Gothic Art in Normandy[314]
The cathedral was perfected slowly and passionately. The Romans
brought to it their force, their logic, their serenity. The
Barbarians brought to it their naïve grace, their love of life,
their dreamful imaginations. From this unpremeditated collaboration
sprang a work modelled by times and places. It is the French genius
and its image. It did not progress by fits and starts; it was not
the servant of pride. It mounted in the course of centuries to
complete expression. And that expression, one throughout the
country, varies with each province, with each fraction of a
province, just enough to make interesting the chain that joins all
the pearls of this monumental necklace of France.
--RODIN, _Les cathédrales de France_.[315]
Virtually the land conquered by the vikings received its civilization
from monasteries. Like Burgundy, Normandy was a very Egypt, a Thebaid,
for the number of its religious houses. Each baron sought to have one on
his domain. In the capital of the duchy was St. Ouen, whose abbot owned
half the city; on the same Seine lay Jumièges, a center of letters and
arts, and farther down the river was St. Wandrille, "nursery for
saints"--three noted houses that inherited directly the apostolate of
Celtic Columbanus. From St. Wandrille went monks to establish Fécamp,
favorite of the Norman dukes, with an early-Gothic church equal to a
cathedral. Other monks from Fontenelle reorganized the most romantic
pile of monastic buildings in the world, Mont-Saint-Michel, guarded by
the patron of the kingdom of France, _Sanctus Michael in periculo
maris_.
When that man of genius, William of Volpiano, abbot of St. Bénigne, at
Dijon, came to Normandy to reform its houses, he himself rebuilt the
abbatial church at Bernay which architecturally is an ancestress for
such Romanesque work as Cerisy-la-Forêt, Lessay, the Caen abbatials, and
St. Georges de Boscherville. At Mortain, at St. Sauveur-le-Vicomte, at
St. Évroult, were monastery churches, and the picturesque ruins of
Hambye cause one to mourn that Primary Gothic abbatial wrecked by the
Revolution. St. Pierre-sur-Dives and the collegiate at Eu are later
monastic works of the province. For its influence as a world power--what
we may call the Cluny of Normandy--was Bec abbey that became, under
Lanfranc the Lombard, and St. Anselm the Piedmontese, the intellectual
leader of the West. Its mammoth church has gone the way of
Cluny's--scarcely stone left on stone.
BEC ABBEY[316]
O beata solitudo!
O sola beatitudo!
--(Inscription on a Benedictine monastery in France.)
In Bec, theology for the first time spoke the language of philosophy.
Herlouin, an unlettered knight, who learned to write only at forty,
founded, in 1034, an abbey on his lands on the banks of a beck in the
valley of Brionne. With the monks who gathered round him, he was engaged
in building with his own hands his convent when, one day in 1042,
Lanfranc of Pavia arrived in their midst, the learned one needed by
those simple, good men. Lanfranc had been teaching at Avranches, and was
journeying to Rouen when brigands seized him in a forest near Bec,
stripped and tied him to a tree to perish. Before aid came to him, as he
faced death during long hours--learning that despite his scholarship he
was incapable of reciting one single psalm to support his soul--a new
comprehension of life dawned on him, and he vowed himself to the triumph
of religion.
The school which he opened in Bec abbey soon drew students from all
parts of Europe. From northern Italy came young Anselm, destined twice
to succeed his master, in Bec as prior, in Canterbury as archbishop.
Lanfranc, practiced in the affairs of the world, a born statesman, was
better fitted to be primate of England than was Anselm with his
childlike, tender nature, and his subtle, speculative brain. Bec gave
still a third archbishop to the see of Canterbury, Theobald, the patron
of St. Thomas Becket; Martin, whilom abbot of Bec, built Peterborough
Cathedral.
For thirty-three years St. Anselm wrote and taught in Bec abbey, student
first, then monk, then prior, and in 1078 abbot. There at night, while
all the house slept, he wrote the books which have won for him the title
of founder of the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages. A forerunner
of scholasticism, he was among the first to set forth the conformity of
Christian doctrine with human reason. Dante places him in Paradise among
the great contemplatives. The union of the mystic and the rational in
theology, in the Norman abbey ruled by Anselm, started impulses which
were to pass down through the centuries. An immediate result was the
quickening of the mental life of the XII century. Among St. Anselm's
pupils at Bec was Anselm de Laon, whose classes, with those of Guillaume
de Champeaux, are regarded as the nucleus of the University of Paris.
What is of interest to us here is that, from the hour of the opening of
men's minds to scholastic learning, rose the architecture of France,
that the giant energy which built cathedrals had its source in a faith
that _believed in order that it might understand_, which is St. Anselm's
own proposition, _Credo ut intelligam_, as well as it is the apogee
flight reached by Plato, what the Greek philosopher called _the wings of
the soul_. And Plato's peer, XIII-century Aquinas, voiced the Greek's
vision, and repeated Anselm's thought, in a hymn whose subtle stanzas
are sung daily over Christendom: "_Præstat fides supplementum sensuum
defectui_" ("Faith for all defects supplying where the feeble senses
fail"). Anselm, with his "face of an angel," naïvely enthusiastic over
his metaphysical proof of God, writing alone in Bec, in the silence of
the night, was digging unaware the foundations for Chartres, Rheims,
Amiens, and those other visions of the Beyond to which man gave tangible
shape in the scholastic-trained centuries because, _believing_, he
_understood_.
Sorely against his will St. Anselm left the peace of Bec to take up the
duties of England's primacy in an hour when the eternal
lay-ecclesiastical controversy was embittered. The wanton and despotic
William Rufus was the opponent who overwhelmed him. His sole friends
were the little people for whom, at that time, any churchman who
maintained independence against layman tyranny was a champion of civic
liberties. The scholar of Bec was the only prelate of the many crossing
from Normandy to England who displayed loving kindness for the
downtrodden Saxons. Homesick in England, St. Anselm used pathetically to
sign his letters to his intimates, "Brother Anselm by the heart,
Archbishop of Canterbury by coercion."
At Le Bec-Hellouin to-day little remains of the abbatial whose choir
once soared on twenty immense piers. Again and again the church was
reconstructed. In 1077 Archbishop Lanfranc crossed the Channel for a
dedication. Early in the XIII century the master-of-works at Rouen,
Enguerrand, proceeded to Bec to superintend a new Gothic edifice. A fire
in 1263 caused another renewal of the choir. In the Rayonnant day the
nave was rebuilt on the same lines as St. Ouen's abbatial. The religious
wars of the XVI century damaged the church, whose demolition was
continued as late as 1814. What now remains are a portion of the
transept, a chapter house of the XII century, and the isolated tower of
St. Nicholas (1467-80), another memorial of Normandy's rejoicing to be
free of foreign rule. Eight large statues adorn its upper walls.
Bec had been pillaged by Henry V's troops before Jeanne d'Arc's advent,
and the abbot then appointed by the invaders was one of the sixty
university professors and ecclesiastics who condemned the Maid to death
in Rouen, 1431. Ten abbots of Normandy thus tarnished their great names,
but it is well to bear in mind that in each case the delinquent
monastery had recently been sacked because of its patriotic stand
against the foreigners, and that it was governed by a tool of the
victors. Fifty Norman abbeys honored themselves by their absence from
the torture of a young girl who had all England against her, half of
France, as well as the perverted learning of Paris University.
NORMANDY'S ROMANESQUE SCHOOL[317]
The Christian world made no mistake when, in calm confidence, it
sought, under the wing of the Benedictine abbeys, that strong
education of the Western races which made possible all the marvels
of faith, courage, fervor, and humility with which Europe was
illuminated from the XI to the XV century, from Gregory VII to
Jeanne d'Arc.
--CHARLES DE MONTALEMBERT, _The Monks of the West_.
Normandy's hardy personality showed at its best in her Romanesque
monastic churches. Their design is decisive and vast, their construction
solid--the Norman excelled in masoncraft--and as art they have never
been surpassed for grave impressiveness. In the Norman minsters is a
primeval energy admirably restrained, a massive grace, a something of
reasoned simplicity lost in the Gothic cathedrals of the region. One who
fell under the spell of Normandy's Romanesque architecture has told how
its repose "appeals to men and women who have lived long and are tired,
who want rest, who have done with aspiration and ambitions, whose life
has been a broken arch.... The quiet strength of these lines, the solid
support of the moderate lights, the absence of display, of effort, of
self-consciousness, satisfy them as no other art does. They come back to
it to rest after a long cycle of pilgrimage--the cradle of rest from
which their ancestors started."[318]
No church earlier than the year 1000 has survived in Normandy. The
Norseman, while still an unbaptized buccaneer, laid low every
Merovingian and Carolingian edifice. All was in ruin. "From Blois to
Senlis," says the old record, "not an acre is plowed, for none dare work
in the fields." Then, Rollo, chief of the marauders, baptized in Rouen,
settled down in the duchy granted him in fief by the harassed king of
France. In an incredibly short time the erstwhile pagans became the most
indefatigable of church builders. For Normandy, the date 911 is as
important a landmark as is 910 for Burgundy, the year of Cluny's
foundation.[319]
The Norman Romanesque school made general use of the roll molding at
window and portal, of griffes at the base of piers, blind arcading,
intercrossing wall arches (that became monotonous in the Anglo-Norman
school), and very frequently it contrived an interior passage at the
clearstory level, whose effect was heightened by the use of arches of
different designs in its outer and inner walls.
Certain archæologists contend that the predominant influences in the
development of Norman Romanesque were Lombard, and that in this it
differed from other French schools which in main part derived from local
Carolingian work. As the Norman's creative genius was not on a par with
his constructive abilities, it seems reasonable to look for foreign
influence when finding its school precociously formed by the middle of
the XI century. The Lombards used, before the Normans, the alternate
system of ground supports, cubic capitals, transverse arches, compound
piers, crypts, and raised choirs, and their most striking feature of
exterior decoration was the arched corbel table that made a continuous
cornice. Mr. Arthur Kingsley Porter says that diagonals were used in
Lombardy early in the XI century as an expedient to economize wood,
groin vaults being molded on a temporary wooden substructure, but as the
Lombard never counterbutted his intersecting ribs, such vaults proved
unsatisfactory and were given up after 1120. If the Norman had an early
knowledge of diagonals through the Lombard, like the Lombard he failed
to derive from them their constructive consequences. That fact of
creative genius no one can deny to the Ile-de-France. Even if the
controversy as to who first used Gothic ribs should be decided in favor
of the Anglo-Norman school, and behind their use of it, traced to
Lombardy's Romanesque builders, none of them saw in it what Abbot Suger
did--the radical member of a new system of building.
William of Volpiano, a Lombard, and an architect as well as a reformer,
spent many active years in Normandy, where he died in 1031. At Fécamp he
is said to have trained a group of masons. A decade after his death,
Lanfranc, born in northern Italy, became a leader in the duchy, and
under him was built the present nave of the Abbaye-aux-Hommes at Caen.
It seems very natural to suppose that such men, alert as they were to
architectural progress, should have exerted influence on the Norman
school. However, M. Lefèvre-Pontalis thinks it wiser not to exaggerate
the immediate influence from beyond the Alps. He holds that the
Romanesque school of Normandy proceeded in main part from the same
element as the other pre-Gothic schools of France, elements derived
somewhat from Barbarian sources, but chiefly from Rome's occupation of
Gaul. In the case of Normandy the Barbarian influences would be largely
Scandinavian, and there has been considerable speculation over the
Norseman's wooden structure and the Norman's partiality for the pleated
capital.
Mr. John Bilson is unsympathetic to Mr. Kingsley Porter's ideas of
Lombard influence in Normandy, and he considers the early dates ascribed
to Lombard diagonals most improbable. Why, he asks, if the solution was
reached in Lombardy about 1025, did it take three quarters of a century
for the Normans, directly in contact with the builders of Italy, to
arrive after long experimenting at the same intersecting ribs? He claims
that the Ile-de-France was indebted to Normandy for diagonals, which
were not in use in the royal domain before 1130, but that, once that
school came into possession of intersecting pointed arches and flying
buttresses, it developed from them a new system of construction,
clothing it with a new expression, which we call Gothic. The controversy
is by no means closed.
Normandy's Romanesque school spread far afield.[320] It passed into
Picardy and penetrated as far south as Chartres. It crossed the Channel
with the adventurers who descended on England, and with other free
lances who carved out distant kingdoms for themselves, its
characteristics appeared in southern Italy and Sicily.
The ornamentation of the Norman school came in part from Oriental or
Byzantine sources already in use in the Carolingian era, and in part
from Scandinavian. Unlike Burgundy, this province, despite its good
stone, never won distinction in sculpture either in the Romanesque or
the Gothic day. Never was Norman decoration equal to Norman
construction, otherwise this school would be without a peer. Its
ornamentation lacks variety and imagination. Geometric designs were
endlessly repeated. Both in England and in Normandy the traveler grows
weary of the zigzag or chevron motive, taken from Merovingian
interlacings, or Carolingian triangular outlines, and very weary, too,
of its variants, the dog-tooth or star ornament, and the fret or meander
which reproduced a classical motive. The Carolingian billet molding was
also overused. Such monotony of decoration was probably the defect of a
good quality--caution and thoroughness. The Norman seldom attempted what
he could not put through, hence his churches were usually completed,
even to having their towers crowned by stone spires. The builders of the
Ile-de-France were less cautious, but more sublime.
THE ROMANESQUE ABBEY CHURCH OF JUMIÈGES[321]
Aucun pays n'avait fourni au moyen âge plus de missionnaires
chrétiens qu'Irlande, ni d'hommes empressés de répandre chez les
nations étrangères les études de leur patrie.--A. THIERRY.
The first Romanesque church of Normandy with architectural pretensions,
the first to present the regional school fully formed, was the abbatial
of Jumièges, begun about 1040. That virile, rugged "château de Dieu"
stands on a semi-island of the Seine where the river makes a gracious
twenty-mile meander, or rather, there stand the "incredible masses of
masonry" which are the ruins of Jumièges, a wall of the big central
lantern, a roofless nave, and two gaunt façade towers, the only Norman
towers entirely of the XI century. In all France is no more austere,
stark, and grandiose a ruin.
How from such a predecessor as Bernay's abbatial the Norman could
immediately evolve an architectural feat as tremendous as Jumièges seems
explicable only by some strong exterior impetus. Here is the Lombard
alternance of ground supports over whose origin in Normandy much
printer's ink has been spilled. As the Lombard groin vault embraced two
bays, a strong pier was needed only for the transverse arch separating
the large square vault sections; or if a timber roof was used, a
reinforced pier was required only for the bigger tiebeams. Now, at
Jumièges, the lower structure proves (say certain archæologists) that
never was a masonry roof planned for, so it is probable that the open
timber roof required heavy tiebeams only at every other bay, hence an
alternance of substantial and slight piers to correspond to the
alternance of big beams and little beams. Jumièges also used the Lombard
engaged shaft. Its uniform _hautes colonnes_, without capitals, rise
from soil to roof, serving as interior buttresses, and some say as
supports for the tiebeams, since they rose too high to be intended for a
masonry roof. They bind together the three stories, and æsthetically
their rhythm breaks the monotony of the plain walls. Mr. John Bilson
thinks that the wall shafts of Jumièges can have had no other motive
than to support a vault over the principal span, and cannot have been
the supports of mere tiebeams. They may have been planned, suggests
Prof. Baldwin Brown, to carry an undergirding arch such as occurs
beneath some wooden roofs.
Normandy's invention of the sexpartite vault came about, thinks M.
