of the six archbishops who were to follow him as builders of Sens'
metropolitan church, all of them were national figures. Under the long
rule of Hugues de Toucy (1143-68) the church was mainly erected. He was
the friend of Abbot Suger the pioneer, the friend, too, of Bernard the
regenerator, who came as his guest to Sens, after preaching the Second
Crusade at Vézelay. The same hospitable bishop welcomed on two occasions
the exiled archbishop of Canterbury. The second visit of St. Thomas
Becket was when he had been forced to quit the abbey of Pontigny,
situated close by over the Burgundian border, because Henry Plantagenet
swore to close every Cistercian house in his English and French domains
if further refuge were offered the prelate. Moved by the welcome given
him in his distress by the archbishop of Sens, the famous Englishman
cried out--so his secretary, Herbert of Bosham, records: "Ah, we have
proved the truth of the old saying--'_douce France! ô douce encore, ô
très douce France! Oui, elle est douce, vraiment douce, la France!_'"
By a series of logical inferences the name of the architect of this
Primary Gothic cathedral has been added to the roll call of honor. It is
known that Guillaume de Sens, a French master, was chosen in 1174 by the
chapter of Canterbury to rebuild their cathedral, destroyed by fire. He
drew the plan of Canterbury and had put up its apse, its Lady chapel,
and two bays of the choir, when one day he fell fifty feet from a
scaffold, and returned, in 1180, to his native land to die. An English
architect, also named William, continued the works at Canterbury, always
on the plan of French William.
Now the chevet of Canterbury has strong analogies with that of Sens.
There is the same single chapel in its axis; at Sens other apse chapels
were added in the XVI and XVIII centuries. The profiles were alike in
both cathedrals, and so were the sexpartite vaulting and the embryo
transept. In both Canterbury and Sens is an exceptional feature, of
Champagne origin, which could hardly have been used accidentally by two
men in the same generation. Each alternate pier, at Sens, consists of
twin columns, placed side by side according to the width, not the
length, of the church. At Canterbury, despite subsequent rebuildings,
the same arrangement is still to be found in the bay before the
sanctuary.
Guillaume de Sens was too prominent to have copied another man's work,
and since it is certain that the plan of Canterbury is his, it is now
accepted that he built the cathedral of his native town before he
proceeded to England. The homogeneous choir and nave of Sens show that
they are the work of the years preceding 1175. And Guillaume's claim to
be Sens' architect is further strengthened by a historic link. Not only
did Thomas Becket spend three weeks with Archbishop Hugues de Toucy on
his first arrival in the city during the pope's stay there, but, after
quitting Pontigny, he passed some years in St. Colombe monastery by the
town. Without a doubt he knew the master-of-works who was erecting the
cathedral, and it may have been he who, on his return to his own see,
made the French architect's skill known to his cathedral chapter.
Guillaume was not called to Canterbury, however, till after the
martyrdom of its great archbishop.
Sens Cathedral was completed by a prince of the reigning house of
Champagne, a son of Thibaut the Great, Archbishop
Guillaume-of-the-White-Hands (1168-76). He, too, was Becket's stanch
supporter, and denounced his murder to the pope, though by blood he was
Henry II's cousin. In 1178 he crossed to England to pray by the tomb of
the newly canonized saint--one of the first of the Canterbury Pilgrims
who for over three hundred years were to wend their way to the shrine in
Kent. Through his influence, Becket's friend and adviser, John of
Salisbury, the ablest scholar of his generation, was raised to the see
of Chartres. Both William of Champagne and John of Salisbury received
episcopal consecration from the hands of good Maurice de Sully, the
builder of Paris Cathedral. In his later life Archbishop Guillaume was
transferred to the see of Rheims, and in that cathedral he anointed as
king his own nephew, Philippe-Auguste, whose prime minister he was; when
Philippe II went on the Third Crusade he left as regents his uncle and
his mother, Alix of Champagne. The archbishop's affection for his nephew
led him to sanction the king's divorce from Ingeborg of Denmark and his
marriage to Agnes of Méran, which drew on France the papal interdict,
and on William of Champagne the censures of Innocent III.
The house occupied by Thomas Becket, in the cloister of Sens Cathedral,
was decorated by a statue of him, which disappeared during the
Revolution. During excavations in the cloister, in 1899, they came upon
an image representing a bishop, and marked with the seal of Archbishop
Guillaume-of-the-White-Hands. The statue is now set up in the choir
aisle on the site where once stood an altar dedicated to St. Thomas of
Canterbury.
The tutelary of Sens Cathedral is St. Stephen, the first martyr. A
XII-century statue at the trumeau, or central shaft, of the west door
presents him as the beautiful youthful servant of the Lord. Gazing at it
one thinks of St. Augustine's words: "The Church would never have had
St. Paul but for St. Stephen's prayer." Paul, holding the robes of those
who stoned Stephen, heard the martyr pray for his executioners. The
trumeau statue of St. Etienne with its parallel feet marks the
transition from the column image, such as those at Chartres' western
portal, to the XIII-century type of saintly personages at the doors of
Rheims and Amiens. It escaped mutilation during the Revolution because
some one had the wit to write on the stone tablet in the saint's hand,
_The Book of the Law_. The foliage relief on the shaft is exquisite.
As the XII century closed the archbishop of Sens was Michel de Corbeil
(1194-99), a well-known scholastic writer. Under him and Pierre de
Corbeil (d. 1222), his successor and also a learned teacher from the
Paris schools, the axis chapel at Sens was rebuilt, and the upper
vaulting of choir and nave reconstructed in order to enlarge the
windows. As the longitudinal or wall arches were now raised to the level
of the keystone, the bombé shape of the vault disappeared; in the chevet
the wall ribs show as many as three sets of capitals. The vault sections
of the side aisles, however, remained domical, as originally built.
Two other distinguished brothers, men of great lineage and intellectual
attainment, ruled the see of Sens during many years, Gautier de Cornut
from 1222 to 1241 and Gilles de Cornut, who died in 1254; and they had a
brother who busied himself with the new cathedral at Beauvais. Gautier
de Cornut, who while doctor of law in Paris University served as
chaplain to Philippe-Auguste and Louis VIII, was the envoy sent in 1234
to fetch Marguerite of Provence to be married to Louis IX in Sens
Cathedral, the king then being in his twentieth year. The young princess
of the art-loving Midi came north accompanied by a troop of minstrels.
Again in 1239 St. Louis returned to Sens for the Crown of Thorns, on its
transit from Venice to Paris, and he walked out some miles from the city
to meet it. Barefooted, he and his brother, Robert of Artois, bore back
the previous relics to the cathedral, through streets hung with
tapestries and lighted by candles. The relic rested in St. Étienne's
church all night and then in a solemn, eight-day procession was carried
to Paris. The king had the archbishop write the formal account of it
all. Gautier de Cornut erected the synodal hall which touches the
cathedral's façade, and his own statue and that of the young king
decorated its buttresses. The best civic monument of St. Louis' reign
many think it to be, and as perfect in its own way as the hospital hall
at Ourscamp, its contemporary.
