CHAPTER VII

Plantagenet Gothic Architecture[174]

Il n'y a pas seulement deux principes opposés dans l'homme. Il y en

a trois. Car il y a trois vies et trois ordres de facultés. Il y a

trois espèces de dispositions l'âme bien différentes: la première,

celle de presque tous les hommes, consiste à vivre exclusivement

dans le monde des phénomènes qu'on prend pour des réalités. La

deuxième est celle des esprits les plus réfléchis qui cherchent

longtemps la vérité en eux-mêmes ou dans la nature.... La troisième

enfin est celle des âmes éclairées des lumières de la religion, les

seules vrai et immuables. Ceux-là seuls ont trouvé un point d'appui

fixe.--MAINE DE BIRAN (1766-1825; born in Périgord).

The Gothic of the southwest grew out of the meeting of the cupola church

of Aquitaine with the intersecting ribbed vault of northern France. It

rose and spread in a region then under Plantagenet rule, Anjou, Poitou,

Maine, and Touraine. As the first known vault of the Angevin type was

dated approximately 1150, and as the system died out about the middle of

the XIII century, Plantagenet Gothic was but an incident of a hundred

years in French architecture. However, it was a phase which produced

monuments of such remarkable individuality and grace that the school

deserves more notice than has hitherto been given it.

The dominant feature in Plantagenet Gothic is its cup-shaped vaulting.

The French term "_bombé_" is more exact than such expressions as

"domical" and "domed." The panels of an Angevin vault do not form parts

of a spherical dome. The keystone of each section is raised higher than

the four arches framing the section. Similar vaults were built during

the first trials of diagonals by other Gothic schools, in districts

where there were no cupola churches to serve as models. They were the

result of inexperience in constructing ribbed-groined vaults, and their

_bombé_ shape disappeared as soon as architects learned to raise their

transverse and wall arches, by stilting and pointing them, to the level

of the keystone. While the so-called domical vault in other schools had

been a transitional step, in Plantagenet Gothic it was intentionally

persisted in and became the most distinguishing characteristic of the

school.

In principle and in construction, the Plantagenet school is truly

Gothic. The cells are carried on the backs of diagonal ribs. The Angevin

builders recognized at once the advantage of concentrating the thrust of

the stone roof at fixed points and counterbutting and grounding the load

at those points only, so they followed close on the northern architects

in adopting the new system. At the same time they felt that the cupola

tradition in their region was not to be wholly set aside. M. Anthyme

Saint-Paul well expressed it when he said that southwestern France

"_s'est conduit en nation tributaire et non soumise_."

There can be little doubt that the presence in the Plantagenet

territories of churches covered by a number of small cupolas encouraged

a decided curve in the newly imported diagonals. It was not for nothing

that near Angers and Saumur, the two cities where Angevin vaults were

first constructed, lay the famous abbatial of Fontevrault, a masterpiece

of the cupola school. Had not the arrival, midway in the XII century, of

the northern French type of masonry roof checked the construction of

such churches, it is probable that they would have extended farther

north. From the meeting of the two schools developed the Plantagenet

phase of Gothic.

Before proceeding to a description of the successive steps taken by

Plantagenet architecture in its best-known examples at Angers, Saumur,

and Poitiers, it is well to touch on the cupola churches of

southwestern France, building for a century before the beginning of the

regional Gothic school. M. de Lasteyrie has divided Romanesque

architecture into some half dozen schools--those of Normandy, Burgundy,

Auvergne, Poitou, the Midi, Champagne, and the scarcely enunciated

Picardy Ile-de-France school. To these he added two isolated

developments of short duration, one typified at Tournus, in Burgundy,

where half barrels are placed transversely across a nave; and the other

consisting of cupola-covered edifices which were building from Saintes

to Fontevrault in the same hour as the Poitou-Romanesque churches

surrounding them. For three generations the cupola haunted the

imagination of southwestern France. The majority of them came into

existence by hazard, as it were. They were not in the first plan of the

church, but were built to replace other roofs, and in France they have

been set on every kind of pedestal.[175] They were a variant of the

barrel vault of the region preferred because less material was required.

How the cupola arrived in Aquitaine is still an open question. M. de

Lasteyrie has belittled the explanation of an Oriental source, since the

mode of construction in France differed from that of cupolas in the

East. His idea is that the use of the cupola never died out from the

earlier days in Gaul, and that the domed churches of France may be

considered to be fairly indigenous. M. Enlart has contended that no

matter how or when the use of the cupola got into France, its origin was

undeniably Byzantine, since Rome took the feature from Byzantium. He

has dwelt on the fact that it was while such churches were building in

France, the men of western Europe were going on pilgrimages, on

crusades, and on trading ventures into countries where the cupola was a

common feature.

ST. FRONT AT PÉRIGUEUX.[176]

Is it not better to dwell a little sadly far from the world, under

the hand of God? The world gives but vain pleasures. You will be

like others beguiled by it and hardened. You will hear many evil

conversations, you will see many contemptible pushing people with

distinguished names, you will feel malignant envy, many will be the

faults with which you will reproach yourself.... Nothing is good

apart from Peace. Peace is the mark of God's finger. All that is

not Peace is but illusion, and disturbing self-love.... Be simple

and insignificant, and Peace will be your reward. It is only you

yourself who can trouble your own Peace. It is in forgetting self

that Peace comes.--FÉNELON (1651-1715; born near Périgueux).

The most discussed of the cupola churches is St. Front at Périgueux. For

a while it was considered a mother church of the school, but such

well-constructed domes are a culmination, not a beginning. One of the

oldest cupolas extant is that of St. Astier, near Périgueux, finished in

1018; there are two large domes over Cahors Cathedral, in which church

Pope Calixtus II blessed an altar in 1119.[177] The two cupolas over

Cahors' unaisled nave appear in the exterior view, but were not well

enough constructed for their inner surfaces to be left uncovered by

coats of plaster, whereas the interior masonry of St. Front is

beautifully finished, proving that in point of time it was separated

from St. Astier.

Long and heated have been the controversies over the date of the

cathedral of Périgueux. As much space has been devoted to the discussion

as to the little Morienval in the Ile-de-France. At first it was taken

to be the church begun before 1000 and dedicated in 1047. To-day no one

dreams of saying it predates the fire of 1120. A few of the bays of the

ancient church, burned in 1120 with much loss of life, were retained as

parish rooms and now stand to the south of the present cathedral's

façade. It is very evident that they never were intended to be

incorporated in the new church.

Once it was thought that the actual St. Front, which is in the shape of

a Greek cross, with a dome over each of its arms, copied St. Mark's at

Venice. St. Mark's was modeled on the church of the Apostles at

Constantinople, destroyed by Mohammed II in 1464. However, its domes

were added only when the basilica was rebuilt, in 1063. And furthermore,

there are indications at St. Front to show that the original design was

to lengthen its nave by another bay, which would have changed the plan

from a Greek cross to the universally used Latin cross.

The present St. Front was begun after 1120 and probably was completed by

1180, in which year a record says that Bishop Pierre de Mimet (1169-80)

moved the ancient tombs into the basilica. During some modern repairs

parchments were discovered in a scaffold hole thirty feet from the

ground and closed only by a loose stone. The MSS. were in the Romance

dialect of the XII century, and were abusive of Henry II of England, who

besieged Périgueux in Bishop de Mimet's time. Such a hiding place for

compromising papers might well have been thought of during the last

stage of a building while yet the scaffolding stood in place.

St. Front's interior possesses a fine, plain solidity of its own, but

its garish white walls cry out for mosaics or fresco. The cupolas rise

above the big arcades without any vertical foundation members. Each is

divided into a hemispherical dome and a drum having the shape of

spherical triangles. So massive are the square piers supporting the

cupolas that narrow corridors have been threaded through them. Those

dense piles of masonry saved St. Front when the Huguenots lighted

bonfires at the base of the piers. St. Étienne, formerly the cathedral

of Périgueux, was devastated then, so that only two of its cupolas

remain; the westernmost one is rougher, earlier work.

The restorer, Abadie, took deplorable liberties with St. Front, but it

is an exaggeration to call it a modern church studied from a Romanesque

original. Abadie from 1865 to 1875 reconstructed the great broad arches

hitherto slightly pointed, and the actual sanctuary is entirely his

work. Oriental and un-French as is the exterior of Périgueux Cathedral

with its white domes, its neo-minarets, its immense tower each of whose

stories is lesser in size than the one below it, and whose summit is a

pavilion covered with the inverted tiles called pineapple scales, one

has to accept the disconcerting fact that it was building in the same

year with the cathedrals at Paris and Laon. Well has St. Front been

called an archæological monster defying the laws of that science.

THE CATHEDRAL OF ANGOULÊME.[178]

If we wish to know all that is worthy of being imitated, we must

make of legends a part of our studies and observations. The marvel

of the lives of the saints is not their miracles, but their

conduct.--JOUBERT, _Pensées_ (1754-1824; born in Périgord).

