Notre Dame of Paris and Other Churches of the Capital[71]
It is important to meditate often and with ardor and respect on the
documents which the ancestors have left us.--ST. THOMAS AQUINAS.
The Era of the Great Cathedrals was inaugurated by Notre Dame of Paris,
the most imposing Gothic church hitherto attempted. The popular voice
has chosen to group it among the chief four, with Chartres, Rheims, and
Amiens--all four of them dedicated to Our Lady, though in a special way
Notre Dame of the capital seems to have appropriated the name.
Of the four, the cathedral of Paris was the first built, and traits of
the Romanesque epoch lingered in it, such as the tribune galleries over
the side aisles, the division of its interior wall into four vertical
stories, and the Byzantine feeling of its earlier sculpture. The piers
were massive single columns of true majesty. In the sixth pier of the
nave, counting from the east, an experiment was tried when an engaged
shaft was added to its front. The seventh pier (c. 1192) marks a date in
the development of Gothic structure since with it was made the type of
ground support which was to predominate in the XIII century--four
engaged shafts around a central pillar. When the middle core was made
elliptical, as at Beauvais, the type pier was achieved.
[Illustration: _Notre Dame of Paris. View from the South_]
Notre Dame of Paris used the sexpartite system which calls for
alternating ground supports. Either the uniform piers here were laid
before a sexpartite vault was thought of, or else the architect
preferred them for æsthetic reasons, and in this case he certainly was
right. Double aisles about both nave and choir differentiate the
interior of Notre Dame of Paris from that of the average cathedral. The
far-stretching aisles of this church compose vistas of unsurpassed
picturesqueness and variety of perspective. Some have said that the
central nave is not sufficiently wide for such a stretch of lateral
aisles, and have found a certain monotony in the clearstory, tribune,
and pier arcade being of equal height. Originally, beneath the
clearstory were small circular unglassed apertures giving on the rafters
over the tribune. Those oculi were done away with during the XIII
century, when the clearstory windows were lengthened for the better
lighting of the church. During his able restoration of Notre Dame, M.
Viollet-le-Duc found hidden under the pavement some of the discarded
window frames, and he took the liberty (which many regret) of replacing
a few in the bays near the transept, thus marring the uniformity of the
interior.
Despite the enlargement of the upper windows and the changes made to
give more light to the tribunes, none can deny that, in gloomy weather,
Notre Dame can be somber and even cavernous. Yet who, of its devotees,
would have it different? Supreme cathedral it is for that supremest of
hymns, the _Dies Iræ_--sound and sense and vision welded. To exchange
its severe majesty for an expanse of brilliant glass--save Suger's
glass--is unthinkable. In Notre Dame you comprehend the spectacular
repentances of the Middle Ages. Here, when pestilence stalked the city
or the enemy was at the gate, have echoed the _Miserere_ and the _Libera
nos, Domine_.[72]
There is an individuality in the cathedral of Paris that overrides every
criticism. Perpetually does the worshiper find in it new aspects, in the
dim, low aisles full of mystery, in the gleam of transept windows as
seen through the tribune arches while one listens, perhaps, to a lenten
friar preacher discoursing of sin, justice, and the judgment to come;
here on the very spot where Dominic himself taught the same sobering
lessons; here where, six hundred years later, his son, Lacordaire, held
the manhood of Paris spellbound. Or, again, one gazes down the length
of the church, with its incomparable perspective, while around one rise
the voices of strong men fresh from the battle of Verdun, fresh from
their firm "They shall not pass," and their _Magnificat_ of thanksgiving
to Notre Dame swells in a volume of sound like the eternal sea. The
crusaders of St. Louis' time prayed, too, for strength in Notre Dame of
Paris.[73]
The curve of the sanctuary as seen from the west end of the nave is one
of the splendors of the monument, and no chevet ever built surpassed it.
The cause of the magic is practical--a structural problem solved, as is
the case with the best aspects of Gothic art. At that eastern curve
extra piers were inserted between the double aisles in order to obviate
the difficulty of vaulting such irregular trapeze-shaped sections.
The enthusiast maintains that the exterior of Notre Dame surpasses that
of all other cathedrals. Certainly better transept façades were never
made nor was apse more romantic than that of the chief church of Paris,
as it rises in three grandiose steps, with flying buttresses of wide
span leaping with an audacity that fairly catches the breath; and again
the success is a case of sound science solving a problem.
The west façade is an accepted classic, "an architectural glory of
France," irreproachable. Once the intelligence has grasped its
pre-eminence, allegiance to it will never waver. The frontispieces of
Rheims and of Rouen are richer and may appeal more to the imagination.
It is possible that the severe dignity of Paris may even chill at first.
But what clarity of plan! Four strong buttresses accentuate the big
square parallelogram. Excess of ornamentation has been avoided in order
that the whole may stand forth. Lest the two towers might appear to rise
abruptly from the massive, some master hand made there the graceful open
colonnade.[74]
The façade of Notre Dame is true to its epoch in its appeal to the
intellect rather than to the emotions. It was built in the golden age of
scholasticism, when religion and philosophy went hand in hand, when the
teachers in the schools of Paris, the _cité lettré_, the _oeil du
monde_, thought that Faith and Reason could give mutual aid one to the
other, that the truths of Revelations could coincide with the natural
judgment.
Scholasticism has been belittled by the modern sophists from the time of
the XVIII-century Encyclopædist to the XIX-century superman. Yet
scholasticism was an important factor in the formation of the French
intellect, which, in its virile youth, it put through a course of useful
mental gymnastics. Precisely the race, whose ancestors sharpened their
wits in the _Sic-et-Non_ debates of the mediæval schools of Paris, is
to-day pre-eminent in precision of language and freedom from fogginess
of thought. Easy enough for the modern mind to ridicule the quarrel of
generations over nominalism and realism, pursued with the personal heat
of a modern political campaign.[75] Certainly the abuse of the
scholastic system led to hair-splitting disputes, for the deductive
method, when carried to excess, ends in thin subtlety. But why judge a
system by its extremes? Because XIV-century architecture grew rigid with
set formulas and the abuse of its own laws, does that discredit the
virile period to which it succeeded?
The bishops who built Notre Dame were notable scholastics. The
generations who built cathedrals were impregnated with the certainty
that what was Christian was rational. Scholasticism produced St. Thomas
Aquinas, whose philosophy has outlived a dozen systems, whose _Summa_
was placed on the assembly table of the Council of Trent, the sole
companion of the Scriptures, Aquinas, whose sanity of ethics and
doctrine was held up by Leo XIII as the best guide amid current errors.
With Aquinas, who taught the inextricable union of Faith and Reason,
Christian philosophy reached its zenith.[76] Too long has it been the
fashion to look on orthodoxy as a sign of mental inferiority. Professors
still dismiss the _Summa_ with a scathing line. They have never opened
its pages, perhaps, but second-hand knowledge to vast regions of human
thought is no impediment to a chair in the modern university.
"Abstractions as repulsive as they are frivolous," is the dictum of a
group of present-day French scholars who seem to think that to belittle
things mediæval is proof of patriotism.
We have looked on at the rehabilitation of certain mediæval saints. It
was not so long ago that the poor man of Assisi was patronized as an
ignorant fanatic. The appeal of St. Francis is to the emotions, while
that of St. Thomas Aquinas is to the intellect, so, perhaps, it is
expecting too much to hope that some day the average man may appreciate
this thinker who set sane boundaries round the human mind. Too long have
the prime sanities of reason been flouted by hazy abstract thinking in
the void; too long has man shut his eyes to the fact that a crime of the
intellect is of more consequence to mankind than a crime against the
civil law; too long has applause been given to philosophers who
obliterated the distinctions between right and wrong--like Hegel,
teaching the identity of Being and non-Being--so that the very soul of
the peoples grew perverted and appalling cataclysms threatened
civilization.
What the older centuries thought of Aquinas, the painter as well as the
poet tells us. In the Louvre hangs Benozzo Gozzoli's picture of the
_doctor angelicus_ sitting in luminous repose amid pope, doctors,
saints, and the sages of antiquity, and the inscription runs: "_Vere hic
est lumen ecclesiæ_." And in Milan hangs Piero della Francesca's
profound study of the saint. "I place Plato high," wrote a sound French
thinker, "but as I see Aquinas he is as superior to Plato, and even
more, than is our knowledge of the physical world to that of the
Greeks.... He embraces St. Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato."