In 1267 the cathedral's southwest tower fell; it may have been one built
in Carolingian times from the proceeds of a gold retable, or it may have
been a XII-century tower of Archbishop Hugues de Toucy's time, as are
the two lower stories of the present northwest tower. Its fall
necessitated the remaking of the last two bays of the nave and of the
damaged western doors during the early XIV century. The side chapels
were built then, too, but they have been rehandled in the present day,
and are now dissimulated behind an arcaded wall. A record of 1319 speaks
of the able Nicholas de Chaumes as architect here before he proceeded to
Meaux Cathedral. He demolished the ancient chapel on the transept's
southern arm, but its corresponding chapel, on the transept's northern
arm, still exists and is, with the ambulatory walls, the oldest part of
the church. Not till after the Hundred Years' War, however, was the plan
to erect a new transept carried through.
Sens then possessed as its archbishop, during forty years, the energetic
Tristan de Salazar (d. 1519) who had fought, sword in hand, with Louis
XII in the Italian wars. Like Bishop Jacques d'Amboise, who was then
finishing at Paris the present Musée Cluny as town house for his abbey
of Cluny, Archbishop de Salazar built the Hôtel Sens in Paris for his
diocesan house. To his own cathedral he added the southwest tower's
upper story (to which later a Renaissance lantern was attached) and he
connected the synodal hall with the episcopal palace by a rich gallery.
Some sculptured panels now attached to a pier in the nave of Sens
Cathedral originally formed part of a tomb he had made for his parents.
It was this munificent art patron who began the late-Gothic transept. In
1490 the most notable architect of the day, Martin Chambiges, was
invited to direct the work, and for four years he gave it his personal
supervision until called to Troyes to make the Flamboyant Gothic façade
of that cathedral.
Sens Cathedral contains some ancient windows, four of which are among
the best in France and allied with Suger's school, though probably
executed as the XIII century opened, since the saddle bars follow the
outline of the medallion pictures. Those four exceptional windows of the
choir aisle sparkle with the jeweled intensity of the golden age of the
vitrine art. In one of them is told the story of St. Eustace, often to
be met with in French iconography, since he figured in the _Golden
Legend_. Another describes the return to England of Thomas Becket and
his immediate martyrdom. Originally next to it hung a companion lancet,
giving Becket's early life, but this was done away with to make room for
a chapel. The other two lancets are of the _Biblia Pauperum_ type. In
one, the parable of the Prodigal Son is given. In the other is the story
of the Good Samaritan, and the half medallions on either side of each
central scene interpret it symbolically. Such correlation of the Old
and the New Testament was most popular in the Middle Ages. Beside a
medallion which shows the traveler fallen among thieves stands the
expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden; and the scene of the
charitable Samaritan is accompanied by pictures of the Saviour's death
and resurrection. They might not be able to write and read, the ordinary
men and women of that day, they had no daily journal to crowd their
minds with half-digested facts, but their souls were fed by sound
ethical truths set forth clearly in their one great book, the cathedral.
The artisan donors of such windows we may be sure knew the symbolic
meaning of every panel.
In the clearstory windows at the curve of Sens' choir is more
XIII-century glass, but it is later work, lacking the marvelous glow of
the choir-aisle lancets. The two big roses of the transept are splendid.
A celestial concert was then a favorite theme. The south rose (1500) was
made by the same Champagne artists, Lyénin, Varin, Verrat, and Godon who
filled the nave of Troyes Cathedral with its high-colored translucent
woodcuts. The north rose of the transept finished in 1504, was the work
of native masters, influenced by the noted school of Troyes. The side
windows in Sens' Flamboyant transept are equally good.[57]
Jean Cousin, born in Sens, 1501, made two of the cathedral's windows,
the rich one of St. Eutropius, in the nave, and the Tiburtine sibyl of
amplest design, in the shrine to the south of the axis chapel. Nothing
could be more resplendent as picture windows, but Gothic-Renaissance
work, whose tendency was to treat each light as an isolated picture, is
not equal to the close-woven patterns of XII-and XIII-century mosaic
glass, which kept itself in subordination to its architectural setting.
The immense superiority of the earlier windows is demonstrated in Sens
Cathedral, which offers us both types at their best.
[Illustration: _The Interior of Laon Cathedral (XII Century). View from
the Tribune Gallery_]
THE CATHEDRAL OF LAON[58]
And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of
heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her
husband.--Apoc. xxi:2, used in the office for the dedication of a
church.
While Sens, Noyon, and Senlis were building, the splendid cathedral of
Laon was begun, about 1160. The usual transition features of Primary
Gothic showed in its retention of tribunes over the side aisles, in the
simultaneous use of round and pointed arches, the beringed colonnettes,
and the salient transept arms. The chapel, in two stories, that opened
on each arm of the transept, was another Romanesque tradition.
The interior of Laon, "the cathedral of Purity, Silence, and Power," is
indeed most impressive. One bay follows another with a regularity that
is accentuated by the interior elevation being in four stories--pier
arcade, tribune arches, triforium wall arcade, and clearstory. It is not
a lofty church, but, like English cathedrals, what it lacks in height is
compensated for in length. There are eleven bays in the nave, and ten in
the choir. Moreover, because it was comparatively low it could build a
square transept-crossing tower, and the average French cathedral was too
high for such a tower to be artistic. Laon and Braine were exceptions
among Ile-de-France churches in having central lanterns; they were
derived from Normandy, since the Rhenish lantern usually was octagonal.
Strange as it may seem to say of the most prominent, most open, and
best-lighted part of a church, there is a blessed seclusion beneath the
wide white tower of Laon that "shuts the heart up in tranquillity."
Down the long church, the stout monolithic piers make two virile lines.
Only during a short period were such sturdy cylinders used, here and in
Notre Dame at Paris are the chief examples, and both cathedrals were
artistically right in preferring their uniform columns, even though both
of them used the sexpartite vaulting that called for alternating ground
supports. The coming cathedrals were to adopt once for all the barlong
system of vaulting, where the concentration of loads fell equally on
every bay, and to evolve a classic type of pier, consisting of a central
cylinder flanked by four semi-attached columns. At Laon a few piers in
the nave experimented with free-standing colonnettes, three of which
were placed in front of the pillar to enlarge, there, the abacus of the
capital on which stood the shafts that mounted to the vault-springing.
The elliptical piers of Beauvais, longer from north to south, were to be
the most perfect solution of the problem of ground supports.
There is no denying that Laon's interior is to-day too white, but we
must remember that originally color was used on the stones, so that any
effect of a hall would have been impossible in the olden times.