Anthyme Saint-Paul, through her predilection for multiple lines. With
such Gothic vaults--each section of which embraced two bays--she
proceeded to reroof various of her Romanesque abbatials, whose already
existent alternated piers were thus made logical. Almost it would seem
as if the presence of ground supports, substantial and slight, had
called into being the new type of masonry roof. St. Denis used a
sexpartite vault in 1140, and M. Lefèvre-Pontalis suggested, at one
time, that Normandy derived the idea from the Ile-de-France. In the
royal domain, however, no steps are to be found leading up to it,
whereas in Normandy can be seen sexpartite vaults of primitive design,
such as those covering the Abbaye-aux-Dames, which consist merely of two
diagonals with a transverse rib crossing their apex. In the
Abbaye-aux-Hommes, where the timber roof of the nave was replaced by a
Gothic vault as early, perhaps, as 1135, the vault web is warped to the
intermediate transverse rib. It has been suggested that the sexpartite
vault originated from the employment of the diaphragm arch.
Jumièges abbey church was dedicated "with great spiritual joy," so an
old chronicle relates, by saintly Archbishop Maurille of Rouen, in the
presence of William the Conqueror and Matilda. Maurille had been trained
at Fécamp under the great William of Volpiano. A Gothic choir, added to
the abbatial later, was blown up after the Revolution by a contractor
who acquired the monastery in order to sell its stones as building
material. Under the flank of the now roofless nave nestles a ruined
little church of the XIV century, St. Peter its tutelary. Two of its
bays incorporate parts from a Carolingian church built by Rollo's son,
William Longsword (928-943). They are of archæological interest in being
the oldest examples extant of twin arches beneath a common arch for the
tribune-opening on the middle vessel. The arrangement became popular in
the Romanesque churches of Normandy and England, and can be seen at
Mont-Saint-Michel, Rochester, Ely, Gloucester, Peterborough, and
Winchester.
Jumièges was an ancient foundation of Clovis II and Queen Bathilde.
They granted forests on the Seine to St. Philibert (d. 684), who had
been an intimate at the Merovingian court, of St. Ouen and St.
Wandrille. To obtain the Celtic rule of Columbanus at its source,
Philibert visited Luxeuil and Bobbio, and he dedicated a chapel of his
abbatial at Jumièges to the Irish missionary. His own cult was to crop
out at Tournus and Dijon when the Norse piratical inroads drove the
inmates of wrecked monastic houses into Burgundy.
Jumièges was a scene of pillage and massacre during the last acts of the
Capet-Plantagenet duel, when Henry V, the victor of Agincourt, overran
Normandy. The abbot, then appointed, sat in judgment on St. Jeanne in
1431, and fell down dead three months later. After Charles VII had
entered Rouen as conqueror, in 1449, he retired to Jumièges. During the
feasts of rejoicing _la dame de beaulté_, Agnes Sorel, died in a manor
close by, and her memorial stone in Jumièges abbatial recorded her
"pitiful loving kindness to all men and especially the poor and
children." Days of decline came for Jumièges under her commendatory
abbots. A XVII-century revival of learning was led by the reformers of
the Congregation of St. Maur, but the famous establishment went under
completely during the Revolution. The sequence is the same for most
French abbeys.
Farther down the Seine, at what once was Fontenelle, stand the less
imposing ruins of St. Wandrille's abbatial, consisting of a transept of
the XIII century and a Flamboyant Gothic cloister, whose _lave-mains_ is
a gem of Renaissance delicacy. The house was founded in 649 by St.
Wandrille, of Merovingian blood. Like his friend, Philibert of Jumièges,
he sought the rule of St. Columbanus at its fountainhead, though the
more equable rule of St. Benedict was to prevail in French religious
establishments before the VII century closed. St. Wandrille trained many
of the saints who planted monasteries over northern France, and in later
centuries the Duke of Normandy chose monks from St. Wandrille's abbey to
institute a Benedictine house of prayer on the rock of St.
Michael-in-peril-of-the-sea.
THE ROMANESQUE ABBATIALS AT CAEN[322]
Clochers légers, clochers aigus,
Clochers de France,
Par quel attrait d'élan pieux
Emportez-vous si vite et si haut dans les cieux
Nos regards et notre espérance?...
Longs et pareils à ces lances pointus
Que les géants piquaient au sol,
Vous montiez d'un seul jet pour défier le vol
Des hirondelles éperdues.
--GEORGES LAFENESTRE, "Clochers de France."[323]
Caen played a prominent part in the builder's story of Normandy. It has
been called the Romanesque Mecca. Its church of St. Nicolas (c.
1180-93), one of the most interesting Romanesque edifices of the duchy,
is dismantled, but the Abbaye-aux-Hommes or St. Étienne, and the
Abbaye-aux-Dames, or Ste. Trinité, are in good repair. All the world
knows how William the Conqueror and his good and gentle Matilda of
Flanders each founded an abbey in Caen, "that God might be served by
both sexes and thus pardon their transgression." Their marriage
disobeyed Church regulations concerning consanguinity and a canonical
atonement was required. Matilda's tomb rests in the middle of the choir
she built. Her epitaph was inscribed in letters of gold: "Consoler of
the needy, lover of piety, a woman who, having lavished her treasures in
good works, was poor to herself, but rich to the unfortunate. Thus
she sought the fellowship of eternal life on the second of November,
1083."
[Illustration: _The Crypt of the Abbaye-aux-Dames at Caen (1059-1066)_]
The Abbaye-aux-Dames, begun about 1059, was dedicated in 1066 by the
same Archbishop Maurille who blessed the new church at Jumièges. A few
weeks after the ceremony, William descended on England, which his
knights and villeins conquered to the chant of the _Chanson de Roland_,
written by some unknown poet who, like themselves, looked to the
Archangel of the Peril for inspiration. Yet a few decades more and
Roland's war song was sung by the first crusaders before Jerusalem.
Architecture, crusades, language, literature--many were the vital
movements then coming to birth.
On the day of the blessing of Matilda's convent of the Holy Trinity, her
little daughter, Cécile, was laid on the altar and dedicated to God's
service. For almost fifty years her aunt, Matilda, daughter of Richard
II and the fair Judith of Brittany, ruled the Abbaye-aux-Dames, and then
Cécile succeeded as second abbess; _Dame de la ville de Caen_, her
brother Henry I of England called her. Cécile was one of the learned
ladies of her day, having studied philosophy and belles-lettres under
the patriarch of Jerusalem. One recalls that it was a contemporary
abbess--at St. Odile in Alsace--who made the first attempt to compile an
encyclopedia. Several English princesses were nuns of the Trinité, among
them the daughters of Henry III and Edward I. In a later century
Charlotte Corday was a pupil of the convent.
It has been thought that Gundulf, a monk of Bec, called to Caen by
Lanfranc, was architect of the Abbaye-aux-Dames, where his mother had
retired as a nun. This learned and pious man had entered Bec in the same
year as St. Anselm, and when he had become the bishop of Rochester he
remained faithful to Anselm, then the primate of England, facing bitter
troubles with the king. The saint came to attend the good bishop on his
deathbed. Gundulf rebuilt Rochester Cathedral, whose crypt and western
bays are of his time (1076-1108); Rochester Tower, too, he raised, and
the chapel of St. John in London Tower. It was said of him that he was
the most skilled of all men in masoncraft.
The apse of the Trinité is considered one of the best things in Caen. It
stands over a crypt whose sixteen piers are in four rows. When the choir
was renovated, after 1100, some of its sculptures were modeled on
certain Byzantine ivories that had been brought as gifts to Abbess
Cécile by her crusading brother. The abbatial's triforium is a blind
arcade behind whose wall was essayed some very primitive flying
buttresses. The present sexpartite vault was an early trial of that
Norman form of the Gothic masonry roof, and is really a quadripartite
vault divided by a transverse rib, the web being unwarped to that
intermediate member. Though the XII century replaced the original timber
roof of the Trinité by this sexpartite one, exactly when it was done is
not known. But those interested in claiming priority for Normandy in the
use of diagonal ribs place it before the sexpartite vaulting of St.
Denis. The XIII century added a handsome Gothic chapel to the transept
of Matilda's convent church.
As the expiatory abbatial erected by the Conqueror was on a far larger
scale than the Abbaye-aux-Dames, it took longer to build; perhaps the
same Gundulf of Bec and Rochester was its architect. Over the aisles are
deep tribunes, some of whose bays have retained their primitive vaults
of the same type as those at Tournus in Burgundy--half barrels placed
side by side on lintels at right angles to the axis of the church. The
original roof of the principal span was replaced by the actual
sexpartite vault (whose web is warped to the six branches) about 1130,
said M. Régnier; other archæologists have placed it a generation later.
By the addition of a sexpartite vaulting the much-discussed Lombard
alternate piers were no longer inconsequent. The height to which the
wall shafts of the nave are carried indicates that the cowled architect
had not purposed originally to cover his main span with a stone roof.
When the Gothic vaulting was added the clearstory was changed in the
interior of the church, but the exterior was left as first built.
William and Matilda made Caen their chief residence in Normandy, and
Lanfranc was brought from Bec in 1063 to be prior of the duke's new
monastery. He opened a school in Caen to which his pupil, Pope Alexander
II, sent his relatives as scholars. In the peaceful cloister of St.
Étienne the able Italian composed a treatise--to counteract Berengar's
heresy on the Eucharist--which is considered a small masterpiece of
Christian controversy. Lanfranc was dialectician, administrator,
builder, subtle lawyer, and statesman. His genius reached its highest
development in the organization of a Norman hierarchy for England. He
rebuilt his own church at Canterbury, and two former monks of St.
Étienne, Caen, rebuilt the cathedral of Winchester and St. Alban's
abbey. Other memorials of Lanfranc's primacy in England are the crypt
and eastern end of Gloucester Cathedral, the work of a monk of
Mont-Saint-Michel, the crypt at Worcester, choir chapels and ambulatory
at Norwich, and the western transept of Ely Cathedral, erected by a monk
from St. Ouen, Rouen. It is said that during the century and a half from
the Conqueror to John Lackland the Norman prelates in England erected
over four hundred churches as expiatory offerings for the grievous wrong
perpetrated in the Norman conquest.
In Caen, Lanfranc built the nave of the Abbaye-aux-Hommes, a monument of
magnificent proportions, compact, tranquil, and sincere. When archbishop
of Canterbury he returned to Caen in 1077 for the dedication of his
abbey church. Another ten years and in St. Étienne's choir took place
the sinister burial of William the Conqueror. In the town was raging a
fierce conflagration which was to wipe out half the place. As they
lowered into the tomb the proud and wrathful overman whose strength had
been so pitiless, whose will so inflexible, a poor townsman stepped
forth to forbid the burial, claiming he had been robbed of that special
parcel of land. In the disorders that ensued the corpulent body of the
dead king was injured, and though incense was burned to purify the
infected air, the people deserted the church in horror. _Sic pulvis es._
In 1210 the Romanesque choir of the Abbaye-aux-Hommes was replaced by
the present Gothic one. Normandy apparently used annulets about the
clustered shafts at a much later date than the Ile-de-France, and it
continued to employ its pre-Gothic zigzag decoration. The chapels round
the choir were made to open one on the other above low dividing walls;
Bayeux and Coutances repeated this, as they did the turrets at the birth
of the apse. The exterior aspect of the edifice was enhanced by a row of
small rose windows each of which lighted a bay of the choir's tribune. A
generation later the same arrangement was employed in the collegiate
church at Mantes.
The new Gothic choir of St. Étienne at Caen was joined with skill to
Lanfranc's grave Romanesque nave. Maître Guillaume is cited as architect
of the new works, and he probably crowned the two western towers that so
grandly dominate the city. Few architectural views in France surpass the
stark majesty of the fortresslike church built by the Conqueror, as it
appears from across the town, from the rue des Chanoines, when one
stands near the convent church of Queen Matilda. St. Étienne's towers
were the prototypes for the other notable ones at Caen.
During the XVI-century religious wars the Abbaye-aux-Hommes was twice
pillaged and the Calvinists scattered the Conqueror's ashes. They
stripped the roofing of its lead, which soon caused the collapse of the
central lantern and the choir vaults. During two generations the great
church lay unused save as a stone quarry. Then the prior, Jean de
Baillehache, in 1609, undertook a restoration, carried through so
judiciously that were it not for the monastery's official record, and a
slight poverty in the sculpture, it would be impossible to detect the
new parts from the old.
For the making of towers Caen is a queen city. In descending the rue des
Chanoines one passes the church of St. Pierre, whose much-admired
Renaissance apse (1518-45) was the work of a regional master, Hector
Sohier. But it is the tower of St. Pierre which is its glory and the
boast of Normandy. It served as model for belfries throughout the duchy
and in Brittany. Built from 1308 to 1317, it stands as proof that the
tradition of Apogee Gothic continued till the opening of the Hundred
Years' War. Apart from the natural rise and fall of things human various
causes contributed to the decline of Gothic art after the XIII century.
A soulless mechanical dexterity that crystallized the principles of
Gothic architecture succeeded to the creative genius that had made
glorious the reigns of Philippe-Auguste and Louis IX. Symbolism and true
mysticism gave place to doubt, and--when internal dissensions and
foreign invasion rent the land--to superstition. With the blurring of
spiritual vision passed the vigor of construction.
The XIV century in France opened under a king who debased the coinage,
overtaxed the clergy, persecuted the Jews, and who, by the outrage of
Anagni, struck a fatal blow at the prestige of the papacy. Soon followed
the Black Death, when a third of Europe's population perished. Radical
deterioration of the national art set in after France "went to pieces at
the Battle of Crécy" (1346). The royal domain was a field of brigandage:
"From the Loire to the Seine, and from the Seine to the Somme, the
peasants being killed, all the fields lay uncultivated, and this during
many years," wrote Bishop Bérenger of Le Mans. In Paris Cathedral a
foreigner was crowned king of France.
What horrors reigned in Normandy, many an old record relates. More than
a thousand patriot leaders perished when English gold was given for each
decapitated corpse. "Houses are without occupants, fields without
workers," wrote a XV-century bishop of Lisieux. Bedford's troops
pillaged and massacred. Near Falaise twelve thousand civilians were
butchered in one day. "The land of Normandy was grievously oppressed and
_le pauvre peuple détruit_," wrote Monstrelet. "Men and women fled for
their lives, by land and by sea, as if in peril of fire. Nobles gave up
their fiefs, clerks their benefices, burghers their patrimony, rather
than take oath to the invader."[324] _Normannia nutrix_ lay almost
uninhabited.
Such is the French version. Naturally the English outlook was different.
"The false Frenchman," sings Drayton in his Agincourt ballad. Freeman
falls into a vein of self-congratulation. "Go from France proper into
Normandy," he writes, "and you at once feel that everything is palpably
better; men, women, horses, cows, all are on a grander, better scale.
The good seed planted by the old Saxon and Danish colonists, and watered
in aftertimes by Henry V and John, Duke of Bedford, is still there. It
is not altogether choked by the tares of Paris."
Gothic art deteriorated, but so persistently lingered the simplicity,
the spiritual poignancy of the XIII century that in the late-Gothic day
it was still possible to produce the mystic loveliness of Riom's Madonna
of the Bird, and the humble prayerfulness of Solesmes' Magdalene.
In the unspoiled years of the XIV century was built the tower of St.
Pierre, at Caen. Its shaft rises in a virile, unbroken ascent from soil
to spire tip. On the busiest street corner of the city it stands like a
perpetual call to recollection and joy. The Norman will boast with
legitimate pride that it is the most beautiful tower in France,
excelling those of Chartres and Senlis, whose shafts, he will tell you,
are either too high or too short, whereas his loved tower of St. Pierre
has spire and shaft in perfect accord. When Caen added this stately
monument to its wealth of churches it was as rich a metropolis as
Rouen, and it had contributed more than London toward the ransom of
Richard Coeur-de-Lion from Teuton captivity. Just before the defeat of
Crécy, this, the intellectual capital of Normandy, was besieged by
English troops, and all its wealth pillaged, and its streets strewn with
dead. Amid havoc wrought, the towers of the Abbaye-aux-Dames were
destroyed.