Often has it been said that a Gothic cathedral is the _Summa_ translated
into stone, logical, ordered, interlinked, leaving nothing to chance, a
sound skeleton on a sound base, so securely balanced that great windows
could be opened on the sky, like flashes of intuitive genius lifting the
soul to the infinite. Many were the points by which St. Thomas touched
Gothic art in its heyday. He was a student in Cologne when its mighty
cathedral was begun. He was in Paris during the years when the transept
of Notre Dame was building, and the Sainte-Chapelle and St. Denis'
abbatial. By blood he was related to St. Louis, and often was his guest
at table, where talk must have turned on that keen interest of the
hour--the making of Gothic churches.[77] He was to die (1274) in
Cistercian Fossanuova, the first Gothic monument of Italy. And his great
work, like many a cathedral, was left unfinished.
Never was aspiration toward the infinite more passionate than in that
scholastic disputing, commune-winning, cathedral-building, crusading
age. The absorbing interest for old and young, for bishop and layman,
for king and poor student, was to know God, to know their own souls, to
learn how to make life more worthy of God. "In the entire length of
France," wrote the archbishop of Sens to the pope, in 1140, "in towns
and even in villages, in the schools and outside them, all, even simple
people and children, are disputing on the Holy Trinity." Paris became
the center of the seething new interest in theology and philosophy. In
1109 Guillaume de Champeaux opened a school of logic on the slopes of
St. Geneviève's hill (where to this day reigns Paris University), and
soon all Christendom frequented it.[78] His pupil, and later his
opponent, was Abélard, brilliant, restless knight-errant of dialectics,
whom the modern orthodox student finds to be a forerunner of the new
method of biblical criticism rather than a rationalist.
In the abbey of St. Victor, whose free classes were founded by Guillaume
de Champeaux when harried by Abélard, there gathered a group of mystic
scholars and poets: Hugues de St. Victor, the Augustine of his day (d.
1141), whose work on the sacraments was an interlinked system of
theology. Lucid in intellect, tender in sentiment, was this friend of
St. Bernard, whom Dante places in Paradise with St. Anselm and St.
Bonaventure (_Par._, xii: 30); and Hugues' disciple, Richard de St.
Victor (d. 1173), ranked in Paradise as the companion of the Venerable
Bede and St. Isidore of Seville, "Richard, who in contemplation was
more than man" (_Par._, x: 132); and Adam de St. Victor, one of the best
poets of the XII century, whose sequences and rimed proses fill the
liturgy. Another pupil of the learned Hugues was Pierre Lombard, who
died bishop of Paris in 1160; his _Book of Sentences_ became a textbook
in European universities for centuries to come.
From the cathedral school and the mount of St. Geneviève and St.
Victor's cloister[79] evolved the University of Paris, "elder daughter
of France," whose title first appears in 1215, the oldest university in
Europe with that of Bologna--one the high priestess of theology, the
other the leader in canon and civil law. In the XII-century schools of
Paris, John of Salisbury met Thomas Becket and Nicholas Breakspear (the
English pope, Adrian IV), and there the future Innocent III became the
friend of Stephen Langton.
By the XIII century over thirty thousand students thronged the colleges
in Paris. Aquinas taught in the Dominicans' branch of the university, in
which same convent, called the Jacobins, lived the reader of Louis IX,
Vincent de Beauvais, whose four _Mirrors_ were depicted in the imagery
of the great cathedrals. No age was ever more enamored of encyclopædias.
To overclassify was a characteristic of the times which even the great
Aquinas could not escape. They say that over five hundred monks, under
the guidance of the Dominican cardinal, Hugues de Saint-Cher, were busy
in the rue St. Jacques preparing the first concordance of Scriptures.
The entire Bible was translated into French in the XIII century. In the
Franciscans' branch of the University St. Bonaventure taught. The king's
chaplain, Robert de Sorbon, founded a house where poor students could
live in common. Canterbury's archbishop, St. Edmund Rich, was a pupil in
Paris, then a teacher. Roger Bacon, first to grasp the importance of
experimental science, studied there, and so did Robert Grosseteste,
builder of Lincoln Cathedral, whom Bacon said excelled all other masters
in his range of useful knowledge.
The smelting pot of modern society those fecund formative years of the
XII and XIII centuries have been called. A life-time's study it would be
to draw adequately the picture of the one city of Paris then, when
Philippe-Auguste and his grandson, St. Louis, were busy raising their
Louvre and their Cité palaces, their Notre Dame, and their
Sainte-Chapelle, busy cleaning the city streets and the city laws; when
one scholarly bishop succeeded another as slowly rose the capital's
cathedral, when lovely Latin hymns poured from St. Victor's abbey, while
in the street the students sang the new lays of trouvère and troubadour,
telling of "love that is a thing so high," of Roland and the _gestes_ of
paladins, of the Celtic heroes, Tristan, Lancelot, and Percival; when
all the newly awakened intellectual and art life was astir welding old
blood and new, making Frenchmen, at last, of Celt and Latin and Frank,
making a kind of commonwealth of the nations that met in universities
whose common speech still was Latin.[80]
That there were black shadows in the picture, none deny. There were
pillages and massacres. It was an agitated day full of tumults and
heresies and terrible reprisals. One has only to read the censures of
St. Bernard and of Innocent III to learn of the cupidity and the lust.
Joinville has told of a sink of corruption lying within a stone's throw
of the saint-king's crusading camp. But, above all the lawlessness, the
men of those ages of faith aspired. Their acts might fall short; their
principles remained sound. "No easy-going doctrines, then, to legitimize
vice," says Ozanam. Man knew how to beat his breast in humble
repentance. He lifted his eyes toward an ideal so far above himself that
it was given his human weakness to build cathedrals such as Notre Dame
of the capital. Not so does he build when as superman he sits on a
self-raised altar.
The virtuous bishop, who had most to do with the erection of the
cathedral of Paris, had been a student and later a teacher of
scholasticism. Maurice de Sully was born of simple parentage in the
village of Sully-sur-Loire, and he came as a poor scholar to the great
city. His abilities and the integrity of his conduct won him
recognition, and after teaching belles-lettres, he was elected to the
see of Paris as the seventy-second successor of St. Denis. From 1160 to
1196 he directed his diocese, a true shepherd whose special care was the
training of young priests. Crowds flocked to his sermons, wrote a
contemporary. He took an active part on the side of Thomas Becket during
the English archbishop's struggle with Henry II, and it was he who
consecrated as bishop of Chartres Becket's friend, the intellectual John
of Salisbury. To Bishop Maurice, who had baptized him, Philippe-Auguste
left the care of the Royal Treasury when he went on the Third Crusade.
So wisely did this churchman administer his revenues that he was able to
build hospitals and abbeys, as well as erect, in larger part by his
personal donations, his own cathedral.
The first stone of Notre Dame was laid in 1163, and tradition says that
Alexander III officiated in the same month that he dedicated for the
Benedictines the new choir of St. Germain-des-Prés; the exiled pontiff
resided in France for four years. Though the name of the architect of
Notre Dame has not survived, his design was adhered to during a century
and a half. A transept was not in his plan; however, a short one was
inserted before the nave was laid down. That nave was nearly finished
when Bishop Maurice de Sully died, in 1196, leaving large sums, in his
testament, for the completion of his beloved church. The two westernmost
bays of the nave are not of the bishop-founder's time.
Notre Dame, because of interruptions in its construction, presents an
irregular alignment, and it is easy to perceive, as one gazes along its
vaulting, that its choir slopes toward the north. Archæologists have
given up the poetic explanation that the slanting choir was symbolic of
the droop of Christ's head on the cross. Nor can the symbol seeker now
call the Porte Rouge (an extra door in the north wall of the choir) a
souvenir of the spear wound of the Saviour, since if made with such
intention it would have been placed below the extended arms of the
transept.
Three campaigns of work built Notre Dame, and each time that the work
was resumed the axis deviated slightly. First rose the choir and a short
transept. Then was done the nave, save its westernmost bays. And
finally, at the beginning of the XIII century, they undertook the west
façade and the two bays behind it. The carving on the pier's capitals
shows the gradual advance in sculpture: in the choir they cut the large
leaves of water plants which were the first nature models copied when
the conventional Byzantine models were discarded. Then, in the nave, the
foliage grew richer, and oak and vine and curled-up ferns appeared.
Capital by capital should be studied, for their sculpture is masterly.
