Countess Marie's grandson, Thibaut IV _le Chansonnier_, born in Troyes.
Thibaut's songs blended the courteous poetry of the troubadour tradition
with the attic salt of his own most civilized Champagne. In his gallant
company Joinville acquired his good manners and inimitable mode of
expression.
The last countess of this land of gay singers and soldier-historians
was Thibaut's granddaughter, Jeanne, who inspired Joinville to write his
memoirs, helped to build Meaux Cathedral, and founded the College of
Navarre where Gerson and Bossuet were to be trained. But, alas! the
liberal young heiress of Champagne married the legist king of France,
Phillipe le Bel, the executioner of the Templars. When he struck a blow
at the international fairs of Champagne by persecuting Lombards and
Jews, the great day for Troyes was over. When Jeanne d'Arc--born on the
confines of Champagne--revived the nation's pride, the art traditions
latent in the citizens of Troyes flowered once more with magnificence.
Only the slow accumulation of centuries could have produced the
unemphatic beauty of the gracious St. Martha in Troyes' Flamboyant
Gothic church of the Madeleine.
THE CATHEDRAL OF TOURS.[153]
A religion is the heart of a race; it expresses the emotions of a
people and elevates them by giving them an aim: but, unless a God
be visibly honored, religion does not exist, and human laws are
powerless.... Thought, the fountain of all good and evil, cannot be
trained, mastered, and directed except by religion, and the only
possible religion is Christianity, which created the modern world
and will preserve it.... France is being saved and lost
perpetually. If she wants to be saved, indeed, let her go back to
the laws of God.--HONORÉ DE BALZAC (1799-1850; born in Tours).
The cathedral of Tours does not startle. One is not carried away by it,
at first. Its charm is that of the tranquil horizons of the Loire,
_fleuve de lumière, de vie doucement heureuse, partout de plein effets
de lenteur, d'ordre_, so Rodin saw it. The beauty of Touraine increases
with familiarity because it is touched with that measure, that justness
of soul inherited from the classic spirit, that has ever tempered, in
the art manifestations of this nation, the sublime overimpassioned
consistencies of the Celt and the lofty overexaggerated dreams of the
Teuton.
The cathedral of Tours does not aspire to the impossible. It is a rather
cold, high-bred church at one with its environment, the gracious garden
of Touraine, a satisfying, discreet church and most intensely French.
While one rejoices that a Robert de Lusarches aspired to the Infinite at
Amiens, one approves the architect of Tours who worked within human
possibilities. The choir of the cathedral possesses both delicacy and
force. Toward its erection Louis IX granted a quarry and some forest
lands near Chinon. The choir must have been nearing its completion when
in 1255 the king visited Tours, whose archbishop, Geoffrey de Martel,
had lately died a crusader in Palestine.
During the fifty years prior to 1270 the cathedral was building. In 1269
the relics of St. Maurice and his companions from Thebes, who were
martyred in Gaul under Diocletian, were transferred to the sanctuary.
Those early Christians were the tutelary saints of Tours Cathedral up to
the XIV century. Then St. Gatien, the first to preach Christianity in
this region, was chosen as patron. _La Gatienne_ the people call their
chief church. The cult of the early missionary had been a favorite
devotion of St. Martin, third and greatest bishop of Tours, who died as
the IV century drew to a close.
Like Lyons, Tours has eminent ecclesiastical memories. The shrine of St.
Martin, the most popular saint of Gaul, made the city a frequented
pilgrimage for Europe. Gregory of Tours, who ruled this see from 573 to
595, has described the richness of the Byzantine church that stood over
the tomb of the great thaumaturge. Like most of the prelates who saved
Latin civilization from the Barbarian's submersion, Bishop Gregory was
of Gallo-Roman stock, of a senatorial family of Auvergne who boasted
descent from an early Christian martyr of Gaul. In the present southwest
tower of la Gatienne are traces of the VI-century cathedral built by
this bishop-historian of Gaul, whose pages are a chief source for
Merovingian times.[154]
The city of Tours always had two great monuments--the cathedral within
the ramparts, the basilica of St. Martin outside the walls. St. Martin's
abbey was the nation's intellectual leader when the Saxon scholar Alcuin
became its abbot (796-804). He made of Tours a Christian Athens. They
buried him in his abbatial, where four years earlier Charlemagne's wife,
Luitgarde, had been laid. To-day only two towers stand of St. Martin's
basilica--the Tour Charlemagne, begun by the Blessed Hervé, abbot in
997, hence one of the oldest memorials of the rebirth of architecture
associated with the year 1000, and a former façade tower mainly of the
XII century. One of the busiest streets of Tours runs up what once was
the nave of the abbatial, but, not discouraged, the people of Touraine
have erected a new Byzantinesque basilica of St. Martin on the site of
the transept's southern arm. Those two tragic frenzies of forgetfulness,
1562, that scattered St. Martin's ashes--for which St. Eloi,
bishop-goldsmith of Noyon, had made a priceless reliquary--and 1793,
that laid in ruins his church in Tours and Marmoutier's Apogee Gothic
abbatial that marked the rock-hewn cells where he had lived a hermit
across the Loire, those two blind hours when men thought to erect
barriers between themselves and their past, destroyed monuments which,
did they exist still, would rank Tours, architecturally, among the first
cities of Europe. St. Martin's church, built by Hervé, became a
_monument-type_,[155] copied by Ste. Foi, Congnes, St. Martial,
Limoges, St. Sernin, Toulouse, and the cathedral at Santiago.
It is said that twenty centuries of human effort are represented by the
stones of Tours Cathedral.[156] In the base of its façade towers are
remains of the city's III-century walls, which had been constructed in
their turn with the big stones stolen from the local Roman temples of 50
B.C. For sixteen centuries Mass has been said on this site. In the
southwest tower are vestiges of Gregory of Tours' VI-century church, and
in the northwest tower traces of the Romanesque cathedral on which
worked the philosopher and theologian, Hildebert de Lavardin, the most
popular poet of his age and one of the builders of Le Mans Cathedral
before promoted to be Tours' sixty-fourth archbishop (1125-34). In
refuting Berengar, a canon of Tours, who taught a confused doctrine
concerning the Eucharist, Bishop Hildebert was the first to use the term
"transubstantiation" in its theological sense. It is said that the
custom of elevating the Host in the Mass resulted from the eucharistic
controversies started by Berengar.
In 1167 a fire, caused by a quarrel over crusaders' treasure, between
Louis VII and Henry II Plantagenet, destroyed the Romanesque cathedral
of Tours. Bishop Joscion, who died in 1173, planned to construct a
Plantagenet Gothic church, since Touraine was in large part under
Angevin control, and to the church he began belongs the graceful
_bombé_ vault borne on eight slender branches beneath the northwest
tower. In 1191 Richard Coeur-de-Lion came to his city of Tours to
receive the crusaders' insignia before his venture to the East. His
ransom drained the land of building funds. For that cause or another,
the projected work at Tours languished. The actual choir was begun only
about 1210, when the city had become a part of the royal domain, and its
new master Philippe-Auguste wrote that he held the church of Tours to be
one of the chief jewels of his crown, and that whosoever molested it
touched his (the king's) person.