Viollet-le-Duc called Laon the laic cathedral _par excellence_. He
considered it a great civic hall wherein the populace "could unite and
enjoy spectacles more or less profane." And even in the flat eastern
wall he found something occultly heretical. The towers, he said, were
more those of a château than a church. He shut his mind to the fact that
Laon was erected largely by its bishops, that it was begun by the choir
end, which is suitable only for divine service, and that if its seven
towers had been crowned with the sky-pointing spires of the architect's
plan, and if its sky-dreaming windows were still intact, there would be
little of the aspect of a town hall about this stately church. Critics
like Huysmans have exaggerated its present iciness: no one can pray in
Laon, he exclaimed; its soul is fled forever. But what would be
Chartres, his spot of election for prayer, were it unsoftened by its
"storied windows richly dight"?
Only a slight amount of ancient glass has survived in Laon. The north
rose of the transept shows pictures of the sciences. Beneath the rose
window in the flat eastern wall are three handsome lancets made by the
school of Chartres early in the XIII century. They show the passing away
of the hieratic Byzantine gesture: in the Annunciation and Visitation
medallions the robes float naturally; in the Nativity scene the natural
gesture of a woman who tests the warmth of the water before bathing the
Holy Child has been well rendered.
If a lack of accessories makes the interior of Laon Cathedral seem
to-day more philosophic than religious, there are certain lovable
individual touches in it that warm both heart and imagination. In the
first place it is a church fairly garlanded with springtime foliage. The
wonder of eternal youth is in its half-curled leaves which the sculptors
conventionalized just enough to make them architectural. Not one sprig,
not one leaf is like another. Never was nature more profoundly loved or
more convincingly interpreted.
Then there are the stone bulls of Laon. They stand high on the western
towers, those sixteen massive oxen, stretching their necks, as if
watching the people climb the steep hill below. Each stands under a
columned canopy. The popular fancy is that they commemorate the patient
beasts who dragged the stones for the cathedral up Laon's precipitous
crags, and there is nothing improbable in the idea. It was a day when
St. Francis was telling man to love his dumb fellow creatures. The
towers of Laon Cathedral are worthy of the magistral setting of the
church on the edge of the abrupt hill where had grown the ancient city.
For miles Laon's towers command the plain, "an assembly without rival
among Gothic monuments." Incomplete though they are, Laon's five towers
come nearer to the ideal plan of seven spires than does any other
cathedral. The corner tourelles pass from one form to another, as they
rise, converting themselves into octagons. "Ponder it well," wrote the
XIII-century architect, Villard de Honnecourt, in his famous sketchbook.
"I have been in many lands, as you can see by this book, but never in
any place is to be found a tower equal to Laon."
Four of the towers are alike, each with the same long lancet openings,
the same free-standing pillars at the corners. Rows of crockets mark the
main lines, for the old-time masters were adepts in every device whereby
to fix the eye on the essential. There are aspects when the fretwork
designs made by Laon's towers against the sky are superb.
The date of the cathedral long gave rise to discussion in the days when
mediæval archaeology was still hazy. No one now contends that the
present Notre Dame is the church which was patched up hastily by Bishop
Bartholomew de Vir after the fire of 1112. That conflagration was a
semi-lawless act. Laon's bishop was also its feudal proprietor, hence a
greedy baronage contended to hold the see. One Gaudry, a knight
adventurer who had served under William the Conqueror in England and
there grown rich, obtained the bishopric of Laon by simony. All his talk
was of hawks, hounds, and hunting. During one of his absences in England
the townspeople set up a commune, and Gaudry bent his energies to
frustrate it. In an uprising in 1112 the infuriated populace murdered
him. The fire, started during the riots, spread to the cathedral, which
was practically consumed. The burghers, being unskilled in arms, were
forced to call to their aid a fierce robber-baron of the house of Coucy,
Thomas of Marle, who, according as he found it profitable, fought, now
against, now for, the communes.[59] It took the king of France half a
lifetime to destroy that "raging wolf," as Abbot Suger called him.
Guizot has brought out that the XII-century uprisings against feudal
exactions on the part of the burgesses were often favored by king and
clergy. Such was the unformed state of society that no liberal general
views could be adhered to; the king is to be found granting charters to
some towns and marching against the rebellious citizens in others. The
bishops of Noyon, Beauvais, and Soissons favored the people's claims.
The prelates of Rheims and Laon opposed them. Such feudalism as that of
Thomas of Marle meant permanent anarchy; for the royal power to
centralize authority then meant law and order.
It is sad to relate that no sooner did the burgess gain his civic rights
than he began to oppress the peasantry. Before the XIII century closed
there were outbreaks of the peasants against the prosperous townspeople.
In our own day has the cry of the underman, voiced by the old Norman
poet, been silenced? "We are men as they. The same in stature, the same
in limb, and the same in strength--_for suffering_. Are we not men even
as they?"
At Laon the antagonism between bishop and citizens continued for a
century; several times the charter was won, only to be abrogated later.
There is food for thought that all through the embittered struggle the
building of the cathedral was carried forward, and it was an enterprise
that required the collaboration of bishop and people. The people might
fight their baron bishop to wrench from him certain civic rights, but
they were aware of the difference between his temporal claims and his
spiritual authority. Their robust faith was not disconcerted by a
discrepancy between "Peter's key" and "Peter's sword." To the end of
time Peter will show his weak human side. Had he not denied thrice? Had
not another of the selected twelve betrayed for paltry lucre? Had not
everyone of them run away in the hour of need?
While Bishop Gaudri's ill-gotten gains were buying him a bishopric there
was in Laon's cathedral chapter a famous scholar who had stoutly
opposed his election. Anselm of Laon, son of a laborer, "the grave, the
sweet, the prudent," was a pupil of St. Anselm of Bec and Canterbury.
For over forty years he taught in Paris and in Laon, and from the
nucleus of his pupils, among whom were Guillaume de Champeaux and
Abélard, was to emerge Paris University, which was not, however, to
appear by name in history till 1215. Anselm of Laon (d. 1117), like his
greater namesake, was a pioneer in scholasticism, which brought to the
study of Christian doctrine not only the aid of tradition, the Old and
New Testaments and the Church Fathers, but also the use of metaphysics
and dialectics. The school of this master at Laon became a veritable
university to which flocked students from Italy, Spain, Germany, and
England.
Laon Cathedral is justly entitled to carve the Liberal Arts on its
façade. A score of the coming notable men of the XII century were
Anselm's pupils; one of them was that bishop who began the Primary
Gothic tower of the cathedral at Rouen. Anselm and his brother trained
the youths who, having heard St. Norbert of Cologne preach in Laon
Cathedral, in 1120, followed him to Prémontré, in the forest of Coucy,
which estate gave its name to the new order Norbert there founded. Like
the Cistercians, so swift an increase had the white canons of Prémontré
that they soon counted a thousand houses over Europe and were an
evangelizing force for their century even as Cluny had been earlier and
as the Franciscans and Dominicans were to be in the XIII century. The
citizens of Laon clamored for Anselm as their bishop when the miserable
Gaudri was killed in 1112, but he declined the honor and directed the
choice to the worthy Bartholomew de Vir, who restored temporarily the
cathedral.
