little Cloister. Charming it must have been to have entered its quiet
walks, with their slender columns of white marble, to have seen the
quaint old well in the little, sun-lit close. Now, between the slender
columns, boards have been placed which shut out light and sun. The
traveller sat down on an old wheel-barrow, waiting till he could see in
the dim and misty light. All around him was forgetfulness of the
Cloister's holy uses; signs of desecration and neglect. One end of the
cloister-walk was a thoroughfare, where the wheel-barrow had worn its
weary way; and even in the deserted corners there was the dust and dirt
of a work-a-day world. The beautiful little capitals of the slender
columns rose from among the boards, clipped and worn; above, he dimly
saw the curious wooden ceiling which would seem to have taken the place
of the usual stone vaulting; through chinks of the plank-wall he caught
glimpses of a little close; and at length, having seen the most
melancholy of "Cathedrals of the Sea," in its disguise of whitewash,
decay, and misuse, he went his way.
[Sidenote: Antibes.]
That part of the southern coast of France called the Riviera seems now
only to evoke visions of the most beautiful banality; of a life more
artificial than the stage--which at least aims to present
reality--transplanted to a scene of such incomparable loveliness that
Nature herself adds a new and exquisite sumptuousness to the luxury of
civilisation. The Riviera means a land of many follies and every
vice;--each folly so delicious, each vice so regal, they seem to be
sought and desired of all men. Where else can be seen in such careless
magnificence Dukes of Russia with their polish of manner and their
veiled insolence; Englishmen correct and blase; Americans a bit
vociferous and truly amused; great ladies of all ages and manners;
adventurers high and low; and the beautiful, sparkling women of no name,
bravely dressed and barbarously jewelled? Such is the Riviera of to-day;
the life imposed upon it by hordes of foreign idlers in a land whose
warmth and luxuriance may have lent itself but too easily to the vicious
and frivolous pleasures for which they have made it notorious, but a
land which has no native history that is effeminate, nor any so unworthy
as its exotic present. "The Riviera" may be Nice, Beaulieu, and their
like, but the Provencal Mediterranean and its neighbouring territory
have been the fatherland of warriors in real mail and of princes of real
power, of the Emperor Pertinax of pagan times, of those who fought
successfully against Mahmoud and Tergament, and of many Knights of
Malta, long the "Forlorn Hope" of Christendom.
Discreetly hidden from vulgar eyes that delight in the architecture of the
modern caravanserai, are the ruins of these older days--Amphitheatres,
Fountains, Temples, and Aqueducts of the Romans; the Castles, Abbeys,
and Cathedrals of mediaeval times. Here are the larger number, if not the
most interesting, of those curious churches of the sea, which protected
the French townsman of the Mediterranean coast from the rapacity of
sea-rovers and pirates, and many more orthodox enemies of the Middle Ages.
From the great beauty of its situation, the small city of Antibes is
at once a type of the old regime and of the new. Lying on the sea,
with a background of snow-capped mountains, it has not entirely
escaped the fate of Nice; neither has it yet lost all its old
Provencal characteristics. It is a pathetic compromise between the
quaint reality of the old and the blatancy of the new. The little
parish church is of the very far past, having lost its Cathedral rank
over six hundred years ago to Sainte-Marie in Grasse, a town scarcely
younger than its own. It is the type of the church of this coast, with
its unpretentious smallness, its strength, and its disfiguring
restorations; and it is, especially in comparison with Vence and
Grasse, of small architectural interest. The facade, and the double
archway which connects the church and the tower, are of the
unfortunate XVIII century, the older exterior is monotonous, and the
interior, an unpleasing confusion of forms.
[Illustration: "THE MILITARY OMEN--THE TOWER." ANTIBES.]
The real interest of the little Cathedral is its ancient military
strength, neither very grand nor very imposing, but very real to the
enemy who hundreds of years ago hurled himself against the hard, plain
stones. From this view-point, the mannered facade and the inharmonious
interior matter but little. Toward the foe, whose sail might have arisen
on the horizon at any moment, the protecting church presented the heavy
rounded walls and safely narrowed windows of its three apses, and behind
them the military omen of the severe, rectangular tower. High in every
one of its four sides, seaward and landward, was a window, from which
many a watcher must have looked and strained anxious eyes. This is the
significance of the little sea-side Cathedral, this the story its tower
suggests. And now when the sea is sailed by peaceful ships, and the
Cathedral only a place of pious worship, the tower with its gaping
windows is the only salient reminder of the ancient dignity of the
church; the reminder to an indifferent generation of the days when
Antibes fulfilled to Christians the promise of her old, pagan name,
Antipolis, "sentinel" of the perilous sea.
[Sidenote: Nice.]