We do not know who was the original architect of _la Gatienne_. Étienne
de Mortagne, who designed the Benedictine church at Marmoutier, is
mentioned, in 1269, as master-of-works at the cathedral, but by that
time its choir was completed. That choir, while making no pretense of
being sublime, is a monument of noble robustness, displaying within and
without the veriest genius of good taste. The vista closing the eastern
end of the church is one of the most satisfactory in France, owing to
its right proportion. In this, Tours derives directly from Amiens. Its
pier arcade comprises one-third of the interior wall elevation; and the
triforium and clearstory make up the other two-thirds--clearstory being
double the height of triforium. At Tours the relation of span and height
is admirable, and both are well correlated with length. Seen in
perspective down the nave, the three stories of colored glass around the
sanctuary are the supreme impression of this church interior, and seldom
does one pass from its west portal without turning back for a lingering
look at that harmonious chevet of consecrated light. Through the pier
arches can be seen symmetrically the windows of the apse chapels. The
design of the glazed triforium is excelled by no other in France; though
serving as a kind of pedestal for the upper lights, it retains its own
entity.
When the choir of Tours was completed, the builders proceeded at once to
erect the transept which, the stones themselves say, must have been
finished as the XIII century closed. The nave's easternmost bays
touching it belong to the first years of the next century, as do the two
rose windows of the transept. The northern rose is irreproachable in
design and of the same scintillating jewel tradition as XIII-century
glass.
The Hundred Years' War, here as elsewhere, checked building activities.
When they were resumed at Tours, happily the first plans were adhered
to, so that choir and nave are homogeneous. As the church advanced
toward the west, the window tracery changed from Rayonnant to
Flamboyant, the profiles grew prismatic, and the sculpture of the
capitals became naturalistic rather than an architectural interpretation
of foliage. The nave was made narrower than the choir, probably with the
intention of joining it to the XII-century façade. Of the four triumphal
piers at the transept-crossing, the two westernmost ones stand closer
together than those flanking the choir, whose spacious procession path
causes the side aisles of the nave to appear meager.
What might seem an overreasonableness in the architecture of Tours
metropolitan church is offset by the glory of its jeweled windows.
Between 1260 and 1270 the choir's upper lights were placed, and
considering their date, they are exceptional in still being of the
legend-medallions type rather than large single figures. Blue is set in
greenish white with good effect, contrasting happily with certain
contemporary windows at Paris, where the juxtaposition of blue and red
produced melancholy purple. The joyous sparkling tone of Tours' lights
proves a skillful use of pot-metal yellow. More care was taken to tell
the legends plainly than to put borders round each medallion.
The glass of Tours belongs to the Paris school, though made, doubtless,
by local workers. Were a floor laid below the triforium of the choir,
its fifteen upper windows, composing a veritable pavilion of glass,
would be almost a replica of the Sainte-Chapelle, and one recalls that
it was Archbishop Odo of Tours who on April 25, 1248, dedicated for St.
Louis his new shrine at Paris. The donors of Tours' great windows were
churchmen and laymen, the lowly and the mighty. Bishop Geoffrey de
Loudon, builder of Le Mans' glorious choir, presented a light, as did
Tours' own prelate and a group of parish priests. Small craftsmen were
donors, drapers, and day laborers, and of course Queen Blanche's donjons
of Castile are to be seen. Her window, devoted to St. James, the patron
of Spain, is splendid in hue.
The fourth clearstory window on the north excels in color harmony. They
call it the Adam window, after the first tiller of the soil. It was
presented by plowmen, and relates their field labors as well as the
story of Genesis. On one side of the central light of the clearstory is
a dazzling Tree of Jesse, the gift of a furrier and his wife. Next to it
is a window devoted to St. Martin, whose story is told again, in the
late XIII-century glass of an apse chapel. More French churches have
been dedicated to St. Martin than to any other patron save Notre Dame.
The windows of the sanctuary north of the axis chapel, though mixed in
design, excel all others in exquisite color, being composed of fragments
from St. Martin's abbatial reset here. The New Alliance window in the
Lady chapel has medallions of Christ bearing His Cross and the
Crucifixion accompanied by such symbols and prefigurings as Elisha
resuscitating the child, Jonah issuing from the whale's jaws, the brazen
serpent, and Moses striking the rock.
All the world was a symbol to the men of those Ages of Faith. The
interlinked petals of the transept's northern rose meet in a symbol of
the Divinity--a knot without beginning or end--the _forma universal_
visioned by Dante. There are Frenchmen who think that the splendid rose
windows in their Gothic cathedrals suggested to the exile of Florence
his conception of the empyrean. Heaven as Dante visioned it had neither
roof of gold nor pillars of jasper, but was an expanded, supernal, white
rose.
Once the nave of Tours Cathedral was filled with late-Gothic windows,
but storms wrecked many of them. Some of its glass has been set in a
line of lights beneath the transept's north rose, XV-century panels
representing members of the Bourbon Vendôme family, that was to mount
the French throne with Henry IV. Jean Fouquet might have drawn them.
Under the XVI-century rose in the west façade is another row of windows
containing good portraits of art patrons as munificent as the
Bourbons--the Laval-Montmorency family. All over France we find them as
donors of beautiful things.
The hour when Tours was an individual leader in art came during the
late-Gothic development.[157] Then was finished the cathedral's nave,
chapter house, library, cloister, and the psaltery with its pretty
Renaissance stair. The cathedral canons, _Messires de la Gatienne_,
sacrificed a forest for the nave's overroof. The elaborate Flamboyant
façade was set up. Jean Papin was its architect, and Jean de Dammartin,
fresh from Le Mans' transept, worked on it. It was begun under
Archbishop Philippe de Coëtquis (1427-41), one of the learned men whom
Charles VII summoned to interrogate Jeanne d'Arc. He pronounced her
entirely sincere.
In Tours Cathedral, April, 1429, knelt St. Jeanne for a solemn
benediction before she went forth to accomplish her feat at Orléans. An
artist of Tours made for her the banner she loved better than her sword.
When Tours heard that she was taken prisoner, public prayers were
ordered and a procession marched with bare feet, in penitential
intercession for her deliverance. Charles VII had been married in Tours
to his cousin Marie of Anjou, who was, says the modern student, more his
incentive to patriotism than Agnes Sorel. The son of Charles, Louis XI,
also was married in the cathedral of Tours, and preferred to live in the
environs of the ancient ecclesiastic city.
Under the saintly Archbishop Robert de Lenoncourt, installed here in
1488, were finished Tours' western portals. Their foliage is tormented,
serrated, and deeply undercut, almost too prodigally and delicately
sculptured for an exterior decoration. The entranceways are to-day shorn
of their imagery, the statues having been shattered in 1562. In the
Renaissance day the façade's twin towers were gracefully topped; _deux
beaux bijoux_, Henry IV called the belfries of Tours.
Throughout the Loire region an astounding number of monuments rose
during the last half of the XV century and the early part of the XVI.
Tours was the foyer for a school of sculpture that spread to Le Mans,
Angers, Nantes, Poitiers, and Bourges. From 1480 to 1512 the school of
the Region-of-the-Loire, as M. Paul Vitry calls it, was at its prime. It
culminated in the ducal tomb at Nantes and the entombments at Solesmes.