It is not known exactly when was laid the foundation stone of Laon's
Gothic cathedral. By its sculpture, the profiles, and the noticeable
keystones, the archæologists say that it belongs to the last third of
the XII century and that it kept to its original plans, though its
building continued into the first third of the XIII century. The
bishop-founder was a pupil of Anselm's and himself had taught rhetoric
in Paris. Gautier de Mortagne (1155-71) gave generously of his own
revenues to the new works. The choir he built ended in a semicircle and
consisted of the present three bays next the transept. There, and in the
west wall of the transept, the profiles are different from those
elsewhere in the church.
In a second spell of work they finished the transept, the nave, the
towers, and the west façade just before 1200. Laon's façade ranks among
the great western frontispieces of Gothic architecture, a model for that
of Rheims. What chiefly characterizes it are the profound shadows made
by cavernous porches, projecting gables, and other varied surfaces. It
has been called a supreme composition in light and shade. In
accentuating the upward surge of lines it was a pioneer. When the façade
was finished the choir was lengthened by seven bays, and now was
terminated by a flat wall whose prototype is to be found in Laon town in
the church of St. Martin, an early-Gothic edifice, building about 1165.
Various regional churches used the square chevet. As the custom died out
in France, it struck root in England, where the Cistercians made it
popular. Those accustomed to the rectagonal chevet of the English
cathedral may prefer that type, but to a lover of the apse of the French
cathedral, of the curving procession path with its radiating chapels
that mystically suggests the thorn crown around the Sacred Head, it will
ever seem a dull way to end a sanctuary precisely like a transept arm.
The cathedral of Laon was consecrated in 1237. That same century built
the treasure hall and the large chapel beside the west façade. The XIV
century added side chapels between the buttresses, and in those chapels
at Laon appears the academic precision of that skilled but dry period.
About the same time was made a new southern portal for the transept, and
the wheel window over it was replaced by a big Rayonnant Gothic light.
The hill citadel called by Charlemagne in the _Chanson de Roland_ "my
good town of Laon" was held by the invader from August, 1914, to
October, 1918. Though the city was shelled by the French, not a piece of
glass in the cathedral was broken. St. Martin's abbatial, too, is
intact, and the XII-century Templar's church, the only well-preserved
monument in France built by the great military Order. The Prussians'
horses were stabled at first in the cathedral till a general public
protest stopped such a desecration. When the Allies, under General Foch,
drove back the German lines in the final weeks of the war, the retreat
was too swift for much havoc to be wrought. On October 13, 1918, General
Mangin made his triumphal entry into Laon, whose much-enduring citizens
flocked around him in the cathedral to chant a solemn _Te Deum_.
THE CATHEDRAL OF SOISSONS[60]
The other evening before the ruins of a Cistercian abbey, that once
harbored St. Louis and his mother, Blanche of Castile, a group of
Alpine chasseurs and Zouaves fell to recounting their daily feats
of heroism just as in the times of chivalry the strong, swift
strophes of the _chanson de geste_ celebrated knightly prowess. To
the north, the cannon thundered.... And the next morning, a Sunday,
I assisted at Mass in a Gothic-vaulted hall that had served as
_promenoir_ for the monks of Cîteaux. Soldiers filled all the
wooden seats, others thronged the threshold, bareheaded in the
shadow of the ruins.... Then when the sacrifice of the body and
blood of our Lord was celebrated, a song rose in the dawn: "_Kyrie
Eleison! God be praised!_" And the soldiers within the chapel and
without sang before returning to battle as in the ancient _Chanson
de Saucourt: "Kyrie Eleison!"_ Even those harnessing the great cart
horses, those saddling their own restive mounts, those
extinguishing the fires of the night's bivouac, and those charging
the six-wheeled camions, all took up the canticle: "_God be
praised! Kyrie Eleison!_".... And the implacable cannonading to
the north echoed in the deep quarries, whence had come the stones
builded here for God's glory.
--A war picture of Longpont abbey,[61] by GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO, who
visited the battle-front in 1914.
[Illustration: _The Oxen on Laon's Towers_]
To-day the fair white city of Soissons lies a scene of desolation, only
to be likened to a wrecked town of old-time barbarism. They say that
Soissons Cathedral is more damaged than if a geological convulsion had
wrecked it. Deliberately was it taken as a target, though, as French
troops held the highlands round the flat town, there can be no excuse
that the towers were used as posts of observation. The westernmost bays
are ruined; the north side of the big church has been riddled with
projectiles; flying buttresses have been cut off; great rents show in
roof and sides; the vaulting hangs in air; a pier lies prone, its stones
scattered like a pack of cards; the aisles are dismantled, and the
windows, some of which Blanche of Castile gave in 1225, have been
reduced to powdered dust. In one week of January, 1916, over three
hundred projectiles fell on the church, said the old priest, who lived
in the midst of the wreckage, to a visitor to whom he spoke gently of
God's mercy. In the once "sweet and tranquil provincial city, whose soul
was the daughter of honorable simplicity, grass grows in the street.
Soissons is a dead city. Its casementless windows fix you like the eye
of the blind." Always has it lain in the path of war, this ancient
capital of Clovis that has ever been part of the very heart of France,
but never war such as this!
Here, in 486, Clovis won the battle of Soissons that annihilated the
last remnant of Rome's empire in Gaul, and conquered the land to the
Loire. In the evil days of the Hundred Years' War, Soissons suffered.
So depopulated was it by the XVI-century religious wars that it took
over a century to recover. Nor did the Revolution spare the seat of the
ancient monarchies of France. In 1814 occurred an explosion of gunpowder
that wrecked precious windows in the cathedral, some of them the gifts
of Philippe-Auguste. In 1870 the Prussian bombardment of Soissons
devastated what remained of the abbey church of St. Jean-des-Vignes,
whose Flamboyant Gothic spires have been mutilated again in the World
War.[62]
Under the southern flank of the shattered cathedral nestles the diamond
of Primary Gothic art in France, the transept arm built by the crusading
bishop, Nivelon de Chérisy. As by a miracle it has escaped. The most
exquisite thing in France, many of us hold it to be. It has drawn its
devotees back to Soissons time and time again, this perfect thing so
little heralded. They would test a second and a third time the
overpowering first impression it had made. Perhaps it had been some
happy mood, some subtle lingering shadows of the late afternoon, that
had touched it momentarily to an ethereal grace. And then standing face
to face again with its small and stately beauty, those who love this
early-Gothic monument of France know that its power is not a chance or
borrowed comeliness.
