“And they deride Shakespeare!”
Thirteen years later chance took me to Rheims again.
It was on August 28, 1838. It will be seen further on why this date
impressed itself on my memory.
I was returning from Vouziers, and seeing the two towers of Rheims in
the distance, was seized with a desire to visit the cathedral again. I
therefore went to Rheims.
On arriving in the cathedral square I saw a gun drawn up near the portal
and beside it gunners with lighted fuses in their hands. As I had seen
artillery there on May 27, 1825, I supposed it was customary to keep a
cannon in the square, and paid little attention to it. I passed on and
entered the church.
A beadle in violet sleeves, a sort of priest, took me in charge and
conducted me all over the church. The stones were dark, the statues
dismal, the altar mysterious. No lamps competed with the sun. The
latter threw upon the sepulchral stones in the pavement the long white
silhouettes of the windows, which through the melancholy obscurity of
the rest of the church looked like phantoms lying upon these tombs. No
one was in the church. Not a whisper, not a footfall could be heard.
This solitude saddened the heart and enraptured the soul. There were in
it abandonment, neglect, oblivion, exile, and sublimity. Gone the whirl
of 1825. The church had resumed its dignity and its calmness. Not
a piece of finery, not a vestment, not anything. It was bare and
beautiful. The lofty vault no longer supported a canopy. Ceremonies of
the palace arc not suited to these severe places; a coronation ceremony
is merely tolerated; these noble ruins are not made to be courtiers.
To rid it of the throne and withdraw the king from the presence of God
increases the majesty of a temple. Louis XIV. hides Jehovah from sight.
Withdraw the priest as well. All that eclipsed it having been taken
away, you will see the light of day direct. Orisons, rites, bibles,
formulas, refract and decompose the sacred light. A dogma is a dark
chamber. Through a religion you see the solar spectre of God, but not
God. Desuetude and crumbling enhance the grandeur of a temple. As
human religion retires from this mysterious and jealous edifice, divine
religion enters it. Let solitude reign in it and you will feel heaven
there. A sanctuary deserted and in ruins, like Jumièges, like St.
Bertin, like Villers, like Holyrood, like Montrose Abbey, like the
temple of Paestum, like the hypogeum of Thebes, becomes almost an
element, and possesses the virginal and religious grandeur of a savannah
or of a forest. There something of the real Presence is to be found.
Such places are truly holy; man has meditated and communed with himself
therein. What they contained of truth has remained and become greater.
The _à-peu-prês_ has no longer any voice. Extinct dogmas have not left
their ashes; the prayer of the past has left its perfume. There is
something of the absolute in prayer, and because of this, that which
was a synagogue, that which was a mosque, that which was a pagoda, is
venerable. A stone on which that great anxiety that is called prayer
has left its impress is never treated with ridicule by the thinker. The
trace left by those who have bowed down before the infinite is always
imposing.
In strolling about the cathedral I had climbed to the triforium,
then under the arched buttresses, then to the top of the edifice. The
timber-work under the pointed roof is admirable; but less remarkable
than the “forest” of Amiens. It is of chestnut-wood.
These cathedral attics are of grim appearance. One could almost lose
one’s self in the labyrinths of rafters, squares, traverse beams,
superposed joists, traves, architraves, girders, madriers, and tangled
lines and curves. One might imagine one’s self to be in the skeleton
of Babel. The place is as bare as a garret and as wild as a cavern.
The wind whistles mournfully through it. Rats are at home there. The
spiders, driven from the timber by the odour of chestnut, make their
home in the stone of the basement where the church ends and the roof
begins, and low down in the obscurity spin their webs in which you catch
your face. One respires a mysterious dust, and the centuries seem to
mingle with one’s breath. The dust of churches is not like the dust of
houses; it reminds one of the tomb, it is composed of ashes.
The flooring of these colossal garrets has crevices in it through which
one can look down into the abysm, the church, below. In the corners that
one cannot explore are pools of shadow, as it were. Birds of prey enter
through one window and go out through the other. Lightning is also
familiar with these high, mysterious regions. Sometimes it ventures too
near, and then it causes the conflagration of Rouen, of Chartres, or of
St. Paul’s, London.
My guide the beadle preceded me. He looked at the dung on the floor, and
tossed his head. He knew the bird by its manure, and growled between his
teeth:
“This is a rook; this is a hawk; this is an owl.”
“You ought to study the human heart,” said I.
A frightened bat flew before us.
While walking almost at hazard, following this bat, looking at this
manure of the birds, respiring this dust, in this obscurity among the
cobwebs and scampering rats, we came to a dark corner in which, on a big
wheelbarrow, I could just distinguish a long package tied with string
and that looked like a piece of rolled up cloth.
“What is that?” I asked the beadle.
“That,” said he, “is Charles X.’s coronation carpet.”
I stood gazing at the thing, and as I did so--I am telling truthfully
what occurred--there was a deafening report that sounded like a
thunder-clap, only it came from below. It shook the timber-work and
echoed and re-echoed through the church. It was succeeded by a second
roar, then a third, at regular intervals. I recognised the thunder of
the cannon, and remembered the gun I had seen in the square.