The capitals of the nave's triforium are said to mark the culmination of
Gothic art in foliate design. While unity was kept throughout the entire
arcade, there was unceasing variation in details.
When Bishop Maurice de Sully, the peasant, died, he was succeeded by
Bishop Eudes de Sully, the feudal baron, descended from the reigning
counts of Champagne, from Louis VII and Aliénor of Aquitaine, and in
whose veins ran the blood of William the Conqueror through his daughter
Adela. The ability to build was his by inheritance. He began the west
façade, and probably at his death all three of the portals were in
place. To him we owe that fairest of sculptured entrances, the Virgin's
door, under the northwest tower, called "the most beautiful page of
stone that the Middle Ages have left us." _Visibile palare_ are Dante's
words for such art as this. In the carved tympanum, "Gothic art reached
the simple perfection of Phidias." The draperies flow easily; only in
the abrupt turning up of the edges of the robes lingers an archaic
touch. Below are represented kings and prophets, the ancestors of Mary.
Above them is a moving version of the Assumption; and in the upper
triangle is the Coronation of the Queen of Heaven by her Divine
Son--she, the mortal, turned toward Him, the divinity, with a gesture of
adoration. The Christ is the Nazarene, a noble Oriental.
No haziness then in their knowledge that the patroness in whose care
they placed their cathedrals was a fellow creature. To the common sense
of the Middle Ages, it would have seemed a muddle-headed way of thinking
to have called Jesus, God, and at the same time to have refused homage
to His Mother, the one whom God chose to honor above all mortals, "she
who didst so ennoble human nature that its own Maker scorned not to
become its making."[81] It was only logical, they thought, that the best
advocate with the son should be the mother. "All of us who fear the
wrath of the Judge, fly to the Judge's mother," wrote Abélard. "_Que
Dieu nous l'octroie par la prière de sa douce mère_," wrote the crusader
Joinville. So, without worrying over future carpers who might murmur
"Mariolatry," the Middle Ages chanted "_Laus Deo et Beatæ Mariæ
laudum_." And the cathedral of Paris dared to dedicate four of its six
doors to the Queen of Heaven.
The door under the southwest tower commemorates St. Anne, the Blessed
Virgin's mother. It is a composite work, carved in Bishop Maurice's
time, between 1160 and 1170, but not set up here till Bishop Eudes de
Sully had undertaken the façade; in its tympanum are representations
both of Louis VII and of Maurice de Sully. St. Anne's door was a link
between the still archaic western doors of Chartres and the clearly
enunciated Gothic portal under the northwest tower of Paris Cathedral.
In the multitudinous folds of the draperies is Byzantine feeling, and
sacerdotal is the Madonna who gravely presents her son to be adored. By
the middle of the XIII century, the Madonna had become a natural mother,
and so she is sculptured at the north entrance to Notre Dame's transept.
Bishop Eudes de Sully, like his predecessor, had many a link with
scholasticism and with other bishop-builders. He had been fellow
student in Paris with the future Innocent III, and that expert in men
when pope called on his aid to find capable occupants for the French
sees. Eudes' own brother Henry was the archbishop of Bourges who
initiated the new cathedral there; and when his brother died, Eudes
assisted in placing in his see the saintly Guillaume, who built the
chevet of Bourges. Through Eudes de Sully, the bishop-builder of Rheims
Cathedral, Albéric de Humbert, was elected, and he also helped to elect
Bishop Hervé, who began the cathedral of Troyes. Able men ever found a
protector in the capable bishop of Paris, whose strict sense of duty was
incorruptible. When Philippe-Auguste, his near kinsman, broke the
marriage law, Bishop Eudes went into exile rather than sanction the
scandal. To him Innocent III sent St. Jean de Matha, that the prelate
might draw up a Rule for the new Order of Trinitarians, established to
redeem captives from Islam. It was Eudes de Sully who founded, in 1204,
the abbey of Port Royal, a name to become of note in French letters.
The bishop of Paris from 1208 to 1219 was Pierre de Nemours, one of four
brothers who were bishop-builders, at Paris, at Noyon, at Châlons, and
at Meaux. He died a crusader under the walls of Damietta. Scarcely a
cathedral but has its crusade memory. The façade of Notre Dame had
almost reached the crowning open arcade when the scholarly Guillaume de
Seignelay was transferred to the see of Paris from Auxerre where he had
begun the Gothic cathedral. The _galerie des rois_, whose date is about
1223, was no doubt his work. Such galleries are found only in cathedrals
in the royal domain, and it is just as likely that they honor the kings
of France as the kings of Judea as some maintain. The majority of the
larger statues of Paris Cathedral are restitutions. Viollet-le-Duc had
an English sculptor, George Frampton, make the gargoyles and grotesques
of Notre Dame, since the Revolution wrecked most of the exterior
sculpture.
Still another noted scholastic, Guillaume d'Auvergne (1228-29), was to
rule the see of Paris while its chief church was building. He finished
the northwest tower, which differed slightly in size and details from
that to the south; across the face of the former are ten statues,
whereas nine only are set before its companion tower. Perhaps a change
of architects caused the disparity, or it may be that when the houses
were cleared away for the erection of the north tower, more space was
available. Bishop Guillaume d'Auvergne's writings show him to have been
one of the most original thinkers in the XIII century, a theologian, a
philosopher, a mathematician, and one versed in Arab and in Greek
literature. He became for St. Louis a kind of prime minister in
ecclesiastical business, and, like the king, he founded hospitals and
houses of charity. There is a charming page in Joinville's reminiscences
concerning this able man. A priest expressed his doubts to him on the
Eucharist. Bishop Guillaume asked if he tried to resist the temptations,
and he replied that he did so with all his force. "Now I," said the good
bishop, "have not a single doubt about the Real Presence. I am like the
fortress of Montleheri, safe in the heart of France, far from the danger
line; but you, who fight unceasingly, are like the king's fortress of
Rochelle in Poitou, on the frontier. Now, of us two, whom will the king
most honor for guarding his fortresses?"
Peasant and prince, crusader and scholar, humanist and mathematician,
men of exemplary lives, born rulers and guides, such were the builders
of Notre Dame of Paris, and their ability and sincerity live eternally
in their work.[82] They gave free wing to the soul in raising their
great church, while they cheerfully accepted the human law of working
within limits. No cathedral in France shows more clearly the relation
between builders and building, more clearly vindicates the ideals of its
age. The partisan historian may cite his instances to prove that the
religion of that age was superstitious. While Notre Dame stands, such
charges are refuted. It is a historical document as potent for the
vindication of the truth as the _Divina Commedia_ itself.
When Bishop Guillaume d'Auvergne had finished the towers of Notre Dame
he caused to be made the open arcade from which they emerge, as from a
royal peristyle. About the same time side chapels were inserted between
the buttresses, and the line of small rose windows, which had hitherto
marked the triforium story, was done away with, in order that the
clearstory windows might be lengthened. Only step by step were the
builders learning that they might open the entire space between the
active members of a Gothic structure; the upper windows of Chartres had
passed on the lesson to Paris.
The plan of the first architect was adhered to throughout, and since the
later masters-of-works were likewise natives of the Ile-de-France and
innate in them a classic restraint and a hardy daring (the hall-mark of
the best Parisian art to this day), the cathedral of Paris was
homogeneous. Midway in the XIII century Jean de Chelles, a precursor of
Rayonnant Gothic, lengthened the transept arms by a bay and finished
them with admirable façades. His name, and the date 1257, are cut on the
foundation stone of the south façade. The sculpture of that southern
entrance honors St. Stephen, since on the site had once stood a church
dedicated to the first martyr; the tympanum of the door is another
_chef-d'oeuvre_ of Notre Dame. Jean de Chelles was the first to use
perforated gables. It is thought that on the north façade worked Pierre
de Montereau, the architect of St. Denis. As the XIII century merged in
the XIV Pierre de Chelles, probably a son of Jean, directed the making
of the apse chapels and the superb flying buttresses which leap
unhesitatingly over chapels and aisle and tribune gallery. He added the
big tribune windows with gables.
The classic restraint which is the leading quality of Notre Dame was
never poverty. Sculpture was lavish where it should be. At the portals
the Scriptures were set forth in detail and saints were held up for the
edification of the people. The signs of the zodiac were carved, as well
as the personification of the seasons and the months. Pinnacle and
parapet were weighted with winged beast or demon, and the useful water
spouts, or gargoyles, were chiseled as crabbed images. However, one
should always remember, in climbing the towers of Notre Dame, that most
of the present stone monsters are modern, and it is one of the
weaknesses of the restorer to overemphasize the grotesque in the art of
the Middle Ages.