[Illustration: _Angoulême Cathedral. A XII-century Cupola Church of

Aquitaine with a Typical Façade of Poitou's Romanesque School_]

The cathedral of Angoulême shares with St. Front and Fontevrault the

distinction of being the finest cupola church in France. It is

unsurpassed in the setting on the edge of the city's steep hill above

the Charente valley. In ancient Angoumois, now the department of the

Charente, are over five hundred XII-century Romanesque churches.[179]

Angoulême Cathedral was begun in 1109 by Bishop Gérard (1101-36), who

had taught at Périgueux in the cathedral school and no doubt learned

there to admire cupolas. His first dome at Angoulême--the easternmost

one--is slightly later than the older cupola of St. Étienne at

Périgueux. Bishop Gérard had the moral courage to rebuke the sinful

union of the troubadour-duke, Guillaume IX, and the fair Vicomtesse

Malbergeon, whose portrait he wore on his shield when he marched into

battle. Guillaume informed Gérard that only when hair grew on his bald,

prelate pate would he give up the lady of his affections. Gérard was

papal legate in Gaul for Pascal II, Calixtus II, and the second

Honorius, and was the prelate chosen, because of his eloquence, to be

spokesman for the bishops who opposed Paschal II's compromise with the

German emperor on the question of investitures. And yet this able man,

because Innocent II had not renewed his dignities, joined the anti-pope

faction and took with him Guillaume X of Aquitaine. Only the passionate

genius of St. Bernard was able to end the scandal.

The cathedral built at Angoulême by Bishop Gérard, like most of the

churches of the southwest, lacks the charm of perspective, since it has

neither curving processional path nor side aisle. A note of force is

given to the interior by the strong projection of the buttress piers,

more salient within the church than without. Farther to the south, when

the Gothic day had dawned, buttresses were to be disguised as walls

between the side chapels. The three cupolas that roof the nave--each

covering a large square bay--are among the largest in France. The side

walls are divided at mid-height: below is a huge blind arch, while above

are two round-headed windows. Angoulême's hemispherical domes on

pendentives were sufficiently well constructed to dispense with plaster

coatings, an advance over Cahors Cathedral and St. Étienne at Périgueux.

At the transept-crossing is an immense dome forming within the church a

lantern lighted by a series of round-headed windows that open in its

pedestal. The arrangement derives directly from the Orient and is rare

in France. A very fine tower, whose stories lessen as they rise, covers

the northern arm of the transept, and till the cathedral was sacked,

during the XVI-century wars, a similar tower spanned the transept's

southern limb.

Angoulême's elaborate XII-century façade is one of the noted pages of

monumental decoration in France, a frontal more of ornate beauty than of

power, in which M. André Michel finds the influence of old ivories. Tier

on tier rise its carven scenes, with a Christ in Majesty crowning the

whole. The XIX-century restorer, M. Paul Abadie, who worked such havoc

at Périgueux, took equal liberties here. He made the upper story with

its turrets topped by conical spires, and over-restored the principal

sculptural groups. These pre-Gothic churches of southwest France

obsessed his imagination, for when he came to design a church of his own

he put up on the Mount of Martyrs in Paris a neo-Byzantine, neo-Gothic

basilica most strangely reminiscent of Aquitaine as it stands in exotic

isolation under the cold, northern sky.

Angoulême's west façade had not long been completed when under its

portal passed John Lackland to be married to the fourteen-year-old

daughter of the Count of Angoulême, Isabella, already affianced to a

Lusignan. Henry III of England, the builder of Westminster Abbey, was

the fruit of that union. Twenty years later Isabella married the son of

her discarded fiancé, and her jealousy filled France with war. Jezebel,

the people called her. She rests in effigy at Fontevrault, beside the

tomb of her great father-in-law, Henry II, the first Plantagenet.

FONTEVRAULT ABBEY CHURCH.[181]

A trait peculiar to this epoch is the close resemblance between the

manners of men and women.... Men had the right to dissolve in

tears, and women that of talking without prudery. The women appear

distinctly superior. They were more serious, more subtle. Richard

Coeur-de-Lion, the crowned poet-artist, a king whose noble

manners and refined mind, in spite of his cruelty, exercised so

strong an impression on his age, was formed by the brilliant

Aliénor of Aquitaine. St. Louis was brought up exclusively by

Blanche of Castile, and Joinville was the pupil of a widowed and

regent mother.--GAREAU, _Social State of France During the

Crusades_.

The art of the cupola church may be said to have culminated in the

abbatial at Fontevrault on the confines of Anjou, Poitou, and Touraine,

and practically the northernmost point to which attained the cupola

development of Aquitaine. Undoubtedly it would have spread farther

afield had it not been checked--even while Fontevrault was building--by

the advent of ogival ribs which initiated a new manner of masonry

roofing. In Fontevrault's bourg is a village church covered gracefully

in the Plantagenet Gothic manner.

The untenable theory was advanced by a French architect that the cupola

church was the egg out of which hatched the radical organ of Gothic

architecture, that the first ribs were employed to stiffen a dome.[182]

No one to-day concedes this. Yet, though cupola monuments may not have

affected French Gothic in general, they certainly exerted a local

influence on the Gothic of the West. The hemispherical domes at

Fontevrault were directly under the eye of the first architects of

Plantagenet Gothic.

An abbess ruled over men at Fontevrault. Its founder, the Blessed Robert

d'Arbrissel, had been impressed by the Saviour giving St. John into the

spiritual guidance of the Virgin. So he organized a new Order comprised

of four communities ruled by a woman: a main house for nuns and another

for men; a hospital dedicated to St. Lazarus, and a house for repentant

Magdalenes. Robert d'Arbrissel was a Breton, schooled in Paris, and

noted for his eloquence, which so impressed Urban II, who heard him

preach at the dedication of Angers' church of St. Nicolas, that he named

him an apostolic missionary to spread the First Crusade.

Feeling need of spiritual renewal, Robert had retired for meditative

peace to these forests when one day he was attacked by bandits. He

yielded all he possessed on condition that they give him their souls to

guide, and, having converted them, the name of their chief, Evrault, was

given, it is said, to the congregation that gathered in cells about the

holy man. Pious folk came and sinners, the rich and the poor, the halt

and the hale, and the impetuous Robert called them one and all "the poor

of Christ." "I never read of a hermit," said honest old Samuel Johnson,

"but in imagination I kiss his feet; never of a monastery but I fall on

my knees and kiss the pavement."

In 1106, Paschal II approved the Order and in Blessed Robert's lifetime

some five thousand gathered at Fontevrault. Abbot Suger, who was a young

student at that time near the new abbey, testified to the edification it

gave. A sermon by the Blessed Robert converted the fair Bertrada de

Montfort, who had quitted her ignoble husband, Fulk IV of Anjou, to

marry Philip I, king of France, which illegal union kept churchmen busy

during sixteen years; she callously brought her second master to visit

her first. The fight which Rome waged to preserve monogamy in western

Christendom deserves the highest praise. Bertrada died the second abbess

of Fontevrault. The historic names of France compose the list of

abbesses. The young widow of the only son of Henry I of England retired

here, after the loss of the White Ship, and her father, Fulk V of Anjou,

came to visit her as he quitted his career in Europe to take up his new

role as king of Jerusalem. Margaret of Burgundy, the builder of

Tonnerre's hospital hall, and second wife of Charles d'Anjou, St. Louis'

brother, was educated at Fontevrault by her aunt the abbess. About 1500

Abbess Renée de Bourbon built the Renaissance cloister. To-day the

famous house serves as a state prison.

Fontevrault church played a part in the Gothic story. Its earliest

cupola, over the transept-crossing, differs from those over the nave in

that its base is not distinct from its dome. Angers copied it in its

churches of St. Nicholas and St. Martin, and so did Saumur in St.

Pierre. When in 1119 Calixtus II dedicated Fontevrault, the church

consisted of the present choir and the transept. During the first

quarter of the XII century the aisleless nave was spanned by four

cupolas on clearly defined pedestals. Perhaps from Angoulême Cathedral

came the fashion of domes on pendentives, after some Fontevrault monks

had gone on legal business, in 1117, to the capital of Angoumois.

The _abbaye-double_ was favored both by the Angevin rulers and their

Poitevin neighbors, the dukes of Aquitaine. Henry II's father and

mother, Geoffrey the Handsome of Anjou and the ex-empress Matilda of

England, gave generously toward the building of the new church, and so

did Aliénor of Aquitaine's forbears of the illustrious house of

Poitiers; hence it was fitting they both, Henry and Aliénor, should lie

in burial there. When Henry Plantagenet died in 1189 in his castle at

Chinon, which the old chronicler tells us rises steeply from the Vienne

"straight up to heaven"--the Chinon whither Jeanne d'Arc was to come to

give France a new soul--the dead monarch was carried to Fontevrault

church near by, instead of to the Grammont he favored, the mother-house

of a new Order founded by Stephen de Tierney in 1176. The archbishop of

Tours came to Fontevrault to conduct the funeral, and Henry's rebellious

son, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, stood by while they lowered into the tomb

the great administrator who gave us the germs of our jury system, the

man of the same unbridled passions, the same strong leadership in arms

and statecraft, as his ancestor, Fulk Nerra, who had won this strip of

middle France by sheer ability. And well Richard might feel serious, for

the nine generations of increasing prosperity, promised to Fulk I of

Anjou, ended with him.

