Midi heretics. Finally, in 1208, the pope's legate was murdered by a
henchman of the Count of Toulouse and hostilities were precipitated.
Innocent III proclaimed a crusade. Later he regretted its excesses just
as he had cause to deplore the divergence of the Fourth Crusade to
filibustering purposes, but he was too entirely a man of his own epoch
to regret the Albigensian Crusade itself. By 1209 the northern barons
had invaded Languedoc and many a building-bishop was in their ranks.
The spirit of crusading was at first strong enough to prevent their
attacking the rich trading city of Montpellier which lay in their path
but which was singularly free of heresy. Yet their very next step was a
sacrilege. The orthodox population of Béziers, when called on to deliver
up their heretic citizens, answered they would sooner see themselves
sunk in the deep sea. It would seem that from the first hour many
Catholics of the Midi looked on the crusade as a war of conquest on the
part of the barons of the north. Between north and south was deep-rooted
antipathy. The more cultivated but more corrupted Midi scorned the
rougher peoples beyond their confines, who in their turn despised the
southerners. Inevitable was it that a clash between those opposite
civilizations should acquire the character of racial hate.
Simon de Montfort, chosen leader of the crusaders after the sack of
Béziers, soon overran the heretical region, whereupon many barons of
the north, deeming that the ethical purpose of the Midi excursion was
accomplished, returned to their homes. Henceforth the racial and
political aspects of the struggle were accentuated. Cruelty and perfidy
marked both sides. The Midi lords boasted that no crusader escaped them
with eyes, fists, or feet, and they cut into little pieces the nephew of
Albéric de Humbert, archbishop-builder of Rheims Cathedral. In
retaliation Simon de Montfort cut off heretics' ears and noses.
By 1212 word was sent to Innocent III that hate and cupidity, as much as
zeal for the Faith, actuated the invaders, whereupon the pope roundly
ordered them to pass into Spain to fight Islam. It was too late to stem
the tide. In 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, in which every power
in Christendom, lay and ecclesiastic, had a voice, Simon de Montfort's
retention of his Midi conquests was sanctioned. Simon's death, in 1218,
led young Raymond VII of Toulouse to rise in arms and the wars that
followed were frankly political. In 1229 peace was signed under the
portal of Paris Cathedral and the only daughter of Raymond VII affianced
to the brother of the king of France.
ALBI CATHEDRAL[234]
Laissons-nous aller de bonne foi aux choses qui nous prennent par
les entrailles et ne cherchons point de raisonnements pour nous
empêcher d'avoir du plaisir.--MOLIÈRE.
The city which gave its name to the terrible episode of the XIII century
lies forty miles east of Toulouse. The local saying is, "Who has not
seen the cathedral of Albi and the tower of Rodez has seen nothing."
Albi Cathedral yields to none in its gaunt majesty. It stands apart in
one's visions of travel, as unique a memorial of past history as the
Mount of the Archangel off the coast of Normandy, as Vézelay looking out
over the soft valleys of Burgundy, as Le Puy on its basaltic pinnacles.
Never was a monument more absolutely itself.
[Illustration: _Albi Cathedral (1282-1399). A Midi Fortress Church_]
Unfrequented Albi was once in the stir of life, and over its stone
bridge, built nine centuries ago, have passed the notable folk of the
Middle Ages[235] as they wended their way to Santiago Compostela,
whither all the world was going in those days. Time-scarred houses
border the reddish Tarn; dark, decayed streets climb the hill. At a
curve of the river, bastions and ramparts rise in terraces to a
fortified episcopal palace and--crowning all--the enormous bulk of the
cathedral. Its long, stark wall strikes the sky in a formidable straight
line. The west façade is a massive donjon, four hundred feet above the
Tarn. No welcoming west portals here, no extended transept arms of
sacrificial mercy, no soaring buttress, no leaping pinnacles. Not the
lore of Christ, "Do as you would be done by," seems to have inspired
Albi, but the Hebraic spirit of breaking one's enemies' bones, as if the
Jehovah of the Old Testament, outraged by Albigensian blasphemies, here
asserted himself in a temple that would forever be a looming menace for
heretics.
Albi's forbidding structure rose between those two harsh epochs--the
Albigensian Crusade and the Hundred Years' War. Its aggressive mass was
planned by a most aggressive churchman, Bernard, Cardinal de Castanets,
the city's learned bishop detested of the people as their uncompromising
feudal master, as well as a spiritual chief so harsh in his
inquisitorial functions that a pontifical commission was appointed, in
1306, to repair his excesses. In 1282 Bernard de Castanets laid the
first stone of Albi Cathedral and for twenty years he and the chapter
contributed a twentieth of their revenues. The church was finished by
the sixty-fifth bishop, Guillaume de la Voulte, in the last years of the
XIV century.
To approach the cathedral at its apse end is not so picturesque as from
the river side, but it is formidable enough. The prodigious apse rises
abruptly, imperiously, from the town square. One fairly shivers beneath
its Tolosan brick walls, overtowering and overpowering, broken merely by
a few narrow windows--surely the narrowest ever made in a Gothic
church--and by uniform bastion-tower buttresses. Gargoyles, of as alien
an aspect as those of the Jacobins' at Toulouse, crane their gaunt necks
from the upper walls, as if asking what manner of Gothic this is.
Albi Cathedral is the meridional interpretation of the national art. The
traditions of Rome held tenaciously in southern France, where builders
disliked to show the machinery by which their edifices stood. The
buttresses at Albi are in larger part hidden within the church under the
guise of walls between the side chapels. The flying buttress is uncommon
in the Midi. Like Rome again, with her preference for an unencumbered
floor space, Albi's immense interior is unbroken by aisles. The vault's
diagonals spring over a width of sixty feet--a span unrivaled by any in
the north. Albi Cathedral is a vast hall three hundred feet long, one
hundred feet high, not high enough for its length, perhaps, but few will
regret having the marvelous frescoed ceiling, "the missal of St.
Cecilia," brought nearer to the eye.
The tutelary of this fortress-church is the gentle patroness of music.
Half the fascination of Albi comes from its convincing inconsistencies.
It would seem that not Cécile--doubly feminine and gracious under her
French name--but Michael Archangel with a brandished sword, should guard
this rugged pile. As if the good people of Albi felt the incongruity,
they added, long after Bishop de Castanets' day, a southern portal
preceded by a porch, the baldaquin, with all its elaborate Flamboyant
tracery executed in a creamy-white marble in which surely Cécile, saint
though she was, must have felt a personal satisfaction. An architect of
genius set that marble porch of Albi against its red time-dulled walls,
'alabaster on corall'; one takes liberties with Chaucer's rime:
And southward in a portal on the wall
Of alabaster white on red corall
An oratorie riche for to see,
In honor of the Roman Cicily.
To ascend to the marble baldaquin one passes under a fortified
sculptured gateway, erected by the Dominican bishop of Albi, Dominique
de Florence (1392-1410). The marble portal and porch were executed under
Bishop Louis I d'Amboise (1472-1502) and his successor, Louis II
d'Amboise (1502-11) his nephew, belonging to an enlightened family all
of whose members excelled in affairs, war, letters, and art, leaving
their memorials at Chaumont on the Loire, their feudal seat, at Cluny,
Paris, Clermont, Gaillon, and Rouen.
Louis I d'Amboise also adorned the interior of his cathedral by the
sumptuous screen of white stone that surrounds the choir, leaving a
passageway between it and the side chapels. The rood-loft, or _jubé_ (so
called because from its balcony the clerk chanted _Jube Domine dicere_
before the gospel), is sculptured with the ermine of Anne of Brittany
and the lilies of France, being made about 1499, when Anne wedded Louis
XII. Bishop Louis at Albi was brother of the king's prime minister,
Cardinal Georges d'Amboise.