Sit before it for hours; study the mystery and play of its lights and
shadows; try to seize in what lies its young poesy of grace, its
maturity of dignity, "its invincible impression of virginity." In vain
to analyze it. Can that intangible quality which is sheer inevitable
beauty be dissected? Those who fall under the spell of its supernal
loveliness lose all false shame that would prune adjectives, lest their
praise be excessive. No glow of words can convey the something celestial
here. The nave and the choir of Soissons Cathedral are XIII-century
Gothic at its prime, and yet they seem merely to be the setting for a
jewel, for the small apse preceded by one bay, which is the transept's
southern arm. That apse and bay are the culmination of the Romanesque
ideals, and at the same time, indissolubly part of the new and richer
art, they crown the Primary Gothic hour.
Soissons' chief church is better documented than Laon's. Bishop Nivelon
I de Chérisy (a Chérisy fell on the field of honor in 1914) occupied the
see from 1176 to 1207. The Romanesque cathedral which he inherited had
become inadequate, so the bishop gave land from his episcopal garden,
and about 1180 the foundation of the south arm of the transept was laid.
Like Noyon's transept, it terminated in a hemicycle, and its interior
elevation was also in four stories, but here was attained a consummate
symmetry not achieved at Noyon. Soissons' curving transept arm is
exceptional in having an ambulatory. The apsidal chapel which opens in
its eastern wall has over it a similar chapel that gives on the tribune
gallery. Slender columns with stilted arches are planted at the entrance
of each of these chapels in the gracious fashion originated by the
Champagne school of Gothic. It was born of a necessity, in order that a
more regular vaulting might be built over the curving aisle. St. Remi at
Rheims had used the same arrangement. So many are the points of
resemblance between Soissons' transept arm and the choir of St. Remi's
abbey church that it is thought the architect of the Champagne abbatial
proceeded to Soissons later; there are the same profiles, the same plan,
the same encircling frieze of sculpture. At Soissons, the architect had
grown bolder and dared to diminish his supports. To have made Soissons'
curving wall of arches and colonnettes proves him to have been, not only
well practiced in mason-craft, but a man of genius who had visions. He
here created a thing apart. The exterior of the transept's arm is
unimpressive and plain; the lower windows are round-arched. Inside, the
pointed arch reigns, however. "The king's daughter is all glorious
within."
The prelate who built Soissons Cathedral was a remarkable personage and
played a foremost part on the Fourth Crusade. Villehardouin tells us
that it was Bishop Nivelon de Chérisy who was sent as an envoy to
Innocent III, when against papal commands the Crusaders had turned aside
to capture the Christian city of Zara on the Dalmatian coast. The
bishop-ambassador found the pope at Viterbo and obtained from him the
raising of the excommunication on condition that the knights should
proceed direct to Palestine. We all know how, a second time, they went
filibustering. Among the first to scale the walls of Constantinople was
Nivelon de Chérisy; with him was the bishop of Troyes. When the chief
barons met to elect the first Latin emperor of Constantinople, it was
Bishop Nivelon who passed out to the waiting crowd to announce that
Baldwin of Flanders had been chosen--Baldwin who began the Cloth Hall at
Ypres--and it was he who crowned Baldwin in St. Sophia. When that new
emperor was captured by the Bulgars the bishop of Soissons returned to
Europe for aid.
All the time that he was absent in the Holy Land Nivelon had devoted the
revenues of his see toward the renewal of the cathedral. Strangely
enough, it was this same prelate who also built Soissons' choir, which
in scale and plan differs so radically from the transept arm. The
fleeting hour of Primary Gothic was over. The new art was moving forward
swiftly; irresistible the development of its principles and impossible
at such a time that the work of one decade could be similar to the
decade preceding it unless, as at Laon, the primitive plan was
insistently adhered to. Whoever the master that designed Soissons' choir
and nave, he incorporated the perfect transept into his bigger church
with reverence. Not to dwarf it was his main care, for he bowed before
the touch of perfection in his predecessor's work, and sought to give to
his own monument, different though it was, a like clarity and noble
simplicity. Examine the skill with which choir and nave are joined to
the small transept arm. It is lower than they, it has four vertical
stories to their three, and yet no discrepancy is felt. It was as if the
new builder said: "Here is a miracle of force and grace, done in a
fugitive hour never to be recaptured. Let us enshrine it fittingly."
In 1212 services were held in the finished choir. The nave proceeded
without interruption and was in use in the first years of St. Louis'
reign. Probably the final touches were given to it by that bishop of
Soissons of whom Joinville tells, Mgr. Jacques de Castel, _fort et
vaillant homme_, who started with the king on the crusade of 1248. After
Mansourah's battle and the disastrous retreat toward Damietta good
Bishop Jacques felt such a desire "to go to God" that he rushed alone to
attack the infidels, whose swords soon "dispatched him to God's company
with the martyrs."
Singular good taste has at all times guided the builders of Soissons.
The XIV century decided to make a northern arm to the transept; and as
if to avoid all hint of rivalry with its peerless neighbor, the new
structure was finished by a flat end wall without a portal.
The cylinder piers of Soissons choir and nave are a distinguishing trait
of the church interior, neither too high nor too short. Before each is
engaged a slender shaft which rises to the level of the springing and
causes the edifice to appear more lofty than its reality. Everywhere, in
the church, the fitting of the stones was done with peculiar nicety,
though the picking out of the mortar lines in black, a recent
innovation, was a sad mistake. In the choir and nave the clearstory
windows were an advance on those of Chartres, their model, for the
lights were made longer, and the oculus, above the twin lancets,
smaller, which gave greater compactness to the whole composition. St.
Gereon at Cologne copied these windows. Marburg's church also was aided
by Soissons.
The talc of this desolate city during the World War is heartrending. The
Germans first entered Soissons on September 1, 1914. The mayor had fled.
But an admirable woman, Madame Macherez, the widow of a senator, went to
the _état-major_ of the Prussians and assumed the responsibility to keep
order among the civilians: "_Le maire c'est moi_." Already the poets of
France have enshrined the memory of this heroine of sixty winters who
saved her city from pillage:
Le regard bleu comme strié de lave
De Jeanne Macherez qui nous sauva Soissons.
Ah! la vieille brave!
For ten days the Germans occupied the town. The first battle of the
Marne caused their departure on September 12th. Then a French reverse in
January, 1915, let them draw near enough to the city to bring it within
the range of fire, and such was its tragic fate till the Germans'
strategic retreat in the spring of 1917. The enemy had intrenched
himself solidly in the vast quarries on the left bank of the Aisne, and
month after month poured his fire on desolated Soissons. Then came the
final grand act of the war. Rolling forward in overwhelming numbers in
March, 1918, the invaders drove the French troops from Soissons after a
desperate resistance in the streets. There they encamped until the first
days of the following August, when the French army re-entered the
smoking ruins of a dead city over which stood a phantom cathedral.
Noyon, Senlis, Sens, Laon, and Soisson, are with Notre Dame of Paris the
first cathedrals of the national art. They are far from being the
complete list of Primary Gothic monuments, which includes such churches
as the Trinité at Vendôme, two churches at Étampes,[63] the collegiate
of Notre Dame at Mantes, the Trinité at Fécamp, and Lisieux Cathedral.