[Illustration: _Belfry of St. Pierre at Caen (1308-1317). Prototype for
the Gothic Towers of Normandy and Brittany_]
All over the department of Calvados are towers.[325] A Romanesque one
crowns the church of Vaucelles, a suburb of Caen. At Ifs, and near
Bayeux, at St. Loup (c. 1180), are others. The monk's church of Norrey,
a dependency of St. Ouen, at Rouen, noted for the lavishness of its
foliate ornamentation, has a tower of the XIII century, and near it,
also ten miles from Caen, is Secqueville's Gothic beacon. There are
belfries at Bernières-sur-mer (c. 1150), at Langrune, Thaon, Tour, and
Basly.
Three of the most beautiful towers in Calvados crown the abbatial of St.
Pierre-sur-Dives, an edifice, too much a patchwork of five centuries to
be altogether pleasing, but linked with a memorable hour of the Gothic
story, 1145. Popular enthusiasm then aided Abbot Haimon to reconstruct
his church, as he wrote, in a much-quoted letter to the English monks at
Tutbury. The same wave of fervor was raising the Primary Gothic towers
of Chartres and Rouen. The western towers of St. Pierre-sur-Dives are of
Haimon's day only in their lower stories; that to the south has a
XIII-century top, and that to the north was finished in the XIV
century.[326]
Throughout the final phase of Gothic, Normandy continued to excel in
towers. Witness Rouen's Flamboyant beacons. In quiet country places and
lesser towns rise belfries as stately as those of cathedrals: at
Carville is the "Giant of the Valley" (1512-14), at Harfleur is a most
beautiful tower, and still another at Verneuil (1506-30), built by a son
of the town, Arthur Fillon, curé of St. Maclou, Rouen, and vicar-general
of that lover of noble structures, Cardinal Georges d'Amboise; when he
became bishop of Senlis, he helped to finish the Flamboyant Gothic
transept of that cathedral.
THE ROMANESQUE ABBATIAL OF ST. GEORGES DE BOSCHERVILLE[327]
I have borne for forty-two years with happiness the sweet yoke of
the Lord.--ORDERICUS VITALIS (xii century).
From Rouen a pleasant six-mile walk through the forest of Roumare leads
to the abbatial of St. Georges de Boscherville, an example of the best
Anglo-Norman Romanesque. Some have thought it belongs to the first
decade of the XII century, but M. Besnard places it a generation
earlier. Mr. John Bilson claims that, like its contemporary, the
cathedral at Durham, the piers show that from the start the design was
to construct ribbed groin vaults over the wide span, and he thinks that
the same is true for the now disused Romanesque abbatial of St.
Nicolas, at Caen (1083-93), building twenty years before Durham's choir.
He has cited the diagonals of Lessay's choir and those of the transept
of Montvilliers as the primitive Gothic of Normandy, vaults which M. de
Lasteyrie considered to be contemporary with Suger's St. Denis. The
German archæologists, Dehio and von Bezold, give priority to Normandy.
The actual intersecting ribs at St. Georges de Boscherville are a
XIII-century reconstruction. So solid were the church walls made that no
flying buttresses have been needed. The tribune at the end of each arm
of the transept is supported by an isolated pillar, apsidal chapels
project from the eastern wall of the transept, and the central lantern
is one of the best in Normandy. The entire church, save its west façade
flanked by slender turrets, was the work of some six or seven years
only. About 1157, under Abbot Victor, was erected the chapter house that
nestles beneath the transept's northern arm. The French students who did
not know, or who have not accepted, Mr. John Bilson's theory of
Anglo-Norman priority in the use of the essential organ of Gothic
architecture, have claimed that the diagonals of St. Georges' chapter
house are among the earliest extant of the province, of the same decade
as the vaulting of the lower hall of St. Romain's tower at Rouen. Mr.
John Bilson's championship of Anglo-Norman pioneer work, and Mr. Arthur
Kingsley Porter's theory of Lombard priority, have both found supporters
among leading French archæologists; the English scholar is patriotically
disgruntled at the American's advocacy of the Italian claims.
It would seem that during the XI century the Normans, like the Lombards,
used what Mr. Bilson calls ribbed groined vaults, occasionally, for one
reason or another. The Norman developed tentatively the ribbed vault,
always associating it with the semicircular arch, and without
comprehending the wonderful results that were to be derived from
concentrating the weight of a masonry roof at fixed points. The
possibility of those results was perceived first in the Ile-de-France,
and from there, when Gothic architecture had taken on its special
characteristics, it entered Normandy by way of the Seine at Rouen and
Boscherville, then at Fécamp and Lisieux. The first Gothic cathedrals of
Normandy show purely French influence and only gradually were regional
ogival traits developed. In the controversy as to who first used
diagonals, one can take whichever side one prefers; the question remains
open. Light will be thrown on it, doubtless, by a forthcoming paper by
Mr. Bilson in the _Archeological Journal_, tracing the evolution of the
diagonal rib in Normandy.
The abbey at Boscherville was founded by the lord of Tankerville, high
chamberlain of the Conqueror and Henry I. In its abbatial, when his
grandson, hereditary constable of Normandy, was knighted, he laid his
sword on the altar, and to redeem it presented property to the
monastery. If we would comprehend the society that built these churches,
we must understand that such donations were voluntary and a matter of
civic pride. "If I cannot myself attend to the works of God," runs an
ancient deed of gift, "at least I can assure a home for those with whom
God loves to dwell. It is only natural to enrich our Holy Mother the
Church, and thus to take a hand in caring for Christ's poor."
THE GOTHIC ABBATIAL AT FÉCAMP[328]
It is a usage bequeathed to us from our ancestors, never to let
anyone depart from our abbey without a gift.
--(From an old Latin chronicle of Fécamp.)
If one would enjoy, without critical comparison, the Gothic of Normandy,
her churches should be visited before the taste has become sensitized by
loiterings in the Ile-de-France. In that classic region of the national
art is found a simplicity, a purity, a restraint, a something of
imaginative genius that makes of its work the touchstone by which all
other manifestations of Gothic are judged. Of the Norman churches, the
Trinité, at Fécamp, is most closely related to the Primary Gothic work
of the royal domain. Its architect must certainly have come from the
Ile-de-France. Monks trained in the Celtic rule by St. Wandrille founded
Fécamp, which was wrecked by Norse pirates in 876. William Longsword,
the first duke's son, built his palace here, and his son, Richard I the
Fearless (d. 996), began a new monastery. In his will Richard ordered:
"Bury not my body within the church, but deposit it on the outside,
immediately under the eaves, that the dripping of the rain from the holy
roof may wash my bones as I lie and may cleanse them of the spots of
impurity contracted during a negligent and neglected life." He desired
that on every Friday a sarcophagus be filled with wheat and grain for
the poor. His son, Richard II the Good (d. 1020), finished Fécamp
abbatial, and was laid to rest beside his father. The dukes of Rollo's
line especially favored Fécamp, which held a front rank among Normandy's
institutions, and was the richest of her monasteries down to the
Revolution. Henry Plantagenet presented Fécamp town to the monastery.
After Duke Richard the Good had brought that man of administrative
genius, William of Volpiano, into his duchy to reorganize its spiritual
life, architectural activities took on new vigor. William himself
directed the construction of Bernay's[329] church; the abbatial of
Mont-Saint-Michel rose when he reformed that house; and the church of
Jumièges followed immediately after his reformation there. The Blessed
William, in his thirst for souls, used to loiter at the crossroads to
gather in the stricken of body or spirit. He passed away in Fécamp in
1031, and his ashes are still preserved in a chapel of the present
Gothic abbatial. In 1034, in the Romanesque Trinité, Robert the
Magnificent gathered the chief men of Normandy to have them swear
allegiance to his sturdy little bastard son of seven, who was to be
known in history as William the Conqueror, after which Duke Robert
started on his pilgrimage to the East, from which he was never to
return. The abbey church of Fécamp long consisted of the nave begun by
Richard I, and a choir built by Abbot Guillaume de Ros (1082-1108),
under whose rule the Trinité won the admiration of Europe. He is said to
have introduced into Normandy the ambulatory and its radiating chapels.
Two of the radial chapels which he constructed at Fécamp have survived.
While they were building, there lived in the Trinité convent, as prior,
Herbert de Lozinga, who, obtaining the bishopric of Norwich, erected on
the Norfolk downs a stately Norman cathedral (1096-1119). Abbot
Guillaume de Ros carried out the instructions of Richard I to give a
loaf of bread to every beggar asking it, and when Fécamp was dissolved
at the Revolution its abbot was distributing daily some twelve thousand
free loaves of bread.
In 1169 fire wrecked the Romanesque Trinité, whereupon the present
Gothic edifice was begun immediately, and in it two of the groin-vaulted
chapels from the choir of Guillaume de Ros were incorporated. Abbot
Henri de Soullay (1139-87) built the Primary Gothic choir, transept,
and half of the nave. After the fifth bay of the nave a new architect
took up the work, as is shown by differences in the pier profiles, but
the cessation of activities must have been of short duration, as the
church is homogeneous. The nave was finished under Abbot Raoul d'Argence
(1190-1220), who organized Normandy's first literary academy--a
confraternity of jongleurs. Its character was more Norman than the
choir, though regional traits had early appeared in the turrets at the
birth of the apse and the square central lantern.
To increase the impression of length in the nave its side walls were
marked by double the number of arcades that divide the middle church
from the aisles. This was accomplished by introducing a fifth rib into
each vault section of those side corridors, which rib fell on a shaft
engaged in the side walls. Like the minsters of England, Fécamp is more
remarkable in its length than in its height.
Abbot Thomas de Saint-Benoît (1297-1307) decided to suppress the deep
gallery over the choir's ambulatory, making the chapels that open on the
curving aisle of exceptional height. He changed the southern aisle,
giving it a coldly elegant Rayonnant aspect, but happily not that to the
north, or we would have lost the two interesting Romanesque chapels of
Abbot Guillaume de Ros. Some of Fécamp's later abbots were Clement VI,
builder of the palace of the popes at Avignon and of the Chaise Dieu in
the mountains of Auvergne, and an abbot of the patriotic Estouteville
family, who was driven out by the English when Fécamp was besieged in
1415. The tool who succeeded him sat in judgment on Jeanne d'Arc.
The abbot of Fécamp during the transitional Flamboyant Renaissance day
was Cardinal Antoine Boyer (1492-1519), a Mæcenas who adorned his
beautiful church with Italian marbles. He had sculptured, in the same
studio at Genoa that provided Louis XII with the Orléans tombs for St.
Denis, an Entombment more spectacular in character than the famous one
at Solesmes. Girolamo Viscardo made for him a tabernacle (for the
choir's procession path), after the style of Mino da Fiesole. The
lovely marble screens that close the side chapels are due to this
generous prelate. For him Jacques Le Roux, the noted architect of Rouen,
lengthened the Lady chapel. The only later change of importance in the
Trinité was the erection of its neo-classic façade.
THE GOTHIC ABBATIAL AT EU[330]
La Nature a bien des manières de sourire. La Normandie est le plus
beau sourire de la nature temperée.--O. RECLUS.
The tutelary of Eu is St. Laurence O'Toole, archbishop of Dublin, son of
a prince in Leinster, an active continuer of the reforms begun by St.
Malachy of Armagh, who died in St. Bernard's arms at Clairvaux. St.
Laurence had crossed the Channel to plead with Henry Plantagenet for
certain of his flock in disgrace (1180). Arriving at Eu's convent, then
belonging to the congregation of St. Victor, he felt a premonition of
his approaching death, and exclaimed, as he crossed the threshold, "Here
is my abode of rest forever." He was worn out in the struggle to uphold
the weak against the strong in those difficult years of the Anglo-Norman
seizure of the eastern coast of Ireland. As his end drew near a monk
suggested that he make his testament. "I thank God that I have nothing
to bequeath," he said.
So impressive was the death of Archbishop Laurence in Eu monastery that
the little people of the Lord soon began to pray beside his tomb. When
the monks reconstructed their church they placed the saintly man's
relics in the new crypt. From 1186 to 1226 the choir, transept, and one
bay of the nave were built without interruption, in a Gothic more of the
Ile-de-France than regional, though the placing of towers between
transept and choir and the central lantern followed the Norman
tradition.
Archbishop Laurence O'Toole was canonized in 1225, and to the joyous
ceremony when his relics were set above the high altar came the
archbishop of Rouen--then building his cathedral, and Bishop Geoffrey,
the "shining man of Eu by whom the throne of Amiens rose into
immensity." For eight days the throng pressed to pray near the relics of
the canonized Irish prelate, and with the gifts that poured in the monks
were able to finish their nave by 1230. It is a gem of Norman Gothic,
sober, elegant, of perfect unity. The first plan called for tribunes
over the aisles, as in the choir. Before they were constructed, however,
the idea was given up, but it was decided to keep the arches by which
the tribunes would have opened on the middle church. The same effect of
false tribunes had been used earlier in the nave of Rouen Cathedral.
In 1426 lightning caused the collapse of the central tower, and in the
reconstruction of the transept and choir, undertaken after the invaders
were driven from Normandy, Flamboyant work was set side by side with
Primary Gothic. From 1511 to 1534 rose the transept's florid south
façade. After the Revolution the church of St. Laurent was restored by
the Orléans family, who own the château and park at Eu.
MONT-SAINT-MICHEL[331]
Chaque peuple a son ange, disait Daniel le prophète. Le nôtre ne
peut pas, même indignes nous délaisser.... Plus encore que Saint
Jacques était le patron des espagnols, Saint Michel voulut être le
Baron de France. Il mit les trois lys dans ses armes et fit passer
sur le royaume l'éclair de son glaive. Avoir suscité Jeanne d'Arc
et par elle libéré la France.... Voilà bien le plus beau miracle dû
à l'archange. Il constitue pour le pays une promesse de
perennité.--JOSEPH LOTTE (born in Normandy, 1875; killed in the
World War, 1914).
Surpassing all the abbeys of Normandy is the outpost of the archangel
that lies offshore, at the junction of Normandy and Brittany, a conicle
mass of "rock on rock, keep on keep, century on century," sand-locked
one hour, and the next rising from the Atlantic. _Tremor immensi oceani_
is the motto of the Mount. Before the days of crusaders it was one of
Europe's chief points of departure for the Eastern pilgrimage. Like
Jerusalem, it has been one of the sites of the earth that has impressed
itself with historic signification on the imagination of mankind.
Many have felt the kindred spirit of the _Chanson de Roland_ and the
granite, military monastery. They are both of the same high lineage. To
the paladin Roland, dying at Roncevaux, as he held up his right glove to
God, his suzerain, there came, to fetch his soul to Paradise, the very
special St. Michael of the Mount that stood in peril of the sea, in
_periculo maris_.[332] Scholars think that the most virile, the most
heroic of the _chansons de geste_, wherein already was _la douce France_
loved beyond the regional cradle, was composed by a Norman who lived in
the marches within the cult of the Angel of the Peril.[333]
[Illustration: _The Hall of the Knights at Mont-Saint-Michel
(1203-1228). Second Story of the Merveille_]
Alas, in our day Mont-Saint-Michel-au-péril-de-la-Mer is in very deadly
peril of the land, for it looks as if the covetousness of financiers was
to defraud France of this rock of glory "_qui s'émeut et s'achève en
prière_." Dikes and dams, to reclaim coast lands, will before long cause
the historic crag to rise from green woods as it did some geological
periods ago.
Citadel, palace, cloister, church, and town, the Mount is a thing of
romance that not all the vulgarity of daily tourist crowds can tarnish.
Charlemagne himself chose its tutelary archangel for the national patron
saint, and the cowled guardians here were in truth through long
centuries what the great emperor called monks: "Knights of the Church,
of the willing vassalage and chivalry of Christ."
The Northmen destroyed the ancient shrine. Then Richard the Fearless,
grandson of the pirate Rollo, placed on the rock the sons of St.