Originally the choir screen of Albi was painted in colors. While the
accessories indicate that the Italian Renaissance was obtaining headway
in France, the images derive from the short, overdraped Franco-Flamand
figures of Dijon. Perhaps the stonecutters who made Albi's choir wall
came direct from Cluny, where a late-Gothic chapel, on which had worked
Abbot Jacques d'Amboise, was adorned with prophets and apostles, each
with his suitable text. On the inner wall of Albi's choir screen are
sculptured homely but charming little angels, and the twelve apostles
holding scrolls inscribed with phrases of the _Crédo_. Old Testament
personages, who only heralded the Messiah, were not admitted to the
_sanctum sanctorum_; the vestibule was their proper place. Prosper
Mérimée called Albi's screen "a splendid folly before which one is
ashamed to be wise." Inside and out it is exuberant with sculpture,
though its extravagant caprices do not stifle a very real religious
feeling in the images. Such a profusion of delicate ornament led the
modern critic to suspect that the choir wall was modeled in cement, not
chiseled in stone, but when a Sorbonne geologist analyzed the substance
it was found to be a fine-grained white stone that grows harder with
time.
Everywhere in St. Cecilia's cathedral is fragile loveliness set side by
side, as an afterthought, with stern forcefulness. Bishop Louis II
d'Amboise brought from Italy a group of artists to paint the panels of
Albi's cyclopean vaulting, and the work accomplished by those men of
northern Italy, from 1509 to 1512, remains the most splendid color
decoration of the Middle Ages in France. Michael Angelo was painting the
Sistine Chapel ceiling in those same years. Languedoc produced another
superb array of color, the windows of Auch Cathedral,[236] and we must
not forget that the greatest of all Renaissance glassworkers, the friar
who filled Arezzo with glory, was a Midi Frenchman.
Amid Albi's arabesques the artists from Bologna and Modena inscribed
their names, and some young lovers wrote "Antonia, mia bella," and
"Lucrezia Cantora, bolognesa." The frescoes give the genealogy of
Christ. They recall Perugino, Francia, and Pintoriccio. Never was blue
background more marvelous--a strong rare hue neither indigo nor Prussian
nor peacock, but a blending of them all in a cerulean depth of
color--an art as entirely lost to posterity as the blue background of
Suger's windows. Chemical analysis has busied itself with Albi's
frescoes, too; but though the blue color of the vault panels was found
to be obtained from the precipitation of salts of copper by carbonate of
potassium, how to produce a similar hue to-day remains unsolved. Over
the blue background wind lovely arabesques, and the saints portrayed are
stately Italians of the Renaissance. The diagonals and transverse arches
are colored in old-gold. On the western wall of the church a XV-century
fresco was painted directly on the bricks, a Last Judgment copied from
popular woodcuts of the day, with the punishments of the seven deadly
sins pitilessly set forth. The painting was ruthlessly cut into when a
chapel was introduced under the western tower. The side chapels of Ste.
Cécile are illuminated in gold and color like a Book of Hours. Never was
there a church of such contrasts: within--a shrine of warm, polished,
over-splendid beauty, and without--the most rugged feudal challenge of
the Middle Ages.
CARCASSONNE[237]
It is the first sharp vision of an unknown town, the first
immediate vision of a range of hills, that remains forever, and is
fruitful of joy within the mind ... that is perhaps the chief of
the fruits of travel.--HILAIRE BELLOC.
The Cité of Carcassonne was long one of the most formidable fortresses
of Europe, covering the route from ocean to sea and guarding a pass into
Spain. These Pyrenean provinces of France gave Joffre and Foch to the
World War. The lower walls of the Cité were of Rome's building; above
came the Visigothic defenses; then St. Louis extended the fortifications
and his son completed them.
Within its double belt of walls and half a hundred towers is the
precious little church of St. Nazaire, once of cathedral rank. Its
western front was never opened by a portal because it stood near what
were long the outer ramparts. The Romanesque nave is small and dark,
without triforium or clearstory, and with high aisles that buttress the
tunnel vault of the principal span, whose transverse ribs are slightly
pointed. Piers and columns alternate. The materials to build this early
church were blessed by Urban II in 1096 in the same month that he
dedicated the new choir of St. Sernin at Toulouse. St. Nazaire was an
entirely Romanesque church when Simon de Montfort ruled the Cité for ten
years. In this church St. Dominic married Amaury de Montfort to a
princess of Dauphiny. St. Dominic had held a public controversy of eight
days with the heretics of Carcassonne in 1205, before the coming of the
northern barons, and in St. Nazaire he preached the Lent of 1213. Simon
de Montfort was buried temporarily in St. Nazaire, and there exists in a
nave chapel a sculptured stone which some have thought to be part of his
sepulcher, but which is more probably from the tomb of a brother of
Count Raymond of Toulouse, who, having sympathized with the northern
barons, was slain in consequence. The curious stone shows the engines of
war described in the _Chanson de la Croisade_, and the costumes of that
period.
Under Bishop Radulph (1255-66), who built the Gothic chapel beside the
south arm of the transept, permission was obtained to replace the
ancient transept and choir by a new one. Bishop Radulph won forgiveness
for those citizens of Carcassonne who were expelled from the fortress in
1262, because they had conspired against the crown with one of the
Trencavel dynasty, their old rulers, and the builders of the Cité's
château. Louis IX, who governed Carcassonne through a seneschal, allowed
the exiles to start the present town of Carcassonne beyond the river, in
the plain below the citadel.
The erection of the Gothic half of St. Nazaire took place under Bishop
Pierre de Roquefort (d. 1321) during the first twenty years of the XIV
century. To him we owe the radiant glass lantern which is St. Nazaire's
transept and choir, a structure that is really a big transept with seven
chapels, equally high, along its eastern wall, the central of which
chapels, and the longest, serving as choir. The windows in the chapels
rise to the roof, and are filled with clear and brilliant glass ranked
with the best of the XIV century; those in the first two chapels excel
the others. Two windows show the arms of Pierre de Roquefort. St.
Nazaire was one of the last to use the legend-medallion type of window;
henceforth, in each panel, a single figure was placed in an
architectural setting.
The seven eastern chapels of the transept open one on the other above a
low dividing wall, and standing out from those walls, so that a narrow
passage is made between them and the transept, are detached piers that
rise powerfully from pavement to vault-springing. Above their capitals
the molds die away in the column--a very early use of a Flamboyant
characteristic. The two pillars flanking the entrance to the choir are
decorated, midway up, with statues under canopies sculptured by northern
artists before 1320.
Archæologists declare that the Gothic part of the Cité's ancient
cathedral are the perfection of XIV-century construction, elastic in
every part, each part fulfilling its own separate function. The ogival
principle could not be carried farther. It is thought that some
architect of the north made the plan, which local masons executed. The
only Midi trait is the flat, tiled roof.
Modern restoration has overhauled the citadel of Carcassonne too
radically. Imperiously set though it is, does it grip the imagination as
entirely as Aigues-Mortes, lying flat on marsh lands, its time-stained
walls untouched? Often in France one echoes Pius IX's response to Baron
de Crozé, who proposed the restoration of the Coliseum: "Dear Son, I
have read your memoir and I thank you for it; but do you not know that
there are two sorts of vandalism, one which consists in destroying, the
other in restoring? Never has the Coliseum been so beautiful as in its
moving contrast of past splendor and magnificent present decay. To
restore it is to annihilate the work of centuries, to recompose an
ordinary pastiche with no _éclat_."
Not that Carcassonne, as redressed by M. Viollet-le-Duc, is deficient in
_éclat_; it has too much of it. It is a vision of a feudal fortress too
carefully prepared, too deliberately made ready for the tourist.
In the lower town are the typically meridional churches of St. Michel,
the actual cathedral of Carcassonne, and St. Vincent whose aisleless
hall is the widest in the Midi--a span of sixty-eight feet. Even when
using diagonals, the south kept true to its favorite Romanesque
traditions. Neither church has a triforium, the apse windows are long
and narrow, over the entrance of each chapel is an eight-lobed rose, and
the buttresses are disguised as walls between the side chapels. The
tracery is Rayonnant. St. Vincent was built after the Black Prince
burned Carcassonne in 1355. At its sculptured portal was placed a statue
of the newly canonized saint-king, Louis IX, under whom this modern
Carcassonne was founded.
NARBONNE CATHEDRAL[238]
Que chaque homme console un homme,
Fasse un bien, donne une pitié,
Ne t'occupe pas de la somme:
Ce pain sera multiplié.
--JEAN AICARD (born in the Midi, 1848).