A strange world of fabulous creatures dwell on the roof of Our Lady's
church--conceptions that are half terrible and half fantastic,
imaginations that are survivals of the old pagan superstitions which
Christianity could not wholly extirpate. The XII and XIII centuries were
not so far removed in time from the invasions of the northern
Barbarians, and the Church made concessions to primitive inheritances.
Artists were allowed to carve on roof or pinnacle the chimeras and
vampires which through long centuries had haunted the imagination of
their ancestors, provided that they expounded the truths of Christian
doctrine in such principal places as portals, façades, and choir
screens. Might not a mocking grotesque beside an angel be taken as
emblem of the external antagonism of the animal and the spirit in man?
The choir screen of Notre Dame of Paris is sculptured with the
apparitions of the risen Lord, from Easter Day to the Ascension. "If
Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain."[83]
The cathedral of Paris during the first centuries of its existence was
the setting of many national scenes. Here the kings of France deposited
their crown and renewed their vow to be just fathers of their people.
Before its altar their newborn heir was blessed. In 1182 the main altar
of Notre Dame was consecrated, and three years later the patriarch of
Jerusalem preached from it the Third Crusade. On the eve of both his
crusades St. Louis prayed here, and in 1270, when his remains were
brought back from Tunis, they rested in Notre Dame for a solemn night of
chanted mourning.
In Notre Dame the Duke of Bedford had his nephew, Henry VI of England,
crowned as king of France. Factional hate and a foreign enemy in control
caused a _Te Deum_ of rejoicing to be sung in this, the most national of
French cathedrals, when the news came that Jeanne the Maid had been
taken prisoner before Compiègne, in 1429, but solemn reparation was made
in 1456, when, in the presence of Jeanne's mother and brothers, the
bishop of Paris (a Norman, and brother of the poet Alain Chartier)
opened in Notre Dame the inquest that was to lead to the Rehabilitation
of the heroine of Orleans.
To the hidden places over the vaults of Notre Dame fled the illustrious
chancellor of Paris University, Gerson, to whom during two centuries was
attributed the _Imitation of Christ_. In 1407 he had reprobated the
murder of the Duke of Orléans (builder of Pierrefonds) by the Duke of
Burgundy (of the regal Dijon tomb), and the mob rose and sacked his
house. It is said that for months Gerson lay concealed in Notre Dame,
alone with his books, and given over to prayer and meditation.
The present stained glass in Notre Dame is modern, save for the north,
south, and west rose windows, the trilogy of light usually found in big
cathedrals. The roses of the transept belong to the Paris school which
led in the art of glassmaking during the second half of the XIII
century. So large were the spaces then to be filled that the scrupulous
patience of the St. Denis craftsmen was no longer possible. Backgrounds
had to be made quickly by bold, simple trellis designs, and as the most
frequent background was a red trellis on a blue field, and the
juxtaposition of red and blue makes violet, in too many of the windows
of that period prevails a melancholy purplish hue. Originally the choir
of Notre Dame boasted some glass given by Abbot Suger himself to the
preceding Romanesque cathedral. In the XVIII century, those
over-confident _gens de goût_, the cathedral canons, whose taste
admitted only the neo-classic, substituted uncolored glass for the
ancient windows. They say that when the workmen were removing Suger's
priceless glass, they were dumfounded by its deep, ineffable blue.[84]
Many a treasure of Notre Dame was destroyed by the Revolution, and the
church itself was put up for sale and escaped demolition by merest
chance. It served as Temple of Reason, as warehouse, as fête hall.
Again, during the Commune, in 1871, for the purpose of destroying it,
chairs were piled high in the choir and set on fire, but brave men broke
in the doors and extinguished the flames. Early in the World War, in
1914, a German airship dropped a bomb on Notre Dame which pierced the
roof of the transept's northern arm.
THE SAINTE-CHAPELLE[85]
Li cuers doit estre semblans à l'encensier,
Tous clos envers la terre et overs vers le ciel.
--(Old song of the Middle Ages).
On the same isle in the Seine with Notre Dame stands the
Sainte-Chapelle, the reliquary of stone and jeweled glass which the
saint-king had made to enshrine the Crown of Thorns redeemed from
Constantinople. To-day it is a body without a soul, as the revered crown
is kept in the treasury of Notre Dame, and until a memorial service
during the World War, Mass had not been said in the _reliquaire de
souvenirs_ for fifteen years.
The chapel, which was connected with the king's palace, was begun in
1246 and dedicated in 1248. "It was," said one who knew St. Louis well,
"the king's citadel against the adverses of the world." He would rise at
midnight to pass into the chapel for the singing of matins. "Into this
shrine Louis IX put all the memories of his crusading ancestors, all the
hues of the Orient. It was his vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem." The
walls were rich with gold and color. The present polychromatic
decorations of the walls are a deplorable modern experiment. Fifteen
splendid windows told the Bible story in a thousand small medallions;
ninety-one scenes related Genesis; one hundred and twenty-one gave
Exodus. A window on the south side told the True Cross story, and the
three central windows were devoted to the lives of the Saviour and John
the Baptist. The western rose was added during the Flamboyant Gothic
revival following the expulsion of the English invaders.
The making of the vast windows of the Sainte-Chapelle raised Paris to
the leadership of the vitrine industry during the second half of the
XIII century. Of that school are windows in the cathedrals of Angers and
Clermont, and Soissons' western rose. Though of splendid effect, such
windows do not equal those of the preceding hundred years, when Chartres
and St. Denis led. The borders round each medallion had now become mere
zigzags, since expedition was required for the glazing of enormous
spaces.
The Sainte-Chapelle, as Gothic science, could be carried no farther
without violating its own laws and becoming what an English critic said
of the late-Gothic of France, "all muscle and glass." Everywhere was the
ascending line accentuated; over the windows are some of the earliest
gables extant. They break the horizontal band of the balustrade above,
and serve structurally as weights on the longitudinal wall arches.
Perhaps it was because the architect felt he was overemphasizing the
ascending line that he interrupted the soar of the columns marking the
chapel walls, by placing against each shaft the amply draped statue of
an apostle--the twelve pillars of the Church. To-day only the forth and
fifth statues on the north side are originals; there are merely ancient
fragments in the other images. For some time it was thought that the
Sainte-Chapelle was the work of Pierre de Montereau, the king's own
architect. A newly discovered record proves that he designed St. Denis'
abbatial, which shows, however, no family likeness with the chapel of
the Cité palace. Now, that chapel does display a certain likeness to the
façades of Notre Dame's transept, and it has been suggested that Jean de
Chelles, who designed the transept, was the architect of the
Sainte-Chapelle.
ST. JULIEN-LE-PAUVRE[86]
La France est l'homme,
Paris est le coeur.
--HENRY IV.
Close to the Seine, under the hill of St. Geneviève, stands a small
contemporary of the choir of Notre Dame, St. Julien-le-Pauvre, built by
the Cistercians of Longpont, about 1180, and claiming as its patrons
three saints of the same name, St. Julian, martyr, St. Julian, bishop of
Le Mans, and a humble St. Julian who had founded a hospice for pilgrims
by the Seine and used to help the poor across the river. It is said that
a leper whom he was piloting over vanished in midstream, whereupon the
people said it had been the Lord himself come to test the holy man's
charity.
The western bays of St. Julien-le-Pauvre have been demolished and all
that remains intact of the Primary Gothic church are the choir, with
three apsidal chapels, the side aisles' vaulting, and the columns
against the side walls. The same sculptor who worked at Notre Dame made
the virile capitals of this little church.
St. Julien to-day is used by the Greek-Melchite rite of Roman Catholics.
It long was the patron church of letters and science, and every year
from its altar started the procession of the University of Paris to the
fair at St. Denis called Lendit, for the solemn purchase of a twelve
months' supply of parchment. The rector of the university led the
throng, and so vast was the concourse of students that the head of the
procession was in St. Denis' abbatial before the rear ranks had quitted
St. Julien-le-Pauvre. For four hundred years Paris University elected
its rector in this little church, and tradition says that Dante prayed
here when he crossed the Alps in 1304. In his imagination was then
surging his mighty poem, and the men of France have pictured him pausing
to muse over the images of Hell at their own cathedral doors. The great
exile of Florence was himself the purest product of scholasticism, as
impassioned as were the cathedral builders for theology and philosophy,
for symmetry and rhythm and the mysterious beauty of numbers. The
_Divina Commedia_ was a poetic _Summa_.