Benedict, trained at St. Wandrille. Richard II, in 1017, came to the
Mount to ask a blessing on his union with Judith of Brittany, whose
beauty was such that the old chronicle exclaimed _corpore et moribus
usque ad miraculum elegantem_. The duke's marriage gift enabled the
monks to supplant their Carolingian church by a bigger one. The
discarded X-century chapel was discovered in 1909 by M. Paul Gout, the
Mount's latest historian. Until 1780 it had been used as Notre
Dame-sous-Terre, but during the building of the foundations for the ugly
west façade of the upper church it was walled up.
With Richard the Good's donation, Abbot Hildebert II erected his new
church on the very summit of the rock, but as there was not sufficient
level space, he built out from the hillcrest a platform of masonry to
support the nave. From William of Volpiano's school at Fécamp came
skilled journeymen. The church at Mont-Saint-Michel was begun in 1020,
and still building in 1057. Abbot Roger I, formerly chaplain to William
the Conqueror, erected the nave. William prayed at the Mount before
undertaking the conquest of England, and the abbot fitted out for him an
entire fleet.
In 1103 the northern wall of the Romanesque nave collapsed one night as
the monks were chanting matins in the choir. It was restored immediately
in the same style, and Abbot Roger II took the opportunity to
reconstruct the monks' quarters. Above the crypt called Aquilon (c.
1112) he built a cloister, which later was vaulted with diagonals, and
over that _promenoir_ was made a dormitory on the same level as the
church. During the years that followed the Mount was governed by a man
of genius, Robert de Torigni (1153-80), whose chronicle is the most
important history of France for that epoch. In the _promenoir_ he
entertained, at a banquet in 1158, his sovereign, Henry II, and Aliénor
of Aquitaine. They chose him as godfather for their daughter, who,
later, as queen of Castile, built the convent church of Las Huelgas by
Burgos. Abbot Robert was a pupil of Bec, whose higher standards of
intellectual life he brought to the Mount, where he formed a library,
built monks' quarters, and added western belfries to his abbatial,
though the façade of his day no longer exists.
As the XIII century opened, Normandy became once more a part of the
royal domain, after being three centuries under dukes of its own. When
Rollo's strong breed ended in the debased John Lackland, the northern
province gladly accepted Philippe-Auguste as ruler. How whole-heartedly,
how unreservedly French it became it was to prove by its heroic
resistance to the English invaders during the Hundred Years' War.[334]
In the frays of 1203, fire had spread from the town that hugged the
rock's edge, to the monastic buildings on the summit. Philippe-Auguste,
always wisely conciliatory toward new subjects, contributed toward the
restorations. With the gift from the king under whom most of the Gothic
cathedrals of France were begun, Abbot Jourdan (1191-1212) built the
supreme architectural work of the citadel, what is called the Merveille,
and a marvel indeed are its three stories that rise, one above the
other, hall over hall, two hundred feet in height above the sea, ridged
heavily outside by stout buttresses and graced within by pillars,
arches, and a sky-gazing cloister.
From the brain of some unknown cowled genius sprang this _mâle_ and
splendid conception, built in the very prime of Gothic. Who else but one
enamored of meditation would have set his cloister atop of his monastery
under the open sky, or have opened on that courtyard of peace a monks'
refectory, where, in a flooded stillness of light, the brethren could
sit pondering as they listened to one of their number reading from the
stone lectern the book which is the spirit of Bernard of Clairvaux
incarnate: "Give all for all; seek nothing; call for nothing back. Thou
shalt be free in heart and the darkness shall not overwhelm thee." And
around them there spread the wide horizon of the sea one hour, of the
white ashes of sand the next.
Pacing the lovely skyward cloister one has time to brood on life and
death, on God and one's own soul; it refutes a hundred calumnies
against monastic life just by being what it is. Serious men enamored of
voluntary seclusion carved it unstintingly and set its columns quaintly
in triangular order. Love and science contrived the diffused, soothing
luminousness of the brothers' dining hall. The present gable windows
there are innovations. Originally when one entered one could discern no
window, and yet light was everywhere. The side walls, that from the door
appear to be blind arcades, are in reality a succession of narrow panel
windows--thirty to a side--deeply recessed in stone embrasures that are
triangular in shape, because they serve the purpose of buttresses. To
have carried the exterior buttress ridges to such a height as is this
refectory, set audaciously up in the sky on the Merveille's third story,
would have been an awkward procedure; so the nameless monk-architect,
because he was a XIII-century man, let his genius lead him, and, "master
of the living stone" that he was, contrived a supreme beauty of
decoration out of a structural necessity.
The Merveille was erected under a succession of abbots, in one
consecutive radiant effort, from 1203 to 1228--a Titan's work. Each of
its three stories is divided into two halls; on the ground floor are the
almonry, where the pilgrims fed, and a groin-vaulted cellery or
storehouse; the top story, as we have seen, consists of open cloister
and monks' refectory; and between the upper and lower stories are two of
the most vigorous halls ever built; that over the almonry called the
Salle des Hôtes because in it were entertained the guests of the
monastery, and that to the west, over the cellery, acquiring the name
Salle des Chevaliers, from the Order of the Knights of St. Michael,
whose members met here. The latter is divided by rows of stout pillars,
and served as the common room of the community, where the tireless
scholar-scribes illuminated missals and copied manuscripts.
The charter for the military Order of the Archangel, founded in 1469 by
Louis XI, welded the name of St. Michael, whom every good Frenchman knew
kept a specially friendly eye on France, with that of Jeanne the Maid,
who had quitted Domrémy-on-the-Meuse because the voice of her dear
archangel rang insistent in her ear: _Fille Dè, va! Je serai à ton ayde.
Va!_ It was St. Michael who first roused her to the sense of the great
misery there was in the kingdom of France, and in her hour of victory
after Orléans she spoke of going to the rescue of the besieged Mount in
Normandy. At her trial in Rouen she dwelt on the comfort he had given
her.[335] He appeared to her, she said, in the guise of "_un très vrai
prud'homme_"--the term loved of St. Louis, who once told Joinville that
to be _prud'homme_ meant to be knight in heart, as well as outward
bearing. "I believe the words of St. Michael who appeared to me," said
Jeanne, at her trial, "as firmly as I believe that Our Lord Jesus Christ
suffered death and passion for us. And what leads me so to believe is
the good counsel, comfort, and good doctrine St. Michael gave me."
On the completion of the Merveille, the monks continued building. They
had finished the officiality hall by the entrance gate of the monastery
before the visit of St. Louis to the Mount in 1254, when he came to
return thanks for his safety during his late crusade. The XIV century
added more defenses till the rock became the most forceful example of
mediæval military architecture. Strong walls were needed during its
siege by the English who invaded Normandy under Henry V. The Mount's
abbot, Robert Jollivet, whose name figures among the well-paid judges at
Rouen in 1431, allied himself with the victorious foreigners who had
quickly overrun the province. His monks repudiated him, led by their
prior, Jean Gonault. Defended by the gallant knight Louis
d'Estouteville, they endured the longest siege recorded in history,
1415 to 1450, when, as Jeanne had proclaimed, the invaders were "_boutés
tous hors de France_."[336]
In 1429, during the memorable siege, the Romanesque choir of
Mont-Saint-Michel's abbey church collapsed. It was impossible then to
rebuild it; they had even to sell their altar vessels to carry on the
defense. When Normandy was again a part of France the erection of a new
choir was undertaken by the abbot of the Mount, who was none other than
the distinguished Cardinal Guillaume d'Estouteville, the chief agent in
the vindication of Jeanne d'Arc's memory. His layman brother had
directed the defense of the Mount during many years. In 1450 were laid
down the crypt's nineteen mammoth piers, among the most powerful ever
planted. The upper church reached its triforium story by 1469, the year
when Louis XI came to the rock to establish his new Order of knighthood,
and about 1513 the choir was completed. Many hold it to be superior to
all other late-Gothic works in France. There are no capitals, the
moldings die away in the shafts, the triforium is glazed. It belongs to
the fleeting splendor of Flamboyant art, but without capriciousness.
There is no overexuberance, no virtuosity in this vigorous, glad
memorial of the nation's reconquered freedom:
Sainte Jeanne went harvesting in France,
And oh! what found she there?
The brave seed of her scattering
In fruitage everywhere.
And where her strong and tender heart
Was broken in the flame,
She found the very heart of France
Had flowered to her name.[337]
Building activities at the embattled abbey ceased after the erection of
its beautiful florid choir. The evil consequences of commendatory
abbots--those named by royal whim--bore bitter fruit from end to end of
France in the relaxed spiritual life of the monasteries. The
XVII-century reformers of the Congregation of St. Maur found the Mount's
abbot to be a princeling of Lorraine, five years of age. Those scholarly
Benedictines carried on excellent research work in local history, but to
their neo-classic generation Gothic art was a sealed book.
Deplorable changes went on during three hundred years: an apsidal chapel
of the church was made into a staircase, irregular windows were opened
in the halls of the Merveille, the cloister was planted as a garden, to
the deterioration of the lower structures, and when, in 1776, fire
weakened the abbatial, its three westernmost bays were demolished and
the present ugly façade put up. After the Revolution pillaged the
monastery it became a state prison called Mont Libre, and so continued
until 1863. The church was floored midway to serve as a convicts' hat
factory. The modern restoration of Mont-Saint-Michel has been, like that
which saved the palace of the popes at Avignon, a truly national
benefit.
THE CATHEDRAL OF ROUEN[338]
One can say that nothing great ever was accomplished in the Church
without women bearing a part. A host of them stood among the
martyrs in the amphitheater; they disputed with the anchorites the
possession of the desert. Constantine set up the Labarum on the
Capitol, and St. Helena raised the True Cross on the walls of
Jerusalem. Clovis, at Tolbiac, invoked the God of Clotilda.
Monica's tears won the conversion of Augustine. Jerome dedicated
the Vulgate to the piety of two Roman ladies, Paula and Eustochium.
The first lawmakers of monkish life, Basil and Benedict, were
seconded by their sisters, Macrina and Scholastica. The Countess
Matilda held up the tottering throne of Gregory VII. The wise
judgment of Queen Blanche dominated the reign of St. Louis. France
was saved by Jeanne d'Arc. Isabella of Castile led in the discovery
of the New World. And in times closer to our own we see St. Teresa
mixing with bishops, doctors, and the founders of Orders by which
the reform in Catholic ranks was operated. We see St. Francis de
Sales cultivating like a rare flower the soul of Madame de Chantal,
and St. Vincent de Paul passing over to Louise Marillac the most
admirable of his designs, the establishment of the Sisters of
Charity.--FRÉDÉRIC OZANAM.
So much for the abbey churches of Normandy. Many another might be
described, but with six Gothic cathedrals to consider, one must refrain.
Of the six--Rouen, Lisieux, Évreux, Séez, Bayeux, and Coutances--that of
Rouen shows the earliest Gothic work and its character is more French
than Norman, as if the river, flowing down from Paris, carried with its
waters the characteristics of the art life astir on the banks of the
Seine, Oise, Aisne, and Marne.
The least local of Normandy's cathedrals, Our Lady's church at Rouen,
has a magnetism distinctly its own--from its florid romantic west front,
the most lavish screen ever set up, to the imposing sentry columns that
guard its sanctuary. The northwest tower is Normandy's best Primary
Gothic, the southwest tower the supremest belfry that sprang up to
commemorate the freeing of France from foreign yoke. The façades of the
transept and the Lady chapel (whose tombs mark dates in the art history
of France) rank with perfect Rayonnant work. Its storied windows are
among the richest ever dight by mediæval guildsmen.
Not but that a dozen flaws might be picked in the metropolitan church at
Rouen. Were it to be strictly ranked among French cathedrals, it could
not be placed among the foremost. But it has gone on embellishing itself
century after century with a self-respect so sincere that few care to
dispute its claim to stand in the front rank.
On a first visit to Rouen many an amateur prefers the regularity of St.
Ouen's abbatial, which in size equals Westminster Abbey.[339] St. Ouen,
the classic of Rayonnant design, geometric in tracery, accentuating the
ascending line, coldly perfect in construction, possessed still the true
_sursum corda_ of Gothic, though the art was fast crystallizing into
formulas. The capitals were lessened, and the glazed triforium united to
the clearstory in a single composition. Made of fine-textured gray stone
St. Ouen is a stately vessel, but, add the critics, "its uniform
excellence is average." Gothic lore has not degenerated, but has simply
gone too far in the development of its principles, says the mechanical
artistry of the last built of the great monastic churches of France,
planned before the tragedies of the Hundred Years' War had petrified the
national genius.[340]
The cathedral of Normandy's capital is not uniform, but its excellence
surpasses the average. It is not homogeneous, its proportions are not
absolutely harmonious, but it has profundity, personal character, and
flashes of genius. The better it is known the deeper grows affection for
it, which is not the case with St. Ouen. In the latter one feels that
the cult is the main concern; in the cathedral there is piety of heart.
The early history of Sainte-Marie at Rouen follows the usual course.
Norse marauders wrecked the ancient cathedral. Rollo, the first duke,
endowed another which was radically reconstructed under an XI-century
archbishop, a son of Duke Richard II. In 1063, that Romanesque church
was dedicated by Archbishop Maurille (whose tomb is in the present
ambulatory) in the presence of William the Conqueror and his good
Matilda. Vestiges of the Romanesque edifice are in the first bay of the
choir aisle. In it were interred the prodigious Rollo, the Norwegian
sea-robber, who sacked half Normandy, sailed up the Seine to terrorize
Paris, and up the Loire to overrun Auvergne and Burgundy, and yet, no
sooner was he granted the duchy of northern France than the buccaneer
gave way to a ruler whose laws were so respected that golden bracelets
were left exposed and remained unstolen for years in the forest of
Roumare. Rollo was baptized a Christian in Rouen, in 912, and there he
wedded a Carolingian princess. When his son, William Longsword, died in
945, he was wearing a gold key that opened a casket containing a monk's
robe for his burial; the new rulers were swift to comprehend that
monasteries were the chief civilizers in that formative age.
Near Rouen, in 1087, died the Conqueror, sixth in descent from Rollo.
"Pirate jostled statesman" in him, too. Mortally wounded at Mantes, he
was brought to the priory of St. Gervase--beneath which suburban church
still exists intact a V-century crypt--and as he heard the bells of
Rouen Cathedral ringing, there rose to haunt him the curses, not loud
but deep, of the oppressed Anglo-Saxons, and most piteously he
petitioned the Queen of Heaven to draw Her Son's attention to all the
religious houses he had built for the people's good on both sides of the
Channel. No sooner was he dead than his retainers stripped and robbed
him, and through private charity he was carried to his horror-inspiring
burial at Caen.
To Rouen, because of its generosity to him in his captivity, Richard
Coeur-de-Lion bequeathed his heart. In 1203 the last duke of Normandy,
John Lackland, fled from Rouen after the murder of his nephew, Arthur of
Brittany, of which the popular voice accused him. Philippe-Auguste
entered the city in triumph in 1204, and the building of the new Gothic
cathedral started apace.
Notre Dame at Rouen is associated closely with the return of Normandy
under French rule. On Easter night, 1200, fire ravaged the city and its
chief church. Whether the cathedral then wrecked was that blessed in
1063 by Bishop Robert de Maurille is uncertain. Some think that it was a
Romanesque choir and transept which were burned, and a recently built
Primary Gothic nave. It may have been an entirely new Gothic church
which was destroyed. At any rate, the northwest tower, named after the
VII-century bishop, Romanus, and the side doors of the main façade
escaped the fire. The preservation of the tower was due, probably, to
its position beyond the side aisle. The doors, built about 1180, are
ornamented with Oriental incrustations such as are to be seen in the
cathedral at Genoa, with which seaport Rouen had trade links.