Dijon, the leader of the first half of the XV century, benefited Tours
by its realism, and the Italian artists, gathered here in the dawn of
the foreign Renaissance in France, contributed certain qualities. But
the art of Michel Colombo is predominatingly of the Middle Ages, and a
product of Touraine, a measured, contained, and charming art, _de pur
esprit français_. Colombe simplified the draperies of the Franco-Flamand
school and eschewed the Dijon roughness. His grace is never petty,
however, nor his idealism conventional. As the XVI century opened he
made, in his Tours studio, the statues for the ducal tomb at Nantes. In
1509 his nephew, Guillaume Regnault, sculptured the recumbent images of
the children of Anne of Brittany and Charles VIII for the sarcophagus,
now in the cathedral of Tours, the base of which was covered with
arabesques by Jerome of Fiesole. Colombo's contemporary, Jehan Fouquet,
a son of Tours, delighted in painting the regional types. He decorated
the walls of Notre-Dame-la-Riche, but his work is lost, though some of
the dazzling Renaissance windows of that late-Gothic church of Tours
have survived. A certain Jean Clouet emigrated from Brussels to Tours in
those days, and his son and grandson, born by the Loire, are two of the
French _primitifs_ whose work the traveler does not care to miss in any
gallery that can boast their Holbein-like canvases. During the
Revolution, plans were afoot to destroy the cathedral of Tours, but two
artists of the city (so loyal through centuries to art interests) risked
their lives to save their noble Gothic church.
THE CATHEDRAL OF LYONS.[158]
What Christian does not approach with veneration this city that was
in France the cradle of the true religion, and where amid
persecutions and tortures rose for the first time the Cross of
Christ? Who does not tread with veneration the soil impregnated
with the blood of so many martyrs and forever consecrated by the
glories of a see that justly claims the title Primate of
Gaul?--CHARLES DE MONTALEMBERT, visiting Lyons in 1831.
In its early Christian memories Lyons outrivals all other cities of
France. It claims a clear apostolic tradition, and boasts that, next to
Rome, it shed most Christian blood witnessing to the planting of the
Cross. And modern Lyons is the center of the Society for the Propagation
of the Faith, which sends forth to non-Christian lands more missionaries
than any other group in western Christendom--apostles who obey the
mandate given to Lyons' first martyr-bishops: Go, teach ye all nations,
baptizing in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
Imperial Rome, that foreshadowed many things, chose Lyons, before the
birth of Christ, as starting point for her network of highways and
aqueducts over Gaul. Augustus made it the capital of Celtic Gaul. It was
the bishop of Smyrna, St. Polycarp (d. A.D. 166), the disciple of St.
John the Beloved (d. A.D. 100), who sent the first two bishops of Lyons
to Christianize Gaul, Pothinus (d. A.D. 177), an Asiatic Greek, and
Irenæus (d. A.D. 202), one of the most remarkable writers of the early
Christian era, lettered in Greek literature and writing in Greek. With
profound knowledge of Christian doctrine, he advocated, for the guidance
of the Church, tradition, or the spoken word of the Apostles, as well as
their written word. Often with just pride did Irenæus boast that his
doctrine came direct from the contemporaries of the Saviour: "I could
describe to you the very spot where the blessed Polycarp sat when he
preached God's word.... His discourse to the people is engraved in my
heart. He had talked with John and the others who saw the Lord."
For twenty years St. Irenæus served as priest in Lyons under Bishop
Pothinus, and then when that holy prelate, at ninety years of age, was
martyred during the persecutions of the Christians under Marcus
Aurelius, Irenæus went to Rome to be consecrated primate of Gaul in his
place. When the pagan judge asked Pothinus who was the Christians' God,
the aged man made answer: "Merit him and you will know him." For twenty
years, till his death in 202, St. Irenæus evangelized the country with
such success that Lyons was almost a Christian city when the persecution
of Septimus Severus broke out. Then followed evil days when the streets
of Lyons ran red with blood, and her learned bishop perished with
nineteen thousand Christian martyrs.
During the first persecution, in 177, the Christians of the city wrote a
famous letter describing how forty-eight of their number were tortured
day after day in the Roman Forum of Lyons, till even the pagans allowed
that never a woman had suffered so much and so long as the fragile slave
Blandina. The letter of "the servitors of Christ who inhabit Vienne and
Lyons in Gaul, to the brothers of Asia and Phrygia who partake of our
Faith and our hope in the Redemption," is not only an historical
document, precious for Lyons, but, as Renan said, is "one of the most
extraordinary pages that any literature possesses."[159]
The hill of Fourvière looms over the scene of the martyrdoms, the _forum
vetus_, the forum of Trajan, which gave its name to the neighboring
eminence to which many generations have come as to a pilgrimage shrine.
On the flank of the hill a hospice marks where St. Pothinus breathed his
last. The sumptuous new basilica that stands on the crest of the hill
beside an ancient chapel, now its annex, persistently dominates the old,
gray city. Lyons fulfilled its war vow of 1870 by the erection of this
church wherein are strange echoes of Greek, Sicilian, Byzantine, and
Gothic art that surely will make archæologists in the far future wonder
at much in our civilization. On its walls the city's proud apostolic
traditions are set forth in mosaics.
Equally venerated is the ancient church of St. Martin d'Ainay which
marks the holy ground where many of the martyrs were slaughtered at the
confluence of the Saône and the Rhone. There once had stood the temple
of the sixty nations of Gaul consecrated to the glory of Augustus.
Haunted by imperial visions, Napoleon at St. Helena suggested that his
burial site be where the Rhone met the Saône. No city is more nobly
girdled than Lyons. From the altar to Augustus came the four pillars at
the transept crossing of St. Martin's; two lofty classic columns were
cut in two to make them. The Burgundian queen, Brunehaut, of tragic
memory, rebuilt Ainay's original oratory over the Christian martyrs'
bones, and founded the monastery which is one of the oldest in France.
In the course of time it became affiliated with the world-power, Cluny.
The present church of St. Martin was blessed in 1106 by Paschal II, who
on this same journey had dedicated various new basilicas in northern
Italy. In the XII and XIII centuries St. Martin's outer aisles were
added. The crypt under the chapel of Ste. Blandine is not later than the
V century. A contemporary of St. Martin's is the little Romanesque
building touching the cathedral's façade, the _Manécanterie_ (to sing in
the morning).[160] Originally it formed the outer wall of a gallery of
the cloister.
The cathedral of St. John the Baptist faces the hill of Fourvière and
its apse overlooks the Saône. The Baptist was the first teacher of St.
John Evangelist to whom the city traces its Christianity. A preceding
Romanesque cathedral, building in 1084 and completed by 1117, was
destroyed during disorders between the two warring local authorities,
the archbishop and the counts of Forez. Lyons for a time was under the
titular jurisdiction of the Holy Roman Empire, but to all intents and
purposes was a free city with well developed communal rights. While the
Romanesque cathedral was building, St. Anselm of Canterbury passed
sixteen months in Lyons as guest of Archbishop Hugues.
The present cathedral was undertaken by Archbishop Guichard (1165-80),
and in its foundation walls were incorporated some of the polished
stones from the forum of Trajan, hallowed by the martyrs' blood. So
thick were the apse walls made that flying buttresses were never needed.
The windows were set in deep embrasures. The absence of an ambulatory,
and the flat roof, are reminders that this city neighbors the Midi. The
cathedral's apse, as seen from across the Saône, is admirable. Over the
arms of the transept are towers whose breadth indicates that the tower
of St. Martin d'Ainay created a school in the district. In comparison
with the transept towers, the western belfries of the cathedral appear
meager.
The nave of Lyons rises twenty-five feet above the choir, and,
furthermore, is covered by an inappropriate high-pitched roof. Within
the church, the difference in height between the two main parts has been
gracefully veiled by piercing, in the flat wall over the triumphal arch
of the choir, a rose window and two lancets. In size this church may be
modest, but its sincere, grave dignity is such that the impression
conveyed is that of a very great cathedral. The nave derived from the
north. The choir emanated from the south, and its creamy, sculptured
marbles and Greco-Italian incrustations compose an interior of sober
elegance, the peer of any sanctuary in the land. A unique feature in
France is Lyons' incrustations--patterns cut in white marble and filled
in with a reddish-brown cement--found only here and in the cathedral of
Vienne.[161] St. Sophia in Constantinople first used the decoration,
which was imported into Italy and thence passed up the Rhone.