The situation of its Cathedral reveals a Nice of which but little is
written, the city of a people who live in the service of those whose
showy, new villas and hotels stretch along the promenades and lie dotted
on the hills in the Nice of "all the world." Besides this exotic city,
there is "the Nice of the Nicois," a small district of dark, crowded
streets that are too full of the sordid struggles of competing
work-people to be truly picturesque. Here, in the XVI century,
when the Citadel of Nice was enlarged and the Cathedral of
Sainte-Marie-de-l'Assomption destroyed, the Church of Sainte-Reparate
was re-built, and succeeded to the episcopal rank. Standing on a little
open square, surrounded by small shops and the poor homes of
trades-folk, it seems in every sense a church of the people. Here the
native Nicois, gay, industrious, mercurial, and dispossessed of his
town, may feel truly at home. Finished in the most exuberant rococo
style, it is an edifice from which all architectural or religious
inspiration is conspicuously absent. It is a revel of luxurious bad
taste; a Cathedral in Provence, a Cathedral by the Sea, but neither
Provencal nor Maritime,--rather a product of that Italian taste which
has so profoundly vitiated both the morals and the architecture of all
the Riviera.
II.
CATHEDRALS OF THE HILL-TOWNS.
[Sidenote: Carpentras.]
Carpentras is a busy provincial town, the terminus of three diminutive
railroads and of many little, lumbering, dust-covered stages. It stands
high on a hill, and from the boulevards, dusty promenades under
luxuriant shade-trees, which circle the town as its walls formerly did,
there is an extended view over the pretty hills and valleys of the
neighbouring country. At one end of the town the Hospital rises, an
immense, bare, and imposing edifice of the XVIII century, built by a
Trappist Bishop; and at the other is the Orange Gate, the last tower of
the old fortifications. Between these historic buildings and the
encircling boulevards are the narrow streets and irregular,
uninteresting buildings of the city itself. It is strange indeed that so
isolated a place, which seems only a big, bustling country-town, should
have been of importance in the Middle Ages, and that bits of its
stirring history must have caused all orthodox Europe to thrill with
horror. Stranger still would be the forgetfulness of modern writers, by
whom Carpentras is seldom mentioned, were it not that the city's real
history is that of the Church political, a story of strange manners and
happenings, rather than a step in the vital evolution towards our own
time.
In the Middle Ages Carpentras was an episcopal city, the capital of the
County Venaissin, governed by wealthy, powerful, and ambitious Bishops,
who took no small interest in worldly aggrandisement. Passing by gift to
the Papacy, after the sudden death of Clement V it was selected as the
place of the Conclave which was to elect his successor. The members were
assembled in the great episcopal Palace, when Bertrand de Goth, a nephew
of the dead Pope, claiming to be an ally of the French prelates against
the Italians in the Conclave, arrived from a successful looting of the
papal treasury at Montreux to pillage in Carpentras. He and his
mercenaries massacred the citizens and burned the Cathedral. The
episcopal Palace caught fire, and their Eminences--in danger of their
lives--were forced to squeeze their sacred persons through a hole which
their followers made in the Palace wall and fly northward.
This unfortunate raid left Carpentras with many ruins and a demolished
Cathedral, deserted by those in whose cause she had unwittingly
suffered. The new Pontiff was safely elected in Lyons, and upon his
return to the papal seat of Avignon he administered Carpentras by a
"rector," and it continued as it had been before, the political capital
of the County. During the reigns of succeeding Popes it was apparently
undisturbed by dangerous honours, until the accession of the Anti-Pope,
Benedict XIII. So great was this prelate's delight in the city that he
reserved to himself the minor title of her Bishop, re-built her walls,
and was the first patron of the present and very orthodox Cathedral,
Saint-Siffrein. By a curious destiny, the church had this false prelate
not only as its first patron, but as its first active supporter; and in
1404 he sent Artaud, Archbishop of Arles, in his name, to lay its first
stone.
Wars and rumours of wars soon possessed the province. Benedict fled, and
through unrest and lack of money the work of Cathedral building was
greatly hindered. In the meantime the ruins of the former Cathedral seem
to have been gradually disintegrating, and in 1829 the last of its
Cloister was destroyed, to be replaced by prison cells; and now only the
choir dome and a suggestion of the nave exist, partly forming the
present sacristy. From these meagre remains and from writings of the
time, it may be fairly inferred that Saint-Pierre was a Cathedral of the
type of Avignon and Cavaillon and the old Marseillaise Church of La
Majeure, and that, architecturally considered, it was a far more
important structure than Saint-Siffrein. With this depressing knowledge
in mind the traveller was confronted with a sight as depressing--the
present Cathedral itself.
Fortunately, churches of a period antedating the XVII century are seldom
so uninteresting. Nothing more meagre nor dreary can be conceived than
the facade with its three, poor, characterless portals. They open on a
large vaulted hall, with chapels in its six bays and a small and narrow
choir. The principal charm of the interior is negative; its dim misty
light, by concealing a mass of tasteless decorations and the poverty and
bareness of the whole architectural scheme, gives to the generous height
and size of the room an atmosphere of subdued and mysterious
spaciousness. The south door is the one bit of this Gothic which passes
the commonplace. Set in a poor, plain wall, the portal has a graceful
symmetry of design; and its few carved details, probably limited by the
artistic power of its builder, are so simple and chaste that they do not
inevitably suggest poverty of conception. The tympanum holds an exotic
detail, a defaced and insignificant fresco of the Coronation of the
Virgin; and on the pier which divides the door-way stands a very
charming statue of Our Lady of Snows, blessing those who enter beneath
her outstretched hands.