There are the two towers built in an hour of religious enthusiasm: the
_clocher vieux_ at Chartres and the belfry of St. Romain at Rouen. The
nave of Angers Cathedral is the Primary Gothic of the Plantagenet
school.
The Attica of Gothic art is the Ile-de-France, and where Picardy touches
it on the north, and Champagne on the south. In that land filled with
never-to-be-forgotten churches speaks the clarity of French genius in
its classic simplicity. The beauty of such churches comes from their
rightness of proportion, that quality which gives the most enduring joy
in architecture, beyond all richness of detail or startling effect. From
such churches one learns the difference between the architect born and
the architect made. The supreme quality of proportion must be innate; it
is never acquired. The artist blessed with it may only produce a small
masterpiece, such a church as that of St. Yved of Braine or a St.
Leu-d'Esserent, but one is sure that he would not exchange the glow
which his work gave him for the fame of building even a Strasbourg.
It is in the early-Gothic churches of the Ile-de-France that the taste
is best purified and trained. There the sense of beauty is
spiritualized. In them art gives an entity to what is ethereal, art
seems to make tangible what is impalpable. In them the heart feels the
loveliness of the space inclosed as the eye rejoices in the inclosing
walls. There is something of poignancy in such churches. Standing in all
the promise of their youth, of the youth of the greatest architecture
the world ever produced, they gravely admonish us that beauty even as
theirs is but a momentary lifting of the veil. To such churches the
memory returns with nostalgic regret amid the magnificence of the Gothic
expansion, when the leaves opened wide to show the golden pollen. But
the sadness which the early-Gothic churches of France rouse in the soul,
is it not the stumbling name we give to an eternal Hope? "There are no
hours in this cathedral," wrote Rodin of Soissons; "there is
Eternity."[64]
THE ABBATIALS OF ST. REMI AT RHEIMS, AND NOTRE DAME AT
CHÂLONS-SUR-MARNE[65]
There are two things for which all the Faithful ought to resist
unto blood, Justice and Liberty.--PIERRE DE CELLE, Abbot of St.
Remi (1162-81).
Before closing our crowded chapter on Primary Gothic cathedrals, let us
add a few notes on a few early-Gothic churches. Those of chief interest,
in the story of the national art, are the big abbey churches at Rheims
and at Châlons, sister monuments, equal in size to cathedrals. So
closely do they resemble each other in plan and ornamentation that it is
thought one architect planned both. They are the earliest Gothic
edifices in Champagne.
Notre Dame at Châlons-sur-Marne was reconstructed soon after 1157. Three
periods of work appear in it. The transept and the four towers--which
give an imposing air to the church--belong to the Romanesque rebuilding
of 1130. The towers which stand between choir and transept are not set
symmetrically, since, in that to the south, use was made of the
foundations of an earlier tower, a boundary mark between the lands of
the big abbey and those of the bishop of Châlons.
In 1157, the Romanesque choir of Notre Dame collapsed, and when rebuilt
the citizens of the ancient city on the Marne displayed the same pious
enthusiasm as had the men and the women of Chartres in 1145. In 1165,
Guy de Bazoches, then a canon of Châlons Cathedral, wrote to his sister
to describe how all ages and conditions brought material to the new
church of Notre Dame-en-Vaux, and how the people, harnessed to carts,
sang canticles as they labored. When the new Gothic choir was under way
the nave of 1130 was remodeled. The pier arches and the tribune arches
were made pointed, and the upper walls were raised in order that a
Gothic vaulting might be added.
Notre Dame's choir is very beautiful. Its three apse chapels open on the
ambulatory, by columns and stilted arches, perhaps the first time this
disposition of Champagne Gothic was used. Soon it was repeated in St.
Remi at Rheims. Auxerre and St. Quentin also used it, and it reached its
apotheosis in the ethereal charm of Soissons' transept. Notre Dame at
Châlons was in other ways a precursor; here first were set in each bay
of the clearstory three windows side by side, a triplet of lancets that
started the complex fenestration of the new art. In its first plan were
no flying buttresses, but they were soon added when it was found that
the thrust of the upper vaulting was not sufficiently counterbutted. In
the XV century the Flamboyant south porch was built. Of the XVI century
are some rich windows of the school of Troyes, now set in the nave's
aisles. One of them represents the victory of Spain's crusaders over
Islam at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, and is the best battle scene
depicted in colored glass. With its beautiful Gothic cathedral, its
immense abbatial, and all of its churches rich with storied windows, one
is profoundly grateful that Châlons-sur-Marne only for a short hour
early in the World War formed part of that "_ligne doulereuse et
triomphale, ce ruban de pourpre et de lumière qui s'étend de Belfort au
rivage des Flandres, la Voie Sacrée_."
Tragic the fate of its sister abbatial, St. Remi, in martyred Rheims.
That grand ancestral church lies well-nigh mortally wounded on the field
of honor. It stood up above the city as prominently as the cathedral
itself, and has been mercilessly wrecked. The vaulting has fallen, and
great rents have been torn in the walls of the precious Primary Gothic
choir. A recent traveler found that its devastated nave recalled gaunt
Jumièges.
Some ten years after the reconstruction of Notre Dame at Châlons, the
monks of St. Remi began to make over their abbey church under the
inspiration of Abbot Pierre de Celle, of the same lineage as the heiress
of Braine who, with her husband, a brother of Louis VII, built the
church of St. Yved. While John of Salisbury was a young student in
France, Pierre de Celle entered into a friendship with him which
continued to deepen till their death, both of them being men of the
highest culture, strong literary abilities, and solid character. Pierre
de Celle succeeded the English scholar as bishop of Chartres in 1181;
_summi et incomparabilis viri_, so his epitaph sums him up.
It was this distinguished churchman who built, about 1170, the superb
choir of St. Remi, and who remodeled as Gothic the ancient Romanesque
nave. The choir had five radiating chapels, each of which opened on the
ambulatory in the beautiful Champagne way, by slender columns bearing
stilted arches. As tribunes were built over the aisles, the wall
elevation was in four stories, and below two of them ran friezes of
sculptured foliage. As if the architect felt that he had thus
over-accentuated the horizontal line, he bound his triforium and
clearstory into one composition by continuous moldings, a precocious
first step toward the glazed triforia of Rayonnant Gothic. Originally no
flying buttresses braced this early-Gothic choir; those that were added,
about 1180, are probably the first ever made. Nothing could better show
the swift development of Gothic structure than to compare the plain old
flying buttresses of St. Remi with the luxuriant counterbutting members
of Rheims Cathedral built fifty years later.
Between St. Remi's choir and the hemicycle transept of Soissons
Cathedral there is such similitude of profile, detail, and plan that it
is thought the same architect designed both. The able Pierre de Celle
built the two westernmost bays of St. Remi's nave, and opened the
tribune on the middle vessel with Gothic arches. He also built the west
façade, which to-day is ancient only in its lower stories, as it was
reconstructed in 1840. The north tower was re-done in the XII century;
the south one is of the XI century, Abbot Herimar's time.