The choir of Lyons' Cathedral, up to its vault-springing, is Romanesque,
of the Burgundian and Provençal type. The classic pilaster strips are
channeled; on each arm of the transept is an apsidal chapel. The prelate
who began it, Guichard, had, while abbot of Pontigny, been the host of
St. Thomas Becket, and in Pontigny's church he was buried in 1180. His
successor, Jean de Bellesmaine (1180-93), born in Canterbury, was
another of Becket's friends, and soon after he was transferred here from
the see of Poitiers, then under English rule, he inspired the building
of a collegiate church dedicated to the new English saint. Archbishop
John undertook the second campaign of works on Lyons' choir, which was
now vaulted in the Gothic way. On the capitals of the upper walls are
the familiar crockets of the north.
In the transept is to be seen the same change from the round arches and
fluted pilaster strips of the Romanesque day to the Primary Gothic
characteristics. During the first third of the XIII century the transept
was vaulted, its two towers raised, and the choir's four easternmost
bays built. Lyons was then governed by one of its best rulers,
Archbishop Renaud de Forez, who laid here the base for several centuries
of prosperity. Circumstances forced him into the position of a leader of
armies, but his natural inclination led him to the cloister's peace to
end his days. In 1226, as president of a free city, he received Louis
VIII, shortly before that king's sudden death.
This capable churchman presented to his cathedral the seven magnificent
lancets in the curving sanctuary wall, that glow with the sparkling
jewel-radiance achieved before 1220, but never equaled afterwards. The
windows at Lyons are linked with those at Sens, and Sens' lancets we
know to have been related to the earlier school of Chartres. What
differentiates Lyons' medallions from those in the north was their use
of certain Byzantine arrangements, such as the Virgin reclining on a
couch in the Bethlehem grotto, or the representing St. John with a
beard.
The first light in the Lyons' chevet celebrates the local martyrs. The
axis window is a New Alliance, wherein the Old Law symbolizes the New.
The meaning of its animal allegories was first explained by Père Cahier,
who observed that they were taken from the ancient book called the
_Bestiaires_. M. Mâle further discovered that Lyons' New Alliance window
showed only those animals spoken of in Honoré d'Autun's popular _Mirror
of the Church_. Honoré, who taught in Autun's cathedral school early in
the XII century, was the initiator of animal symbolism in French
cathedrals.
In the upper lights of Lyons' choir are some XIII-century archaic
figures of big gaunt patriarchs with strange white eyes. The upper
choir's triplet windows of different heights are most artistic. Under
the north rose of the transept is a large lancet of surpassing effect,
and in the transeptal chapel, close by, is a window that is like a
sublimated topaz. The small pieces of glass used, their varied
thicknesses and roughnesses are causes producing such sparkle. One
cannot stress too strongly the exceptional character of Lyons' glass.
Centuries later, in the Flamboyant day, this city produced again a bevy
of notable masters.
The nave of Lyons Cathedral advanced, bay by bay, in slow progress all
through the XIII century, and sculpture and tracery in triforium and
clearstory show the gradual change to Rayonnant design. The nave of
northern Gothic conformed itself with sound instinct to the Romanesque
southern choir. This is a cathedral that kneels more than it soars. The
ancient city exulted on Fourvière's hill, but it thought best to keep
its cathedral as a solemn cenotaph for its white army of unburied
martyrs.
There came to Lyons, while its nave was building, the great Englishman,
Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253), who at Lincoln made an angel-choir, "one
of the loveliest of man's works," to shrine the relics of his
predecessor, St. Hugh of Avalon, born in this semi-southern region. And
many another enthusiast for the art of the builder studied the nave of
Lyons in the course of its construction. Here gathered in 1245 a general
Council of the Church. Modern congresses are sometimes dull affairs, but
they must have been thrilling in the days when cathedrals were building
and each prelate championed his regional ideas and yet looked about
eagerly to seize on new ones.
The two westernmost bays of Lyons Cathedral were finished by 1310, and
then were sculptured the façade portals with hundreds of little panels
as full of frolic and fancy as the marginal gaieties of illuminated
missals. A few years earlier the transept doors at Rouen had made
similar medallions. Vice in them was rendered hateful. Where Lot's story
should have been was left a blank space. Not until Flemish realism
entered French art, in the XV century, were certain gross scenes
rendered. The medallions at Lyons are "Gaulois but without obscenity."
From 1308 to 1332 the wide, plain west façade of St. Jean's cathedral
was done. Two of the Avignon popes were crowned here in those days,
Clement V, the builder of Bordeaux's choir, and John XXII. The great
dukes of the west, Philippe le Hardi and his son Jean sans Peur, being
hereditary canons of the cathedral, often sat in its choir stalls. Of
their time is the astronomical clock in the transept. For ten years,
prior to 1429, Jean Gerson lived in the old Christian city, teaching
little children their catechism, and the only payment he craved was that
they should pray: Lord have mercy on your poor servant Gerson. He had
been worsted by his century's treachery, bloodshed, foreign rule, and
church schism; but after his death Lyons revered him as a saint, and
carved his device, _Sursum Corda_, on a chapel in the church of St.
Paul. Scholars have decided against Gerson as author of the _Imitation
of Christ_, yet during two centuries he was so believed to be, and his
memory will be dear to those who have found inspiration in that precious
book.
Lyons played so important a part in the revival of late-Gothic art that
it was called the French Florence. Its new school of glassmakers
decorated the church of Brou, at Bourg-en-Bresse, not far away.[162] Two
elaborate Flamboyant Gothic tombs were put up in the cathedral--that of
Archbishop de Saluces (d. 1419) by Jacques Morel, and that of Cardinal
Charles de Bourbon, a grandson of John the Fearless of Burgundy, and son
of the Bourbon duke commemorated by the Souvigny tomb. From 1486 to
1501, he and his brother Pierre de Bourbon, son-in-law of Louis XI,
added to Lyons Cathedral the splendid chapel of their name whose walls
are carved with their winged stag and the device Espérance.
Unfortunately the windows, made by the Lyons master Pierre de la Paix,
exist no longer, save a few upper panels, in one of which is an angel of
rare beauty holding the Bourbon arms. Frequently in France one meets the
donations of Henry IV's art-loving forbears, at Chartres, Tours,
Souvigny,[163] Champigny-sur-Veude. Henry was married in Lyons
Cathedral, in 1600, to Marie de Medici, daughter of another line of
connoisseurs.
Like many a cathedral of France, Lyons was at its richest when it was
sacked most piteously both in 1560 and 1562. Every church in the city
was devastated by the cruel Baron des Adrets, who led the Huguenots one
year, the Catholics the next, for in those bitter civil wars religion
was often the thinnest cloak. The Huguenots destroyed the tomb of
Cardinal de Saluces, with its eighteen alabaster statuettes, smashed the
Bourbon chapel and tomb, broke up the Flamboyant rood screen, and
dragged through the streets a silver statue of Christ that had
surmounted it. On the west façade some fifty large statues were brought
down, though happily the lovely little scenes chiseled under their
brackets were spared. It is told how an archer shattered Our Lady's
image, but when he attempted to dislodge that of God the Father, on the
pignon, it fell and killed him. Lyons was again the scene of saturnalian
havoc during the Revolution, when by the thousand her citizens were
mowed down with grape shot because they chose to adhere to the old
régime. A passageway was broken open in the walls of the cathedral to
permit the entry of a chariot bearing the Goddess of Reason.