ST. GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS, ST. MARTIN-DES-CHAMPS, AND ST.
PIERRE-DE-MONTMARTRE[87]
Ces vénérables bénédictines dont la science n'était égalée que par
leur modestie--F. BRUNETIÈRE.
There are in Paris three abbey churches that show steps in the
transition to Gothic art: St. Germain of the meadows, St. Martin in the
fields, and St. Peter's church on the martyr's hill, names that keep
alive early Christian traditions--the first bishop and martyr of Paris,
St. Peter whom always "the eldest daughter of the Church" was glad to
honor; St. Martin, first beloved of the apostles of Gaul, and Bishop
Germain (d. 576) who founded outside the city walls the abbey called
later by his name, and who helped to Christianize the new Frankish
conquerors. So disinterested was he that, to feed the poor, he sold a
horse given him by the king; whether riding or walking, the saint-bishop
ever went in prayer.
The present church of St. Germain-des-Prés has a tower that in part
predates the year 1000; it was erected by an abbot who ruled from 990 to
1014, and shows the small stones used at that period. The nave and
transept, finished before the XI century closed, under a bishop of Paris
who was uncle of Godfrey de Bouillon, comprise the only remaining
Romanesque work in the capital. Twice in the XII century the choir was
reconstructed by the monks, first about 1125, and at the same time the
ancient tower's upper story was built; and again, after Suger, in 1144,
had demonstrated the superiority of Gothic vaulting. St. Germain's abbot
wrote, in 1163, that he had repaired his church in a new fashion. In the
ambulatory the round and the pointed arch appeared side by side, and the
groin vault was used simultaneously with the diagonals. The capitals
were altogether Romanesque, since sculpture changed less swiftly than
construction in those transitional years. Perhaps the new choir of St.
Germain was not wholly finished when Pope Alexander III dedicated it in
1163, the year that the foundation stone of Notre Dame was laid. The
choir's triforium arches were cut off, later, to lengthen the clearstory
windows, and the nave has been revaulted.
In the abbey inclosure a Sainte-Chapelle, a cloister, and a refectory
were built by Pierre de Montereau; he and his wife, Agnes, were buried
in the chapel. Fragments of his work have been collected in the small
garden beneath the Carolingian tower of the abbatial, as well as in the
gardens of the Musée Cluny.[88] The Revolution entirely wrecked the
monk's quarters.
St. Germain-des-Prés, in popular speech, was _The Abbey_. Here gathered
the learned men of Paris for mental stimulus. In its priceless library,
destroyed by the Revolution, worked those famous scholars Dom Luc
d'Achery (d. 1685), Dom Mabillon (d. 1707), and Dom Rivet (d. 1749),
whose tireless patience and scrupulous respect for historical truth
made the name Benedictine a synonym for "savant." Three monumental works
were begun by the XVII-century reformers who renewed the love of letters
in the leading monastic houses of France: the _Acta Sanctorum_; the
annals of the Benedictine Order; and that pride of French letters, the
_Histoire Littéraire de la France_, which to-day the Institute of France
is continuing. "_Gros livres inutiles_," Voltaire glibly called the
invaluable books which for the modern school of mediæval archæology have
made flesh-and-blood men of the old prelate-builders of cathedrals.
The parts which have survived of that other notable Benedictine
establishment in Paris, St. Martin-des-Champs, are now comprised in the
_Arts et Métiers_ establishment. Affiliated with great Cluny, St.
Martin's priory was as like it, said Peter the Venerable, as seal is
like signet. To-day in the ancient church is installed an exhibit of
machinery. The beautiful hall, once the monks' refectory, and now a
technical library, is thought to be the work of Pierre de Montereau. The
slender pillars dividing it into two aisles, the well-carved capitals,
the elaborate keystones, and the portal's foliage all belong to the
golden hour of the national art.
For the student it is the choir of the church (c. 1135), built by the
prior who surrounded the monastery lands with walls (1130-40), which is
of chief interest, for in it were taken marked strides in the advance of
Gothic structure. Here first was attempted a double ambulatory, an idea
which Suger within a few years was to carry out in its fulfillment at
St. Denis. The Lady chapel, a lobed half dome--the sacred
trefoil--developed further the ribbed apse first found at Bury (c.
1125); here the ribs are structural, not merely decorative. Like other
monuments of the transitional hour, St. Martin used simultaneously
intersecting ribs and groins, round and pointed arches. Its XIII-century
nave was never vaulted.
The third monument of the capital which shows other stumbling first
steps of the national art is the little church of St. Pierre under the
towering new basilica of the Sacred Heart on Montmartre.[89] Till the
XII century there stood on the site of St. Pierre a church dedicated to
St. Denis, for tradition said that the first martyr of Paris had here
been interred until his relics were removed to the new abbey of St.
Denis on the Roman road outside Paris. In the crypt, by St. Peter's, on
Montmartre, it is said that the earliest Christians of the region held
their rites. And to that hallowed spot has come many a soul to beseech
enlightenment on the eve of some projected good work. Here, in 1534, St.
Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, and the first Jesuits passed a
night in prayer and vowed themselves to God's service. Here came St.
Francis de Sales before founding the Visitation Order, St. Vincent de
Paul before founding the Lazarists, and M. Olier before he organized St.
Sulpice. Ursulines and Carmelites also have memories with St.
Pierre-de-Montmartre.
A Benedictine priory was installed here by Louis VI and his queen,
Adelaide, niece of Pope Calixtus II of the Capetian house of Burgundy.
They began the present church as Romanesque, but soon the new system of
vaulting was employed. Slowly but consecutively throughout the XII
century St. Peter's church was built. Its oldest Gothic vault is the one
over the section of the choir preceding the apse; the stout ribs have
profiles like those which Abbot Suger was making about that same time in
the forechurch of his abbatial.
The solemn dedication of St. Pierre-de-Montmartre took place in 1147
with Pope Eugene III officiating and St. Bernard and Peter the Venerable
acting as deacon and subdeacon. Since the rebuilding of the apse, at the
end of the XII century, numerous reconstructions have gone on in order
to preserve the revered church.[90]
ST. LOUIS AND JOINVILLE[91]
Je dis que droit est mort et loyauté éteinte
Quand le bon roi est mort, la créature sainte,
A qui se pourront désormais les pauvres gens clamer
Quand le bon roy est mort qui tant les sut aimer?
--REGRES DU ROY LOEYS.
The greatest glory of the Middle Ages was the saint-king himself. He was
essentially of his epoch both in his love of theology and his enthusiasm
for building. Under his grandfather, Philippe-Auguste, most of the
Gothic cathedrals of France were begun. The majority of them continued
building under Louis IX. In his reign Beauvais Cathedral was started,
that of Meaux rebuilt, as was also St. Denis' cathedral-like abbatial.
There rose now a host of lesser Gothic edifices, such as the
Sainte-Chapelle at Paris, the synodal hall at Sens, and the hospital
hall at Ourscamp. "And as a writer who has made his book, illuminating
it with gold and azure, so our king illuminated his kingdom with the
beautiful abbeys he built," wrote his friend Joinville.
All too many of his abbatials have been swept away--Royaumont,[92] built
with the proceeds from his father's jewels, where Louis IX had worked
side by side with the masons, where he had passed his saddest hours, for
in its church was laid to rest his promising eldest son, whose beautiful
tomb now is harbored at St. Denis. Gone, too, is Maubuisson Abbey, where
was buried his mother, Blanche of Castile. Her bronze tomb was melted up
and made into cannon during the Revolution, but one knows that the
something high and Spanish in Blanche (whom her contemporaries compared
to stag and eagle) would have preferred a cannon to the copper pennies
into which were transmuted all too many of the ancient tombs. The mother
of St. Louis was a woman cast in a heroic mold, daughter of that Spanish
king who at Las Navas de Toloso saved Europe from an avalanche of
400,000 Mussulmans and granddaughter of art-loving Aliénor of Aquitaine
and Henry II, Plantagenet.