In 1199 the Lion-hearted himself was brought to Fontevrault for burial;

he had begged to be laid in penitence at the feet of the father he had

defied, like the true Angevin he was. As his elder brother had said: "It

has ever been the way with Plantagenets for brother to hate brother, and

for son to turn against father." The ceremony for Richard in Fontevrault

abbey church was conducted by St. Hugh from Lincoln, where he was

raising a splendid Early-English cathedral. He had come to France to

protest to Richard against further spoliation of his see. At this

'shrouding of a second Angevin among the shrouden women,' Aliénor stood

beside the nuns, and, the ceremony over, St. Hugh, so wise and holy amid

such seething passions, proceeded to comfort the widowed Berengaria.

Richard, like his father, was a cosmopolite. "_Miey hom e miey baron_,

_Angles_, _Norman_, _Peytavin et Gascon_," he sang in his prison lay,

and indeed one would be puzzled to know which of them were the

countrymen of him whom Guizot called "the bravest, most inconsiderate,

most passionate, most ruffianly, most heroic adventurer of the Middle

Ages."

In 1204 his equally turbulent, able, and seductive mother, Aliénor, was

buried at Fontevrault beside the husband against whom she had stirred up

undutiful sons, and who in his last years had kept her shut away from

further mischief. From 1122 to 1204 stretched her full life; queen of

France for fifteen years, queen of England for fifty, a pernicious

influence upon them both, but always a most sensible ruler for her own

Aquitaine. She passed her final years in peaceful Fontevrault, but her

stormy destiny was to be troubled to the end. In 1204 her grandson,

Arthur of Brittany, besieged her in a Midi castle where she was

visiting, and when John Lackland heard of his mother's plight he came by

forced marches to her relief and captured Arthur, who soon after was

foully murdered. Aliénor had seen the rise of Gothic at St. Denis, whose

corner stone her French husband laid, and she lived to found churches of

the gracious Plantagenet phase of the new art. But true daughter of the

Midi that she was, an Aquitaine cupola church is her rightful funeral

monument. In her, as in her own Midi of that age, culture and corruption

were precocious.

The fourth of the famous Plantagenet tombs at Fontevrault which England

has tried to get for Westminster Abbey, is that of Isabelle of Angoulême

(d. 1247), the wife of John Lackland. And there once were two others,

the tomb of Richard Coeur-de-Lion's favorite sister, Jeanne (d. 1199),

who became the fourth wife of Raymond VI of Toulouse, and that of her

son, Count Raymond VII (d. 1249), of the Albigensian wars--tombs swept

away either by the Huguenots or during the Revolution. As the XIX

century opened, the Plantagenet tombs lay forgotten in a cellar. When

England became aware of their value they were shipped to Paris in 1846,

to be taken across the Channel. Luckily, however, an Angevin, M. de

Falloux, became minister on the declaration of the Second Republic, and

the four precious mausoleums were returned to Fontevrault church.

Aliénor was ninth in descent from that Duke of Aquitaine who had founded

great Cluny itself. Her grandfather, Guillaume IX, the troubadour duke,

was a benefactor of the newly established Fontevrault. When her father

resigned his dominion in penitence, his will was that Aliénor, his

heiress, should wed the son of the king of France. So in Bordeaux

Cathedral, in 1137, Aliénor married the future Louis VII. No

temperaments could have been more opposite. In 1249 she took the

Crusader's cross from St. Bernard, at Vézelay--where the monks were

building their glorious basilica. At Constantinople her troublous beauty

roused admiration, and scandal at Antioch, where the ruler was her own

handsome young uncle, Raymond of Poitiers.[183] Her union with Louis

became an irksome bond and she clamored for its dissolution on the

ground of consanguinity. The flouted French king was only too happy to

be rid of her, but Abbot Suger, foreseeing all too clearly the national

calamity that would be precipitated should Aliénor's great domains pass

to a rival of France, held together the mismatched pair. When he died,

in 1152, headstrong Aliénor broke loose, and as she rode away from the

court of France the great lords came out to woo her--one of them even

tried to kidnap her. Because she craved a strong arm to revenge herself

on her first husband, she chose as consort young Henry Plantagenet,

Count of Anjou and Maine, and Duke of Normandy; she was thirty, Henry

not yet twenty. Thus began the long Capet-Angevin duel, not to be fought

out to a finish until 1452, when all that Henry II had possessed on the

Continent and all of Aliénor's wide domain were in the hands of the king

of France. It needed a St. Jeanne to atone for the very unsaintly

Aliénor.

[Illustration: _The Plantagenet Tombs at Fontevrault_]

From this unscrupulous, mischief-making, virile, and capable queen of

the XII century sprang a vigorous brood of men and women, passionate in

both good and evil, and most of them enlightened art patrons, builders

of churches, and writers of verses. Coeur-de-Lion was a troubadour.

John Lackland's son built Westminster Abbey. Aliénor's daughter, the

queen of Castile, had an Angevin architect help in the building of Las

Huelgas, by Burgos. Her daughter of Champagne set the trouvères singing

of Lancelot, Tristan, and Iseult. Another Eleanor of her lineage had her

funeral journey marked by sculptured crosses from Lincolnshire to

Charing Cross. It was given Aliénor to make some atonement for the evil

she brought on France in her youth; at eighty years of age she went into

Spain to bring back her granddaughter, Blanche of Castile, as bride for

the grandson of the discarded Louis VII, and Blanche gave France the

saint-king who illuminated his realm with fair churches. Another of

Aliénor's great-grandsons was a saint-king, Ferdinand, the conqueror of

Seville, who founded many a church. Even as the cruelty and craft of

John Lackland cropped out in Charles d'Anjou, whom the Sicilian Vespers

punished, so the culture and inconsistency of Coeur-de-Lion appeared

again in his nephew of Champagne, Thibaut IV, the maker of songs. From

Aliénor descended Bishop Eudes de Sully, who built the western portals

of Notre Dame at Paris, and Henry de Sully, who had the plans drawn for

Bourges Cathedral. Herself an outstanding figure in the early day of

Gothic art, and ancestress of enlightened builders, much can be forgiven

Aliénor. All of which brings us back to the starting point of our

chapter, the formation of the Plantagenet Gothic school of architecture.

PLANTAGENET GOTHIC

The XII and XIII centuries were a period when men were at their

strongest; never before or since have they shown equal energy in

such varied directions or such intelligence in the direction of

their energy; yet these marvels of history--these Plantagenets;

these scholastic philosophers; these architects of Rheims and

Amiens; these Innocents and Robin Hoods and Marco Polos; these

crusaders who planted their enormous fortresses all over the

Levant; these monks who made the wastes and barrens yield

harvests--all, without apparent exception, bowed down before the

woman. The woman might be the good or the evil spirit, but she was

always the stronger force.--HENRY ADAMS.

There have been various divisions of this school, and it is always well

to bear in mind that such cut-and-dried classifications are arbitrary

and made use of merely for the greater ease of the student. By dividing

Plantagenet work into three periods--preceded by a brief incubation

hour, the twenty years before 1150--it is easier to follow the evolving

steps of this brilliant phase of the builder's art.

During the short introductory stage before 1150 the cupola had the upper

hand and imposed its construction on the intersecting ribs just imported

from the north. The earliest _bombé_ vaults with ribs are really cupolas

still, since the stones of their infilling were laid in concentric rings

round and round. Only a small number of these ribbed cupolas were built.

Then in the first phase of Plantagenet Gothic appeared the ascendency of

ribbed vault over cupola. The dome was lowered and the stones of the

infilling were laid like those of a true Gothic vault, not horizontally,

round and round, but vertically, with the courses running parallel with

the ridges of the triangular compartments traced by the diagonals. Each

of the four triangular cells was concave in both directions, with a

groin defining its axial line. Hence eight panels, not four, composed

the _bombé_ vault, groin ridges alternating with ribs.

Such groin lines called for strengthening ribs beneath them, since a

curving surface has more need of a bone skeleton to stiffen it. Given

the _bombé_ shape, it was inevitable for the architect to arrive soon at

the use of ridge ribs between the diagonals. The Plantagenet vault _par

excellence_ is made up of eight ribs that branch from a central

keystone, those ribs being of the same slight graceful profile as the

arches framing each vault section.