At Narbonne one is at the very heart of the Midi. It is an ancient
mother city of Europe, a capital of Celtic Gaul. Surpassed by nothing
in the Roman world, Narbonne kept its pre-eminence under both pagan and
Christian Rome. It became the seat of the Visigothic royal line, and of
their Moorish conquerors. Charlemagne made it a fortified outpost, and
during the Middle Ages it was the richest of trading centers, a third of
whose population was Jewish. In 1311, the same covetous king who
abolished the Templars banished the Jews, to whom Charlemagne had given
the freedom of this town for their support of his cause against Islam.
To-day one walks its dust-white streets with a strange sensation of
loneliness. Narbonne is a dead city.
When in the latter part of the XIII century the great Gothic cathedral
of St. Just was begun, there seemed no reason why so flourishing a
trading center could not succeed in the enterprise. Unlike Beauvais,
where the chief church was from its inception out of all proportion to
the population, Narbonne could easily have erected a nave to complete
its mighty choir. In 1272 was laid the first stone of St. Just
Cathedral.[239] Then there occurred here what happens to all rivers that
communicate with the sea by means of lagoons: gradually the salt lakes
silt up till they become marshes through which the river winds
tortuously till suddenly it breaks a new path to the sea. In 1320
occurred this catastrophe for Narbonne. The Roman dike gave way and the
river Aude left its ancient bed, quitting Narbonne to flow toward
Courson, where it still is. The stagnant waters bred disease, and the
metropolis, greeted by Sidonius Apollinaris for its salubrity, _Salve
Narbo, potens salubritate_, became a pestilential site. Narbonne sank
into silent decay. Over the shrunken city stands the ghostly fragment of
the great cathedral, surpassed in height only by Beauvais and Amiens.
St. Just was begun in 1272, and three years later the cathedral of
Toulouse was started on a plan and with profiles so closely resembling
Narbonne's chief church that one master may have designed both. Both
derive immediately from those northern Gothic churches translated with a
meridional accent, the cathedrals of Clermont, whose choir was finished
in 1265, and of Limoges, begun in 1273.
The Midi shows in Narbonne Cathedral in the simplified triforium which
is framed by wall spaces, as are the clearstory windows, in the
extremely high pier arcades, and in the stout buttresses that are
disguised as dividing walls between the side chapels. The capitals are
mere uncarved bands, and over them certain molds die away in the pier.
M. Anthyme Saint-Paul's theory was that even in the XIII century began
the evolution which was to end in Flamboyant Gothic. He pointed out, in
Narbonne's chapels, windows with Rayonnant tracery side by side with
flamelike undulations. M. Enlart thinks we cannot be sure that they were
done at the same time. An unusual and graceful aspect was achieved in
the choir's northern aisle by the setting of piers beyond the dividing
walls of the chapels, making a kind of double aisle like that in the
transept of St. Nazaire at Carcassonne.
An architect named Henri is cited as master-of-works at Gerona Cathedral
whose chevet, begun after 1312, resembles that of St. Just. Henri was a
name uncommon in the Midi. It is thought that he was the original
architect of Narbonne. His successor at Gerona, Jacques de Favari or
Favers, a name of the central plateau of France, is known to have
directed the works of Narbonne's chief church. Catalonia, Aragon, and
Languedoc were allied in architecture as in tongue. Poblet in Catalonia
is directly the daughter of the abbey at Fontfroide, six miles from
Narbonne.[240] The Gothic influence of Narbonne spread to the isles in
the Mediterranean, to southern Italy and Cyprus.
Archbishop Maurin began Narbonne Cathedral after the tragic crusade of
St. Louis in 1270. He had vowed that if ever again he saw the fair land
of France he would offer thanksgiving by rebuilding his church. The
corner stone and relics were sent by Pope Clement IV, originally a
lawyer at St. Gilles, and then archbishop of Narbonne, whose crumbling
cathedral of Charlemagne's time he had purposed to replace by a Gothic
one, when his translation to the papacy intervened.
The apse chapels were built first. The main parts of the choir are the
work of Archbishop Gilles Aycelin de Montaigu, (1292-1311), a noble of
Auvergne, brother of the bishop who was building Clermont Cathedral and
who had himself been a canon at Clermont. He also began the cloister,
and to his own residence added a donjon tower. It is thought that the
episcopal palace at Narbonne served as prototype for the palace of the
popes at Avignon. In modern times, between its ancient towers a town
hall has been constructed. In 1311 Gilles Aycelin was transferred to the
see of Rouen, and Rouen's archbishop, Bernard de Farges (d. 1341), a
nephew of the pope who built the choir of Bordeaux Cathedral, took his
place at Narbonne, where he completed the giant choir. Services were
held in it in 1320.
The truncated western end of the cathedral is a depressing sight. Work
stopped after the completion of the east wall of the transept, whose
window apertures had later to be filled in; by the XV century all hope
of completing the church was abandoned, and two west towers were raised.
In the XVIII century the plan to build a nave was revived and part of
the city ramparts were thrown down to allow for its extension. One bay
of the proposed structure was begun in bastard Gothic, and then the
enterprise collapsed. The present entrance is through a door contrived
in one of the apse chapels. The exterior of that apse was fortified.
From one turreted buttress pile to the other was maneuvered a crenelated
gallery, and originally the passage communicated with the bishop's
palace.
Although sadly needing a nave, Narbonne's choir is a proud and noble
vessel. Critics have called it a work of mechanical skill more than of
imagination. Its science is beyond cavil, each thrust being exactly
counterbutted. Profiles, however are angular and there is a painful lack
of sculpture. If, technically, Narbonne's chief church is somewhat hard
and dry, it has retained sufficient of the emotional quality of Gothic,
what has been called its _sursum corda_, to belong to the grand
tradition of the national art. Moreover, one can kneel reverentially on
the very steps of the altar instead of being kept at a stately distance.
In the clearstory are the loveliest XIV-century windows in France, like
rare-toned etchings or delicate spider-web, time-stained lace. As there
is color in them, it is inexact to call such windows grisaille, but the
subdued note of grisaille glass predominates.
Between Narbonne and Spain lies Perpignan's XIV-century[241] cathedral,
and Elne's cloister, called a work of supreme elegance by the critical
Prosper Merimée, and to the east at Béziers is a fortified cathedral
with massive towers, begun in 1215 and building through the XIV century;
it has good stained glass of this latter period.
One's interest in Béziers centers in the terrible massacre of 1209, the
opening act of the Albigensian Crusade. Not that the mere sacking of a
city would have roused such horror. In the course of its history eight
massacres had occurred in Béziers. It was a day when such acts were the
accepted methods of warfare and the northern leaders had discussed
whether it were not good tactics to start their campaign by
terrorization. It was the slaughtering of the citizens in the churches
to which they had fled for sanctuary that violated the general
standards.
Witnesses of the sacking of Béziers say that while the chiefs of the
besieging army were considering how to spare those in the city who were
not Albigensian, an assault was started through the skirmish of lawless
hangers-on of the crusading army and a few townspeople. In the confusion
that followed, the northern knights rushed to arms and the city was
captured. A XX-century wrecking of the Louvain-Dinant-Termonde type
followed, and some twenty thousand perished.
Modern scholars doubt that the famous _Tuez-les-tous_ remark, attributed
to Abbot Arnaud of Cîteaux, who died archbishop of Narbonne, was ever
uttered. He is accused of saying, "Kill them all, God will know his
own," when asked how the orthodox were to be told from the heretics. No
contemporary chronicle mentions it and Albigensian historians would
certainly have flung such words at the crusaders; equally would an
ardent admirer of Simon de Montfort, who wrote his _Gestes_, have lauded
the sentiment, if one is to judge by other happenings he thought
praiseworthy. Neither enemy nor friend mentions the _Tuez-les-tous_
phrase. It first occurs in the history of a German monk at Bonn, long
after the Midi crusade, and the pages of that chronicler are so filled
with discredited assertions that little he says should be taken
seriously.