The prudence of Blanche of Castile saved the kingdom for her son against
the insurgent barons of France. She hastened to have him crowned at
Rheims, in 1226, in the same year that St. Francis died, in Italy. It is
said that the lad of twelve held up firmly the sword of the Emperor
Charlemagne, whose blood ran in his veins. The barons tried to kidnap
the young king from his mother, and when he escaped the snare and rode
back to Paris all the countryside poured out to bless him. Years later
he told Joinville it was from that hour he dedicated himself to the
welfare of his people.
In 1234, at twenty, he was married in Sens Cathedral to a princess of
the cultivated house of Provence; Dante has a line for the daughters of
Raymond Berenger IV, patron of the troubadours: "Four daughters had he
and each a queen."[93] Marguerite of Provence was somewhat overridden by
the stronger personality of Blanche, her mother-in-law. For his valiant
mother, Louis IX retained always a passionate admiration. On his first
crusade he left his kingdom in her charge, which, however, he did not do
for his queen, when he last went crusading. He had seen her sister, on
the throne of England, tamper with that country's interests for the
advancement of her own family, and he recognized in his Marguerite a
strain of the same intriguing. She could rise to her lord's level,
however, and was his faithful lifelong companion. A sublime word of hers
has come down to us: they were sailing back to France after four years'
sojourn in Palestine; off Cyprus the ship was well-nigh wrecked, and an
attendant rushed to ask if he should awaken the royal children. "No,"
cried the queen, "let them go to God in their sleep."
That a king whose forebears had fought in all the crusades should, in
his turn, strike a blow for Christendom, was inevitable. Jerusalem had
fallen in 1244, and the instinct of Europe felt the menace of the Mongol
advance from the East. Was not the fate of Spain close at hand to prove
the possibility of Oriental invasion? So St. Louis took the crusader's
vow, and with him went the turbulent lords whose departure gave France
some needed years of peace. He had in vain tried to negotiate peace
between Papacy and Empire, in whose protracted duel he remained neutral.
In Cyprus, in 1248, the crusaders paused before descending on Egypt, and
there St. Louis and Joinville drew together. The hereditary seneschal of
Champagne was a very great lord, his mother being of Burgundy's Capetian
line, and his Joinville forebears notable crusaders.[94] The contingent
which he provided for the holy wars consisted of nine knights and seven
hundred men, but because of the long winter's halt in Cyprus he found
himself in straits to meet their expenses. Louis IX, ten years his
senior, came to his aid, although the ruler of Champagne and not the
king of France was Joinville's suzerain. Side by side the two friends
went through the disastrous campaign in Egypt--the delayed march on
Cairo, which ended in Mansourah's defeat. Together they shared
imprisonment, and the king's elevation of soul won the Mussulmans'
respect. Then, their ransom paid, they sailed together for Palestine,
and there, in the daily intimacy of years, the affection of these two
loyal knights struck deep root. To Joinville the king intrusted his wife
and children in the perilous overland journey in Syria, before they
embarked for France.
When, in 1254, Louis IX came back from the East, he gave himself up for
fifteen years to his country's welfare, "the most conscientious man who
ever sat on a throne," touched to the core by that divine unrest which
is man's highest faculty and does lasting work for God, revered by the
"little people of the Lord" as their champion for justice and social
progress. "_Il est en doulce France un bon roy Loeys_," sang the
minstrels then. Never did king love more _la doulce France_ and prove it
more conclusively. Justice was inherent in him. A most sensitive feeling
of duty ruled his every act. Yet he knew how to mete out deserved
punishment unflinchingly. From his shrewd and capable grandfather, so
little of a saint, he had learned that no one could govern well who
could not refuse as well as grant.
That Louis IX understood his age is shown in his dealings with the
feudal system. He made no attempt to destroy it, which would then have
been impossible, and, moreover, his respect for the rights of others
always kept him from extreme measures; but he regulated its excesses,
knowing that organized anarchy could be broken only by organized laws.
One of the best laws he passed was that of the _quarantaine-le-roy_,
which forbade any baron to wage war on his fellows without a notice of
forty days. The king favored the written law to offset the law of
custom, on which feudal abuses were based. During a generation he had
his agents all over France collect old laws and customs--Roman law,
canon law, feudal privileges, and from their composite mass was created
the great code called the _Établissements de St. Louis_. He substituted
jurisprudence by inquest, and witnesses for that by force, and he made a
supreme court by instituting the right of appeal. Admirable were some of
his treaties such as that which made the Pyrenees the natural boundary
between Spain and France. His reform of the coinage was another link of
unity for France.
In Paris he organized a police, protected commerce by regulations, put
an end to the selling of magistratures, and he began, there, the library
which to-day is the richest in Europe. In the garden of the Cité and
under the oaks of Vincennes, the king held open courts of justice, and
when his youngest brother, Charles d'Anjou,[95] tried to browbeat one of
lesser rank, the king gave a legal councilor to the poor knight who won
the case against the prince. Louis IX's very enemies chose him as
arbiter. Little wonder that the people of France have sung of him:
Ha! le bon Roy!
Simples, ignorans supportait
Pauvres, mendians confortait,
Observant de Jhusys la foi,
Redoutant Dieu--
Ha! le bon Roy!
Joinville has drawn for all time the picture of the years between the
saint-king's two crusades, a golden age, if ever there was one. The
friendship begun during their years of Syrian comradeship continued, and
the seneschal often came up to Paris. It was he who arranged the
marriage of the king's daughter with his own suzerain, the son of
Thibaut IV, the song maker, in whose court of Champagne Joinville had
acquired his delightful mode of speech.
Then, again, came the call of the East. Jaffa and Antioch had fallen to
Islam, and the condition of the Oriental Christians was heartrending.
Louis IX could not resist their cry for aid. In 1270, twenty-two years
after his first departure from Aigues-Mortes, the king sailed again from
that half-finished fort by the dead waters. Joinville was not with him,
for he was needed by his "little people," an excuse which his friend
acknowledged.
The crusaders had scarcely landed on the coast of Africa when plague
struck them down. First died Tristan, the son born to St. Louis in the
sorrowful, earlier days in Egypt. Then the saint-king himself passed
away; and on his lips was the prayer that his race might learn to
despise the prosperity of this world and not to fear adversity, and that
France might never deny the name of Christ. The night before he died
they heard him singing, "_Nous irons en Jerusalem_," the holy city he
had never seen, the aspiration, the magic name that stirred those strong
generations.[96] Before the century closed the Church canonized him.
"House of France," announced the pope, "rejoice to have given the world
so great a prince, and to heaven so great a saint. People of France,
rejoice to have had so great a king."
"If ever the golden age of the good old times existed," wrote
Sainte-Beuve, "it certainly was under St. Louis, and it is by the pen of
Joinville that it exists for us. They believed then in their king, they
believed above all in their God, as if God were present in the smallest
occurrences of daily life." In the _Histoire de St. Louis_ by Jean, sire
de Joinville, there is not a mawkish note, and considering what happens
to too many saints in their biographies, it must be acknowledged that
the seneschal accomplished a feat. As depicted by his contemporaries,
Louis IX is so convincingly himself that later efforts to stereotype him
as the sacristan's ideal of piety have failed. His "pleasant manner of
speech seasoned with wit" had nothing of the prig in it. From his
childhood to his deathbed of ashes in ancient Carthage (birthplace of
his favorite Augustine), St. Louis possessed a direct personal touch
with God. "_Beau Sire Dieu, garde-moi mes gens!_" he rose at night to
petition with insistent outstretched arms when, in Egypt, the "Greek
fire" was hurled into the Christian camp. And Joinville, who had a
wholesome dread of the Saracens' projectiles, turned to rest, feeling
secure while such prayers were beseeching Heaven.
Louis IX was a tireless student of the Bible and works of the Church
Fathers. He had a passion for the liturgy. The number of hours which he
spent in prayer has roused the sarcasm of our indifferent generation.
His hours before the Tabernacle bore fruit in deeds. His temper was
naturally quick, and he had a keen sense of irony, but his friend, the
seneschal, was able to bear witness, at his canonization process, that
in an intimacy of over twenty years never had he heard a word of
disparagement of others fall from the king's lips. "There was something
in the mere sight of him that found a way to the heart and affections,"
wrote one who knew him; "the eyes of a dove," said another. "He seemed
pierced to the heart with pity for the unfortunate," wrote Queen
Marguerite's chaplain who had daily intercourse with him. An observant
Italian who saw the king on his way to his first crusade described the
something of rare refinement and grace in his bearing.