For a time the rib molds of the First Period were enormously heavy and

wide, like the diagonals of the nave of Angers Cathedral--the oldest

Angevin Gothic work extant (c. 1150). Their profile shows two large

round molds with a flat space between. Before long the level space

tended to swell into a roll molding, which in time predominated over the

lateral ones; such are the diagonals of the Trinité church at Angers

(c. 1170). Finally, the side rolls died out altogether, leaving one

slender uniform torus, a characteristic of the Second Period of

Plantagenet art.

When the lateral and transverse arches adopted the same delicate profile

as that of the eight branching ribs, there was achieved the slender

elegance and rare distinction typical of the best Plantagenet interiors.

Keystones were richly carved, and pretty figures and heads were added

where the vault ribs met the framing arches. During the last quarter of

the XII century the Plantagenet school was building vaults of this type,

and they remained in vogue till the cuplike shape died out altogether.

In Plantagenet art the ramification and intercrossing of ribs had a

structural reason, since they were the logical result of the concave

outline of the vault and not, like the supplementary ribs of Flamboyant

Gothic, mere ornamentations.

In the third and final period of Plantagenet Gothic, the ribs ramified

more and more. They had first been increased about the windows of apses,

because an eight-branch vault was better suited to a square than to a

curve. During the years preceding 1250, the ramification of the ribs

grew very complicated. All divisions between the vault sections were

eliminated, and the masonry roof appeared to be continuous, one bay

melting subtly into the next--in reality a cradle vault, _à

pénétrations_, carried on intercrossing, branching Gothic ribs. The

construction of such stone roofs was no easy matter and comparatively

few of them were built.

It is interesting to note that a germ of the Angevin school when carried

to England, then under the same Plantagenet rule, developed into what is

a unique architectural glory, English fan tracery vaulting.

Most of the monuments of Angevin art fall under the three main divisions

here given. Like a beautiful hybrid, the Plantagenet stone roof passed

through a continuous series of transformations, while in northern

France, once a satisfactory masonry vault had been achieved, it was

adhered to faithfully as a classic type until the Flamboyant, or final,

phase.

Frequently a Plantagenet church is extremely plain outside, in striking

contrast with the aërial grace of its interior. The cause is a

structural one, hence satisfactory. The thrust of a _bombé_ vault is not

altogether concentrated on branching ribs, piers, and buttresses, but in

part is borne by the inclosure walls. Hence these latter were made thick

and pierced merely by lancet windows; with such walls there was no need

of flying buttresses. When the piers were somewhat relieved of the roof

load by the thick walls, they could be made exceedingly slender. There

is an effect of gracious winsomeness in certain Plantagenet churches, to

be described only by such words as "fairylike" and "Saracenic." The

transient perfect moment of the art of northern France was seized and

rendered by the curving transept at Soissons, an ideal vision of the

Beyond. In southwestern France the first, fine, careless rapture nothing

can recapture is to be found in St. Serge at Angers, of lesser genius

than Soissons, but, like it, possessed of an enthrallment that is

enduring.

THE CATHEDRAL OF ANGERS.[184]

A mon avis, ceux qui n'ont pas au moins le tourment religieux

ignorent la moitié de la vie, et la plus belle, la moitié de la

pitié. Un esprit est bien incomplet s'il ne s'élève pas jusqu'à sa

destinée, et un coeur est bien faible s'il n'a que des motifs

humains d'agir, de se contraindre, et de se donner ou de

pardonner.--RENÉ BAZIN (born in Angers, 1850).

No city in southwestern France is a more satisfactory center for a

comparative study of Plantagenet Gothic than Angers--the old Black

Angers of history, which owed its importance not to any pre-eminence of

site, but to the powerful line whose cradle land it was.

Each phase of the regional school of Gothic can be found in Angers. In

the tower of St. Aubin, a vestige of an ancient abbey named after a

VI-century bishop of the city, is a ribbed cupola, typical of the

incubating period of the school.[185] It is more a cupola than a Gothic

vault. The stones are laid horizontally in concentric rings, and the

ribs are more decorative than structural, being in part embedded in the

infilling. The abbot who erected it ruled from 1127 to 1154.

The First Period of the Gothic of Anjou is represented at Angers by a

masterpiece of elemental force--the nave of the cathedral. Three huge

so-called domical vaults, truly Gothic in construction, span the

sixty-foot unaisled nave of St. Maurice. The stones are laid parallel

with the groin line of each triangular panel between the intersecting

ribs. Those diagonals are needlessly heavy, for the builders were still

experimenting. The crown of each vault section is ten feet higher than

the framing arches--wall arch and transverse arch. The exceptional span

of Angers' three massive vaults is due to a reconstruction of the nave

undertaken in the XII century, at which time the side aisles of the

Romanesque cathedral were eliminated and the entire width of the edifice

thrown into an unobstructed hall.

Mr. John Bilson, the eminent English archæologist, belittles the

influence of the cupola church in Angevin Gothic, the shape of whose

vaults he attributes to a structural cause. He thinks that the extreme

width of Angers' nave made it essential to raise the keystone above the

crowns of transverse and wall arches in order to prevent its settling.

The diagonals were made more obtuse than the equilateral framing arches

lest they might tower too high. Given the form adopted for the arches,

the _bombé_ vault web resulted inevitably. Arch curves determine the

forms of a vault. None the less is M. Berthelé's account of the

Plantagenet school sound both ethnically and æsthetically. The Angevin

architect chose to persist in the use of _bombé_ vaults over narrow

spans where there was no structural need to raise the keystone.

A succession of cathedrals had stood on the site of Angers' actual

church. To that of the IV century, St. Martin, Gaul's apostle, presented

relics of St. Maurice and his legion of Theban soldiers. A Merovingian

cathedral mentioned by Gregory of Tours was succeeded by a Carolingian

basilica, and after the year 1000 the chief church of Angers was rebuilt

several times as Romanesque. A dedication occurred in 1030. In 1032 the

cathedral was wiped out by a fire caused by that remarkable personage,

Fulk Nerra, the Black Falcon, who raised Anjou from an insignificant

under-fief to be one of the chief powers in France.[186] To atone for

his feudal excesses, Fulk built many shrines and made many pilgrimages;

in Palestine, with the same melodramatic instinct for the picturesque

which his descendant, Coeur-de-Lion, was to display, he walked

barefooted in the streets of Jerusalem, flagellated by his own

servitors, as he lamented, "Lord be merciful to a perjured, unfaithful

Christian wandering far from his native land."

All over Anjou, and in Touraine, Fulk III put up abbey churches and

castles; "the great builder," he was called. One day, from his castle on

the rock of Angers, his falcon eyes saw a dove fluttering over a certain

spot beyond the river, and there he founded the abbey of St. Nicholas in

1020, and his wife at that period (he had a succession of wives, one of

whom he is said to have killed) founded a nunnery close by to which was

once attached the church of the Trinité. In the XVI century St. Nicholas

was called Ronceray, because a bramble-rose insisted on pushing its way

up through the choir's pavement.[187] A superman was Fulk the Black,

highly dowered intellectually, with enormous capacity for organization,

but of shameless wickedness, calculating, subtle, unscrupulous as to the

means by which he pursued his designs, and of demoniac temper--marked

traits in his race from generation to generation.

Vestiges of the cathedral of Angers which rose after the fire of 1032,

and in which Urban II preached the First Crusade, are in the actual

nave, built by Bishop Ulger[188] (1125-49). He taught in the cathedral

school, which school was the nucleus of the present University of

Angers. His successor, Bishop Normand de Doué (1149-53), at his own

expense, substituted for the timber roof of the new nave its massive

Angevin vaults. When we recall that only fifteen years earlier Abbot

Suger, who started Gothic architecture on its triumphal career, was

building the heavy diagonals to be seen in the antechurch at St. Denis,

we can understand what pioneers were the builders of southwest France in

the use of the cardinal organ of the new system.

Angers Cathedral continued building during the final years of the XII

century, under Bishop Raoul de Beaumont (1177-97), who erected the

southern arm of the transept and added a short choir; the city walls at

that period prevented the farther extension of the apse. Along the west

façade, the same prelate built a spacious porch, twenty-five feet deep,

which stood till 1806, when, in spite of episcopal protest, the civic

authorities tore it down rather than trouble to repair it. Sorely does

the western entrance need that softening portico. Angers' portal images

are of the same archaic column-statue type as those at Chartres' western

doors, and here, too, in the tympanum is a Byzantine Christ in an

elliptical aureole, surrounded by the symbols of the evangelists. Bishop

Raoul de Beaumont came of one of the illustrious races of crusaders,

statesmen, and prelates, the _ancienne chevalerie_ in which France was

so prolific for centuries. A XIII-century Beaumont, marshal of France,

stood by Joinville in voting against the knight's return to Europe until

they had redeemed their servitors from captivity; a XIV-century Beaumont

was instrumental in giving Dauphiny to France; a Beaumont in the XVIII

century was the archbishop of Paris, who warned the nation that if it

de-Christianized itself it would be denationalized. Bishop Raoul's

nephew, Guillaume de Beaumont, became bishop of Angers, and in 1236

donated land from his garden for the erection of the northern arm of

the transept. Eight-branch Plantagenet vault sections cover transept and

choir.