MONTPELLIER AND MAGUELONNE[242]
The tocsin sounded its lamentable notes of alarm over all the land
of France. Fire? No. _War._ The voice of the bells long condemned
to silence by the authorities suddenly rang out everywhere. From
the high belfries spread the warning, and no one worried now to
refuse to God, to the Inexplicable, the right of speech. From God's
house alone came to France, waiting in tense agony, the
announcement of the most terrible catastrophe that ever fell like
an avalanche on humanity. Sunrise to sunset from east to west, from
north to south rang out the coming of War, the world's
misery.--JEAN AICARD, on how the World War opened in the Midi.[243]
In Montpellier is a stately terrace called the Peyrou, built in the
artificial, distinguished style of Louis XIV, from which one looks out
on a most lovely landscape of Midi fertility.[244] Here Mistral in 1878
read his vibrant ode to the Latin race, _la race lumineuse, la race
apostolique_, and a generation later the people gathered here to listen
to the belfries far and near ring out over that peaceful Claude Lorraine
scene the hour of unity in battle array, for all Frenchmen--Latin and
Celt and Frank. No longer a Midi and a North. The time was past for race
hate or conquest to pose as a crusade. The time had come to end the
silencing of Christian steeples under the guise of freedom. As one man,
Midi and North sprang up in answer to the tocsin of August, 1914.
What to-day is the cathedral of Montpellier was built from 1364 to 1367
as a monastery church, so that it hardly falls within our scope. But if
architecturally the city of Montpellier is of lesser importance, it has
been for long centuries the intellectual stronghold of the Midi, and we
know that cathedrals are built with more than stones. Montpellier's
school of medicine was famous in the XII century. The city was free of
Albigensian taint; no trading town was more flourishing during the XIII
century. At the hour that the northern barons invaded the Midi, the
heiress of Montpellier, whom the king of Aragon married for her dowry
and immediately deserted, gave birth to one who was to build more
churches than any monarch in Christendom. Twelve candles were set up in
the chief church of Montpellier, each with the name of an apostle, and
when the candle called James burned the longest the child was named
Jaime. An inscription on the Tour du Pin, a vestige of the city ramparts
that originally had twenty-five such towers, records the birth of Jaime
el Conquistador, the scourge of Islam, the conqueror of Valencia and the
Balearic Islands, and the builder of six thousand churches. His father
was one of the victors of Las Navas de Tolosa, in 1212, where a vital
blow was struck at Moorish domination in Spain; yet he was killed in the
very next year in Languedoc, fighting on the heretic side.
Peter of Aragon looked on the Albigensian Crusade as a northern war of
conquest, and if outsiders were to win new lands why had he not the same
right. Jaime's mother fled to Rome, the sole court of arbitration then
in Europe, and when she died there, she left her son the ward of
Innocent III.[245] The pope compelled Simon de Montfort, who held the
child as hostage, to return him to his Spanish subjects. Jaime's tutor
was that Languedoc knight, St. Peter Nolasco (d. 1258), who founded the
Order of Mercy to redeem captives from Moslem prisons, but no
saint-tutor or saint-neighbor could tame this fierce young eagle, the
scion of the French Midi and the Spanish Pyrenees. From the time he
buckled on his sword as a boy, to his death in 1276, the weapon never
left his side. He cut off the ear of the bishop of Gerona who had
rebuked his free living, for Jaime's domestic relations were on a par
with those of the Languedoc lords and of his Mahommedan neighbors.
The church which now is Montpellier's cathedral consists of a modern
choir of the meridional type, without ambulatory or flying buttresses,
and a nave built as an abbatial by Guillaume de Grimoard, the best of
the Avignon popes, Urban V. The nave is a wide, unaisled hall, with
small clearstory windows. Even when the Midi used diagonals, says M.
Enlart, it remained faithful to Romanesque traditions. At the west
façade is an ungainly canopy held up by two round turrets of solid
stone, the sort of thing which is a builder's notion, not the design of
an architect. Urban was disappointed when he found that his architect
from Avignon had erected a big chapel rather than a church. When he came
to Montpellier in 1367 the new edifice was almost finished. He was
honored as never man was before by any city. The townspeople marched out
to meet him, every guild and corporation in the ranks, the lawyers
carrying the image of the newly canonized St. Yves of Brittany. When the
pope's visit ended, half the population walked for miles with him into
the country, and the town authorities escorted him all the way back to
Avignon.
Urban V had been educated in Montpellier and he loved its university, in
which for years he had taught law in the school where Petrarch studied.
He renewed the departments of law and art, put new life into the famed
medical school (which to-day is housed in the former bishop's palace,
fortified with propped machicolations), and founded a college for the
free maintenance of a certain number of students. To this day
Montpellier reveres him.
All over Christendom this energetic Midi baron endowed institutions of
learning, supported hundreds of students, and built monuments. He
founded the universities of Prague, Cracow, and Vienna, re-established
that of Orvieto, made a school of music at Toulouse, began the cathedral
of Mende,[246] near his birthplace, and in Marseilles rebuilt St.
Victor's, where he had been abbot,[247] and where remains his towering
tomb. At Avignon he continued the making of its walls of defense, for it
was a day when the lawless _Grandes Compagnies_ roved over France.
Urban was too wise a man not to perceive that his continued residence at
Avignon was a detriment to the papacy, and he made a valiant effort to
return to Rome. There, too, he was no sooner established than he
initiated works of art.[248] Broken by the disorders round him with
which he had not strength to cope, he returned to his beloved southern
France, where he died almost immediately, in 1370. His successor,
Gregory XI, inspired by St. Catherine of Siena, who journeyed to Avignon
in 1376, was to be the pontiff who ended what Italy, sick to death,
called "the Babylonian captivity."
Montpellier was not a bishopric till 1536, when the see was removed from
Maguelonne here, and no sooner was the new see established when the city
was sacked twice--in 1561 and again in 1565. Every tomb in the present
cathedral was violated. Were its walls lined with those old-time
memorials they would appear less bare. Neither side was distinguished by
amenity in those long years of civil strife.
Maguelonne, the original bishopric, lies six miles from Montpellier on
the Mediterranean. In ancient days it was a little island of volcanic
formation, then in time an island in a swamp, connected artificially
with the mainland. Climb to the flat stone roof of the ancient cathedral
of St. Pierre, almost the only monument left standing here where
civilization has followed civilization, and look across the lagoons that
lie between France and the solitary dead city. Europe and the present
seem no longer to exist in this the most aloof, self-effaced, most
philosophic spot in the world.
Maguelonne had known all the peoples in their pride. During fifteen
hundred years it played its part--Celt, Phoenician, Greek, and Roman
ruled here in turn. Visigothic Wamba besieged it. Islam held it under
the name of Port Saracen till Charles Martel drove the sea robbers from
their stronghold by destroying the city; only the new church of St.
Peter was saved. For the following three centuries Maguelonne lay
deserted. Then in 1037 Bishop Arnaud undertook to restore the city, and
the cathedral he rebuilt was blessed in 1054. Prosperity soon returned
under a republican form of government, with the bishop as president.
Maguelonne became an asylum for exiles and a retreat for scholars. Urban
II blessed the island in 1095. When Pope Gelasius II, driven from Rome,
landed at St. Gilles in 1118, he soon sailed thence for Maguelonne, and
hither came Alexander III in 1162.
The cathedral of St. Pierre stood up a very rock of defense against the
corsairs of Spain and Africa. On its flat stone roof engines of war were
placed. The present XI-century church replaces that of Charles Martel's
day; over an arm of its transept occurred one of the pre-Gothic early
uses of diagonals. The transverse arches of the nave are slightly
pointed. On the lintel of its portal of creamy-white marble--Classic,
Saracenic, Romanesque, and Gothic, with doorjamb bas-reliefs of Peter
and Paul, key and sword--were inscribed by Bernard de Trevies in 1178
some Latin verses still legible:
Ye who seek life's port to gain enter now this sacred fane.
If ye pass these gates within, ye may break the chains of sin,
So to pray thou must not fail, all thy cruel sins bewail;
Know that all thy sins and fears may be washed away in tears.[249]
The cathedral of St. Peter was spared in the second annihilation of
Maguelonne, which took place after the religious wars, when Richelieu's
policy was to level every possible fort that rebellion might use. Stone
by stone the other monuments of the city were carried away. When the
canal from Cette to Aigues-Mortes was built, in 1708, Maguelonne became
a useful quarry. St. Peter's church now stands alone, embalmed as in
amber, preaching the sobering lesson, _Sic transit gloria mundi_.