Not a touch of self-consciousness was in Louis; barefooted, in a white
tunic, he carried the Crown of Thorns through the streets of Paris. In
his sublime other-worldliness, he bathed the feet of beggars, dressed
the sores of lepers, and when he felt that his soul needed it he
scourged himself. And at the same time he was a model of knightly
prowess, who many a time had fought
For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field,
Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross
Against black pagans, Turks, and Saracens.[97]
At the battle of Mansourah, Joinville saw the king, "the most beautiful
of men," to his eyes, fair, gallant, in stature head and shoulders above
those around him, defend himself alone with great slashing sword cuts
from the onslaught of six paynims. He was a true _prud'homme_, a name
for which he had a weakness, for to be a _prud'homme_ meant to be a
knight, not only bodily, but in one's soul.
Side by side with his other-worldliness went a sound practical sense.
When his son-in-law, Thibaut V of Champagne, gave overgenerously to a
monastery in Provins, all the while that he was in debt, St. Louis asked
him was it fair to bestow alms with other people's money. His personal
tastes were unostentatious, but he held court sumptuously when the
occasion required, and he advised his lords to dress well so that their
wives would love them better. He was ever human; when word came to him
in Palestine that the mother he adored had died in France, he shut
himself away from sympathy for two days, then sent for the friend he
loved best. As Joinville approached, the king opened his arms to him
with the cry, "Ah, seneschal, I have lost my mother!"
Joinville has recounted a scene which took place between him and his
friend, that is one of the fairest things in literature, slight episode
though it is. In council, in Palestine, the barons urged the king to
return to France. Almost alone, Joinville held out against such a course
while their retainers were still unredeemed from captivity. For he
remembered how a knight of his family had admonished him: "You are going
beyond the seas. Be careful how you come back. For no knight, rich or
poor, can return an honored man if he leaves in Saracen hands the humble
folk of Our Lord with whom he started forth."
The king listened in silence at the council, and in silence sat through
the banquet that followed, paying no heed to Joinville, who was placed
by his side. The seneschal, saddened by what he thought to be his
friend's displeasure, was standing alone, leaning against a casement,
thinking that when the others returned to France, he would join the
Prince of Antioch, his cousin, till another crusade came to deliver the
"little people of the Lord" unransomed still in Egypt. As he leaned
against the window bars he felt friendly arms laid about his shoulders:
"Have done, Monseigneur," he cried, thinking it was one of the barons
come to mock him, "leave me in peace." Then the loving hands slipped
over his face and he recognized the emerald ring worn by the king. The
dear words of mock reproach: "What you, the youngest, dare advise me
against all the great and the wise men of France? Tell me, you think I
would do wrong in leaving?" Then sturdy Joinville, who paints his
friend, too, by the confession, "Never did I lie to him," made answer,
"Yes, Sire, as God is my aid." "And if I stay, will you stay?" asked the
king.
The bloom of the exquisite moment has come to us across the dividing
centuries because Joinville was not thinking of making a book when he
wrote his reminiscences. His object was to have others understand the
gracious distinction, the tender familiarity with him of this
king-crusader whom he loved and who loved him. Written artlessly, and in
entire good faith, his book is full of that indefinable quality called
charm. The seneschal's honest heart is in its infinitely precious pages.
In that other early monument of French prose, the grave Villehardouin
rises to the historian's plane in depicting the Fourth Crusade.
Joinville cannot be said to have taken in the Sixth Crusade as a whole;
he muddles the battle scenes; he digresses to right and to left in idle
details, then catches himself up with happy ease, as if saying, "Dear
me! I forgot to mention," imparting to his chronicle an inimitable
quality all its own. No one would have Joinville different. Amiable,
jocund, unaffected, the soul of honor, candor itself, he does not fear
to acknowledge that he could tremble with fright in battle despite his
stalwart six feet and over. He beguiled his captivity by trying to
convert a Mohammedan by highly colored descriptions of hell. He whiled
away the long hours in Syria in composing a treatise of theology, a
_Credo_, wherein he warns every _prud'homme_ to hold on to God with both
arms lest that felon, the devil, come between. And the two arms by which
a man was to hold on to God were Faith and Good Works. "You must have
both, if you wish to keep God: one without the other is worthless,"
warns the young seneschal. No quibbling then!
Joinville had also that quality which the French term _enjouement_, hard
to translate, a playful, most lovable frankness, a mocking vivacity
which was for St. Louis a source of relaxation. The king loved
conversation; he thought there was no book so good as _quolibet_, or say
what you please. Some Armenian pilgrims besought of the seneschal a
glimpse of the saint-king. Joinville came merrily to tell his friend,
warning him that he, the seneschal, was not yet prepared to kiss his
bones. And the king laughed, too, but because he knew it would give the
devout Armenians pleasure, he accorded them an interview. Stroke by
stroke, Joinville filled in the picture of Louis IX, and all the while
he unconsciously paints himself as well. He is so eager to make you love
his hero that you learn to love himself. A tear is always close to the
eye in reading Joinville, not that what he relates is sad, but because
this story of a high soul, written by his loyal friend, touches things
that lie deep in all true hearts.
Joinville was to survive his friend for half a century. He died in 1317.
With a character ripened by six years of intimacy with the _bon
saint-homme roy_, he came back from the East and set himself to work for
his people's welfare, the "little people of the Lord" by whom he had
stood in their hour of need. He was then but thirty. In his old age he
was the accepted arbiter of good taste, admired as the last of a
generation of courtesy. When over ninety, this vigorous old crusader
rode into Flanders on a military expedition for the crown. He had seen
the reigns of six French kings and the passing away of the crusader's
spirit. He had seen his own Champagne become a part of the royal domain,
when the heiress Jeanne was married to the grandson of St. Louis. And it
was at the bidding of that queen of Philippe-le-Bel that Joinville wrote
down his memories of Louis IX.
France has high advocates to plead for her before the Throne in hours of
national peril. Jeanne d'Arc said that she saw St. Louis petitioning God
in the dire hour of foreign invasion. "May they never deny Thy name,"
prayed the saint-king at Tunis, as he rendered "his pure soul unto his
captain, Christ, under whose colors he had fought so long." And in the
men of 1914-18, true _prud'hommes_ after the heart of St. Louis and his
dear friend Joinville, stirred the crusader blood of their ancestors.
THE COLLEGIATE OF MANTES[98]
The king was very well built, of easy bearing and smiling
countenance, bald, high-colored, a great eater and drinker. Toward
his friends he was most generous; toward those who displeased him
he was very firm; in his designs he was foresighted and tenacious,
very catholic in his beliefs, and he judged rapidly and with great
perspicacity. Easy to arouse, he was also easy to appease. Upon the
great who disobeyed him he was hard, and he enjoyed sowing
discord among them, and to make use of the little people in his
purposes.--Portrait of Philippe-Auguste by a canon of St. Martin,
Tours.
[Illustration: _Notre Dame of Mantes (1160-1200). The Contemporary of
Paris Cathedral_]
From Paris can best be visited the cathedral-like collegiate at Mantes
on the Seine to the east, and the cathedral of Meaux on the Marne to the
west. Mantes-la-Jolie, the "well-beloved" city of Philippe-Auguste, and
where he died in 1223, is set picturesquely above the Seine, in whose
widened course are wooded islands. From the bridge crossing the
river[99] may be had the best view of the town. The collegiate church of
Notre Dame stands above the houses of the pleasant little city, in the
high-shouldered way of many a French church. Happily, it has never been
reconstructed. It has various traits in common with Notre Dame of Paris,
and some think that the same architect planned both.
Mantes' Primary Gothic church was begun about 1160, at the same time as
the cathedral in the capital, but, being on a lesser scale, it was
finished sooner, and thus appears more archaic. Normandy's Romanesque
zigzag ornamentation was still retained, and the cells of certain vault
sections show the hesitating rough work of masons as yet unpracticed.
While the transverse arches are pointed, those of the diagonal-crossing
ribs are round. Too wide an expanse of plain wall space was left between
tribune and clearstory, for it was to take half a century longer before
architects dared fill their entire upper wall with windows. Like Notre
Dame of Paris, the tribunes open on the middle church by wide, graceful
arches. And this smaller Notre Dame also has western towers that are
connected by an open colonnade. The collegiate has no transept, and one
recalls that neither had Paris Cathedral in its first plan. The flying
buttresses here are among the first ever made. A striking feature of the
exterior of the church is the row of little oculi that light the
tribunes over the aisles, some of which have been changed to windows of
Rayonnant tracery. The deep galleries once were entirely vaulted by
transverse half cradles borne on low lintels, an experiment in masonry
roofing first tried at Tournus, but which never became popular; at Caen
the tribunes of the Abbaye-aux-Hommes had been vaulted by similar half
cylinders whose axial lines were at right angles to that of the nave.