Of all the happenings in Lyons Cathedral, the most momentous was the
Ecumenical Council of 1274. Christendom never witnessed a greater
gathering. At the Council held at Lyons in 1245, Innocent IV had
preached his famous sermon on the five wounds of the Church, but he was
less concerned with healing them than with excommunicating Frederick II.
St. Louis tried in vain to make peace between pope and emperor on his
visit to Lyons in those days. When the saint-king died on his last
crusade his ashes rested in honor in Lyons Cathedral on their long
journey from Tunis to St. Denis. Till the death of Frederick II, the
pope lived in Lyons, whose independent position, neither wholly of
France nor of the Empire, caused it to be a chosen spot for exiles.
Innocent contributed toward the building of a stone bridge over the
Rhone to replace one that had collapsed under the troops of
Philippe-Auguste and Coeur-de-Lion as they marched to the Third
Crusade.
The Council of 1245 had been held in a cathedral of whose nave only four
bays were completed. For the far greater gathering of 1274, Lyons
Cathedral could seat over two thousand prelates and princes. The chief
visitors were placed in the choir with Gregory X (formerly a canon of
this church). Among them was Aragon's king, Jaime el Conquistador,
mighty builder of churches and untiring crusader, Guy de la Tour, the
bishop-builder of Clermont Cathedral, and the bishop of Mende, Guillaume
Durandus, author of the universally read liturgical treatise. St.
Bonaventure, whose book of meditations was soon to inspire Giotto,
preached at the opening Mass. His fellow teacher in Paris University,
St. Thomas Aquinas, journeying north to attend the congress at Lyons,
had died suddenly in the prime of life.
The Council of 1274 was not political, as had been that of 1245; its
main purposes were the Holy War in the East and the reconciliation of
the Greek and Latin churches. The Emperor of Constantinople had sent
officials to reconcile him with Rome, and to this day memorials of that
short reunion--Greek and Latin processional crosses--stand behind the
chief altar of Lyons Cathedral. The emperor's ambassadors solemnly
abjured the twenty-six propositions condemned by Rome, then took the
oath of fidelity to the pope. With swelling heart the vast throng rose
to chant the _Te Deum_. Gregory X intoned the _Credo_ in Latin, and the
Greek patriarch repeated thrice the _Filioque_ phrase which, centuries
earlier, had been the occasion of the break with Rome, _qui ex Patre
Filioque procedit_. Before the century ended the union was a
dead-letter, though the emperor till his death remained faithful to his
pact. The Greek priesthood proved irreconcilable.
The day before the Council closed St. Bonaventure died, and around his
grave, in the Franciscan church at Lyons, stood the most imposing group
of mourners recorded in history, pope, kings, and five hundred princes
and prelates of note. The sermon was preached by Bonaventure's pupil of
the Paris schoolroom, the learned Pierre de Tarentaise, archbishop of
Lyons, soon to mount Peter's chair as Innocent V. All Christendom was
bidden to offer up a prayer for the soul of Brother Bonaventure. The
city adopted him as a patron. In 1562 the ashes of the Seraphic Doctor
were flung into the Rhone, but there still stands in Lyons a late-Gothic
church that bears his name.
LE MANS CATHEDRAL[164]
A cathedral is a book, a poem, and Christianity, true to its
promise, has drawn voice and song from stone, _lapides
clamabunt_.--FRÉDÉRIC OZANAM.
Like Bourges and Lyons, the cathedral of Le Mans shows the influence of
different schools. An Angevin architect made the _bombé_ vaults of its
nave, and from the Ile-de-France and Normandy came the masters who
designed its mammoth choir. The nave of Le Mans is a masterpiece of
Romanesque despite its diagonals; the choir a masterpiece of Apogee
Gothic. In the nave appear different stages of pre-Gothic art, and in
the choir, the transept, and the nave's masonry roof are
represented--Primary, Apogee, Rayonnant, and Flamboyant Gothic.
To read the stones of this composite church with intelligence, one must
trace its story step by step. It is named after the first bishop of the
city, St. Julian, who brought Christianity into the region. Several
earlier cathedrals succeeded each other on the site. The one erected
after the Northmen sacked Le Mans was falling into ruin when, about
1060, Bishop Vulgrim began a new cathedral, carried on by his successor,
Arnould. Their Romanesque choir exists no longer, but vestiges of the
church are to be traced in the walls of the present nave, and in the
gable of the Psallette, a building to the north of the cathedral, which
in Bishop Vulgrim's day formed part of his transept's north tower.
The nave of Le Mans as we have it to-day shows three distinct campaigns
of work undertaken by the three bishops, Hoël, Hildebert de Lavardin,
and Guillaume de Passavant. Bishop Hoël (1085-97), a Breton, able,
handsome, patriotic, continued the Romanesque transept and the towers
that terminate its arms. His works exist in the base of the southern
tower and also in those two pier arcades of the nave that touch the
transept. The groin vaulting of the side aisles is of Hoël's time, as
well as the aisle walls, decorated with blind arcades, the capitals of
whose shafts are carved crudely with chimerical animals. As the capitals
opposite those of the engaged shafts show more skill, they must have
been done later in the XI century.
Good Bishop Hoël, in famine time, sold the gold and silver plate of his
cathedral to feed the poor, and on his deathbed distributed his
possessions among them. After a visit to Rome, he accompanied Urban II
back to France, on the momentous occasion of the launching of the First
Crusade. When the Council of Clermont ended, the pope came to Le Mans,
in February of 1096, to visit his friend the bishop, to the intense
pride of all the city. Such episodes reflect clearly the unison of
aspiration which was presently to express itself in mighty movements.
The Greek princess who saw the first crusaders arrive in Constantinople
has told in graphic phrases how Europe, unloosed from its foundations,
hurled itself on Asia, and with a like impetuosity western Christendom
was about to fling itself toward heaven in cathedrals.
The church on which Bishop Hoël had worked was destroyed in large part
by fire, and his successor, the illustrious Hildebert de Lavardin
(1097-1125), began a reconstruction about 1110. Hildebert was the most
popular poet of his day and in the mediæval schools his letters were
committed to memory. A lover of the Latin authors, he composed verses of
such facture that some of them have been mistaken for ancient classics.
He was philosopher, orator, and architect as well. The best years of his
life were passed in Le Mans, though he was to die in Tours as archbishop
of that city. While a teacher in Le Mans' cathedral school, he
accompanied Bishop Hoël on his travels, and knew well Cluny and its
great abbot Hugues, whose biographer he became. Hildebert possessed
_esprit_, a sound judgment, and much independence. Life tested him
harshly. The ordeal of prison he suffered several times, and the
worse ordeal of calumny, which is disproved by the affectionate
friendship felt for him by St. Anselm, St. Bernard, and Bishop Ives of
Chartres. No man, he himself said in one of his sermons, should be a
bishop whose life has not always been irreproachable. His contemporaries
called him "a prelate attentive to the distribution of the bread of the
word of God," a man zealous for discipline, charitable to the poor, and
with a love for the House of Prayer that made him a builder both at Le
Mans and Tours.
[Illustration: _Le Mans' Choir_ (_1217-1254_). _The Double Aisles_]
Like St. Anselm, he was bullied by William Rufus. Maine lay between
Anjou and Normandy and was fought for by each of those expanding powers,
a duel settled only by the marriage of the heiress of Maine to the heir
of Anjou, the son of which union was Geoffrey the Handsome, the first
Plantagenet so called, who married the heiress of Normandy and England.