The choir of Angers Cathedral was extended after 1274, when permission

was obtained from St. Louis' brother, Charles d'Anjou, to demolish part

of the city ramparts. Heavy buttresses mark the junction of the old part

and the new. By the extension of the eastern limb the church became a

bold Latin cross. Secluded nooks in dim religious corners are not to be

found in these unaisled churches of southwestern France. In them is no

curving procession path, no picturesque perspective effects. Though they

possess their own quiet nobility, seldom does their grave reverence rise

to sublimity. The exterior of Angers Cathedral was made equally simple,

without radiating apse chapels or flying buttresses.

The cathedral's nave boasts some windows which were donated before 1180

by a generous canon. Borders of the St. Denis glass were repeated in

them. The third window (north), which has an inimitable deep blue

background and a wide border, relates St. Catherine's life; the fourth

portrays, the Burial of the Virgin; and the fifth is devoted to St.

Vincent. Probably local workers allied with the St. Denis school made

these lights. In the nave's southern wall is a good Renaissance lancet,

transferred here from a ruined château. When the choir was completed,

its windows were filled with glass of the Paris school a century later

than the nave's windows. The transept roses are Flamboyant Gothic.

Angers Cathedral tops a high hill, so that its towers are landmarks,

visible for thirty miles around. Its west façade has been so

reconstructed that it now presents the ungainly proportions of the

church fronts in Hanover and Brunswick. After a fire, in 1516, when the

towers were renewed, stone spires were added by the well-known

Flamboyant Gothic master, Rouland Le Roux, who elaborated the

frontispiece of Rouen Cathedral. Then, in 1533, a third tower was built

between the original two. One of its walls rested on the west façade,

but the other three have mere arches for foundations, so that the tower

hangs in space, as it were, the kind of feat applauded by the tourist

guide, but which the true lover of structural sincerity can dispense

with. Jean de l'Espine, a local master of whom Angers is proud, designed

the curious central tower, and two sculptors who had worked on groups at

Solesmes made the façades eight warrior images which have been restored.

Scarcely was Angers Cathedral newly dressed when came the tragic year

1562, to wreck the gathered treasures of generations. The Huguenots

broke into the transept from the bishop's garden--and ever since that

door has been walled up in disgrace. For a fortnight they intrenched

themselves in the church, looting its treasures, destroying tombs and

images. More than a hundred splendid tombs lined the walls of the

church. The neo-classic canons of the XVII and XVIII centuries lost so

entirely the comprehension of the national art that they sent priceless

bronze tombs to the smelting pot, even that of Bishop Raoul de Beaumont,

the builder. A silver-gilt altar given by Bishop Normand de Doué who

spanned the nave with its vaults of magnificent proportions, was sold,

as was another altar, the gift of Bishop Guillaume de Beaumont, and with

the proceeds was erected the pseudo-classic baldaquin over the high

altar. They did away with the lower panels of the precious XII-century

windows in order that a new metal balustrade might show to better

effect. In a final attack of _bon goût_, those worthy canons proceeded

to whitewash the entire inside of the cathedral, including the tombs and

statues. The Revolution broke up the elaborate funereal monument of good

King René, on which several generations had worked; Jacques Morel, who

sculptured the Souvigny sarcophagus, was putting final touches to it

when he died in Angers in 1453. For years after 1793 its chiseled stones

were used by the city's masons to adorn chimney pieces in civilians'

houses.

Anjou, after returning to the French crown in the XIV century, was again

given as an appanage to a king's son, to Louis,[189] son of Jean le Bon,

and brother of those art-loving Valois princes, Charles V and the Dukes

of Berry and Burgundy. Louis I d'Anjou had made for his palace chapel at

Angers, in 1378, some tapestries telling the Apocalypse wonders. His

grandson, good King René, presented them to the cathedral, where first

they were hung for a visit of Louis XI. In the days when the cathedral

walls were being whitewashed those one hundred and fifty yards of

textile art, made by Parisian weavers after Flemish models--and the

oldest-dated tapestries extant--were put up for sale, but, not finding a

purchaser, were used to cover greenhouses and to line stables. When in

1843 the bishop of Angers was able to rescue a hundred yards of the

Apocalypse, he was mocked for his taste for rubbish. Three hundred

francs was all he paid for over sixty sections of the embroidery, and

when one section was recently loaned to the exhibition at Ghent it was

insured for forty thousand dollars.

Louis II d'Anjou married Yolande of Aragon, a statesman-like woman of

sound character and good taste, and together they built the pavilion

that stands within the fortress inclosure, and the chapel adjoining it

(finished in 1411), whose _bombé_ vaults are carried on ribs of

prismatic profile. Yolande's two sons, Charles and René, ruled Anjou.

The claims of Louis XI to the duchy caused his uncle, King René, to

spend his latter years in Provence, but never did he forget his

birthplace, and to Angers Cathedral he sent the green marble Roman bath

mounted on lions, now used as a holy-water font. René wrote poems and

plays, composed church music, painted and illuminated, and throughout a

long life of misfortunes proved himself a loyal knight and Christian

philosopher. Shortly after his death Anjou returned to the French

crown.

The ramparts within whose somber walls was the palace[190] of the counts

and dukes of Anjou's three lines of rulers, was constructed by St.

Louis, from 1228 to 1238, though begun by his grandfather,

Philippe-Auguste. For the precincts of his huge fortress St. Louis was

compelled to take lands from the congregation of Toussaint. With the

compensation money the religious rebuilt their church and roofed it with

a Plantagenet Gothic vault of the elaborate final phase of the regional

school. The interlocking ribs had three lines of keystones, like the

vault of Airvault (Deux-Sèvres).

Toussaint had been founded in the XI century by a pious canon, as a

refuge for the poor and stricken, and the duty of its clergy was to

visit the sick and bury the dead. That every forlorn soul might feel

under the protection of his own chosen patron saint, the name All Saints

was chosen. The Revolution suppressed the asylum of charity and in 1815

Prussian cavalry were stabled in the neglected church. The roofless nave

now serves as an archæological museum. The vaults of the choir were made

early in the XVIII century on the same model as the nave's XIII-century

Plantagenet roof.

The fortress built by St. Louis on the Toussaint property was saved from

demolition by the seneschal of Anjou, who, when Henry III's orders came

to destroy the ramparts, had the tact to proceed in so leisurely a

fashion that after seven years, when he was able to get the order

revoked, little more was destroyed than the upper stories of the towers.

A kneeling image of that truly patriotic seneschal, Donadieu de

Puycharic, is now in the museum installed in the XII-century hospital of

St. Jean.

That hospital of St. Jean was begun by another enlightened seneschal of

Anjou, but before long (c. 1180) Henry Plantagenet undertook to finish

and endow it, some say to expiate the assassination of St. Thomas

Becket. The oldest parts of St. John's establishment are the granary and

the north and east corridors of the cloister; the latter's south gallery

was built (1538) by Angers' local architect, Jean de l'Espine. The

hospital hall was undertaken between 1174 and 1188, and at first was

roofed in wood.

Shortly after 1200 the Knights of St. John Hospitalier of Jerusalem were

put in charge of Angers hospital, and governed it till 1232. During

their occupancy the hall was covered by its twenty-four small cuplike

sections, each of which is carried on four slender ribs. The effect of

the three aisles of little _bombé_ vaults is alluring. The slender torus

usually distinguished the eight-branch Plantagenet type, and its use

here for simple diagonals is an exception. The chapel attached to the

hospital was also built in two campaigns; over part of it was employed

the eight-rib vault, while portions were roofed in the more complicated

Plantagenet way.

The singular grace of St. Jean's hospital hall, with its slender columns

and multiple little _coupoliformes_ vaults, inspired the small choir of

St. Serge, which many hold to be the most exquisite example of

Plantagenet Gothic. The church[191] once formed part of an ancient

Benedictine monastery named for the pope, who had instituted the triple

chanting of the _Agnus Dei_ in the Mass. Hitherto the Angevin masonry

roof had been applied to churches without side aisles. The ground plan

of the cupola church had been adhered to. The Plantagenet architects now

began to copy another regional model, Poitou's Romanesque church, whose

side aisles were almost as high as the principal span they buttressed;

hence the light came entirely from the lateral corridors. One roof

covered all.

Poitiers Cathedral was among the first to use Poitou's pre-Gothic plan

in Plantagenet architecture. The choir of St. Serge developed the same

idea in its own small, gracious way. No doubt the harmonious effect

obtained in St. John's hospital by the three aisles of _bombé_ vaults

inspired the architect of St. Serge, who built his choir, from 1220 to

1225. Six fragile-looking columns, thirty feet in height, support with

ease the twelve little Plantagenet vaults, which are of the eight-branch

type, with elaborate keystones, and minute figures at the intersection

of the ribs and the framing arches. At the choir's square eastern end

the ribs ramify considerably around the windows. It is impossible to say

wherein lies the witchery of this small monument--all elegance and

lightness. Some call it Saracenic because of its exotic loveliness. Its

science of construction is perfect. Certainly some individual genius

designed it.