The Tour Saint-Romain, whose prototypes were the towers at Étampes,
Vendôme, and Chartres, was long counted as the oldest Primary Gothic
work extant in Normandy, with the chapter house at St. Georges de
Boscherville and the chapel of St. Julien, Petit-Quevilly.[341] But as
many archæologists now say that the Gothic vault of St. Étienne's nave
at Caen may be 1130 just as well as 1160, and that there are still
earlier diagonals in the duchy, it remains an open question where the
oldest extant ogival work of Normandy is. Mr. John Bilson claims that
the diagonals of Lessay's choir pre-date any in the Ile-de-France.
However the controversy over the priority of diagonals may be decided,
the tower of St. Romain is the first Norman monument that shows the
incontestable influence of Gothic of the Ile-de-France type.
The spirit of religious ardor that expressed itself in the northwest
tower of Rouen Cathedral was described by Bishop Hugues d'Amiens in a
letter, in 1145, to a brother prelate. He tells how volunteers were
quitting Normandy to aid in the making of the new tower at Chartres: "In
like manner, a large number of the faithful of this, our diocese, and of
neighboring regions, put themselves to work on the cathedral church,
their mother, forming associations to which no one is admitted unless he
has confessed his sins, fulfilled his penances, laid down at the foot of
the altar every enmity and revenge, and become reconciled with his
enemies in a true peace. Under the lead of one in the band, who is
chosen as chief, the people drag heavy wagons in humility and silence."
The writer of this famous letter had been a monk of Cluny, and while
ruling the see of Rouen he taught school there; he had inherited the
traditions of Bec's scholarship through Anselm of Laon. The lower hall
of the cathedral tower then begun is considered faultless. Before the
close of the century the upper hall was completed, but the belfry story
was not added till the late-Gothic day.
After the fire of 1200 work on the new cathedral was pushed on with
energy. A master called Jean d'Andely is cited as the architect, a
native, probably, of Les Andelys farther up the Seine, where there are
two churches so closely resembling the cathedral of Rouen that they are
doubtless from the same hand.[342] Another architect, named Enguerrand,
is mentioned as quitting work on the cathedral of the capital in 1214,
to undertake the abbatial at Bec. A keystone of Notre Dame, of the date
1233, is inscribed by one Durand, mason. He is thought to have been the
son-in-law of the original architect, Jean d'Andely.
The first plan of Rouen Cathedral called for tribunes over the aisles,
but the idea was given up in order to have the side aisles twice as high
as originally designed. The arches by which the tribunes would have
opened on the central vessel were retained, however, as was done later
with the false tribunes of the abbey church at Eu. In the side aisles,
resting on the capitals of the nave's piers, are ringed colonnettes that
rise to the ledge above--a ledge constructed to catch the tribune's
diagonals (which never were built). By this graceful expedient they
cloaked architectural members prepared but not used. The passageway
carried from pier to pier above the main arcade of the nave is
exceptional. An apsidal chapel projects from each arm of the transept,
as in the Romanesque edifices of the region.
The archbishop under whom Notre Dame of Rouen was begun was Walter of
Coutance, _Gautier-le-magnifique_ (1184-1207), who willed his fortune to
the cathedral, since it was he, devoted public servant of the
Plantagenets, and long the chief justice of England, who had urged the
chapter to sell its treasure to help ransom Coeur-de-Lion from
captivity after the Third Crusade. He himself went as hostage into
Germany in order that Richard might be released before his full ransom
was raised. Learned, liberal, and affable, Bishop Walter was a man of
whom all spoke well.
The choir of Rouen Cathedral showed more the regional characteristics;
the arches were more acute and the moldings multiple. The circular piers
about the sanctuary have Norman round capitals. We know that in 1235 a
bishop was buried in the choir, which must have been entirely finished
when, in 1255, St. Louis spent Easter in Rouen as the guest of his
friend and counselor, Archbishop Eudes Rigaud (1247-74), a Franciscan,
who was to accompany the king on his fatal crusade. The choir's upper
windows were reconstructed during the XV century.
About 1280, architect Jean Davy began the south façade of the transept,
the Portail de la Calende, so called because there was carved there a
mythical animal of that name, considered in ancient times as a symbol of
the Saviour, since the superstition was that the sight of a Calende
cured illness. The transept façades of Rouen are among the best works of
the Rayonnant phase. Their sculpture, says M. Enlart, has not yet the
fluid indecision of XIV-century draperies. A pronounced feature of that
period are the openwork gables, which, though they may be superbly
decorative, are none the less a step away from constructive sincerity,
since drip stones made of lacework masonry fail to fulfill their
practical function.
The northern door of the transept was named from the canon's library
beside it. It, too, like the earlier Calende portal, was paneled with
medallions over which many a pharisee has shaken his head. The Middle
Ages were neither pharisaic nor prudish. Rouen's little sculptured
groups are merely fantastic and popular. They embody no satire against
the clergy, as some would intimate; nor are they obscene. To place a
centaur or an acrobat in proximity to a scriptural group seemed then no
more profane than to illuminate the margins of missals with meaningless
frolics. Leeway was allowed the artistic imagination, which here ran
largely to grotesques. The medallions of the Calende door were in better
sequence and of more vigorous character than those of the Portail des
Libraires. Beside this latter entrance is the courtroom of the
archepiscopal palace adorned with statues representing Solomon's
judgment, in souvenir of the old usage of rendering justice before
church doors.
From 1302 to 1320 rose the Rayonnant Gothic Lady chapel of impeccable
mechanical skill but not inspired. Long centuries later, during the
Revolution, its tomb of the cardinals d'Amboise,[343] in which Gothic
sculpture culminated, escaped destruction because the axis chapel served
as a granary. Clement V, the builder of Bordeaux' Rayonnant choir,
arranged that his nephew, who was archbishop of Rouen and had got into
difficulties with the Norman nobles, should exchange his see with Gilles
Aycelin, the prelate who was erecting Narbonne Cathedral, brother of the
bishop-builder of Clermont's nave. A little later another archbishop of
Rouen became the Avignon pontiff who built the audience hall and the
chief chapel of the palace on the Rhone. Other XIV-century additions to
Rouen Cathedral are the side chapels; every guild and corporation craved
thus to honor its own particular patron.
Those contemporary works, Rouen's Lady chapel, the choirs of Bordeaux
and Narbonne, Avignon's halls, belong to the phase of the national
genius which we call Rayonnant because of its geometric window tracery,
a phase aptly designated as metallic by M. Gonse. Artists were fast
losing their exquisite feeling for the silhouette; the vertical line
was over-accentuated; triforium and clearstory had become one
composition. Pitiless logic was drying up the spring of inspiration.
When the cathedral of Rouen remade three bays of the nave's triforium,
the model taken was the geometric design of that masterpiece of
Rayonnant Gothic, the abbatial of St. Ouen. Before the XIV century
closed the façade of the cathedral was redressed with arcatures and
statues like the west frontispieces of Wells, Salisbury, and Litchfield.
The XV century carried through the chief supplementary works of
Sainte-Marie of Rouen in a style frankly florid. Normandy, Artois, and
Picardy reveled in the last development of the national art, regions all
of them having close links with England. For if much of Flamboyant
Gothic was indigenous, as M. Anthyme Saint-Paul contends, if it
enveloped and absorbed Rayonnant Gothic, it seems fairly well proved
that its two most pronounced traits, the flamelike window tracery and
arches of double curvature, came from England. M. Enlart says that
ramified vaults were built at Ely, Lincoln, and Litchfield, during the
XIII century. By 1304 accolade arches were used; at Merton College,
Oxford, is a flame-tracery window of 1310, features not to be found in
France before 1375.[344] In the Rayonnant phase lines break; in the
Flamboyant they undulate. Rayonnant capitals were diminished; capitals
disappeared altogether in the later period, and molds melted into the
piers.
Normandy expressed her renewed national dignity with enthusiasm in the
flowery, happy architecture we call Flamboyant:
Le Temps a laissié son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluye,
Et s'est vestu de broderye
De soleil raiant, cler, et beau.
So sang Charles, Duke of Orléans, come back from twenty years in English
prisons to witness the expulsion of the invader from Normandy:
Il n'y a beste ne oiseau
Que en son jargon ne chante ou crye;
Le Temps a laissié son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluye.[345]
How they built in Rouen! With what vim and emancipated energy! St. Ouen
carried forward its nave and raised a central tower. From 1437 to 1480
was built the gallant little church of St. Maclou with a central tower
that is one of the best in Normandy, and whose curving front of five
arcades is profusely elegant. Similarly large, ornate portals became the
vogue in late-Gothic Norman construction. St. Maclou is to the Gothic
art of the XIII century what the reel is to the minuet, said an English
architect.[346]
In the cathedral of Rouen one noted master succeeded another. Guillaume
Pontifs put the belfry on St. Romain's tower (1463-77); built the
canon's library, to which he made a staircase from the cathedral's
transept; and made the decorated portico leading from the rue St. Romain
to the court before the Portail des Libraires. No approach to a church
possesses more entirely the atmosphere of the Middle Ages than that.
Pontifs began a masterpiece of Flamboyant architecture, the Tour de
Beurre (1485-1509), that, as it rises, grows more and more sumptuous,
though it never loses its architectural lines. Unfortunately the stone
used was of poor quality, which necessitated a coarse sculpture. The
transition from square to octagon was gracefully achieved by the one
constructive arrangement which originated during the final stage of the
national art: to unify the design, flying buttresses were sprung from
the corner turrets and the face-shafts to the octagon.[347]
From 1497 to 1507 the master-of-works at Rouen Cathedral was Jacques Le
Roux, who continued the Tour de Beurre, finished by his nephew, Rouland
Le Roux (1507-20), an artist of the first order. He redressed the upper
part of the main frontispiece in order to put it into character with the
Tour de Beurre and St. Romain's belfry. After completing the middle
portal of the façade he reconstructed the central tower, whose platform
he raised a story higher. When Rouen's lantern tower was burned in 1822
the present iron skeleton was contrived, a structure too mechanical to
be architecture, but of good effect in the distant views of the city.
The oft repeated renewals of the famous frontispiece of Rouen Cathedral
account for its failure to express the interior church structurally, but
though merely a screen, it is deservedly popular, "one of the dreams of
the Middle Ages," M. Émile Lambin has called it. By moonlight its effect
is romantic, almost spectacular. Most popular, too, is another work of
Rouland Le Roux, the Palais de Justice which he built with Roger Ango,
from 1493 to 1507, for the parliament of Normandy. A pomp and a
pageantry carried almost to folly distinguished the generations that
raised monuments such as these. In 1520, when Francis I met Henry VIII,
not far from Rouen, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, many a lord,
says the chronicler, carried on his back his mills and his forests and
his meadows. One of the most curious houses in France, Rouen's Hôtel du
Bourgtherould, now a bank near the Old Market, is decorated exteriorly
by reliefs of the Field of the Cloth of Gold.[348] M. Léon Palustre
discovered that the sculpture on its tower, originally polychrome, was a
copy of a Flemish tapestry in the possession of that prince of
pageantry, Philippe le Hardi of Burgundy.
The archbishop of Rouen from 1493 to 1510 was none other than the
Mæcenas of his age, Cardinal George I d'Amboise, chief minister of Louis
XII. All over France we have traced the work of that art-loving
family--at Paris, Cluny, Clermont, Chaumont, Albi. A nephew of the same
name held the see here until 1545, and saw to the erection of his
uncle's tomb, designed by Rouland Le Roux, with sculpture by artists of
the Michel Colombe tradition as well as those of the Italian
Renaissance.
Rouen was so active a center for glassmaking that, in 1317, Exeter
obtained windows here, as did Gloucester and Merton College, Oxford.
Next to Troyes, Rouen contained the richest collection of colored glass
in France. Until the Revolution her eighty lesser churches were filled
with it. The best windows left are six lancets in the ambulatory of the
cathedral. They belong to the XIII-century school of Chartres and are
exceptional in being the only signed windows; "Clement of Chartres" was
their maker. The first, given by a company of boatmen, relates the
legend of St. Julian Hospitator, who ferried strangers day and night
over the river, a story recounted by Gustave Flaubert, a son of
Rouen.[349] The other five lancets are of the _Biblia pauperum_ type,
teaching dogma to the people. The cold, limpid hues of the XIV century
appear in the Lady chapel, and in the chapel of St. Jeanne d'Arc is an
interesting Pentecost window of that century; contemporary are the apse
lights in the upper choir, where the unsuccessful experiment was tried
of continuing the subject from one panel to another--here the arms of
the Crucified Lord extend into the lateral lights. The cathedral's west
rose is of the XV century; in the transept is a XVI-century window
devoted to the ancient bishop Romanus. The abbatial of St. Ouen has,
with the choir of Évreux, the best array extant of XIV-century canopy
glass figures. So loath were the vitrine artists to give up an
architectural design in glass that when the XV century composed scenes
instead of single figures for each panel, even those small groups were
set in grisaille frames.
The iconoclastic 1562 worked havoc in Rouen. For twenty-four hours a
Huguenot mob wrecked tombs, altars, and windows in the cathedral, to
such an extent that it lay unused during half a year. One mourns the
loss of the cenotaph of good Charles V, made in 1369 by the same Jean de
Marville who designed the famous Dijon tomb of the king's brother. Ten
years later, in 1572, the Rouen Catholics retaliated by massacring some
eight hundred Calvinists in the city on St. Bartholomew's Day.
In the World War Rouen became almost an English city again. This time,
however, England, the ancient combatant of France, came not as a
detested invader, but as her ally in dire years of distress. It is
pleasant to learn that devotion to the Maid of Orleans was not
infrequent among the English troops of 1914-18.
JEANNE D'ARC'S TRIAL IN ROUEN[350]
De ma part, je répute son histoire un vrai miracle le Dieu. La
pudicité que je vois l'avoir accompagnée jusques à sa mort, même au
milieu des troupes; la juste querelle qu'elle prit; la prouesse
qu'elle y apporta; les heureux succès de ses affaires; la sage
simplicité que je recueille de ses réponses au interrogatoires qui
lui furent faits par les juges du tout voués à sa ruine; ses
prédictions qui, depuis, sortirent effet; la mort cruelle qu'elle
choisit dont elle se pouvoit garantir s'il y eût de la feintise en
son fait; tout cela dis-je, me fait croire (joint les voyes du ciel
quelle oyoit) que toute sa vie et histoire fut un vrai martyre de
Dieu.--Testimony of ÉTIENNE PASQUIER (1529-1615).
So swiftly followed the fruitage of the sacrifice offered up in the
Vieux-Marché on May 21, 1431, that in every part of the ancient city of
Rouen sprang up exuberant, vigorous, Flamboyant monuments. The most
momentous and the saddest happening in the history of Normandy's capital
was the burning at the stake of Jeanne la Pucelle whose relief of
Orléans, only two short years before, had saved the nation in its last
gasp.
From the church of St. Saviour on the market place they brought her the
cross for which she begged on that tragic morning, that the pillory on
which her Lord had hung might be held up before her eyes, to strengthen
her in her last hour. Long afterward, in 1450, Massieu, the
priest-sheriff of her trial, a weak man but less unsympathetic than many
in that grim gathering of rascals, testified: "The English feared her
more than the whole army of the king of France.... It was they who held
the trial and paid its costs. She was taken to the Viel-Marché, having
beside her Brother Martin and me, and accompanied by more than eight
hundred men at arms, with spears and swords. On the way she made pious
lamentation so touchingly that my companion and I could not keep back
our tears. She recommended her soul to God and the saints with such
devotion that those who heard her wept. All distressed, she exclaimed,
'Rouen, Rouen, must I die here!'"