Geoffrey's son, Henry II of England, inherited Maine, Anjou, and
Normandy before he fell heir to the kingdom across the Channel.
When William Rufus captured Le Mans in 1097, he exacted the demolition
of the cathedral's towers on the charge that they dominated his
residence. Annoyed that Hildebert had been elected bishop without his
deciding voice, he pillaged his palace, confiscated his possessions, and
kept him chained in prison for a year. The bishop was imprisoned as well
by Maine's designing neighbor to the south, the Count of Anjou, and once
while in the south of France he almost met death at the hands of Saracen
pirates.
Despite vicissitudes, he found time for writing poetry and for building.
He obtained a monk-architect named Jean from the noted Geoffrey, abbot
of Vendôme,[165] author, writer, and the intimate of many popes. Later,
when Abbot Geoffrey asked for the return of his architect, Hildebert
retained him, and a tart letter of the abbot to the bishop exists; it
appears that monk Jean was sent, in consequence, on a penitential
pilgrimage to Palestine. Bishop Hildebert's part in Le Mans' actual
cathedral is the semicircular pier arches discernible in all the bays of
the nave save the two touching the transept, the alternate circular
piers, and the west façade, wherein were retained older portions, and
against which leans a big menhir of immemorial age: "_Il y a dans la
cathédrale toute la simple beauté du menhir qui l'annonce_," is one of
Rodin's vivifying phrases.
Bishop Hildebert consecrated his new cathedral in 1120, and it is
related how, on that day, Fulk V of Anjou, the widower of the heiress of
Maine, about to start for the Holy Land, set his little son of seven,
Geoffrey, on the high altar of Le Mans Cathedral, and said with emotion:
"O holy Julian, to thee I commend my child and my lands. Defend and
protect them both." His prowess in Palestine was eventually to win for
him the heiress of Jerusalem, so that when he had married his son
Geoffrey to a woman of great fortune, he sensibly left him as sole ruler
in Maine and Anjou, contenting himself with his Oriental kingdom.
Two fires in quick succession damaged the Romanesque cathedral of Le
Mans. Ordericus Vitalis tells how "in the first week of September, 1134,
the hand of God punished many sins by fire, for the ancient and wealthy
cities of Le Mans and Chartres were burned." In the necessary changes
that followed practically all the central nave was redone by Bishop
Guillaume de Passavant (1145-86). The triforium, the clearstory, and the
masonry roof are his, and he constructed the pointed arches under the
semicircular ones of Bishop Hildebert's pier arcade. The four immense
square vault sections (c. 1150) over Le Mans' nave are of the heavy rib
Plantagenet type, like the so-called domical vaults of Angers Cathedral.
Their crown, or keystone, being ten feet higher than their framing
arches, a pronounced concave shape results. The addition of a heavy
stone roof necessitated the englobing of each alternate monolithic
column by a square pier cantoned with shafts.
Bishop Guillaume developed the door in the south flank of the nave,
whose column images, though much mutilated, are allied with those at
Chartres' western entrances. At the door joints, in bas-relief only, are
Peter and Paul; an additional step was taken when the other images were
made to stand almost free of their columns. Guglielmo, the Lombard, had
used jamb-sculpture at Modena Cathedral as the XII century opened. This
door of Le Mans, among the earliest of French imaged portals, belongs to
the decade before 1150. The porch leading to it was built in time for
the consecration of the cathedral in 1158.
Guillaume de Passavant was another of the outstanding men of his age.
He, too, wrote Latin verses, and even as he lay dying composed a little
satire on his attendants, whom his clear eyes observed to be more
concerned over the coming recompense from his estate than for the loss
of their bishop. Like St. Bernard, who had loved him as a youth, he was
a tireless reader of the Bible. Daily at his table the poor were fed. He
presented to his cathedral a cloth of gold studded with gems, for which
he wrote verses, saying that in case of famine it was to be sold to feed
the destitute. Another princely gift he gave to Le Mans Cathedral was
the enameled tomb of Count Geoffrey the Handsome, of which only one
large panel has survived, now the treasure of the Museum. Both kinds of
enamel were used, the flat surface, or champlevé, and the cloisonné
method. The technique is Limousin, not, as some have said, Rhenish;
between Le Mans and Limoges were many links.
Geoffrey the Handsome was the thirteenth count of Anjou, though the
capital of Maine was always his favorite residence, rather than Angers,
the chief city of his father's patrimony. He won the nickname
"Plantagenet" because of the sprig of broom he used to stick in his cap.
True to his race's instinct for territorial aggrandizement, he married,
when not yet twenty, a woman twice his age, Matilda, daughter of Henry I
of England, the Conqueror's son. Geoffrey died in 1151 on his return
from the Second Crusade, where he had fought for his half brother,
Baudouin III, king of Jerusalem. His son, Henry II, was born in Le Mans
(1133) and baptized in its cathedral. Henry had revered Guillaume de
Passavant from childhood, yet once, in an Angevin passion, because the
aged bishop had crossed his will, he sent messengers from England to
order the sacking of the prelate's palace. Thomas Becket, then Henry's
chancellor, gave secret advice to the envoys to tarry long on their
journey to Maine. On the third day after their departure he wrung from
the king, who fancied his order was already carried out, a
counter-order, which he rushed through to Le Mans.
Henry Plantagenet loved Le Mans better than any city in his wide
dominions, and his heart broke when his rebellious son, Richard
Coeur-de-Lion, drove him out in 1189. Two months later he died in
Chinon castle and was carried for burial to Fontevrault; the ancient
prophecy had said that Anjou's ruler of his generation would lie
shrouded among the shrouden women.
If Fulk Nerra's wild blood had passed to Henry, so had his shrewdness
and progressive statesmanship. He, too, like his father, before twenty,
wedded a woman much older than himself, the richest heiress in
Christendom, Aliénor of Aquitaine. Possessing Anjou, Maine, and
Touraine, Normandy and Aquitaine, this king of England ruled more
territory in France than did the French king. And Philippe-Auguste, son
of the French monarch, whom Aliénor had discarded, bent his resourceful
genius and fox-like policies to change so abnormal a state of affairs.
The Capet-Plantagenet duel was to last for centuries.
Both Henry and Philippe were munificent patrons of the new
architecture. Henry sponsored that individual phase of it called
Plantagenet Gothic; under Philippe, French Gothic reached its highest
development. And the cathedral of Le Mans records them both, Plantagenet
in its nave, northern French in its choir. When Maine, Anjou, and
Touraine, because of John Lackland's crimes, passed willingly to the
French king, the art of the Ile-de-France found favor in southwest
France. Then it was that the XI-century Romanesque chevet of Le Mans
Cathedral was replaced by the present stupendous Gothic choir.
In 1217 Bishop Hamlin obtained the consent of Philippe-Auguste to
destroy the Gallo-Roman city walls in order to extend the apse of his
church, and the next year the choir was started. The bishop, trowel in
hand, spent hours on the new work. His two successors continued the
enterprise. From 1234 to 1255 Bishop Geoffrey de London was its princely
benefactor. In 1254 the choir was dedicated, "a day of benediction" for
our land, said the people with tears of fervor. Men and women worked
voluntarily to clear the edifice of builders' rubbish, even the little
children of four carrying out the sand in their frocks. For the happy
ceremony, each guild of the city, chanting psalms, brought a candle of
two-hundred-pound weight, to be set up in a majestic circle round the
high altar.