SAUMUR[192]

L'ancienne Grand' Rue de Saumur ... la rue montueuse qui mène au

château, obscure en quelques endroits, remarquable par la sonorité

de son petit pavé caillouteux, toujours propre et sec ... la paix

de ses maisons impénétrables, noirs, et silencieuses--l'histoire de

France est là, tout entière.--BALZAC, _Eugénie Grandet_ (whose

scene is Saumur).

Close by Angers lies Saumur on the Loire, "well-loved, well-set city."

It comprises, with its environs, another center for the study of

Plantagenet Gothic. The town is topped by its castle, now in main part

of the XIV century. In its former great hall, built by Henry

Plantagenet, took place, in 1241, that celebrated fête called the

_Non-Pareille_ which Joinville has described. His memory of it was so

fresh, after sixty years, that he could tell the color of Louis IX's

robe and surcoat; perhaps it was the first time that Joinville saw the

saint-king who was to become his closest friend. He was not yet twenty

when he accompanied his suzerain of Champagne, Thibaut IV, the maker of

songs, to the feast held in Saumur château for the knighting of Alphonse

of Poitiers, the king's brother.

[Illustration: _The Plantagenet Gothic Choir of St. Serge at Angers

(1220-1225)_]

The bodyguard of St. Louis were a Bourbon, a Coucy, and a Beaujeu,

behind whom stood ranged a host of barons and knights in silk and cloth

of gold. The future king of Portugal and a prince from Thuringia, the

son of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, waited on the table of the

queen-mother, Blanche of Castile, who, when she heard the name of the

princeling from beyond the Rhine, called him to her side and placed a

kiss upon his brow, since there, she said, his saintly mother must often

have blessed him. Jealous passions, too, burned behind the glitter and

show. Isabelle of Angoulême, the widow of John Lackland, married now to

a Lusignan who had to render homage to his new suzerain, cried out,

imperiously, "Am I a waiting woman that I should stand while they sit at

ease?" and she proceeded to stir up war.

Below the castle of Saumur lies the XII-century unaisled church of St.

Pierre, whose masonry roof belongs to different phases of Angevin

Gothic. Over the transept-crossing is a ribbed cupola without distinct

pedestal, inspired evidently by the small unribbed cupola of

Fontevrault's crossing. The stones are laid in horizontal concentric

courses like a true dome. Though archaic in structure, St. Pierre's

_croisée_ is of skilled execution. It belongs to the last third of the

XII century.

Over the choir and transept are the heavy diagonals of the First Period

of the Plantagenet development, and the nave's vault sections are

carried on the eight branches of the Second Period. Powerful transverse

arches separate the wide, square bays, and against the inclosure walls

are other strong arches beneath the windows. The walls of St. Pierre's

choir are not parallel, but draw closer together at the eastern end, for

undoubtedly there was much intentional asymmetry in mediæval monuments.

The Flamboyant day gave to St. Pierre its well-carved choir stalls and

some exquisitely toned Flemish tapestries executed by local weavers.

Other superb tapestries adorn Notre Dame-de-Nantilly, a church

patronized by Louis XI, who added to it the south aisle and a Flamboyant

oratory. The body of the edifice belongs to the first half of the XII

century; its barrel vault is braced by slightly pointed transverse

arches. At the transept-crossing is a ribbed cupola, without distinct

pedestal, like that of St. Pierre. Against the fourth pier, to the

south, is the epitaph which good King René himself composed and set up

because of his affection for his old nurse, Dame Tiphaine, for whose

soul he begs a paternoster of all who pass by. Against the fifth pier is

the Limousin enamel crozier of the archbishop of Tyr, keeper of the seal

for St. Louis, who was buried here in his native city in 1266.

Behind the Gothic Town Hall is the now unused chapel of St. Jean, a

small example of the Third Period of Angevin architecture, when ribs

branched considerably; in the square chevet they ramify to the number of

twenty.

A mile down the river lies what is left of St. Florent-les-Saumur[193]

re-established by Fulk Nerra when he conquered Saumur in 1026. Its

narthex, now the chapel of a nuns' community, shows one of the earliest

uses of the Plantagenet vault of eight branches (1170-1200). At St.

Florent was living the daughter of the exiled poet-duke of Orléans, with

her young husband, the Duke of Alençon, when one day in 1429 word came

that at Chinon, near by, where Charles VII was staying, had arrived an

inspired maid, and young d'Alençon, soon to be Jeanne d'Arc's

lieutenant--her _gentil duc_--galloped along the banks of the Loire to

see the wonder. So delighted was he with Jeanne's management of spear

and horse that he presented her with a palfrey, and she came to St.

Florent-les-Saumur for a four days' visit to his duchess, promising[194]

that anxious young wife that she would bring back her husband safe and

sound.

Fontevrault's abbatial, where culminated the art of the cupola church,

is the chief excursion to be made from Saumur. It can be reached by a

ten-mile trolley ride. Only three miles from Fontevrault, and a pleasant

cross-country walk from it, is the beautiful Plantagenet Gothic church

of St. Martin, at Candes,[195] crowned with battlements, on the highland

above the confluence of the Vienne and the Loire. In the ancient abbey

here St. Martin died as the IV century closed. A chapel to the north of

the choir marks the site of his cell, and its window recalls the pious

piracy of his loyal parishioners of Tours, who claimed his body for

burial, but who, knowing that Candes would not give it up, came by night

and stole it away; and quite rightly they had judged, for when,

centuries later, the Northmen invasions forced Tours to send its great

relic for safe-keeping to Auxerre, it took an army of six thousand men

to get it back.

The present choir of St. Martin's at Candes was built in the latter half

of the XII century (c. 1180). Fifty years later rose the nave, justly

considered one of the most brilliant examples of Plantagenet Gothic

architecture, its model, not the unaisled cupola-church, but the

Romanesque church of Poitou, whose side aisles are so high that their

lancets are the only lighting of the edifice. St. Martin's hall-like

interior of three spacious aisles is inundated with light. The

well-proportioned clustered piers rising from pavement to

vault-springing are placed considerably out of alignment, and in a

number of other arrangements the architect here followed his personal

bent. In the western porch the ribs of several Plantagenet vault

sections fall on a central pillar.

THE CATHEDRAL AT POITIERS[196]

_Vexilla Regis prodeunt_

_Fulget Crucis mysterium_

_Qua vita mortem pertulit_

_Et morte vitam protulit._

Abroad the regal banners fly

And bear the mystic Cross on high,

That Cross whereon Life suffered Death

And gave us Life with Dying breath.

_Impleta sunt quæ concinit_

_David fideli carmine,_

_Dicendo nationibus_

_Regnavit a ligno Deus._

That which the prophet-king of old

Hath in mysterious verse foretold

Is now accomplished whilst we see

God ruling nations from a Tree.

--FORTUNATUS, bishop of Poitiers (599-607).[197]

The noblest Gothic monument due to Henry Plantagenet and Aliénor of

Aquitaine is the cathedral church at Poitiers, founded by them in 1162

about the same time that, in Paris, Louis VII witnessed the laying of

the corner stone for a new chief church in his capital. Never were

contemporary edifices more unlike in their form and their informing

spirit. In Notre Dame of Paris breathes the struggle of human existence

and that Christian resignation voiced by the XIII-century Franciscan in

the _Dies Iræ_. St. Peter's Cathedral at Poitiers rings with Christian

joy, with the triumphal strains of the hymn composed by its VI-century

bishop for the arrival from Constantinople of the True Cross relic. From

the hour that the ancient ecclesiastical city marched forth with banners

flying to meet the Cross, Poitiers has held it to be a tree of royal

honor, not of pathetic agony. Her greatest bishop, St. Hilary, was

western Christendom's champion for the Son's divinity when the Arian

heresy attacked it. Clovis defeated the Arian Visigoths at Poitiers in

508; Charles Martel checked the Mohammedans at Poitiers in 732.

A city's spiritual history speaks by its monuments. In the high place of

honor in Poitiers' cathedral of St. Peter, hangs a gleaming canticle of

translucent mosaic, a window which many hold to be the finest in the

world. It celebrates God ruling nations from a tree. It is a passion and

a triumph, an agony and an apotheosis. Eight centuries divide the

inspiration of the Crucifixion window from St. Hilary's struggle with

Arianism, six centuries from the canticle of Bishop Venantius

Fortunatus, but Hilary's affirmation and the rejoicing of Fortunatus

live in it, and through it have been passed on to us.