The first Gothic rose window of big dimensions adorns the west façade of
Mantes collegiate. It is what they call plate tracery--that is, the
pattern is formed of voids, the window being a group of variously shaped
openings, and not, as in bar tracery, a single opening with the pattern
made by solids, or stone mullions. The western rose at Laon stands
halfway between plate and bar tracery. Mantes' rose was the prototype
for that at Chartres.
Like most of the larger XII-century churches, the sexpartite system of
vaulting was used. Mantes also followed Noyon and Senlis in having
alternating piers and, like Noyon, it showed the Rhenish trait of a
western transept, formed by the two lower stories of the towers and the
westernmost bay of the middle vessel. Two of the portals are of the XII
century, but the largest--the one under the south tower--was made by
Raymond du Temple. And probably that same XIV-century architect of
Charles V added the gracious chapel of Navarre which is among the best
works of Rayonnant Gothic. In it are four charming statuettes of the
donors, the princesses of Navarre, portrait work showing personal
mannerisms. When the sister of the art-loving Valois king, Charles V,
married Charles the Wicked (a scion of Capetian stock who was count in
Évreux and king in Navarre) she brought the town of Mantes in her dowry,
and it was probably her daughters who are sculptured in this chapel of
Navarre--their gift to Mantes collegiate.
On the site of the present church once stood a Romanesque edifice built
by funds donated by William the Conqueror on his deathbed, to atone for
his having set fire to the ancient church (1087). Angered by a coarse
joke of the French king's, he had sworn his usual oath, "by the splendor
and resurrection of God," that he would light a hundred thousand candles
when he went to his churching Mass; so he marched against his tormentor
and set fire to Mantes that lay in his path. For, as Mr. Henry Adams has
picturesquely expressed it, "Mantes barred the path of Norman conquest
in arms, as in architecture." As the corpulent Conqueror rode around the
place, his horse stumbled, and from the injury then received he died in
Rouen in a few weeks. That burning of Mantes by the Duke of Normandy and
King of England has been called the prelude to the Hundred Years' War
between France and England, whose actual span was from 1337 to 1453. And
in a way Waterloo was its epilogue. The shoulder-to-shoulder fight of
the ancient rivals, from 1914 to 1918, let us hope, has put the seal on
their pact of peace.
THE CATHEDRAL OF MEAUX[100]
Ah, see the fair chivalry come, the companions of Christ!
White Horsemen who ride on white horses, the Knights of God!
They, for their Lord and their Lover have sacrificed
All, save the sweetness of treading where He first trod!
These through the darkness of death, the dominion of night,
Swept, and they wake in white places at morningtide....
Now, whithersoever He goeth, with Him they go;
White Horsemen who ride on white horses, oh, fair to see!
They ride, where the Rivers of Paradise flash and flow,
White Horsemen, with Christ their Captain: forever He!
--LIONEL JOHNSON, _Te Martyrum Candidatus_.[101]
To decipher Meaux Cathedral has been a student's _tour-de-force_, so
early and unceasing have been its rebuildings. With Troyes and Séez, it
was the only Gothic cathedral that had a flaw in its structure. Begun
with the choir, in the last decades of the XII century, it still
retained the Romanesque idea of deep galleries over the side aisles.
Whether poor foundations were laid or whether the tribune vaults were
made too cumbersome, the edifice gave signals of insecurity from the
start.
As the XIII century opened, the transept and that part of the nave near
it were building with the tribunes still, although by that time such
galleries had fallen into disuse. Repeated restorations delayed the
works. Cracks continued to show until, about 1270, when the collapse of
the whole church was threatened, a complete reconstruction was
undertaken by Bishop Jean de Poincy.
Already, in 1220, the choir had been redone and two more chapels added,
making five apsidioles in all. In 1270 they demolished throughout the
church the tribunes over the side aisles, and thus the aisles became
twice their intended height. In the first three bays of the choir were
retained the arches of the tribune, so that now certain bays of the
choir aisles open on the central vessel by pier arcades surmounted by
false-tribune arches. Striking effect is made in the nave by some giant
cylinder piers whose height is double what was originally planned and
whose capitals are gems of interpretative sculpture, vine leaf and fern.
Much mechanical dexterity was shown in the recutting of piers and the
elimination of the tribunes, but even now a few of the shorter columns
are to be found embedded in the newer parts, and a few sections of the
triforium show their primitive plan.
By the time Meaux Cathedral was completed it was practically an edifice
of the end of the XIII century. Its chief patroness was the queen of
Philippe-le-Bel (St. Louis' grandson), the Jeanne of Champagne who
brought that rich province to the Crown, as well as the kingdom of
Navarre, the same princess who encouraged Joinville to write his
reminiscences. The city of Meaux was in her dowry, and they say that her
portrait was carved on a keystone of the choir. When she died, in 1305,
she named the bishop of Meaux as her executor and donated a legacy to
his church.
A well-known XIV-century architect, Nicolas de Chaumes, worked on the
west façade, two of whose portals are of that period, and one of the XV
century. Unfortunately, use was made of a soft stone which time has
sadly eroded. Flamboyant Gothic sculpture, with foliage in gracious
disorder, appears in the western bays: the undulating flora of the XIV
century, and the nervous, deeply indented, pointed leaves of the XV
century when such complicated forms as the curly cabbage were taken as
models. Wiser were the earlier sculptors who had interpreted and
arranged their leaves with architectural fitness. The south portal of
Meaux's transept must have had in mind St. Stephen's door of the
cathedral at Paris. At Meaux the sculptured figures show certain
mannerisms, such as the throwing out of one hip, a trait soon to be
exaggerated. The carvings throughout the church were mutilated by the
Huguenots in 1562, and from that date no further work was done on the
edifice. One tower of the façade remains painfully stunted.
The church of Meaux would stand well in the front rank of Gothic
cathedrals were it not for certain flaws of proportion. Such
exceptionally high side aisles call for a nave twice as long, and the
clearstory appears dwarfed by the lofty pier arcades of the chevet. Yet
though made piecemeal, and without uniformity of style in its main
parts, Meaux possesses a unity of its own, and its effect as a whole is
one of elegance and even radiance.
The tomb of its greatest bishop is an immense slab of marble in the
pavement of the choir. Bossuet devoted himself to his diocese for over
twenty years (1681-1704). Frequently he preached in the cathedral built
by the generosity of Jeanne of Champagne, the founder of the College of
Navarre, where he had studied in his youth. There is something akin in
Meaux Cathedral to the high soul and courtliness of Bossuet. The two
most religious and national epochs in French history were the XIII and
XVII centuries.
Few churches in France present a better setting for a festival of
solemn joy than the cathedral of Meaux. It is the church for _Noël_, for
the white radiance of First Communion gatherings, for the _Te Deum_ of
victory. Fitting is it that the victory of the Marne should here have
become a personal heritage. At the very gates of Meaux came the turning
of the tide on September 5, 1914, when the thunderous advance on Paris
was suddenly arrested. The password for that day of miracle was "Jeanne
d'Arc." Near by, on the Oureq, Jeanne's troubadour, Péguy,[102] fell on
that same September 5th, he who had chanted prophetically:
_Heureux ceux qui sont mort pour une juste guerre ..._
_Heureux les épis murs et les blés moissonnés,_
_Heureux ceux qui sont mort dans les grandes batailles,_
_Couchés dessus le sol à la face de Dieu._
Close to Meaux the battle raged outside, and the wounded, in bewildering
numbers, were carried into the desolated town which lacked a civic head.
The bishop of Meaux, Monseigneur Marbeau, stepped forth as the accepted
leader, as in the time of those earlier invasions when the bishops of
Gaul saved Latin civilization.
Again, in 1918, the invader drew perilously near, and a second victory
of the Marne swept back the avalanche. From the fields around the city
forever will an invisible white army of martyrs swell this cathedral's
_Te Deum_. In Meaux on the Marne, God will always be the omnipotent Lord
God of Battles, the _Dominus Deus Sabaoth_ of the great hymn of
thanksgiving.[103]
[Illustration: _The Cathedral of Meaux, Viewed from the Nave's Aisle_]