The choir, then blessed for God's service, is one of the vast designs of
Gothic architecture. "Words are powerless to paint the majesty of this
sanctuary," wrote M. Gonse. Here, as at Bourges, is the note of dream
beauty that haunts the memory, the something mysterious and
superlatively picturesque. Were the church completed on the same scale
it would rank with the supreme cathedrals of France. From the exterior
the contrast between the XII-century nave and its towering neighbor is
painfully abrupt. The nave's outer walls are stark and unadorned, the
round arched windows insignificant in size. But who would be willing to
forfeit the venerable monument built by the poet-theologians, Hildebert
de Lavardin and Guillaume de Passavant, wherein history has been lived,
and whose interior aspect is of so grave, white, and primeval a
simplicity?
Overawing in size is Le Mans' Gothic choir. The ground falls away to the
cast of the church, and then opens out in the Place des Jacobins, whence
can be obtained an unobstructed view of the stupendous edifice. Its
numerous apse chapels are of exceptional length. The forked flying
buttresses allowed the insertion of ambulatory windows. As at Bourges
and Coutances, the inner aisle is sufficiently high to possess its own
triforium and clearstory, but Le Mans improved on Bourges by omitting
altogether the triforium of its middle choir in order not to dwarf its
clearstory.
Archæologists have traced the handiwork of three different men in Le
Mans' choir. First, an architect of the Ile-de-France made the general
plan, and built the thirteen radiating chapels. Then a Norman worked on
the eastern curve, and it is thought he was Thomas Toustain, cited here
as master-of-works, since Toustain is a Norman name. Perhaps he was the
same genius who had already planned the high inner aisle at Coutances
Cathedral. Very Norman are Le Mans' circular capitals, the sanctuary's
twin-column piers, the carved band under the clearstory, the
sharp-pointed arches beneath arches, and the foliate sculpture covering
the spandrels of the aisle's triforium. The third master-of-works must
have been a native of the Ile-de-France, for the upper choir and the two
bays nearest the transept belong to that school.
There is a progressive enlarging of the bays of the choir from its
entrance to its end, done too regularly to have been accidental.
Professor Goodyear has developed the thesis of these intentional
refinements in Gothic monuments.[166] Mr. Arthur Kingsley Porter thinks
that undoubtedly there are cases when it was done with subtle design,
but more often the irregularities resulted from the sound artistic taste
of the old masters who preferred a free-hand drawing to mechanical
perfection. "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness
in the proportion," said Bacon. Some think that at Le Mans the desire
was to counteract the perspective narrowing. Others say that the builder
thought thus to conform the wide choir to the ancient nave of lesser
breadth.
Not till the day of Rayonnant Gothic was Le Mans' transept begun, and it
proved exceptional in continuing building while the foreign wars ravaged
France; the chapter taxed itself heavily to meet expenses. As the XIV
century closed, the southern arm was finished; it is entirely blocked by
the ancient tower, to which were then added two stories. Midway in the
vertical wall of the northern arm (begun in 1403) appears Flamboyant
tracery. As cracks soon showed, the chapter called in a new architect,
Jean de Dammartin, whose grandfather and great-uncle had beautified
Dijon, Bourges, and Poitiers. When in 1430 the English captured Le Mans,
he passed to Tours, on whose west façade he worked.
Because the Gothic transept of Le Mans was confined to the same space as
the Romanesque one it replaced, it may seem too narrow for such
tremendous height. It is a monument as stately and cold as the glass it
frames. Window over window rises the fragile audacious sweep of color
that closes the transept's northern vista, each part being bound by
stone traceries into the monumental whole. White and the yellow produced
by silver-stain is the general theme, with brilliant touches of green,
flashed ruby, violet, and blue. It has been said that what XV-century
glass needs, to give it character, are the strong black cross-hatchings
of the earlier schools. In the row of lights below the big rose, a
damasked background to the figures was used with good effect. Among
those represented are good King René, faithful amateur of art, and his
mother, Yolande of Aragon, the regent dowager of Maine and Anjou. Her
son-in-law Charles VII contributed toward the transept of Le Mans.
For its wealth of storied windows Le Mans comes second only to Chartres
and Bourges. It has suffered from hail-storms which wrecked many of its
XIII-century treasures. The majority of the choir lights were set up
between 1250 and 1260. Those in the radial chapels are somewhat earlier;
in the long Lady chapel is a notable Tree of Jesse. The upper windows,
contemporaries of those at Tours, have large figures with signatures
that tell us their donors were canons, Benedictines,[167] Cistercians,
architects, drapers (the donors of the fourth window), furriers (who
gave the fifth), innkeepers and publicans (who presented the sixth). The
seventh window--in the center of the apse--was the gift of Bishop
Geoffrey de Loudon. In the thirteenth window bakers pour grain into
sacks and take bread from the oven.
In the clearstory of the inner aisle the legend-medallion type of window
is retained. The first two bays were filled by Bishop Guillaume Roland
(1255-58) here portrayed. The vintners presented the next light, for, on
the "day of benediction" in 1254, when each of the town guilds brought a
giant candle, the vintners chose to donate a light that would burn
longer, so they set up this dazzling window of St. Julian.[168] Over the
entrance to the Lady chapel Bishop Geoffrey is again portrayed, and in
the eleventh bay Pope Innocent IV appears.
A hundred years separate Le Mans' splendid specimens of XIII-century art
from certain small lancets in the cathedral's nave, made probably by
Suger's own workers of St. Denis, who came here when they had finished
the three lancets in Chartres' façade. M. Mâle has proved that all the
XII-century windows in the west of France derive from St. Denis. Le
Mans' lancets show the same robes, the same borders of medallions as in
the Suger lights at Chartres. The up-gazing apostles in Poitiers'
Crucifixion window resemble the apostles in Le Mans' Ascension. The
large much-restored light in the west façade, relating the story of St.
Julian, though modeled on the St. Denis school, must have been executed
by local craftsmen; it is rougher workmanship than the XII-century
lancets in the nave aisles.
Le Mans suffered woefully in 1562 when the Huguenots worked their will
for three months on the cathedral's treasures. A choir screen with three
hundred figures, a contemporary of that at Albi, was demolished, windows
by the dozen were broken, and there was a holocaust of carved altars and
tombs. After the Revolution, the XIII-century tomb of Berengaria of
Navarre, the childless widow of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, was set up in
the transept. For thirty years, as chatelaine of Le Mans, she watched
its new Gothic sanctuary rising. They have mistakenly called hers the
house of a XV-century lawyer in the Grande Rue.
The earliest Renaissance tomb in France is in Le Mans Cathedral, that of
King René's brother, made by Laurana from beyond the Alps. The effigy
reposes in Christian fashion, but near by, on the later tomb of
Guillaume du Bellay, the deceased is represented reclining at ease amid
his mundane books.
THE SAINTS AT SOLESMES.[169]
No one can speak with the Lord while he prattles with the whole
world.--HILDEBERT DE LAVARDIN, bishop of Le Mans (1097-1125).
Bishop Hoël, who worked on the nave of Le Mans Cathedral, used to retire
for meditation to the priory of Solesmes, farther down the Sarthe, a
house founded in 1010 by the lord of Sablé and given to the Benedictines
of the _Cultura Dei_ at Le Mans. Closed by the Revolution's hurricane,
Solesmes was reopened in 1833 through the devoted efforts of Dom Prosper
Guéranger, who made it a modern Cluny for erudition, for arts and
crafts, and above all for church music. Solesmes restored to the church
the Gregorian chant in its purity. Cowled architects of the XIX century
rebuilt their monastery. On their own printing press the monks brought
out books. Guests came here to find peace of mind and inspiration. At
Solesmes Montalembert wrote the noble chapter on the Middle Ages that
prefaces his _History of St. Elizabeth of Hungary_.[170]
The traveler from Le Mans to Angers should quit the train at Sablé and
walk two miles to the now deserted monastery on the Sarthe. In the
transept of its church are the groups of images called _Les Saints de
Solesmes_, work that ranks with the most vigorous final samples of the
national art, and that are in spirit profoundly a part still of the
Middle Ages despite Renaissance arabesques and pilasters.