Poitiers Cathedral is a spacious hall-church illuminated by large

lancets that seem to be chanting Alleluias, yet whose piety is plain and

robust. It is a church loyal to indigenous art traditions, yet blending

those sober Romanesque inheritances of Poitou with the delicate grace of

Plantagenet Gothic. Its loveliness is severe, its slenderness is sturdy.

St. Peter's both imposes and allures.

Poitiers was the cradle of Aliénor of Aquitaine's brilliant and

debonaire line of troubadours, crusaders, and church builders.

Charlemagne gave them the title of Duke of Aquitaine for their services

against Islam. The first warrior duke died a hermit at St.

Guilhem-le-Désert, which became a Midi pilgrim shrine where, in the

Gothic dawn, appeared a very early use of diagonals, profiled like those

of the Ile-de-France. A duke of Aquitaine founded Cluny, the greatest

building energy of the ages. Another of the dynasty of the Guillaumes

aided Bishop Fulbert to build Chartres, and, when fire wiped out

Poitiers Cathedral, reconstructed it in Romanesque form. Guillaume VIII

and Guillaume IX built at Bordeaux the churches of Ste. Croix, St.

Seurin, and St. André. In Poitiers they raised anew Notre Dame-la-Grande

and St. Hilaire, and founded Montierneuf,[198] blessed by Urban II in

1096. Aliénor's grandfather, Guillaume IX, the first-known troubadour,

especially favored Fontevrault. Her father was that Guillaume X, with

the appetites of eight men, an open boaster of his crimes, whom it took

St. Bernard to beat to his knees in penitence, after which he passed out

of history in the odor of sanctity as pilgrim to Compostela.

With the art of the builder Aliénor's own links were multiple. When

Bishop Geoffrey de Lèves took charge of her as a young bride in

Bordeaux, he was raising at Chartres the most beautiful tower in the

world. She assisted at St. Denis' dedication and knew Abbot Suger well;

at Vézelay she watched the Burgundians sculpting a portal of paradise.

Through all her crowded life, with all her reckless sins upon her,

Aliénor was loyal to her own region. She began Poitiers Cathedral in the

same decade that she had her favorite son Richard the Lion-hearted

installed as ruler of Aquitaine--another troubadour duke--seating him in

the abbot's chair at St. Hilaire's, according to ancient custom. She

blended with her own Poitou's Romanesque what was choicest in the Gothic

art of her Angevin husband.

Poitiers Cathedral was the prototype of monuments such as Candes and

Puy-Notre-Dame, in whose interiors Aliénor's own "high grace, the dower

of queens," seems incarnate. An Angevin architect probably designed St.

Peter's at Poitiers. The works started at the east end, which is square,

and rises from the down-slope of the hill like a solid fortress, a

hundred and fifty feet in height; Coligny's troops were one day to

riddle with bullets that big quadrangular target. So thick was the

eastern wall that the round chapels ending the choir disappeared in its

depth.

The easternmost bays and the south arm of the transept were built about

the same time, soon after 1160, and their masonry roof belongs to the

first phase of the Gothic of the West. Over the crossing is a six-branch

vault; for the rest of the church, the eight-branch type was used. The

lower half of the inclosure walls is ornamented with a blind arcade

above which runs a circulating gallery carried on corbels carved with

fantasy. Again was used the artifice employed in Poitiers' Romanesque

church of Notre Dame-la-Grande, whereby from the eastern end onward the

edifice grew slightly wider and higher. The axial line deviates

considerably, and it is known that this cathedral rose during different

periods.

While the plan and the beginning of the work were of Aliénor and Henry's

day, the greater part of the church was erected under their

great-grandson, Alphonse of Poitiers, the brother of St. Louis. When he

died in 1271, the two westernmost bays were incomplete. After a lull,

the work was resumed at the close of the century. In the XIV century was

erected the not very interesting west frontispiece which stands below

the street level and which is too wide for its height; it would have

been better had the towers been set in a line with the aisles and not

planted beyond them like the towers of Rouen and Bourges. The first of

the Avignon popes, Clement V, builder of the Rayonnant Gothic choir of

Bordeaux Cathedral, watched Poitiers' Rayonnant façade rising during the

sixteen months that he spent in the city. While here he learned that

fire had damaged St. John Lateran's at Rome and ordered it to be

reconstructed. The last windows in St. Pierre's Cathedral have the

Flamboyant tracery of Jean de Berry's time. That amateur of art--sixth

in descent from Henry and Aliénor--left his mark all through middle

France.

The interior of Poitiers Cathedral is an ample parallelogram of eight

bays, divided into three aisles of equal height, by a dozen widely

spaced piers, each of which is a cluster of lovely shafts rising from

pavement to vault-springing. The eighteen _bombé_ vault sections are

grace itself. As the light floods in from the big lancets in the side

walls, one scarcely notices that this church has ground supports. The

plan of Poitou's Romanesque churches--seen at its best at St.

Savin[199]--shows adroit construction, since it employed the aisles to

buttress the principal span, and used one roof to cover the entire

structure.

Poitiers' memorable Crucifixion window is in the flat, eastern wall of

the central aisle. The three windows in that square chevet belong to the

transition between the XII and XIII centuries. That to the north was the

gift of Maurice de Blason, who became bishop of Poitiers in 1198, and

who is supposed to have been also the donor of the Crucifixion, whose

date has given rise to controversy. The straight saddle-bars still used

in it were abandoned after 1200. In the lower panel of the central

light, the founders of the cathedral, Henry and Aliénor, are pictured

kneeling. Aliénor knew well Suger's school of glassmakers, and as M.

Mâle has proved that all the XII-century windows in western France

proceed from those of St. Denis, very likely the ex-queen of France was

instrumental in spreading their fame. At Poitiers the apostles gaze

upward in quite the same attitude as those in the Ascension window at Le

Mans, an accepted work of Suger's craftsmen.

Blue as profound as sapphires and a crimson that glows like blood-red

rubies make of Poitiers' Crucifix an unapproachable glory. The genius

who conceived it had brooded over the ecstatic hymn composed for the

glad celebration of November 19, 569. This is the Tree of Life,

effulgent in fecundity, on its branches hanging such fruit as the Ransom

of the World, the vine that gives sweet wine of the red blood of the

Lord. No agonizing Christ on Poitiers' Cross _ornata regis purpura_. The

Saviour's eyes are wide open to indicate that the Christ dies not. The

arms are extended to great length as if embracing the entire world.[200]

The halo is marked by the Greek cross, emblem of divinity. In many other

chevets of France the Crucifixion holds the central place, in the Lady

chapel at Tours, in the clearstory at Rouen, in the ambulatory at

Bourges, in St. Remi's wide gallery at Rheims, in the square east wall

of Moulins, and at Ervy. And in many ways was the Sacrifice presented;

sometimes the Cross became an apple-decked Tree of Knowledge with Adam

and Eve beside it; sometimes the Saviour's arms were high uplifted and

angels received the precious blood in chalices. Never was the meaning of

Calvary presented with more profundity than at Poitiers, whose ancient

bishops had suffered exile to defend the Son and written verses to exalt

him.

The other lancets of the cathedral are in most part XIII-century work of

the closely woven pattern type that produces scintillation; contrary to

the more general usage the medallions are to be read from the top

downward. As color schemes they have been composed with extraordinary

care. Few church interiors can equal this for jeweled riches: 'And the

building of the wall thereof was of jasper stone.... And the foundations

of the wall were adorned with all manner of precious stones--jasper,

sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, sardius, chrysolite, beryl,

topaz, chrysoprasus, jacinth, and amethyst.'

Poitiers' ancient church of Notre Dame-la-Grande has the appearance of a

cathedral, and its elaborate front, the best of all Romanesque façades,

is classed among peerless works such as Vézelay's portico, St. Gilles'

portal, and the Auvergnat apses. The pre-Gothic school of Poitou,

formulated as early as 1050, excelled in sculptured frontispieces,

decorated apses, and ornate window frames. Sometimes the side aisles

bracing the principal span were made too narrow, as here in Notre Dame,

but where the school reached its structural apogee as in St.

Savin-sur-Gartemps (which has lofty ample aisles and splendidly carved

capitals), it can hold its own with that of any region. Poitou has been

called the paradise for lovers of Romanesque architecture.

In Notre Dame-la-Grande are some XII-century frescoes, but its modern

experiment in polychromy is distressing. Many a gathering has the

ancient church seen. When in 1100 a church council at Poitiers censured

the illegal marriage of the king of France and the fair Bertrada de

Montfort, Guillaume IX, the troubadour duke of Aquitaine who was

present--and in much the same predicament, living with the wife of a

neighboring lord--made a scene and indignantly left the hall. Stones

were thrown at the churchmen who dared censure an open scandal. Then

brave Robert d'Abrissel, founder of Fontevrault, tore off his cloak and

stood forth, in token of his willingness to suffer in so good a

cause.[201]

Poitiers' abbey church of St. Hilaire has much interest for

archæologists.[202] The Vandals destroyed a church here, the Saracens

burned another, twice was it wrecked by Norse pirates during the IX

century when St. Hilary's relics were carried to Le Puy Cathedral for

safety. Then a daughter of the Duke of Normandy, Emma, the mother of

Edward the Confessor, had her architect, Gautier Coorland, rebuild the

abbatial, which was dedicated in 1049. Owing to continuous

reconstructions, little of that period remains, save in the ambulatory

and in the tower which once stood isolated. The XII century added the

oblong cupolas whose only counterparts are to be found at Le Puy. To

support its new cupola-vaulting, St. Hilaire built two rows of pillars

with a narrow passageway between, and when, in later times, outer aisles

were added, the interior was given the uncommon aspect of triple aisles.