When the Old Market was reached Jeanne heard herself sermonized as a
limb of Satan, a blasphemer guilty of diabolical malice, of pernicious
crimes, and infected with the leprosy of heresy. Her sentence read, she
fell on her knees and addressed to God prayers so ardent that even the
foreign masters of Rouen were moved. Her dear St. Michael she
petitioned, too. "As soon as the flames reached her," relates an
eyewitness, "she cried out more than six times, '_Jhésus!_' and then a
final time, in a loud voice, with her last breath, '_Jhésus!_' And her
cry was heard from end to end of the market place, and almost everyone
was weeping.... A shiver passed over the assembly.... The people pointed
at her judges and said that Jeanne was the victim of a great
injustice.... They murmured that such an evil deed should have taken
place in their city.... That evening the executioner went to the
Dominican convent and confessed in fear, 'I have burned a saint!'... The
secretary of the English king turned away from the lamentable spectacle,
muttering: 'We are lost. We have burned a saint!" Surrounded by her
brutal jailers, at dawn that May morning, Jeanne had said, with
confidence, "With God's aid, I shall be this night in His Kingdom of
Paradise." As her final cry to her Redeemer rang out, a canon of Rouen
Cathedral prayed aloud, "Would to God my soul were where I believe is
the soul of this Maid."
The young priest-secretary, the clerk of the court, Manchon, who took
down her trial (and let his irresistible admiration for her run over in
marginal notes, "_Superba responsio!_"), testified later: "Never did I
weep so much over any grief that has come to me, and for a month I could
not be appeased. I bought a little missal with the money that came to me
from the trial, that I might have cause to remember her in my prayers."
The verdict of all impartial men in Rouen, that somber May morning of
1431, was that the whole business from beginning to end had been
violence and injustice.[351]
A packed jury had judged her. The president of the tribunal, the
renegade selected to prove a saint a sorceress, was Bishop Pierre
Cauchon, driven from his see of Beauvais by loyal Frenchmen, as the
enemy of his own country. Because the see of Rouen was unoccupied, the
English preferred to hold Jeanne's trial there rather than at Paris,
where the bishop was not their creature. How abject a tool Cauchon was
is to-day shown by old receipts which prove that he was the recipient,
on each day of the trial, of a hundred _sols tournois_. For the same
ignoble reason many a learned professor "charged his soul."
There was not the faintest shadow of fair play in the process. After
Maître Jean Lohier had said to Cauchon that the proceedings were not
valid because Jeanne was allowed no counsel, nor were the hearings in
public court, and those present had not freedom to express their true
opinion, that honest Norman lawyer saw that his only safety lay in
quitting the city. "It is an affair of hate," he said to young
Secretary Manchon one day as they stood together in Rouen Cathedral.
"Deliberately they try to trap her. If only she would not say in regard
to her apparitions, 'I know for certain,' but, 'It seems to me,' I do
not see how she could be condemned."
Some canons of the cathedral who criticized the trial were thrown into
prison, and the English locked up a citizen who remarked that since
Jeanne had been judged innocent by the doctors at Poitiers, in a court
presided over by the archbishop of Rheims, a second trial was illegal.
Three of the younger judges who at first dared to give their true
opinion were berated by Cauchon, who bade them quit their ecclesiastical
quibbling and let the jurists decide the matter. The testimony of the
aged bishop of Avranches, then a resident of Rouen, was set aside
because he advised that in matters doubtful touching the faith the case
should be referred to a council or to the pope. Because Massieu, the
humble court usher, said to a townsman, "I can see nothing but goodness
and honor in her," he was threatened with a prison cell where never
again would he see sun or moon. The secretaries, Manchon and
Boisguillaume, were beaten by the English. A man on the street who spoke
well of Jeanne was chased by Lord Warwick with a drawn sword and almost
killed. Passions ran high. Lord Stafford drew his dagger on Jeanne in
her cell one day because she said that the English would be driven out
of France. Even after her execution, when a Dominican in the city spoke
kindly of her, he was flung into prison for a year.
Her judges sought to tire Jeanne out by long hours of interrogation; the
lawyers themselves came away exhausted from the sessions. Virulent
against her was Beaupère, rector of Paris University, who, when routed
by the young girl's replies, called her sly. When Cauchon wished to have
it appear that she refused to submit to the Church, he made the scribes
omit her statement that gladly she appealed to a general council or to
the pope. "Ah," cried Jeanne, "you write all that is against me, but you
do not write anything for me." The lawyers' subtle questions rained on
her thick and fast till she would call them to order with admirable
courtesy, "_Beaux seigneurs, faites l'un après l'autre_." Whenever she
wished to make no reply to a question came her concise, "_Passez
outre_." Secretary Manchon testified before an inquest, twenty years
later, "Never could Jeanne have defended herself as she did in so
difficult a cause, against so many and such learned doctors, if she had
not been inspired."
Sublime to tears are some of the answers made by this young country girl
not yet twenty, who could barely read and write, who knew only _Pater_
and _Ave_. When sheeringly asked were she in a state of grace, she
replied: "A serious question to answer. If I am, may God keep me so; if
I am not, may God put me in his grace. I would rather die than not have
God's love." Awe fell on the assemblage and for that day the session
broke up.[352]
Yet Jeanne was very human at her trial, too. It was just the
well-brought-up country maid, the Jeannette they all loved in Domrémy,
who boasted before those callous men: "For sewing and for spinning, I
fear no woman in Rouen." Those housewives of Rouen, the "little people
of the Lord," to whom Jeanne's thoughts turned in homely fashion, dared
only murmur beneath their breath that her process was "a crying
injustice," and shame it was that so evil a _cause célèbre_ should take
place in their good town. Rouen was terrorized into silence by her
foreign master.
Jeanne's five months' imprisonment and final execution at Rouen was a
political crime covered with the cloak of religious zeal by a very
genius of hypocrisy. John Plantagenet, Duke of Bedford, together with
the boy king's great-uncle, the cardinal of Winchester, were the movers
behind the scenes. Jeanne never quitted her prison in the castle built
by Philippe-Auguste--only a tower of which is extant to-day. From that
stronghold the English governed Normandy. Since the opening of the
World War an erroneous inscription, placed by partisan politicians in
the wall of the episcopal palace of Rouen, has been changed, for it
sought to convey the idea that from the prelate's court of justice
Jeanne was led forth to her death. Never did she set foot in that
officiality building; she was held from the first day to the last in an
English prison. From a dark cell in the tower fortress she was conducted
through corridors of the same castle to the hall where sat her judges.
Massieu, the usher, used to let her slip into the castle chapel for an
_Ave_ as she passed its open door, but even that solace was stopped by
Estivet. That venomous agent of Cauchon accused Jeanne of ironic replies
ill suited to a woman.[353]
Cauchon tried to coerce the young priest-secretaries of the trial,
Manchon and Boisguillaume, to falsify their notes, but they proved
incorruptible. And twenty years later they, with Massieu, became the
chief vindicators of the Maid when the inquests for her rehabilitation
were started. Jeanne had felt their unspoken sympathy. Once with
pleasant humor she told them not to ask her the same question twice or
she would pull their ears. We know from contemporaries that Jeanne's way
of intercourse was natural and friendly, _enjouée_, that her attitude
was modesty itself, that her voice had a feminine note of sweetness,
that she was strong and comely and well shaped, that her hair was dark.
Born in 1412, by the Meuse, in Domrémy, on the old Roman road from
Langres to Verdun, in French territory, on the borders of Champagne and
Lorraine, she was not yet eighteen when she crossed the ravaged land in
the winter of 1429 to rouse Charles VII, then in Chinon Castle. In March
of that year she raised the siege of Orléans; in July she witnessed the
coronation of her "_gentil dauphin_" at Rheims; in September occurred
the assault on Paris, from which siege Charles VII, counseled by
traitors, retired, and all winter Jeanne was kept in semiactivity,
though chafing to free the land from the foreign yoke. Especially she
longed to go to the aid of the besieged Mont-Saint-Michel, and to
liberate from his English prison the poet-duke of Orléans, even, she
said, if it meant going to London Tower itself. In May, 1430, she was
captured by her enemies, the Burgundians. Jeanne's active mission
covered only a year. "Several times in my presence," testified the Duke
d'Alençon,[354] her companion in arms, "Jeanne told the king she would
last but a year, and to look well that he made right use of her." But
Charles VII failed her.
After her capture Jeanne spent some months in prisons in northern
France, and finally she was sold to the English for a king's ransom.
Never in their minds was there any mistake as to who had turned the tide
against them. "They had for her a mortal hate," said, in later years,
Pierre Minier, one of the judges cowed by the Duke of Bedford; "they
thirsted to bring about her death, no matter by what means."
From December, 1430, to May, 1431, Jeanne's martyrdom at Rouen endured.
"An iron cage was made for her, and at night she was chained up,"
declared Secretary Boisguillaume, at the inquest of 1450. "She was
incarcerated in Rouen Castle; her guardians were English soldiery of the
lowest type; day and night they kept watch ... they made her the object
of their mockeries; often she reproached them for it. Her feet were held
in irons which were attached to a post." There were scenes in that dark
cell, vouched for by witnesses, which are too painful to
transcribe.[355] Only when she fell ill was the severity with which she
was treated relaxed, lest by a natural death she escape public burning.
One day Estivet so vilified her that she had a relapse of fever. Every
detail is set down in the process for her rehabilitation, for which the
Dominican Bréhal traveled from end to end of France, gathering testimony
from those who had known Jeanne. But the chief instrument of her
vindication is the word-for-word record of her trial at Rouen in 1431.
Not in all history is there a more personal and appealing document. One
can hear Jeanne's very accent in her valiant replies to her tormentors.
"_Répondes hardiment_," her voices admonished her.
Why did Charles VII, who, before Jeanne appeared, was about to pass into
foreign exile, strike no blow to rescue her who had given him back his
kingdom? A difficult question to answer. Charles was no hero, though his
quality of perseverance was ultimately to make him the instrument that
ended the centuries-old Capet-Plantagenet duel. Charles was surrounded
by counselors who were jealous of Jeanne's leadership, who represented
her captivity as the result of her headstrong character.
In 1449 Charles, _le bien servi_, but not the duly grateful, entered
Rouen "in triumph and magnificence as never king in city." Bells rang
out and children cried, "_Noël!_" in welcome. In the cathedral the
festal throng gathered. Beside the king stood Jacques Coeur, the
merchant-prince, who had provided the funds for the reconquest of
Normandy, and whose splendor of apparel on this triumphal entry was so
to excite the barons' envy that within four years their machinations had
him impeached, despoiled, and banished. He who was building at Bourges
the finest bourgeois mansion in France, must have observed with interest
the host of Flamboyant monuments then arising in Rouen. With Charles VII
came, too, his commander in chief, the great Dunois, who had fought with
Jeanne, the half brother of the Duke of Orléans, who that day was
singing:
"Resjoys-toy, franc royaume de France!
À présent Dieu pour toy se combat."
When Normandy was again French, not many years were to pass before Rouen
exonerated herself of the crime of Jeanne's execution. The chief mover
of the rehabilitation was the archbishop of the city, the Norman,
Guillaume d'Estouteville, son of the hero who in 1415 held Harfleur
against the entire army of Henry V, brother of the knight who led the
defense of Mont-Saint-Michel, and nephew of Archbishop d'Harcourt, who
gave up his see of Rouen to live in exile, rather than swear fealty to a
non-French master. Cardinal d'Estouteville saw the propriety of clearing
not only Normandy but France and the Church of what had been the
political crime of foreigners. Through his efforts Pope Calixtus III, in
1456, revoked the legal decision of 1431, as "iniquitous, malicious,
calumnious, and fraudulent." The unworthy Cauchon was excommunicated. A
formal reading of the sentence of rehabilitation took place in the big
hall of Rouen's episcopal palace: "Considering the quality of the judges
and of those who directed the trial, considering that her abjuration was
extorted by fraud and violence, in presence of the executioner and under
threat of fire, without the accused understanding its full content and
terms, considering finally that the crimes charged against her are not
proven whatsoever by the process"--thus runs the decree declaring
Jeanne's two sentences of condemnation in 1431 to be the work of
iniquity. It was ordered that the rehabilitation be read publicly, not
alone in Rouen, but in all the chief towns of France.
Rouen celebrated with gladness the justice rendered to the Maid who had
saved France in her darkest hour. A solemn procession, in which marched
Jeanne's brothers, who had been ennobled by the king, proceeded to the
graveyard beside St. Ouen's abbatial, where, twenty-five years earlier,
Jeanne had sat alone on a platform above the crowd, just a week before
her execution. They had there read to her the twelve
accusations--dubbing her witch and wanton--which a doctor of Paris
University had drawn up, and then a preacher thundered in vituperation.
Jeanne listened gently till she heard Charles VII abused, whereupon she,
who had the mystic cult of royalty, lifted up her head bravely: "By my
faith, sire," she cried, "my king is a noble Christian. Say what you
will of me, but leave my king alone." "Hush her up!" angrily cried
Cauchon.
In that cemetery of St. Ouen occurred what now is called proper
self-defense on Jeanne's part. She could write her name, but with a
smile she signed with a circle, emblem of mockery, and a cross, meaning
negation. She hoped to be transferred to the prisons of the Church,
where she clamored to be placed. Jeanne signed a paper consisting of
seven lines, and afterward they produced an abjuration of fifty lines.
Her judge might be a bishop, but never once did she confuse the Church
she revered and the unworthy clerics who sat in judgment on her. During
the ceremonies of the rehabilitation at Rouen, a great procession
marched to the Old Market where had stood Jeanne's funeral pyre, and
with solemnity the twelve accusations against her were torn into shreds
and burned. Rouen felt happier after rendering that justice, and her
renewed self-respect found natural expression in her Flamboyant Gothic
monuments.
However, many a long year was to go by before France fully comprehended
the martyr of Rouen. Voltaire libeled Jeanne as vilely as the XV-century
savants of Paris University. The rationalists of a later day have
patronized her as self-hallucinated. But the tide has mounted. "The day
that all the bells of the world ring in honor of Jeanne d'Arc, they will
sound abroad the glory of France," said Leo XIII, in 1896. The Maid of
Domrémy-on-the-Meuse was declared Venerable in 1904, Blessed in 1909,
and canonized a saint in 1920. _St. Jeanne d'Arc, ora pro nobis!_
THE CATHEDRAL OF LISIEUX[356]
One must live as one thinks, or else, sooner or later, one finishes
by thinking as one lives.--PAUL BOURGET.
Lisieux Cathedral is, with that of Rouen, the least Norman in the
province. It claims to be the first built of the Gothic cathedrals of
Normandy and the most vigorous. The preceding Romanesque cathedral was
grievously damaged by fire in 1136. Arnoul, a prelate who had gone
through the disillusioning experience of the Second Crusade, began the
present church. Similarities between it and Laon Cathedral, and various
other indications, prove that it was building from 1160 to 1190.
Bishop Arnoul, of a line of shrewd Norman diplomatists, profited
materially by his ability to keep on good terms with both husbands of
Aliénor of Aquitaine, Henry of England, and Louis of France. In Lisieux
Cathedral he married Aliénor to Henry II, which act was to take three
hundred years of war and Jeanne's sacrifice to undo. Arnoul was the
English king's chief adviser before Becket's ascendancy. It is said that
he counseled Henry, after his first quarrel with Becket, to detach one
by one the English bishops from their primate, which policy of _divide
et impera_ came only too easily to an Angevin-Anglo-Norman. Four times
did Bishop Arnoul journey to Sens to negotiate for Henry with the pope,
during the Becket controversy. Some of the leading men of his day
admired the prelate of Lisieux; but soundly honest men such as Abbot
Robert de Torigny of the Mount, and the bishop of Chartres, John of
Salisbury, distrusted him entirely--the latter remarked on his political
sense in bestowing benefits when he wished to convince a man of his
point of view.
Under Bishop Arnoul the nave of Lisieux rose in one campaign, a monument
severe and pure, fog-colored like the wintry sky over it, say the
townsmen. A note of force is imparted by the sturdy cylindrical piers.
There is a narthex bay at the western end--a Germanic influence. No
trace of vaulting shows in the deep gallery over the aisles, though the
triforium arches that open on the central vessel are better suited for a
tribune than a blind arcade. Behind that arcade now stands a poorly
constructed wall opened here and there by doors, reminding us that once
it was the custom for crusaders to store their valuables in the upper
galleries of cathedrals.