What master, or masters, made the Solesmes groups has led to animated
controversy. They belong to the Region-of-the-Loire school, of which
Tours was the center, and, like Michel Colombe's work, in them the harsh
realism of the preceding school of Burgundy has been softened, and the
draperies made supple and less overwhelming. If the _Maître de Solesmes_
is not Colombe himself, he was some one trained in his art school at
Tours, perhaps some monk in this priory.
The entombments at Solesmes are the best of the Middle Ages, with that
of Ligier Richier at St. Mihiel.[171] Interest centers chiefly in the
Entombment of Christ, the earliest and finest group, made about 1496
under Prior Cheminart, whose crest is cut on the stones. No Holy
Sepulcher can compare with this in contained and sustained emotion. Its
classic moderation is very different from the dramatic, almost violent,
sculpture soon to be made popular by the Renaissance from Italy.
The two men who lower the dead Christ into the tomb, Nicodemus (bearded)
and Joseph of Arimathea (shaven, for such was the ritual in the mystery
plays), are powerful images, and the latter is indubitably a portrait
study, but of whom is not known. The Christ type could not be nobler.
The Virgin's grief is rendered without emphasis, and St. John,
supporting her, is an admirable image. But the supreme saint of Solesmes
is the Magdalene, seated beside the tomb, her head bowed, her lips
pressed against her crossed hands. She is garbed in as homely fashion as
her sister Martha in St. Madeleine's church at Troyes--sisters in blood
and sisters by the heart are these two admirable conceptions of
late-Gothic sculpture. Nothing could be gentler, more discreet, more
poignant in emotion, than the Magdalene of Solesmes, "the exquisite
flower of the art of the Loire region," says M. Paul Vitry, "one of the
masterpieces of French imagery of all times."
"She is alive, she breathes gently," wrote Dom Guéranger, "her silence
is at the same time both grief and a prayer." Dom de la Tremblaye asks
what Italian master of the Renaissance has rendered faith more
profoundly than this Magdalene, whose desolation is closer to a smile of
ecstasy than to the contraction of grief. Even the neo-classic XVII
century admired this image, and Richelieu wished to transport it to his
château in Poitou.
Some fifty years later, while Jean Bougler ruled Solesmes, was made the
Burial of the Virgin, whose setting is entirely of the Renaissance,
though the imagery remains faithful to the French Gothic spirit. It is
said that the monk at Our Lady's feet represents the prior, Jean Bougler
(1515-56), who returned to the lord of Sablé the eternal answer of the
spiritual to the temporal powers. Accosted one day on the bridge over
the Sarthe by the baron, against whom he had just maintained the
priory's rights, the irate layman cried out: "Monk, if I did not fear
God, I should throw you into the Sarthe." "If you fear God,
Monseigneur," replied the prior, "I have nothing to fear."
ST. QUENTIN'S COLLEGIATE CHURCH[172]
Out in the night there's an army marching ...
Endless ranks of the stars o'er-arching
Endless ranks of an army marching ...
Measured and orderly, rhythmical, whole,
Multitudinous, welded and one ...
Out in the night there's an army marching,
Nameless, noteless, empty of glory,
Ready to suffer, to die, and forgive,
Marching onward in simple trust....
Endless columns of unknown men,
Endless ranks of the stars o'er-arching....
Out in the night they are marching, marching ...
Hark to their orderly thunder-tread!
--ALFRED NOYES, _Rank and File_.[173]
In size, if not in name, the church that tops St. Quentin's hill is a
cathedral, an achievement of the apogee hour of Gothic fitted to close
this group of stately churches. Throughout the World War battles raged
round St. Quentin. The saints buried in its crypts, the cloud of
witnesses in its window and sculptured groups, listened year after year
to the marching millions, marching in the hope that a better world might
emerge from the chaos, _ready to suffer and die and forgive_.
St. Quentin has always stood in the path of invading armies. Much of its
precious glass was destroyed in 1557, when Philip II of Spain attacked
the town on St. Laurence day, and in memory of his victory built the
Escorial. The siege of 1870 damaged the city dedicated to Caius
Quintinus, the Roman senator's son who evangelized this region where he
met a martyr's death. In August of 1914 the invaders passed in swift
advance on Paris. When the Marne battle drove them back, they dug
themselves into trenches a mile from St. Quentin's suburbs and there,
with tragic monotony, the giant battle fluctuated. On August 15, 1917,
suddenly, like a candle in the night, St. Quentin's great church flamed
up, lighting the country for miles around. The projectiles came from the
south where the invaders, not the Allies, were intrenched. From beneath
this hill, in April of 1918, started the final desperate thrust toward
Paris. Four months later the Allies, taking the offensive, swept all
before them, and in October the Germans quitted the city in too great
haste to destroy the big church, as the bored holes in every one of its
piers would indicate had been their intention. A ghost of its former
self is the collegiate of St. Quentin to-day. The venerated crypt, part
of which dated from 840, was blown up with gunpowder before the
evacuation (1918). The notably good XIII-and XV-century windows are
wrecked, and the Flamboyant Gothic Town Hall, close to the church, is a
ruin.
About 1115 was begun the present collegiate as a Romanesque edifice; the
north arm of the easternmost transept and the side wall between it and
the larger transept are pre-Gothic. St. Quentin is an exception, in
France, in possessing two transepts. When in 1257 St. Louis came to St.
Quentin for the removal of the martyrs' relics to the new crypt, the
Gothic choir was completed. Three of the small chambers in the
XIII-century crypt are of Carolingian origin, and vestiges of
Carolingian work remain in the west tower, placed directly before the
church, and serving as a kind of vestibule to it. Till the present nave
was extended to meet that ancient belfry, it stood isolated.
Fissures showed in the new constructions and much time was wasted in
consolidations. Only as the XIV century opened was the big transept
between choir and nave begun; it was made twenty feet wider than the
transept between apse curve and choir. The tracery in the rose windows
of both cross inclosures is most artistic. The nave continued building
all through the XIV century. It repeated the shafts which, in the choir,
had been later additions needed for consolidation. Only by 1470 was St.
Quentin's nave completed by joining it to the ancient west tower. Three
different campaigns of work built this church, and three breaks in its
axial line are distinctly visible. Toward its repairs the good king
Charles V contributed, and Louis XI bore the expense of remaking the
small transept.
To Villard de Honnecourt is attributed the plan of St. Quentin, since
there are details in his sketchbook--the thirty-three parchment leaves
now a treasure of the National Library at Paris--to substantiate the
claim. His annotations are in the Picard dialect. St. Quentin's
ordinance followed that of Rheims Cathedral sketched by Villard. The
planting of columns between axis chapel and ambulatory--a Champagne
feature--is the kind of charming novelty which would have appealed to
the eager traveler who, at Kassovie, made a church for the king of
Hungary wherein he repeated the unique fan-spreading eastern end of St.
Yved at Braine.
Thus he opened his precious book: "Villard de Honnecourt salutes you,
and he begs all those who work at different classes of studies contained
in these pages, to pray for his soul and remember him, for in this book
can be found great help in teaching oneself fundamental principles of
masonry and church carpentry."