A Huguenot sacking worked irreparable damage, and after the Revolution

the westernmost bays of the church had to be demolished.

In Merovingian times the two most-visited shrines in France were St.

Hilary's at Poitiers, and St. Martin's at Tours. When Hilary, the

thirteenth bishop here (d. 368), returned from his exile in Phrygia,

whither he had been driven for combating the Arian heresy, he brought

back from the East a fondness for the interpretation of Scripture by

allegory which was to have a strong influence on the iconography of

Gothic cathedrals. To pray by St. Martin's tomb at Tours there came

north the Italian poet, Venantius Fortunatus, who continued his

pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Hilary, the master who had trained Martin

in the spiritual life. Never was he to quit Poitiers, where, in 607 he

died, its revered bishop.

In those days, Radegund, the Thuringian wife of Clotaire, son of Clovis,

had retired to Poitiers to pass her life in study and prayer. Scripture

and the works of the church fathers were read in Greek and Hebrew, in

her cloister. About her gathered pious maidens, chiefly of the

Gallo-Roman stock, harried by the rougher peoples from the north.

Fortunatus became for Queen Radegund and her Abbess Agnes a sort of

self-appointed intendant; he sent them gifts of fruit with verses.

Puvis de Chavannes has painted it all on the walls of Poitiers' Town

Hall.

St. Radegund's tomb became a pilgrim shrine. The savants see no reason

to doubt the genuine antiquity of the queen's sarcophagus of black

marble now in the crypt of her church, part of which crypt escaped the

fire of 1083 and so dates before 1000. The new apse was dedicated in

1099. The three big bays of the aisleless nave are covered by

Plantagenet Gothic vaults with eight branches, and along the walls are

the same blind arcades and carved carbels as in the cathedral. The

sacristy shows an octagonal dome on ribs. The church has no transept,

but over the north portal is a XIII-century rose window of deep blue

hue, between which and the apse are some XIV-century windows that

experimented not very successfully with colored figures in white glass.

The porch is good Flamboyant Gothic.

Poitiers boasts the oldest extant Christian church in France, the

baptistry of St. Jean, in whose walls are Gallo-Roman IV-century

vestiges.[203] There is VII-century Merovingian work in its apsidal

chapels, and the later Romanesque and Gothic times added their quotas.

The ancient well in which baptism by submersion was practiced has been

preserved. A son of Poitiers feels doubly a Christian if baptized in the

church of St. Jean's.

The venerable little edifice to-day lies many feet below the level of

the city streets, for Poitiers escaped few of the sackings of history.

For safety from the Barbarian invasions some rich Gallo-Roman must have

buried the statue of Minerva exhumed in 1902, in the garden of a girls'

school, and now in the town's museum. It is a most lovely Greek marble

of the VI century, B.C.[204]

Henry Plantagenet and Aliénor of Aquitaine built in Poitiers the guard's

hall of the Counts' Palace, in the center of the town, on its highest

eminence.[205] The wall-arcading is like contemporary work in the

cathedral and the church of St. Radegund. In late-Gothic times the south

wall was remade. In this hall the second husband of Isabella of

Angoulême made amends to his suzerain, Alphonse of Poitiers, for the war

to which her jealous haughtiness had forced him. In this hall in 1307-08

the accused Templars were interrogated by Clement V, the pontiff who

initiated the residence at Avignon, and the consequent papal

subserviency to the French crown, Philippe le Bel cowed the pope, and

the group of anti-cleric legists who controlled the king arranged that

only picked specimens of the doomed military Order should appear at

Poitiers. The royal coffers were empty and those of the Templars were

full.

Torture and intimidation had wrung from all too many of the monk-knights

false avowals of guilt. In Spain, where the investigation was carried on

without torture, the bishops found no heresy in the Order; instead, they

bore testimony to its exemplary standing. One brave old crusader raised

his voice in honest speech: "Let him have a care," wrote Joinville,

"this king who now reigns. Let him amend his ways, lest God strike him

down without mercy." The Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques Molay,

was burned publicly in Paris, calling on king and pope to meet him

before God's judgment seat within the year. A month later Clement V

died, and before 1314 closed, the young king met sudden death. And the

people recalled that when Clement was crowned at Lyons, the tiara had

been knocked from his head by a collapsing wall and one of its precious

jewels lost.

Less discouraging were other doings of Clement V in Poitiers. Here he

dated the nomination of John of Montecorvino (d. 1328), pioneer of

Christian missionaries, to the see of Peking. Armed crusading had run

its course; the crusade by preaching, prayer, and penance was to begin.

Already in 1245 Innocent IV had sent Dominicans to Persia and

Franciscans farther east, St. Louis had sent William de Rubruquis to the

Mongols, and those astonishing Venetian merchants; the Polos, had roused

the papacy to the spiritual needs of Cathay, the far Cathay of the

mediæval tradition, to which Columbus was seeking a shorter route when

he accidentally discovered America. For thirty years John of

Montecorvino missionized Tartary. He translated the New Testament and

the Psalms. To encourage missionary activity, Clement V ordered that

Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic be taught publicly at Rome, Bologna, Paris,

Oxford, and Salamanca.

The Hundred Years' War, so fatal to French architectural progress,

surged round Poitiers. After Crécy, in 1346, the hall of the Counts'

Palace was damaged by the English. In the environs of Poitiers took

place the bitter French defeat of 1356, when King Jean le Bon was made

prisoner. "_Et fut là morte toute la fleur de chevalerie de France_,"

says Froissart. The siege by Duguesclin to recapture the hill city from

the English damaged its monuments. When the Duke of Berry, son of King

Jean the Good, became master of Poitiers he undertook to restore the

Counts' Palace, and he had noted Flamboyant Gothic masters construct for

him the splendid triple chimney piece of the guard hall, decorated about

1383 by André Beauneveu with statues of Charles VI, of his wife Isabeau

of Bavaria, and of Jean of Berry and his first duchess. In the pignon

above the great fireplaces was set some XIV-century glass. Guy de

Dammartin re-established the donjon tower called Maubergeon, now cut off

at the third story. The images of the counts of Poitiers, decorating it,

belong to that phase of French sculpture which preceded the

Franco-Flamand school at Dijon. Before transalpine influences were

imported, a truly national renaissance had begun. The Tour Maubergeon

and the pignon of the great hall are all that remain of the palaces

built at Poitiers by Jean de Berry; but what they were can be seen in

his illuminated Book of Hours now in Chantilly's museum.

The historic hall of Poitiers has its memories of Jeanne d'Arc. Hither,

in 1429, Charles XII brought her to be examined by learned men. When one

of them told her, with condescension, that if God wished to deliver

France he had no need of men-of-arms, swift was Jeanne's reply, "Man

does the battling and God gives the victory." Finally her judges

reported to the king that she was of sound sense and a true Christian

and appeared to be sent of God, and that, given the desperate need of

the kingdom, they advised the king to put her at the head of an army for

the relief of Orléans. Decision momentous for the fate of France!

Jeanne, during her trial at Rouen, often referred to the answers she had

given to her honest judges at Poitiers: "If you do not believe me, send

to Poitiers, where I was questioned before.... It is written in the book

at Poitiers." Cauchon might wear a miter, well she knew it was not the

Church which persecuted her, though the English left no stone unturned

to have it so appear. Jeanne in Poitiers lodged with Maître Jean

Rabateau, advocate, and it was the duty of his good dame to spy on her

night and day. Many years after she testified to Jeanne's habit of long

prayer in the night-time. To test the maid's virtue the king's own

mother-in-law visited her. That able Yolande of Aragon had brought up

Charles VII. Her own son, the young knight René d'Anjou, was soon to

fight under Jeanne, and Yolande, herself, convinced of the Maid's

mission, helped with funds for the expedition to Orléans. They say that

Jeanne made answer to the court ladies with such sweetness and grace

that she drew tears from their eyes.

The old hill city of Poitiers, so ecclesiastical, so full of national

memories, has had the good sense to keep itself _très province_, and its

street directory still makes a sort of calendar of saints. At Bourges,

the mania to wipe out its past has reached such a pass that the rue St.

Michel is now the rue Michel-Servet and the rue St. Fulgent the rue

Fulton. Poitiers has no desire to blot out her high historic memories.