AIGUES-MORTES[250]
Aigues-Mortes! Consonnance d'une désolation incomparable! Dans le
train si lent à traverser la Camargue je m'imagine ces mornes
remparts qui depuis sept siècles subsistent intacts. J'évoque ces
mystérieux Sarrasins, ces légers Barbaresques qui pillaient ces
côtes et fuaient, insaisis, même par l'histoire. Aigues-Mortes, le
vieux guerrier qu'ils assaillaient sans trêve, est toujours à son
poste, étendu sur la plaine, comme un chevalier, les armes à la
main, est figé en pierre sur son tombeau.--MAURICE BARRÈS.[251]
"I propose that we institute a pilgrimage," sighed Rodin, "to all
monuments _de plein air_ yet spared by restoration." Aigues-Mortes' big
quadrangle set on the dead lagoons is precisely as it came from its
builder's hand in the reign of Philippe III, son of St. Louis. No
destructive restoration has ever chipped away the time stain of
centuries. So shrunken is the little town of to-day, within those
imposing ramparts with their fifteen towers and nine gateways, that it
is as weird an experience to encircle the walls within as to make the
solitary tour without.
No sooner did St. Louis take the crusaders' vow, in 1244, when he began
to look about for a concentration camp on the southern coast. He was
suzerain only in the south of France. Narbonne had its own counts and so
had Provence; St. Gilles and Adge were in the Toulouse countship, and
the Montpellier coast was under Aragon. Practically only swampy
Aigues-Mortes was available. St. Louis purchased it from the monks of
Psalmodi, and reconstructed an old tower on the site which had served as
a fort during piratical attacks. The grand Tour de Constance, now
standing outside the quadrangle fortification, is the only part of
Aigues-Mortes of Louis IX's day. He deepened the tortuous canal of eight
miles that led to the sea, since Aigues-Mortes never was directly on the
Mediterranean. The Genoese architect, Boccanegra, who constructed the
ramparts for Philippe III, followed the type of fortified town in the
Orient; Aigues-Mortes especially resembled Antioch.
On both his crusades St. Louis started from his fort on the dead waters.
When in 1248 the crusaders saw the low-lying spot so like the
pestilential coasts of the East, many a heart felt oppressed. Again in
1270 the king's army arrived at Aigues-Mortes. Finding his transport
ships delayed, Louis IX thought it best to move his warriors to the more
healthful site of St. Gilles. There he held brilliant court, to keep up
the idle army's spirit, and at the tourneys excelled his Provençal
queen's nephew, the future king of England, Edward I. The crusaders left
their mark on the walls of St. Gilles.
ST. GILLES[252]
Noms des Morts pour la Patrie,
Qu'on vous trie
Selons vos provinces; puis,
Pour propager votre culte,
Qu'on vous sculpte
Sur la borne et sur le puits!...
Mais d'abord, que votre zèle
Vous cisèle
Sur les maisons mêmes d'où
Pour aller vers le martyre,
Ils partirent
Dans le soleil du mois d'août.
... On lira sur la corniche
Pauvre ou riche:
"_Mort pour nous ... un tel ... un tel...._"
Trois fois, tous bas, comme on prie,
On s'écrie:
"_Morts pour nous ... pour nous ... pour nous!_"
--EDMOND ROSTAND (1868-1918; born in Marseilles).[253]
To this day on the stones of St. Gilles' abbatial are the graffiti of
ships and warriors--a king among them--scratched by the swords of St.
Louis' crusaders before they crossed to their death in Africa, 1270. The
sadly dilapidated bourg which is St. Gilles to-day played a prominent
part in the important centuries of the Middle Ages. Many were the popes
and kings who visited it to venerate the tomb of the VIII-century
hermit, Ægidius, from Athens, whose cult was widely spread over western
Christendom, as many a church image and window showing the holy man and
his fawn remain to tell.
The counts of Toulouse were the chief patrons of the abbey. On the First
Crusade, Raymond IV of Toulouse bore the title Count of St. Gilles.
Raymond VI held here, in 1208, an interview with the papal legate, Guy
de Castelnau, the after-consequences of which precipitated the
Albigensian wars. Angry words were uttered by the count when the legate
rebuked him for shielding the heretics, and the next day the legate was
murdered by one of the count's retainers as he was about to cross the
Rhone. Thereupon Innocent III declared the Albigensian Crusade. In the
following year Raymond VI performed penance before the church door of
St. Gilles--the last public canonical penance of the Middle Ages. The
disasters of the house of Toulouse diminished the abbey's building
funds.
The discussions over the date of St. Gilles have been of importance
because of its relation to the school of Provençal sculpture of which
the most notable monument is its triple portal. Before St. Gilles'
western end is a mass of composite imagery, of different dates and
material, yet composing an architectural unit. Six bays of the nave are
covered by a masonry roof of the XVIII century; only the piers and side
walls of the edifice are ancient. Beyond the nave lie the ruins of the
choir, in which has been installed an open-air archæological museum.
Did the choir of St. Gilles still stand, it would be the best Gothic
monument in the south of France, exceptional in possessing an ambulatory
and radiating chapels. At its entrance still exists a spiral staircase,
the _vis de St. Gilles_, the first of its kind constructed, which many a
mason of the Middle Ages journeyed hither to see. The steps compose an
annular vault, winding like a corkscrew.
According to M. Labande, the choir of St. Gilles was built from 1140 to
1175, and at first there was no intention of vaulting it with diagonals.
As the walls rose, however, a Gothic vault was prepared for. The nave,
whose capitals have well-cut acanthus leaves, was erected from 1175 to
1209. It could not have been finished when in 1265 Clement IV rebuked
his fellow citizens of St. Gilles for their delay in completing their
church. Clement had been a local lawyer--a Romanesque house is still
pointed out as his--by name, Guy Fouquet, or Fulcodi. The death of his
wife caused him to embrace religion. When raised to St. Peter's chair,
such was his dread of nepotism that he wrote to his daughters they were
not to expect matches any more important than if he were a simple
knight; we learn that the well-admonished young ladies failed to obtain
any husbands at all. This pope, whom St. Louis called "_notre aimé et
féal Guy_," instigated the crusade of 1270, which was associated in the
hour of its departure with his own town.
Despite his exhortation, St. Gilles' choir was joined to its nave only
in the XIV century, as is proved by the rows of Rayonnant Gothic foliage
on the capital of the nave's easternmost bay. The XVI-century religious
wars devastated the abbey, which now was held by Calvinists, now by
Catholics; and finally the Huguenots, after using the church as a
citadel, ordered that it be razed. The tower was mined and its fall
wrecked all around it, but the arrival of the king's troops saved the
edifice from entire destruction; as the masonry roof had collapsed, a
bastard-Gothic restoration of the nave was undertaken from 1650 to 1670.
Then came the Revolution; the choir was sold and its stones carted away.
So dead seemed all appreciation of the national art that the
constitutional curé of St. Gilles clamored for the demolition of the
famous triple portal, as its images "were insupportable reminders of
past servitude, recalling the odious feudal régime, displeasing to
lovers of liberty and equality." Till the middle of the XIX century the
church was abandoned.
During excavations in 1765 a chamber, or bay, of rough workmanship was
unearthed in the crypt, and in it was found a tomb inscribed as that of
St. Gilles. This is all that remains of the church in which Urban II
blessed an altar in 1096. On a buttress of the crypt an inscription
states that its foundation was laid Easter Monday of 1116. The abbey had
been damaged by an irate count of Toulouse, and Calixtus II asked Peter
the Venerable to send from Cluny a new abbot to reorganize things.
The crypt's north and west walls rose first, but the work was dropped
and taken up several times. All the vaulting, whether groin or
diagonals, was an afterthought, for all the piers have been rearranged
for the masonry roof they now support. Only a few of the westernmost
bays of the crypt used diagonals, and as their profiles are the same as
those in the choir, building from 1140 onward, they are probably
contemporary. Inscriptions on the outer west wall of the crypt prove
that in 1142 people were buried there, which would indicate that the
present stair to the west portal was not yet arranged. Perhaps for a
time they were not sure of making an upper church above the spacious
basement. By 1209 that upper nave was built, because Innocent III buried
his murdered ambassador beside the tomb of St. Gilles, and when Raymond
VI had performed public penance before the portal, we are told that he
was brushed against by the crowd, and escaped through the lower church,
passing his victim's new tomb.