Some have suggested that Guillaume de Sens was the architect of Lisieux,
whose resemblances with his known works at Sens and Canterbury are
discernible. Lisieux adhered to the Romanesque tradition of salient
transept arms; that to the north lacks a portal; that to the south is an
excellent example of plainest Primary Gothic. The transept has an
eastern aisle, an arrangement found at Durham, Lincoln, Salisbury, and
Peterborough. The first two bays of the choir were built, like the nave,
in the XII century; the birth of the apse is marked by a staircase, as
at Caen, Boscherville, Fécamp, and Eu.
The ample central tower of Lisieux, not in the first plan, was erected
as the choir was gradually extended. In the later-constructed straight
bays of the choir, and at the apse, finished under Bishop Jourdain du
Hommet, no annulets broke the ascending line of the clustered shafts,
quatrefoils were cut in the spandrels, and more and more the structure
took on regional characteristics. Arches were set under arches, some of
them being acutely pointed, because the Norman preferred to use the same
opening of the compass for all his arches, wide or narrow. It gave his
eye pleasure to multiply molds, and his sense of exactitude craved a
support for every roll molding. Lisieux' choir, however, avoided what
was to become an excessive complication of parts in the Anglo-Norman
school. The cathedral is essentially vigorous and severe.
In 1226 a fire necessitated repairs, and Bishop Guillaume de
Pont-de-l'Arche took the opportunity to make three ambulatory chapels.
He built the façade towers whose lower walls retained Romanesque parts
of the XI century. When the southwest tower fell in 1553 it was replaced
by one of pre-Gothic design. The northwest belfry had as prototype the
famous one of St. Pierre at Caen. The axis chapel--longer than the
XIII-century one it replaced--is a gem of Flamboyant art. On its walls
are some small funereal bas-reliefs erected by the cathedral canons.
The builder of Lisieux' Lady chapel was Pierre Cauchon, president of the
tribunal that sentenced Jeanne d'Arc to death. He did not erect his
chapel, as some intimate, in expiation of his conduct at Rouen in 1431,
for he remained to the end the creature of his country's invaders. His
detestation of Jeanne, moreover, was a personal affair, since it had
been her triumph at Orléans, creating a national hope, that put heart
into the citizens of Beauvais to expel their pro-English bishop. The
English sent him to buy Jeanne from her captors. After the happenings in
St. Ouen's cemetery, by law Jeanne should have been passed into the
control of the Church, but Cauchon ordered her back to her English
prison, and when she again donned male attire, and again asserted that
she had heard her voices, her unscrupulous enemies were enabled to
accuse her of being a relapsed heretic and wanton, to start a new trial,
and condemn her to death. Cauchon himself hastened to the fortress to
witness Jeanne's "relapse," and with Lord Warwick he is said to have
chuckled over it--"This time she's well caught!" The morning that Jeanne
was led to her execution she faced Cauchon fearlessly: "Bishop, I die by
your hand. Had I been placed in the prisons of the Church, this would
never have happened. You have left me in the clutches of my enemies. I
call you before God, the great judge, to answer for the wrong you have
done me." Even as she so spoke a spirited statue now represents Jeanne
in Cauchon's Norman cathedral, while her judge is a condemned felon
before the bar of history.
Like Arnoul, builder of Lisieux' nave, Cauchon knew how to act a better
part. As rector of Paris University he had been esteemed for his
learning. But, coming to the parting of the ways, he chose the broad and
easy path, and the rest followed. His influence encouraged the
University of Paris in its pernicious betrayal of France after Henry V's
invasion. Cauchon won the see of Beauvais by defending Jean Sans Peur of
Burgundy, in 1407, when the latter had murdered his cousin, the Duke of
Orléans,[357] in the streets of Paris. And in the same hour that he thus
truckled for advancement, Jean Gerson, the chancellor of Paris
University, denounced the ducal crime--destined to be for France of
incalculable consequence--and had his house sacked by Burgundians.
Ten years later, at the Council of Constances, in Switzerland Cauchon
upheld the murderer, and Gerson rebuked the crime, whereupon he felt it
to be wiser to quit Constances in disguise and to pass his latter life
in retirement. Cauchon became the butcher of Jeanne d'Arc, his name
forever an infamy; Gerson, dying in poverty and defeat at Lyons, was
thought worthy, during two centuries, to be called the author of the
_Imitation of Christ_, and before he passed away in July, 1429, it was
given to him to learn that the Maid had triumphed at Orléans, and to
testify that her mission was of God: _Gratia Dei estensa est in hac
puella; a Domino factum est istud_.
Cauchon, ex-bishop of Beauvais, having placed his learning and energies
at the service of his country's invaders, ambitiously hoped to obtain
Rouen as his thirty pieces of silver, but the Duke of Bedford
compromised matters by bestowing on him the lesser see of Lisieux, in
1432. As the national cause prospered the traitor was more and more
detested by the populace. When the Burgundian partisans of the English
were expelled from Paris, the properties of the bishop of Lisieux in the
capital were seized and he himself was mobbed. In 1442 he fell dead
suddenly one day while his barber was shaving him. A few years later,
when Jeanne was rehabilitated and her judge excommunicated, the populace
broke open Cauchon's tomb in the cathedral and flung his bones into the
mire. His successor at Lisieux, Bishop Pasquier de Vaux, also one of
Jeanne's faithless judges, died alone, deserted, on the day that the
French army entered his city as victors, in 1449. The after history of
Lisieux Cathedral followed the same course as others in France; 1562 and
1793 wrecked its monuments and smashed its stained glass. In the
Flamboyant Gothic church of St. Jacques--where not a capital breaks the
ascending line--are some XVI-century windows, making it the first church
with such remaining.
Lisieux can boast of no bishop canonized by the Church, but her citizens
are doing all in their power to let Christendom know of the gentle
Norman girl, Thérèse Martin, the "Little Flower," who died in the odor
of sanctity (1897) in the Carmelite convent of the town, before she had
reached her twenty-fifth year. Her extraordinary cult, especially among
soldiers during the World War, proves that the thirst for sainthood is
as strong as ever in the peoples who went crusading and flung themselves
toward heaven in cathedrals. Art springs from emotions such as that felt
by Frenchmen for the "Little Flower." To ignore such manifestations, as
do the rationalists who still are insisting, as dogmatically as before
1914, that France, at root, is the land of Voltaire, is a willful
shutting of the eyes to the basic forces that make history.
Those good people of Lisieux who are mystic-minded, who _believe in
order that they may understand_, as Anselm taught at Bec near by, as
Plato taught in Greece, feel subconsciously that their "Little Flower,"
who said that only after her death would begin her real mission, is
atoning for Pierre Cauchon.[358]
THE CATHEDRAL OF ÉVREUX[359]
Il en coûte cher pour devenir la France. Nous nous plaignons, et
non sans droit, de nos épreuves et de nos mécomptes. Nos pères
n'ont pas vécu plus doucement que nous, ni recueilli plus tôt et à
meilleur marché les fruits de leurs travaux. Il y a dans le
spectacle de leurs destinées de quoi s'attrister et se fortifier à
la fois. L'histoire abat les prétentions impatientes et soutient
les longues espérances.--GUIZOT.
The cathedral of Évreux is not homogeneous like that of Lisieux, but,
gathering of different styles though it is, Romanesque, Gothic, early
and late, neo-classic, it possesses its own distinct personality. A
church of whose choir it has been said by one so competent to compare
the cathedrals of his native land as M. Louis Gonse, that it is "one of
the fairest bits of Gothic architecture in France," surely can hold its
own among more brilliant companions.
Two Romanesque edifices stood in succession on the site, not to speak of
the Merovingian and Carolingian cathedrals here. Évreux is the _Evora_
of Gallo-Roman times when it was ranked with Rouen and Tours. St.
Patrick came hither in 432 for his consecration as bishop before his
apostolate to Ireland. The first of the Romanesque cathedrals was
dedicated in 1072 by Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury, but in 1119,
when Henry I of England was besieging the city, it was destroyed for
strategic purposes, by consent of its bishop, who was in the king's
camp. Henry and all his barons gave generous compensation, we are told
by Ordericus Vitalis, the English monk who spent most of his life in the
Norman monastery of St. Évroult, "delighting in obedience and poverty,"
writing a history which is the chief XII-century record of the duchy.
The second Romanesque cathedral was begun in 1126. To it belonged the
pier arcade of the present nave and the entire westernmost bay, as well
as portions of the façade towers. At one time it was thought that the
arches adjacent to the transept were part of the earlier church blessed
by Lanfranc, inasmuch as they differ from the profiles of the other pier
arches. Further study has demonstrated, however, that the entire arcade
belongs to the XII century, since it was not the usage, before 1120, to
flank a pier's four faces by columns, as was done here throughout.
The second Romanesque cathedral of Évreux was also destined to be of
short duration. In 1194, Philippe-Auguste laid the city in ashes as
chastisement for John Lackland's black deed. John had allowed a French
garrison into Évreux during his intrigues with the French king, while
Richard the Lion-hearted was on his crusade. When word came that his
brother was returning to his possessions, John, hoping to placate him
for his own treachery, invited the French garrison of three hundred to a
feast and, it is said, foully murdered them all. The bishop of Évreux
had accompanied Richard Coeur-de-Lion to the East and in Cyprus had
crowned his bride, Berengaria of Navarre. In the course of time the
counts of Évreux became kings of Navarre, through the marriage of
Berengaria's sister to the Count of Champagne.[360] The niece of Richard
and John, Blanche of Castile, brought in her dowry Évreux to the French
Crown, when she married (1200) the son of that wily augmenter,
Philippe-Auguste.
The renewal of the cathedral as Gothic proceeded slowly. By 1230 the
nave had merely reached the triforium level. A horizontal sculptured
band, such as surmounts it, was not used after that date. The clearstory
of the nave is contemporary with the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, and when
Louis IX came to his mother's dower city, in 1259, for the consecration
of its bishop, who was his personal friend, he and the group of
building-prelates with him, from Rheims, Rouen, Coutances, and Séez,
must have discussed the new works at Évreux with interest. The choir of
the cathedral was not undertaken till the close of the century. From
1298 to 1310 it was built in a Rayonnant style fully as advanced as the
later abbatial of St. Ouen, at Rouen, with glazed triforium, capitals
that are slight bands of foliage, and precocious prismatic profiles. The
only distinctly Norman trait is the balustrade of the triforium. As the
choir was made fifteen feet wider than the nave, its westernmost bay was
canted to join the transept, but the effect is not displeasing.
The Hundred Years' War caused a cessation of works at Évreux. Dire years
were they for the city ruled by Charles le Mauvais, a "demon of
France," "perfidy in person." He plotted ceaselessly against the
national party, not because he leaned to the English side, but that he
was obsessed by his own superior claims to the French crown, being by
both father and mother directly of St. Louis' line. His high
abilities--and he was learned, eloquent, and handsome--were wasted in
mischief making. In 1365 he gave up his city of Évreux to the flames.
Charles the Wicked is pictured in the cathedral's clearstory windows, in
the fourth on the north side of the choir, and across the sanctuary from
him, in another light, is his wife, a Valois, sister of the French king,
Charles V, and his art-loving brothers at Dijon, Angers, and Bourges.
She possessed Mantes by her dower right, and added to its collegiate
church the Rayonnant chapel of Navarre, in which are portrait statuettes
representing her daughters. Her four brothers, says M. Anthyme
Saint-Paul, were the paramount influences in the formation of French
Flamboyant Gothic, from 1365 to 1415.
The best array of XIV-century glass[361] in France is that of the choir
of Évreux. The windows are not forceful, like XIII-century
medallion-mosaics, any more than the Rayonnant stonework framing them
resembles hardy Apogee Gothic. The hues, while limpid and pleasing, show
none of the lovely half-tones which the Flamboyant-Renaissance day was
to achieve. Large plates of glass were employed in order that fewer
leads might darken the window. White was overused, as well as the
recently discovered yellow, called silver-stain, obtained by fusing the
surface of white glass with a solution of silver. Pot-metal glass--that
colored in the mass--had hitherto been used exclusively. Effective
backgrounds were obtained by damasked patterns. In each panel was a
single figure in an architectural setting of grisaille and
silver-stain, which frames grew so elaborate, by the middle of the
century, that perspective was represented.
The earliest example of a canopy type of window is in Évreux' upper
choir--the third light on the north side. It was the gift of the _grand
queux_, or cook, of France, Guillaume d'Harcourt, who died in 1327. The
two windows presented by the bishop of Évreux, Bernard Cariti (1376-83),
show progress in architectural backgrounds, and the donor is drawn from
life. In the canted bay of the choir (north) is a XV-century window of
the Saintes Maries, whose alleged relics were given to the bishop here
by good King René of Anjou. The window commemorates Normandy's newly
acquired freedom, hence its portraits of Charles VII, his son, the
future Louis XI, and the seneschal of Normandy, Pierre de Brézé. It is
also a memorial of the Great Schism of the West, ended by the Council of
Constance, at which the bishop of Évreux was present. Foliate designs
cover the grisaille lights of the triforium. The quarries (white,
parallel pieces of glass framed together in a lead pattern) are
enlivened by strips of colored glass and heraldic ornament.
Louis XI built the Lady chapel of Évreux, in whose windows he depicted
his coronation. In the lily-petals formed by the Flamboyant tracery of
the mullions are pictured the barons who attended the king's investing.
Instead of the single figures in each panel, hitherto popular, small
groups were now set under the vitrine canopies, and subjects heretofore
unknown in western iconography appeared, such as the Transfiguration,
the Woman of Samaria, the Marriage at Cana. They were pictured just as
the mystery plays of the day presented them on the stage. In the Tree of
Jesse, at the end of the chapel, the new process of abrasion was
employed, by which the color of flashed glass was ground away in places,
and on the white surfaces thus exposed were enameled new colors, so that
one piece of glass could exhibit a variety of hues. These windows of
Évreux' Lady chapel belong to the transition hour between the earlier
tradition that treated a window as an adjunct of the architecture, and
the later tradition that composed a window as an independent painted
picture.[362]
When, in 1441, Évreux opened its gates joyously to the national troops,
new works were begun in the cathedral. The actual Flamboyant transept
was substituted for a decrepit Romanesque structure, whose ground plan
it followed, hence it is too narrow for its height; seen from the
interior of the church, the octagonal lantern appears cramped. The
lacework stone spire of the crossing was one of the first in the region.
For sixty years during the XVI century two prelates of the prominent
Tillières family held the see; to Ambrose le Veneur is due the
superlatively ornate Flamboyant north front of the transept, an
unanswerable proof that if Gothic art was soon to end it was not of
inanition it expired. To put the northern flank of his church in accord
with the façade's festival of lace stone he re-dressed the chapels along
nave and choir. His nephew, Bishop Gabriel le Veneur, undertook to
remake the west frontispiece in a style so neo-classic that M. Léon
Palustre, the historian of the Renaissance, exclaimed, "_Pour cette fois
le moyen âge est bien fini!_" And yet only thirty years separated the
façades of uncle and nephew. The southwest tower has been left
uncrowned; that to the northwest is an imposing heavy mass in which is
the sonorous bell of Évreux, called Gros-Pierre.
THE CATHEDRAL OF SÉEZ[363]
Il y a plus d'une sorte de chevalerie, et les grands coups de lance
ne sont pas de rigueur. À défaut d'épée, nous avons la plume; à
défaut de plume, la parole; à défaut de parole, l'honneur de notre
vie.--LÉON GAUTIER, _La Chevalerie_.