With book in hand should be read the complicated story of St. Remi's
nave and transept, the ancient Romanesque edifice re-dressed as Gothic
in 1170. Nothing remains of the church built in the IX century under
Bishop Hincmar of Rheims. The oldest parts extant are the piers of the
nave, which belonged to the reconstruction of the abbatial by Abbot
Airard (1005-33). His successor, Thierry (d. 1041), decided that the
works then under way were on too elaborate a scale to be within his
means, so he simplified the plan. The outer side aisles were suppressed,
the archivolts were doubled, the bays widened, and the old columns
replaced by compound piers. In the transept his work still exists in the
west wall (north arm) where are two stories of arcades supported by
thick, short, cylinder piers whose capitals are coarsely carved acanthus
leaves.
The rest of the transept (save what was added in 1170 to connect it with
the Gothic choir and the re-dressed nave) is the work of Abbot Herimar
who raised the west towers. Under him occurred the notable dedication of
St. Remi's new Romanesque church, in 1049, by Leo IX, the reformer, with
whom the Benedictine Order took possession of the papacy for some vital
years of needed regeneration.
St. Bruno of Cologne, the future founder of the Carthusian Order, was a
student in the episcopal school of Rheims while Romanesque St. Remi was
building. And later he returned from Germany to direct the school from
1057 to 1075 with great prestige. His most notable pupil, Eudes de
Châtillon, became the pope of the First Crusade, Urban II. Feeling the
call for a life of prayer and retirement, Bruno thought of joining the
group of earnest men about to commence the Cistercian Order, but his
destiny led him to Grenoble, near which in the mountains he began the
Grande Chartreuse (1084) where they say reform never was needed.[66]
In St. Remi's abbatial the last phase of Gothic art was to be
represented. The transept's south façade is Flamboyant, and over its
sculptured portal is a highly colored XV-century window. The façade was
finished by Abbot Robert de Lenoncourt (d. 1531), who later became
archbishop of Rheims. To his abbey church he presented ten rich
tapestries relating the life of the first bishop of the city, St.
Remigius, who baptized Clovis in 496, and whose rule of seventy years is
the longest spiritual reign on record. Clovis and Clotilda founded the
abbey. At its church altar St. Louis was knighted. On the day of Charles
VII's coronation the barons rode their steeds into the basilica,
dismounting at the sanctuary to ask for the sacred ampulla needed for
the king's anointing in the cathedral.
In the clearstory windows of St. Remi's choir were thirty-three lancets
in which were portrayed the archbishops of Rheims from holy Remigius to
Robert of France, brother of Louis VII, who was ruling here from 1162 to
1175, while Abbot Pierre was building his choir. The windows were
probably set up in the time of Archbishop Robert's successor, Archbishop
Guillaume of Champagne, who had finished the cathedral at Sens. They
were memorable for their lovely browns and greens, and were allied,
undoubtedly, with St. Denis' glass, though executed by local workers.
Deep borders surrounded each lancet. Similar ornate borders and a
magnificent deep blue color distinguished still older XII-century
windows in the tribune gallery. The central lancet was an extraordinary
Crucifixion, somewhat like that at Poitiers. An irreparable loss to art
is the destruction of St. Remi's windows, though it is said that some of
them were dismounted in time and carried to a place of safety.
ST. QUIRIACE CHURCH[67] AT PROVINS
Provins, une des plus charmantes villes de France, rivalise avec la
vallée de Cachemire.... Des croisés rapportèrent les roses de
Jéricho dans cette délicieuse vallée, où, par hasard, elles prirent
des qualités nouvelles, sans rien perdre de leur couleurs.--BALZAC,
_Pierrette_ (whose scene is Provins).
Another Primary Gothic church in Champagne is St. Quiriace at Provins,
which one goes out of one's way to see because Provins is one of the
most individual little towns in France, still in part surrounded by
massive XII-and XIII-century ramparts. Thibaut IV the Singer added to
the great walls of the lower town about 1230. They say that when
crusaders drew near to Jerusalem on its hill encircled by its walls and
towers they often cried out, "Provins!" Once the population of this
shrunken little city rivaled that of Paris. Here were held annual fairs
to which flocked the merchants of Europe, and the sensible counts of
Champagne encouraged their visitors by wise regulations and strictest
justice. The money of Provins was accepted in Florence and Rome.
The valley of roses was the favorite residence of the reigning counts.
Here Thibaut IV, the most celebrated lyric poet of the Middle Ages,
wrote his songs that wedded the art of the Midi troubadour with the salt
of the northern trouvère. His son, Thibaut V, married the daughter of
St. Louis and brought her in state to Provins, "_où ils firent leur
entrée accompagnés d'une grande foison de barons_," wrote Joinville, who
had helped to arrange the match. Thibaut V's heart is contained in a
XIII-century monument now in the chapel of the Hôtel Dieu, which
hospital was originally the ancient palace of the countesses of
Champagne. Thibaut V and his wife died returning from the tragic last
crusade of Louis IX. Their niece Jeanne married the king of France, and
the prosperous days of Champagne ended when it merged its independence
in the royal domain, for new regulations soon impaired the popularity of
its famous fairs. It was Countess Jeanne of Navarre who persuaded her
seneschal, Joinville, to write his reminiscences.
In the days when Provins was a world center St. Quiriace church was
begun about 1160 by Henry the Liberal, the reigning count who was
warmest patron of John of Salisbury when the latter, forced to quit
England, lived in Provins. Little more than the choir of St. Quiriace
now remains. In the tympanum of a late-Gothic portal is a XIII-century
image of Christ. The semicircular chevet is boxed in a square ambulatory
on which open square eastern chapels. The shafts are banded with
annulets. There is Romanesque feeling in the zigzag ornamentation on the
heavy ribs; the round arch reigns in the triforium, although the pier
arcades below are pointed. The choir shows a curious experiment in
vaulting hardly to be called successful: three bays are embraced by the
vault section of eight branches.
St. Quiriace crowns the hilltop; in the lower town is St. Ayoul, whose
portal sculpture (c. 1160) is of the same type as the three western
doors at Chartres, as is the portal of St. Loup-de-Naud
(Seine-et-Marne), close by.[68] Those who have fallen under the spell of
Chartres' fascinating column statues will always study their sister
images with interest.
Epitaphs on the walls of St. Quiriace recall two true shepherds of this
church, one, who went daily into the hills to teach children and to tend
on the sick poor in their homes, and the other, who opened up the
forgotten crypt and left a school and presbytery to his parish. There
is a quaintly worded tablet of the XVI century telling of the _haute et
puissante dame_, the Marquise de Chenoise, who had "for God a tender
solid piety; for her husband a submissive, respectful love; for her
children a Christian and reasonable tenderness; for her friends a
sincere and generous affection; for the poor charity without limit; and
for the rest of the world _une bonté, une douceur, une honestété
charmante_." One would not mind being the rest of the world for this
gracious person. Both her sons were killed in one week, fighting under
Turenne, so she passed the last years of her life in a retirement, which
"she sanctified by prayer, and her prayer she nourished and sustained by
good works." The robust piety of Bossuet's preaching breathes in such
records. In St. Remi's abbatial at Rheims is the eulogy of another good
lady of Champagne who was "Rachel in beauty, Rebecca in fidelity,
Suzanna in purity, Tabitha in piety of heart, Ruth in sentiment, and
Anna by good works." Paragons those old-time ladies seemed to be!