The imaged portal of St. Gilles, which inspired the porch of Trinity
Church, Boston, is a composite mass of imagery begun in the XII century
and continued till St. Louis' day. Pilfered fragments were made use of,
as was only natural in a region where Rome had left many monuments. Some
of the pillars are the fluted marbles of antiquity; others are of
granite. Fourteen columns and fourteen large images of apostles and
angels give unity to the composition, as does the continuous wide
frieze.
St. Gilles' images, strong and short like the figures on the Gallo-Roman
sarcophagi near the mouth of the Rhone, are perfectly proportioned to
the place they occupy, cold, impersonal figures, more architectural than
sculptural, the fruit of an old art, not the beginning of a new
tradition, as was the theory of Herr Vöge, who would trace to Provence
the origin of French Gothic sculpture. M. de Lasteyrie contended that
the Porte Royale at Chartres--first of the Gothic portals, last of the
Romanesque--with its long, slender figures in whose visages expression
has been attempted, descends from the imaged portals of Burgundy, not
from St. Gilles or St. Trophime, but from a nascent rather than a dying
art tradition. The Lombard school gave to St. Gilles its lion
caryatides, a very popular feature at church doors; Lanfranco, who
remade Modena's cathedral in 1099, had been the first to plant pillars
on the backs of lions, perhaps copying some lost work of antiquity.
"A world in itself," said Prosper Merimée of St. Gilles' sculptured
portal. Under the biblical scenes of the frieze animals crouch and
crawl. Some of the frieze groups, such as the Flagellation, are full of
spirit, and must be of later date than certain other stiff archaic
figures. The Kiss of Judas with its grimacing soldiers is probably a
XVII-century restoration. The only time that the Expulsion from the
Temple was treated in the older work was here. The sisters Martha and
Mary and their brother Lazarus, with Mary Jacobi and Mary Salome, are
all imaged at St. Gilles' door. The tradition of their arrival in
Provence was gaining in favor every day while this portico was making.
The savants inform us, though not patriotic Provençal savants, that no
mention of the saints of Bethany is to be found in Provence before the
middle of the XI century. Monseigneur Duchesne of the Institute of
France, who takes saints out of their niches as boldly as any
Bollandist, tells us that it was the monks of Vézelay in Burgundy who
first imagined the arrival in southern France of Mary Magdalene, in
order to explain how it was they possessed her relics, the lodestar of
their pilgrim shrine. Then, gradually, the legend grew till it was a
remarkably full boatload that landed, in A.D. 40, at Les
Saintes-Maries,[254] where the Little Rhone, on which stands St.
Gilles, enters the Mediterranean: the risen Lazarus, whose relics were
claimed by Autun in 1144; Martha, whose relics appeared at Tarascon in
1187 and caused a new church there to rise;[255] Marcella, the waiting
woman of Martha and Mary; Maximinus, one of Our Lord's disciples; Simon
the leper; St. Sidonius; Joseph of Aramathea; and the Blessed Virgin's
sisters, Mary Jacobi, mother of James the Less, and Mary Salome, mother
of James and John, and their dark handmaiden Sara, who became the
patroness of gypsies.
Monseigneur Duchesne says that a grotto dedicated to the Virgin in the
mountains east of Marseilles came to be regarded, by gradual unconscious
fabrication, as the Sainte Baume where Mary Magdalene passed years of
penitence, for the Midi wove the story of St. Mary the Egyptian with the
saint of Bethany. All these holy people who had known the Lord fled from
Syria after the martyrdom of St. Stephen and found asylum in southern
France. The savants can prove what they will; while in Provence, in the
"kingdom of sentiment," one believes every word of it. Read Mistral's
_Mireille_ and dare to be a skeptic! Under the leaden skies of Paris you
may take the Institute's learning seriously. But gazing at _la grand
bleu_, the frequented highway between Syria and Gaul when Roman Emperors
ruled both, you say to yourself that it all _could_ have happened. For
hundreds of years the people of Provence have been made better and
happier because they have believed that the historic family of Bethany
who entertained the Lord were entertained by them.
ST. TROPHIME AT ARLES[256]
Seigneur, des lois et voies
antiques, nous avions
quitté; l'austérité, vertus,
coutumes domestiques,
nous avions tout détruit,
démoli....
Seigneur, nous sommes tes
enfants prodigues; mais
nous sommes tes vieux
chrétiens: que ta justice
nous châtie, mais au trépas,
ne nous laisse point....
Seigneur, au nom des pauvres
gens, au nom des forts, au
nom des morts--qui auront
péri pour la patrie, pour leur
devoir, et pour leur foi!...
Seigneur, pour tant d'aversités,
de massacres, d'incendies;
pour tant de deuil sur notre
France, pour tant d'affronts
sur notre front,
Seigneur, désarme ta justice!
Jette un regard par ici-bas;
et enfin écoute les cris
de meurtris et des blessés!...
Seigneur, nous voulons devenir
des hommes; en liberté--
tu peux nous mettre!
Gallo-Romans et fils de noble
race, nous marchons droit
dans notre pays.
--(Literal French translation of Mistral's "Psaume de la pénitence," 1870.)
The western portal of the cathedral at Arles, less carefully executed
than that at St. Gilles, was begun at the end of the XII century and
finished in a couple of generations. Both were inspired by the same
local classic influences of Rome and the subsequent Gallo-Roman
development. The large statues, eminently architectural, at the famous
door of St. Trophime, are as sturdy and squat as the images on early
Christian tombs. Two of those ancient tombs, of the V and VI centuries,
have been turned to ecclesiastic usage in this very church, as baptismal
font and altar, and across the square from the cathedral many others can
be studied in the Museum of Arles. The strong Byzantine influences
apparent in St. Trophime's sculpture recall that Arles was the favorite
residence of Constantine. From northern Italy came the animal-caryatides
idea.
St. Trophime's Romanesque entrance leads into a somber church under
whose barrel vault reigns a mellow gloom.[257] Begun before the middle
of the XI century, it was reconstructed in the XII century; the
painfully narrow high side aisles are covered by quarter circles that
buttress the central vessel, whose undergirding arches are slightly
pointed because the pre-Gothic masons had learned that the thrust of a
broken arch was less. The XV century built the insignificant choir
(without the vestige of a capital), exceptional only in having the sole
ambulatory and radiating chapels in Provence. A prelate of the Grignan
family built a chapel projecting from the transept, for, not far away,
in Dauphiny, is the château of Grignan, where Madame de Sévigné died
while staying with her daughter; one knows that she and XIII-century
Blanche of Castile had been friendly.
[Illustration: _The Mediæval Cloister of Arles_]
St. Trophime's cloister, among the most beautiful in France, building
from the XII to the end of the XIV century, is the fairest Christian
monument of Arles.[258] This Midi art expands in the sunlight and
grows melancholy under a masonry roof. Arles was a free town when it was
begun, with its own podesta and consuls like a flourishing commercial
city in Italy. About 1150, the north gallery was commenced, and the one
to the east soon followed. The angle pier is composite (c. 1180), with
St. Trophimus standing between St. John and St. Peter, the latter being
sculptured in marble. The storied capitals of the cloister are
exceedingly interesting. In the second half of the XIV century the west
walk was begun, and almost immediately was followed by the south
gallery, which is similar to it save for slight details. The cloister
was completed under Bishop Jean de Rochechouart (1390-98).
Arles, like Lyons, claims a direct apostolic origin. A tradition says
that St. Trophimus, her first bishop, was the disciple of the gentile of
Ephesus, whom St. Paul mentioned in his epistle to Timothy. For
centuries before the popularity of the Saints of Bethany legends in the
Midi, St. Trophimus was revered. Pope Zosimus, in the V century, called
Arles "the source from which flowed all over Gaul the rivulets of the
Faith." Gregory of Tours voiced another tradition concerning St.