"Prudent, modest, and gracious," reads the epitaph of Bishop Jean de
Bernières, who, having in large part built the choir of Séez Cathedral,
impressing on it his personal qualities, departed this life on Holy
Thursday of 1292. Séez has been called a little sister of Chartres. It
is well set, but of unpretentious dimensions. Its twin spire-crowned
western towers will be improved when the masses of masonry now propping
them are removed. The interior is white and clean, almost to prudery,
which may be due to the renewal of choir and transept in modern times.
Never from its inception have restorations ceased in this church. Not
that Séez overstepped the possibilities of Gothic equilibrium, but it
made incautious use of the calcined foundations of the Romanesque
cathedral to which it succeeded. That earlier church had been erected by
Bishop Yves de Bellême after two cathedrals had been wiped out by the
Norse invasions. Brigands had nested beside his church, and in seeking
to dislodge them he had set fire to his own sanctuary, for which act he
was rebuked by Leo IX at the Council of Rheims in 1049. He took as his
penance the replacing of the cathedral at his own expense, and since he
was connected with the rich Norman princes of Italy funds soon poured
in. The edifice he erected was destroyed in the unceasing petty wars
waged against each other by the husbands of Aliéner of Aquitaine.
The nave of the actual cathedral, the part first undertaken, rose from
1220 to 1240 under Bishop Gervais, a member of the Order of Prémontré.
After the pause of a generation, its upper vaulting was constructed. All
the traits loved by the Norman are here; friezes below triforium and
clearstory, balustrades, sharp twin lancets under equilateral arches,
multiple ridges and multiple supports, circular capitals and bases,
interior passageways contrived skillfully. Subdivision and
multiplication of parts reign supreme; merely for the pleasure it gave
his eye the Norman increased the molds of his archivolts. There are
diagonals here of so generous a profile that little vault-web shows. The
Norman was partial to shadow decoration. He covered his walls with holes
cut into foiled shapes which lent themselves to ever-changing contrasts
of light and shade. In each spandrel of the main arcade is cut an
elaborate rosette before which stands the shaft that mounts to the
vault-springing. No Ile-de-France architect had thus obstructed his
pierced ornament.
The choir of Séez was begun soon after the nave, but about 1270 was
entirely reconstructed as a Rayonnant vessel, designed audaciously to
weigh as little as possible on defective foundations. The sanctuary was
raised above the ambulatory, with no screen between. The capitals were
slight. Here again appeared a trait of Norman redundancy--rain-guards or
weather-drips over the main arches and the wall arcading; an
Ile-de-France master had relegated such crocketed gables where they
belong--to the exterior walls of a church.
Like Évreux, Séez Cathedral possesses a uniform array of XIV-century
glass. Above and below the canopied figures in the clearstory lights are
panels of grisaille. The triforium was among the first to become one
composition with the upper windows, by means of stone mullions; its
quarry designs are bordered with strips of colored glass. The transept,
built from 1290 to 1330, has in its side walls excellent images of the
prophets. Its roses are linked by mullions with the row of windows
below; the north rose traces a star with rays. In 1373 a fire damaged
the edifice, and its reconstruction continued through the foreign wars.
The Bishop of Séez, Robert de Rouvre, proved loyal to the national cause
and quitted his city for the wandering court of Charles VII, rather than
take oath to Henry V. This patriotic Norman prelate knew Jeanne d'Arc,
not at her trial at Rouen, but in her triumphal hour of the coronation
at Rheims.
The cathedral of Séez was twice pillaged during the religious wars. The
Huguenots tore the lead from the roofs, and piled the art treasures in
the aisles for bonfires. One doubly regrets the loss of the nave's
windows which would have completed the coherent scheme of color
decoration that distinguishes the church. Séez was neglected for
centuries, its decrepitude becoming such that the priests at its altars
were inconvenienced by wind and rain, and not so inconsequent, after
all, then seemed the interior weather-guards. The much criticized
restoration of M. Ruprich-Robert was a necessity, even though it may
have been too radical.
Of the six Norman cathedrals, that of Séez is the least known, yet it
lies but a few miles beyond Falaise, visited by most travelers in
Normandy. In the streets of the Conqueror's birthplace they still sing,
"_Vive le fils d'Ariette, Normans, vive le fils d'Arlette!_" A statue of
William faces the Trinité in which parish he was baptized (1027). The
XIII century built the Trinité's transept, the XVI century its choir
(beneath which passes a street), and the Renaissance appears in a porch
of faultless taste.[364] The donjon of the castle belongs to the XII
century, though the guides will point out a window whence Duke Robert
the Magnificent first beheld the maid Arlette.
THE CATHEDRAL OF BAYEUX[365]
Mais c'est toujours la France, ou petite ou plus grande
Le pays des beaux blés et des encadrements,
Le pays de la grappe et des ruisslements,
Le pays de genêts, de bruyère, de lande.
--CHARLES PÉGUY.
In the cathedrals of Rouen, Lisieux, and Évreux, the Norman traits are
subordinate to those of the Ile-de-France; at Séez all is Norman, and
altogether Norman, too, are Bayeux and Coutances, the gems of the
duchy's Gothic school. The cathedral of Bayeux stands on the site of one
burned in 1046. After that fire Bishop Hugues began a Romanesque
cathedral which was continued by his successor, Odo de Conteville, a
half brother of the Conqueror. The fair Arlette, the tanner's daughter
of Falaise, after the death of Duke Robert the Magnificent, was joined
in lawful wedlock with a Norman baron. Her son, Odo, without the
slightest vocation, was made a bishop at seventeen--precisely the feudal
debasing of the priesthood which Gregory VII was combating. At the
battle of Hastings, when he had blessed the troops, he sprang to his
charger and led the cavalry. A XII-century canon of Bayeux, Robert Wace,
in his rimed history of the Norman dukes, the _Roman de Rou_, tells how,
at Hastings, the Norman minstrel, Taillefer, "famed for song, mounted on
a charger strong, rode on before, awhile he sang of Roland and of
Charlemagne, Oliver and the vassals all, who fell in fight at
Roncevals."
As governor of Kent, Bishop Odo deepened, by his injustices, the hate of
the dispossessed Anglo-Saxons for their new masters. On an excursion
against Durham he so harried the countryside that it lay waste for a
hundred years. When to his misgovernment was added the folly of
grandeur--for this unbalanced feudal bully intrigued to wear the papal
tiara, to succeed to the great-hearted champion against iniquity,
Gregory VII--his brother, William, thought it best to shut him up. From
1047 to 1096 Odo held the see of Bayeux. The Romanesque cathedral which
he completed was blessed in the presence of William the Conqueror and
Matilda, in 1077, on which occasion the bishop presented to his church a
candelabrum such as can be seen at Hildersheim. Bayeux' crown of light
hung from the high vaults until wrecked by the Calvinists in 1562.
Of the cathedral built by this anomalous prelate very little remains.
The crypt is of his time, parts of the outer walls, and the body of the
west towers in their lower halls; their upper stories were re-dressed
later. The crypt was forgotten till 1412, when, in digging for a certain
bishop's tomb they unearthed it. Odo's cathedral was in part destroyed
in 1106 when Bayeux was besieged and burned by Henry I of England.
Another fire in 1160 made rebuilding imperative, and even before the
latter disaster Bishop Philippe d'Harcourt (1142-62) had begun a new
Romanesque church. To it belonged the core of the actual
transept-crossing's piers and the lower part of the nave, which is
considered the richest Romanesque[366] work extant. The flat wall above
the pier arcade is covered with geometric designs, interlacings, and
chevrons. The curious carved disks, in the spandrels of the arches,
represent Oriental animals and the grotesques that are to be found in
Celtic illuminations. Some have thought that the exotic sculptures of
Bayeux derived directly from an ivory coffer, of the IV-century Hegira,
brought home by crusaders for the treasury of their cathedral. Oriental
Byzantium was their common origin.
[Illustration: _The Choir of Bayeaux Cathedral (1210-1260). Typical of
Normandy's Elaborate Gothic_.]
The choir of Bayeux is a masterpiece of Norman Gothic erected by Robert
des Ablêges (1206-31), who died a crusader, and by the two successive
bishops. In the nave those prelates surmounted the Romanesque lower
walls with Gothic windows and vaulting; a balustrade marks the division
between the dissimilar parts. They reinforced the façade towers, and
made five western doorways--although the church behind possessed only
three aisles.
The student who would comprehend at a glance the difference between the
æsthetic equipoise of the Ile-de-France and the sumptuous Gothic of
Normandy can do nothing better than to place side by side the pictures
of Bayeux' choir and the curving transept end of Soissons. Those whose
taste has been formed by English minsters may prefer Bayeux, those whose
loiterings have made them familiar with the cradle-land of the national
art of France will find their ideal in the classic restraint of
Soissons. Scarcely a square foot of Bayeux' choir is unadorned. Each
spandrel is pierced by trefoils and quatrefoils, and at the apse the
triforium spandrels are entirely covered with foliage. There are acutely
pointed arches, and arches under arches. Mold has been added to mold,
and each roll molding has its own colonnette. There are carved friezes
at different levels, and the horizontal line is still further
accentuated by balustrades. At the sanctuary curve double pillars stand
one behind the other. Even the vault web is decorated with the portraits
of bishops. As the choir surmounts Odo de Conteville's crypt it is
raised above the procession path. Some of its side chapels open, one on
the other, above a dividing wall, as in the Gothic choir of the
Abbaye-aux-Hommes at Caen, an arrangement repeated with beautiful effect
at Coutances. At the birth of the apse are turrets; there are corner
towerettes with staircases on each of the western belfries.
The Norman façade, as a rule, is very plain, lacking rose window and
galleries, and with undeveloped portals. Two marked stories usually
divide it--that of the entranceway and the big window story over it.
Often the towers are disengaged awkwardly from the massive, nor is the
transition from shaft to pyramid accomplished with subtlety. Yet the
Norman church has great compensations to offer. Few edifices in the
classic region of the Oise, Seine, and Marne present a more complete
exterior than this chief church of Bayeux that stands so proudly over
the flat little city, unencumbered by houses, raised on a dignified
platform where the ground slopes to the east.
The cathedral's transept is Rayonnant Gothic of the XIV century, in
which day were added the various side chapels whose tracery is
geometric. When Jeanne d'Arc had given France a new soul, Bayeux raised
its lordly central tower "to praise God in the sky." It was undertaken
by a wealthy prelate, Louis d'Harcourt (d. 1479), of the same family as
the bishop who had built the Romanesque wall of the nave. He planted his
Flamboyant octagon on the square XIII-century lantern, but the actual
top story of the transept-crossing tower is modern. Bayeux almost lost
her notable beacon in the XIX century, when fissures appeared, and a
zealous restorer thought to demolish it whereas all that was needed was
consolidation. The ancient Romanesque piers at the four corners of the
_croisée_ were found incased in XIII-century masonry.
Opposite the cathedral in the town library is an invaluable historical
document, the Bayeux Tapestry,[367] the oldest extant large amount of
the art of design in the mediæval centuries. Many a vicissitude it has
had: lost from view till Montfaucon, the learned Benedictine of St.
Maur's reform, unearthed it in 1720, and again, during the Revolution's
disorders, used as covering for ammunition carts till an enlightened
citizen redeemed it. Originally it comprised one seamless piece, just
sufficient to encircle the nave of Bayeux Cathedral, for which,
indubitably, it was made. Every summer solstice, on the dedication day
of Odo's church, it adorned the cathedral, "the toilet of St. John," it
was named, a very simple toilet, for, though called a tapestry, it is
really a drab linen band twenty inches wide, two hundred and thirty feet
long, with the design alone worked in worsted of eight colors.
The scheme is the perjury of Harold and its punishment, hence its
suitableness as an embroidery for a church. It begins with Harold and
ends with his death at Hastings. His oath of allegiance to William,
given at Bayeux, is pictured. Odo is shown saving the Normans from
retreat at the battle of Hastings. Some have thought he would not have
dared to glorify himself till after the death of his brother, William.
The tapestry was made, probably, from 1067 to 1077, immediately
following the successful conquest of England, and is a contemporary,
therefore, of the _Chanson de Roland_, composed by a Norman anterior to
the First Crusade. The embroidery was done before 1085, since the
Conqueror's seals of that date show armor similar to that pictured in
the canvas; the sequence of the scenes indicates they are subsequent to
Wace's poem (c. 1160).
Critics have thought, from the inscriptions, that Anglo-Saxons made the
tapestry. It is known that the textile art flourished in Kent, the
province ruled by Odo; in Normandy, too, the industry was popular. M.
Levé, in the most recent monograph of this precious legacy from the
past, contends that a Norman who was favorable to William the Conqueror
made it, and that the popular attribution to Queen Matilda is not
unlikely. She may have had the work done as a gift for Bayeux Cathedral
while Odo was still in royal favor. The war-like bishop died as a
crusader journeying East, and lies buried in Palermo Cathedral. The
people despised Odo, and would openly mock as he passed, "Fie on the
bishop who married adulterous King Philip to adulterous Bertrada de
Montfort."
A century after Harold's oath to Duke William, in Bayeux, and in the
same hunting-seat, at Bures, near the city, occurred a scene of passion
whose consequences were momentous. Bishop Henri de Beaumont was at work
on the cathedral's transept and upper nave when Henry II came to Bayeux
to spend the Christmas season of 1170. For seven years western
Christendom had watched his feud with the exiled primate of Canterbury.
The lesser people of France and England considered that the prelate
defended their liberties by his defense of church liberty. For how, they
asked, can a churchman rebuke lay injustices if he owes his position to
the very culprits he should censure?
A pretense of reconciliation between Henry and his whilom intimate had
recently been brought about. Becket felt its hollowness, since none knew
better than he that the Angevin monarch's besetting sin was duplicity
and a merciless vindictiveness when his will was successfully crossed.
As he parted with the king he had looked steadily at him, saying, with
meaning: "I think I shall never see you again," and Henry Plantagenet
had cried, vehemently, "Do you take me for a traitor?" Soon after word
was brought to the king that Becket, newly arrived in England, was again
stirring up difficulties. Henry flew into one of his madman passions
hereditary in his blood from Fulk Nerra, from the Conqueror, too;
frenzied words broke from him, their purport being the upbraiding of his
followers that he lacked a friend to rid him of this upstart priest.
Immediately four of his courtiers started for England, and as December
of 1170 closed, Canterbury Cathedral was the scene of a bloody
assassination.
Becket dead was more formidable than Becket alive. Frightened by the
indignation roused by the murder, Henry conceded what the primate had
contended for. The Canterbury martyr became a frequent theme with the
mediæval artist. At Coutances, Chartres, Angers, and Sens are medallion
windows that relate his story. Twice he is honored in Bayeux Cathedral,
in the sculpture of the southern portal and in a window of the transept.
The popular voice of Europe canonized St. Thomas, and his grave at
Canterbury became the loadstone of an international pilgrimage. The
XIV-century poet has related how Merrie England rode down to Kent in the
first spring days, when that Aprille with his shoures sweet hath pierced
to the root the drought of Marche, and with the new-liveried year the
_wanderlust_ awakes:
Then longen folk to goon on pilgrimages ...
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Englelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.[368]
THE CATHEDRAL OF COUTANCES[369]
Art is the stammering of man driven from his terrestrial Paradise
but not yet arrived at the heavenly Paradise. Ever has he recalled,
ever will he recall, the lost beauty. He is fallen: beauty's
sanctuary is shut to him, but the exile traces a sketch of his
original home in the strange land where he finds himself. Does not
art fill in the intellectual life the same place that hope does in
the moral? Art is man's trial to embody his ideals, it is a
presentiment and a souvenir.--ERNEST HELLO, _Philosophie et
Athéisme_.
If the exterior aspect of Bayeux is admirable, that of Coutances
Cathedral is superb. The high hill of the town is its pedestal. Few
architectural views in France are finer than the silhouette of Coutances
against the sky. And when its crowning cathedral is seen rising from a
mist, it appears to ride the clouds like a mighty ship--a vision of
Norman energy as memorable as the Mount of the Archangel off this very
coast, in the bay of St. Michael.