ST. YVED AT BRAINE[69]
I am just back from the battle line in that Royal Domain of
Soissons, where the soul of ancient France seems more itself than
in any other region, country of martyrs, and of kings, of
Merovingian crypts, of the donjon of Coucy, of the five apses of
St. Yved--realm of the first race of rulers bearing vestiges of the
greatest history of France.--GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO, 1914.
Strictly speaking, St. Yved at Braine is not so much a Primary Gothic
monument as it is a link between that first tentative hour and the
fuller development of the national art represented by Rheims and Amiens.
In the same group as Braine, between Primary Gothic and the Era of the
Great Cathedrals, are St. Leu d'Esserent, Montréal, Vézelay's choir, and
the church of St. Laumer at Blois.
Braine, on the ancient Roman highroad between Rheims and Soissons, had
been a farm of the Frankish kings. In the VII century it belonged to
the father of St. Ouen, and it was here that the future bishop of Rouen,
as a child, was blessed by a passing guest, the Irish missionary St.
Columbanus, whose Celtic rule of Luxeuil dominated, in Gaul, the century
called of saints.
Lady Agnes of Braine espoused a son of Louis VI, the turbulent Count of
Dreux (d. 1188), and, from them came the funds for St. Yved, the second
foundation of the new Order of Prémontré. The recorded date of the
enterprise is from 1180 to 1216, but as the church is perfectly
homogeneous, it must have been built in one campaign, probably in main
part before the dedication of 1216.
As a composition, the plan of the collegiate is original. The apse
chapels on each side of the choir chapel are placed on the bias so that
the sanctuary opens out like a fan, with five altars visible at the same
time. The arrangement was copied in far-off Hungary in St. Martin's
church at Kassovie, built for the king by the wandering Picard artist
Villard de Honnecourt. In Cologne the church of St. Gereon, and in
Marburg that of St. Elizabeth, show the influence of Braine. St. Léger's
abbatial at Soissons copied it. St. Yved has a square transept-crossing
tower that opens still farther the central part of the edifice. Carved
about the interior is a cordon of free springtime foliage. There is
youth in every line of this beautiful white church. The superb
monocylindrical columns and their capitals are robust virility itself.
Everywhere is firmness of touch, and never has the unity been marred by
patchwork reconstructions. Like its neighbor, Soissons, the same nicety
of stonework is shown.
Before the Revolution the collegiate at Braine harbored an unparalleled
collection of tombs, since here for centuries were laid to rest the
barons and bishops of the proud family of Dreux, warriors at Bouvines,
crusaders, and donors of storied windows at Chartres and Rheims. The
four west bays of the church of Braine were stupidly demolished after
the Revolution, because funds for repairs were at that time lacking.
From the destroyed portal were saved the two statues now set in the
choir's wall. They represent the Coronation of Our Lady; the robes flow
easily and there is scarcely a touch of Byzantine rigidity left in them.
Twice during the late World War was Braine's collegiate in the direct
path of invasion. The first battle of the Marne freed it, but in May,
1918, the Germans again entered the little town. Then swept forward the
second battle of the Marne, and Braine was liberated in September. One
can only pray that, in such hasty retreats, St. Yved escaped mutilation.
ST. LEU D'ESSERENT[70]
I think that that style which is called Gothic is endowed with a
profound and a commanding beauty, such as no other style possesses
... and which probably the Church will not see surpassed till it
attain to the Celestial City.... The Gothic style is as harmonious
and as intellectual as it is graceful.--CARDINAL NEWMAN.
St. Leu d'Esserent is one of the small but perfect churches of the
classic Ile-de-France that satisfy both eye and soul by the exquisite
justness of their proportions. Its serene white charm is unobtrusive.
Only a master of the inmost heart of France could have produced the
assured rightness of its proportions. Unforgettable are the moments
spent in this Benedictine abbatial on the Oise; sometimes up and down
its lovely white avenue flits some happy lost bird, rejoicing in the
paradise of quietude he has found.
The quarries round St. Leu d'Esserent were noted, and many a church of
France has been made of their firm white stones. The origin of Gothic
art is comprised, thinks M. Lefèvre-Pontalis, in this region where good
quarries abounded, with Senlis taken as a center. A line from Senlis to
Laon, if carried round, would pass through Rheims, Provins, Montereau,
Étampes, Vernon, Amiens, Péronne, St. Quentin. Well within that
circumference lies St. Leu d'Esserent.
The Benedictine church stands on prominent foundations overlooking the
river loved of Corot and Daubigny. The priory was founded and presented
to great Cluny by a knight of Esserent as thank-offering for his ransom
from the Saracens by monks of St. Benedict. Of the church built in that
XI century, there remain only the two stout columns, with archaic
capitals, which now are embedded in the westernmost bay of the nave.
About 1150 the present church was begun, and for a century continued
building, in three distinct bouts of work. First was made the west
façade, only one of whose Romanesque towers was ever finished with a
spire, the octagonal faces of which were relieved by curious lancelike
ridges not repeated elsewhere. In the narthex, or porch between the
towers, was tried an experiment to eliminate the so-called domical shape
of the first Gothic vaults. The transverse arches were loaded with
masonry to raise them to the vault's apex. Experimental also are the
ungainly diagonals, in part ornamented with Norman chevrons, that span
the tribune over the forechurch (c. 1150). The ribs are not free of the
vault web, so elasticity is missing.
During the last quarter of the XII century, the chevet was built, as
were the two towers placed beside the apse, an arrangement derived from
Rhenish churches. Of that time, too (c. 1180), is the double bay,
surmounted by a sexpartite vault which precedes the apse. There is no
transept. The recently finished choir of Senlis Cathedral influenced the
ambulatory and apse chapels of St. Leu. At Senlis and here occur the
earliest examples of double flying buttresses. The six bays of the nave
were added about 1220, after a pause in the works. Previously, each bay
of the church had been lighted by a single lancet; now two lancets
surmounted by an oculus were used, which added much dignity to the
exterior aspect of the edifice. Over the axis chapel was built a second
story. The unvaulted tribunes, above the side aisles, were transformed
into a sort of triforium by building a wall slightly behind their
arcaded openings. As that wall was pierced by some odd little square
windows, this may be regarded as one of the first essays of a glazed
triforium, the feature which was soon to develop into the decorative
richness of St. Denis, Troyes, Le Mans, Tours, and Beauvais.