Trophimus when he named him as one of the seven evangelists sent by Pope
Fabian into Gaul in 250. At any rate, whether he lived in the first
century or the third, St. Trophimus was the first bishop of Arles, and
it is right that its primate church should be dedicated to him.
Arles, from which flowed over Gaul the rivulets of the Faith, is a city
of ruins, and yet most gracious in aspect; _Arles la blanc_, Joinville
called it as he sailed by on his way to the Sixth Crusade; _Arles la
Grecque_. The women walk as nobly as the matrons of antiquity here where
"the copper coins of Rome's republic and the gold of the emperors gleam
in the sun amid the springtime wheat." "I tell you, and you can well
believe me," sings Mistral, "that the damsel of whom I speak is a queen,
for, know you, she is twenty years old and she is Arlésienne.... She
descended with lowered eyes the steps of St. Trophime, and the stone
saints by the portal blessed her as she passed, for she was ineffably
good." There are books so typical of their race, or this period, that
they belong to all time, and by them posterity can learn more of the
basic forces that build monuments than from many a learned treatise.
Such a book is Voragine's _Golden Legend_, such a book is the
_Rationale_ of Durandus. The _Barzas-Breiz_ teaches us to comprehend
Carnac and the Calvaries of Brittany. Even so the soul of Provence has
been interpreted by her own Mistral, who loved "the perfume of the
ancient days when on the banks of the Rhone flourished a refined
civilization that for a time bore the name, the Kingdom of Arles, but
that really, through all the successive revolutions, was naught else but
the direct survival, on French soil, of Rome's civilization."[259]
ST. MAXIMIN[260]
The cement, without which there can be no stability of the walls,
is made of lime, sand, and water. The lime is fervent charity which
joineth to itself the sand--that is, undertakings for the temporal
welfare of our brethren. Now the lime and the sand are bound
together in the wall by an admixture of water. Water is the emblem
of the Spirit. And as without cement the stones cannot cohere, so
neither can man be built up in the heavenly Jerusalem without that
charity which the Holy Ghost worketh in them. The stones are built
by the hands of the Great Workman into an abiding place in the
Church: whereof some are borne and bear nothing, as the weaker
members; some are both borne and bear, as those of moderate
strength; and some bear and are borne of none save Christ the
Corner Stone. All are bound together by one spirit of Charity as
though fastened with cement, and these living stones are put
together in the bonds of peace.
--BISHOP GUILLAUME DURANDUS of Mende (1220-96), _Rationale_.[261]
The bourg and church of St. Maximin lie about thirty miles east of
Aix-en-Provence. Some rich Gallo-Roman noble of the V or VI century had
his estate here, thinks Monseigneur Duchesne, on which he built a
funereal chapel and crypt according to custom. That crypt with its early
Christian sarcophagi is now under the church of St. Maximin, though why
that saint is honored in the locality is not known. The first record of
the site occurred when the estate was passed over to the monks of St.
Victor's at Marseilles, who built a priory here (1038), and chose
Maximinus as its tutelary. It was only when some fertile brain, in
Vézelay, said that St. Maximinus was one of the Lord's seventy-two
disciples, and had accompanied Mary Magdalene to Provence, that
Aix-en-Provence began to claim him as her first bishop. For two
centuries Provence allowed Vézelay to boast of the possession of the
Blessed Magdalene's remains. During Saracen inroads she had lost the
relics of Lazarus and his sister, so the Burgundian church told her.
Finally--we are quoting Monseigneur Duchesne, not a Midi savant--a
patriotic Provençal whose mind was as fertile in inventions as the
chronicler at Vézelay, arranged a rediscovery in 1279, in the crypt of
St. Maximin, of the Magdalene's relics, whereupon the pilgrimages to
Vézelay ceased.
Before witnesses and the ruler of Provence, Charles II d'Anjou (nephew
of St. Louis), was opened one of the sculptured tombs in the Gallo-Roman
noble's funeral crypt now under the nave of St. Maximin. In the
sarcophagus was found a manuscript, in a wooden coffer, relating that in
the year of the Incarnation, 716, on December 6th, under King Odoin, the
body of Mary Magdalene had been moved from its alabaster tomb, in this
same crypt, to the plainer tomb of St. Sidonius, in order to save it
from those felons, the Saracens. The uncritical mind of the age accepted
the obvious forgery as genuine. It was worded in XIII-century, not
VIII-century Latin, the use of the term Incarnation for dating was an
anachronism, and no such king as Odoin ever existed. Why should it have
been expected that Saracens would spare one tomb more than the other,
asks the courageous Monseigneur Duchesne. But why feel too critical of
the pious fraud, since the genuine enthusiasm it aroused led to the
building of the most imposing Gothic church in Provence and the one most
pure in style, an edifice that inspired the imposing modern church of
St. Vincent de Paul at Marseilles.
In 1295 Charles II d'Anjou[262] (1285-1309) began St. Maximin, which he
passed into the care of the Dominicans. Abbé Albanès has discovered that
the architect's name was Jean Bandier. During two centuries the Angevin
rulers of Provence continued the church, and good King René finished it
before he died in 1480. As the first plans were adhered to, the edifice
possesses unity save for a few Flamboyant windows in the aisles. Those
side aisles of St. Maximin are almost as high as the central vessel;
they braced the main span and did away with the need of flying
buttresses. Traits of Midi Gothic are the exceedingly narrow windows,
the lack of a triforium, and uncut bands for capitals, though the
omission of sculpture may be due to the fact that the abbatial belonged
to a mendicant Order, vowed to poverty. St. Maximin's piers soar
majestically from pavement to vault springing, nor has nobility of
proportion been sacrificed in its severe granite interior.
AIX-EN-PROVENCE[263]
Le désordre des malheureux est toujours le crime de la dûreté des
riches.--VAUVENARGUES (1715--47; born in Aix-en-Provence).
The cathedral of St. Sauveur is a composite edifice needing skilled
archæologists to decipher it. Its semicircular apse, without ambulatory
or chapels, was begun by Bishop Rostan de Noves. Its nave, of the XIV
century (with typical capitals whose foliage is disposed in two bands),
shows vestiges of a far more ancient church. The nave's north aisle is
neo-classic. The south aisle, called _Corpus Domini_, is Romanesque, and
was held to be the ancient cathedral, since it conforms to the classic
type of the regional Romanesque school, such as the Dom at Avignon.
M. Labande has demonstrated that this pre-Gothic portion of Aix
Cathedral was originally a church for the laity, built between 1150 and
1180 and dedicated to St. Maximinus, and that it was planted along the
side of a church for the canons, dedicated to Notre Dame in 1108.
Vestiges of this latter church are the ancient parts in the actual nave
of St. Sauveur.
The _Corpus Domini_ has its own sculptured doorway, and three bays
covered by a barrel vault carried on pointed arches. Over the fourth bay
is a shallow cupola ridged with eight pilasters in a manner inherited
from ancient Rome. Classic, too, are the columns now arranged to form a
baptistry.
Aix was the capital in Provence of the art-loving Anjou princes of the
Capetian line. Under them in 1476 was begun St. Sauveur's beautifully
restrained Flamboyant Gothic façade and tower. In the nave is a stone
reredos of 1470 called the Tarasque, from the dragon of St. Martha
represented in it, and under King René's inspiration was made the
splendid triptych of the Burning Bush by the French _primitif_, Nicolas
Froment, born in Avignon, but impregnated with the Flemish spirit of Van
Eyck. King René kneels in one panel, and his second wife, Jeanne de
Laval, in the other; the outer side of the folding panels is painted in
grisaille. The Burning Bush was taken as a symbol of the Virgin's
integrity. The carved doors at the west entrance of St. Sauveur, rich
with prophets and sibyls, are ranked with the noted doors of Beauvais
and Rouen.
While the church of St. Maximinus, or the present south aisle of St.
Sauveur, was building, a student at the University of Aix, across the
way from its cathedral, was St. Jean de Matha (1156-1213), one of those
good men of history who accomplished a great work but are overlooked by
posterity. In Aix he passed his leisure waiting on the poverty-stricken
sick. Then he went up to the Paris schools to perfect himself in
theology, and good Bishop Maurice de Sully, then building Notre Dame,
became interested in him, and with the prior of St. Victor's, after
attending the young Midi noble's first Mass, prophesied that this was a
soul chosen of God. Because Jean de Matha had been born in the south, a
witness of Islam's piracies, he vowed himself at his first Mass to the
redemption of Christian captives. His fellow student at Paris, Innocent
III, approved the new Trinitarian Order called popularly Maturins
because their Paris house was dedicated to St. Maturin. So rapidly did
it spread that before long it had fifty houses in far-off Ireland, and
as many in England. In its annals are the names of all the western
nations. Jean de Matha, until his death, passed backward and forward to
Africa. When the first boatload of redeemed captives landed at
Marseilles a cry of thanksgiving rose in Christendom. Sometimes a
brother of the Order would remain in a captive's place, when his funds
for ransoming prisoners gave out. In Granada, Maturins were martyred. In
the year 1260 five thousand Christians were redeemed from Islam prisons
by these devoted men. And for five centuries the good work went on, so
that we hear of Trinitarians freeing Christians from Mohammedans in the
reign of Louis XIV. Cervantes was released from African captivity by the
sons of St. Jean de Matha, else we would have no _Don Quixote_. All
through the dark episodes of the Albigensian wars these lives of
unobtrusive Christian charity endured. Their deeds have not been
trumpeted to the winds. I dare say the historian who rings the changes
on the _Tuez-les-tous_ phrase never heard of St. Jean and his Maturins.
AVIGNON[264]
In abandoning Rome, their cradle, in departing from the venerated
tomb of the Prince of the Apostle, in ceasing to reign on the site
consecrated by the blood of martyrs, the popes failed to value the
prop those august memories were for them. In their voluntary exile
on the banks of the Rhone the popes were controlled by the king of
France. Villeneuve's high towers, a French stronghold, threw too
protective a shadow over the papal palace of Avignon.--L.
SALEMBIER.
Architecturally Avignon does not fit into our category, but who can
close a chapter on the Midi and not mention, among gems, this diamond?
There is no more imposing, no more magnificent a palace in the world
than that of the XIV-century popes at Avignon.
Romanesque architecture is represented by the Dom and the bridge built
by _frères-pontifes_ over the Rhone (1177-85) under the inspiration of
the shepherd boy St. Bénézet. Many a time has the river carried away its
bays. The chapel on the bridge shows the work of three epochs, part
being of Little Benedict's time, part of 1234, and an apse of 1513.
Notre Dame-des-Dom, as it was first built, belonged to the usual type of
a Midi Romanesque church (1140-60), but to it have been added chapels
and neo-classic decorations.[265] The west porch of the cathedral can
claim to be one of the first conscious revivals of classic art in
France, inspired by a Roman triumphal arch in neighboring Carpentras.
Originally the inner walls of the porch were frescoed by Simone Martini
of Siena, a friend of Petrarch. That humanist spent many years in
Avignon, and it was at the door of the church of St. Clara that he first
saw Laura, in 1327. If the Avignon popes employed Italian painters,
their architects and sculptors were mainly local.
Avignon's great day was under the seven Roman pontiffs who lived here in
succession during sixty-eight years, a period disastrous to the
interests and prestige of the Church, but fecund for the art life of
southern France. All seven of the popes were meridionals.
Clement V (1305-13), whom the patriotic Italian poet places in hell for
his subservience to the French king, was the first to take up his
residence in Avignon, but his building enterprises were elsewhere, at
Bordeaux and St. Bertrand-de-Comminges, and he chose to be buried near
Bordeaux, at Uzeste, his native place, where his tomb was mutilated in
1577. Clement is pictured on the walls of the Spanish chapel in Santa
Maria Novella at Florence. Neither his statue at the chief portal of
Bordeaux Cathedral nor his effigy on his tomb is a portrait.
After an interval he was succeeded by John XXII (1316-33), born in
Cahors, where a tower of his palace still stands, as well as the most
beautiful bridge of the Middle Ages, which he helped to build. John had
been educated at Cahors, Montpellier, and Paris; he had taught law at
Toulouse, and from 1310 was bishop of Avignon, so that he made it his
permanent residence when elected to the papacy at seventy-two. John was
an organizer of genius; he founded Perugia University and reformed those
of Paris, Cambridge, and Oxford. The great treasure he left was the fund
drawn on by his successors for the erection of their palace. His tomb in
the cathedral of Avignon is like an immense reliquary, excessive lace
stonework and pinnacles, though if some of the sixty statues that once
embellished it remained, there would naturally be more character in the
ornamentation. The tomb has recently been claimed as a late-Gothic
west-of-England work, similar to monuments at Exeter and Tewksbury.
His successor, Benedict XII (1333-42), was the pope who really began the
Avignon palace which was to be completed in twenty-five years. While
abbot of Cistercian Fontfroide, he had watched Narbonne's episcopal
palace rising, and there are decided likenesses between it and the papal
residence on the Rhone. Both were fortresses eminently of the Midi, not
of Italy. Of Benedict it is related that when his father, a baker in the
comté of Foix, came to visit him, dressed richly by courtiers who
thought to save the pope's _amour propre_, the pope declined to
recognize him till he garbed himself humbly. His was a complex
character. He spent vast sums lavishly on his palace, bringing artists
from Italy to decorate its walls and ceilings. His tomb, that had
resembled his predecessor's, exists only in a few arcades housed in the
Musée Calvert. The tomb called his in the cathedral is a composite
affair. There is a statue of Benedict XII in the crypt of the Vatican.
The next pontiff, Clement VI (1342-52), a Limousin lord of great
lineage, more knight than churchman, made the most beautiful parts of
the papal palace, the conclave gallery, the Audience Chamber, the
Pontifical Chapel over it, and the tower called St. Jeane whose chapels,
_sotto_ and _sopra_, were decorated by Martini. Petrarch had praised
Clement for his liberality toward the Jews, who, driven out of other
countries, found a home here, "_povres Juifs ars et escacés par tout le
monde excepté en la terre d'Église dessous les clefs des papes_." For
his burial Clement VI rebuilt, in the Forez mountains, the church of his
former abbey, La Chaise Dieu, in the center of whose choir he placed his
own sumptuous monument, whose forty-four statuettes represented his
great relatives. In the religious wars of the XVI century the mausoleum
was sacked and only the pontiff's marble effigy now remains.
Clement VI purchased the city of Avignon from Queen Joanna of Naples of
the Anjou house. The Comtat-Venaissin, but not Avignon, formed part of
the possessions that fell to the French Crown on the death of Alphonse
of Poitiers and his wife in 1271. Philippe III gave it to the popes, to
whom it had been promised by the last count of Toulouse.
The papal palace was finished by Innocent VI (1352-62), another
Limousin. He made the tower applied to the south wall of audience hall
and church, and he added to the city's fortifications. Across the Rhone
he began the Chartreuse, later called Val de Bénédiction, a vast
structure carried on by his family as a hereditary obligation.[266]
To-day it is a mass of desolate ruins, and the pope's mutilated tomb is
now housed in the hospice at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.
Urban V (1362-70), "_moult saint homme et de belle vie_," says
Froissart, was a patron for art and letters throughout the Midi. At
Avignon he continued the fortifications. His work is to be found in
Montpellier Cathedral, also at Mende, St. Flour, and Marseilles, where
his mausoleum towers in St. Victor's abbatial. His attempt to
re-establish the papacy in Rome failed, but his successor, Gregory
XI--Count Roger de Beaufort, a nephew of Clement VI--went back
definitely in 1377 to the Holy City, where a bas-relief on his tomb, in
Santa Francesca Romana, records his triumphal entrance. The consequences
of the long exile were deplorable. Immediately came the Great Schism of
the West, during which some of the doubtful pontiffs resided at Avignon.
After their return to Rome the popes governed their small Midi
principality by viceroys till at the time of the Revolution it passed to
France. The palace was turned into a prison and barracks; when a local
antiquarian society begged that they might be allowed to preserve the
precious frescoes of Simone Martini in the chapels of Clement VI, the
military governor replied that such notions were contrary to military
custom. Happily the Palace of the Popes is now a national monument, and
its judiciously accomplished renovation is one of those restorals
against which no one can cavil.