This simple portal, and indeed the whole church, is a significant
example of Provencal Gothic, a style so foreign to the genius of the
province that it could produce only feeble and attenuated examples of
the art. Compared with its northern prototypes, it is surprisingly
tentative; and awkward, unaccustomed hands seem to have built it after
most primitive conceptions.
[Sidenote: Digne.]
Well outside the Alpine city of Digne, and almost surrounded by graves,
stands a small and ancient church which is seldom opened except for the
celebration of Masses for the Dead. Coffin-rests stand always before the
altar, and enough chairs for the few that mourn. There are old
candlesticks for the tapers of the church's poor, and hidden in the
shadows of the doors, a few broken crosses that once marked graves,
placed, tenderly perhaps, above those who were alive some years ago and
who now rest forgotten; on battered wood, one can still read a baby's
age, an old man's record, and the letters R. I. P.
In this strange, melancholy destiny of Notre-Dame-du-Bourg there seems
to be a peculiar fitness. The mutability of time, forgetfulness, and at
length neglect, which death suggests, are brought to mind by this old
church. Once the Cathedral of Digne, but no longer Cathedral, it stands
almost alone in spite of its honours and its venerable age. After the
desecration by the Huguenots, its episcopal birthright was given to a
younger and a larger church; the city has moved away and clusters about
its new Cathedral, Saint-Jerome; and Notre-Dame-du-Bourg is no longer on
a busy street, but near the dusty high-road, amid the quiet of the
country and the hills.
Parts of its crypt and tower may antedate 900, but the church itself was
re-built in the XII and XIII centuries. The course of time has brought
none of the incongruities which have ruined many churches by the
so-called restorations of the last three hundred years, and although its
simple Romanesque is sadly unrepaired, it is a delight to come into the
solitude and find an unspoiled example of this stanch old style.
[Illustration: THE INTERIOR OF NOTRE-DAME-DU-BOURG.--DIGNE.]
The Romanesque shows forth its great solidity in the exterior of its
churches, and nowhere more than in Digne's deserted Cathedral. Flat
buttresses line the walls, the transepts are square and plain, and on
either side the facade wall is upheld by a formidable support. This
severity of line is not greatly modified by the deep recesses of a few
windows; nor is the tower--which lost its spire three hundred years
ago--of less sober construction, less solidly built. Below the
overhanging eaves of a miserable roof and the curious line of the nave
vault which projects through the wall, is a round window with a frame of
massive rolls and hollows; and below this again, under a narrow sloping
covering, is the deep arch of the Cathedral's porch. This, in its prime,
must have been the church's ornamental glory. Beneath the outer arch,
which is continued to the buttresses by half-arches, are the great
roll-mouldings that twist backward to a plain tympanum. Capitals still
support these massive curves of stone, but the niches in which the
columns formerly stood are empty, and grinning lions, lying on the
ground, no longer support the larger columns of the plain arch. All
stands in solemn decay.
The traveller entered a battered, brass-nailed door and saw before him
the stretch of a single, empty nave, a choir beneath whose lower vault
are three small windows, and on either side the archways which he knew
must lead to narrow transepts. In the south side, plain, rounded windows
give a glimmering light, and over each projects an arch, the modest
decoration of the walls. Far above rises the tunnel-vault, whose sheer
height is grandly dignified; the arches rest on roughly carved capitals,
and the outer rectangle of the piers is displaced for half a column. The
rehearsal of these most simple details seems but the writing of "the
letter which killeth," and not the portrayal of the spirit that seems to
live within these walls. Details which seem so poorly few when read, are
nobly so when seen. This small old church has a true religious
stateliness, and it seemed as if a priest should bring the
Sanctuary-light which says, "The Lord is in His holy temple."
Saint-Jerome was built between 1490 and 1500, a hundred years before its
episcopal elevation, and forms a most complete antithesis to
Notre-Dame-du-Bourg which it supplanted in 1591. Where Notre-Dame is
small, Saint-Jerome is large, where the old church is simple, the newer
one is either pretentious or sumptuous, and where the one is Romanesque,
the other is Gothic.
The present Cathedral stands on the heights of the city; and from one
side or another its clean, straight walls can be seen in all their large
angularity and absence of architectural significance. Towers rise
conventionally above the facade; and a big broad flight of white stone
steps leads to three modern portals that have been built in an
economical imitation of the sculptured richness of the XIII century.
The interior, also Gothic, has neither clerestory nor triforium, and its
naves are covered by a vaulting which springs broadly from the round,
supporting piers. The conception is not noble, it has no simplicity, and
no more of spiritual suggestion than a Madonna of Titian; but the space
of the nave is so largely generous and the new polychrome so richly
toned that the church has majesty of space and harmony, deep lights and
subdued colourings; it is large and sumptuous with the munificence of a
Veronese canvas, a singular and most curious contrast to the cold
severity of its outer walls.
[Illustration: "THE INTERIOR HAS NEITHER CLERESTORY NOR
TRIFORIUM."--DIGNE.]
Before the High Altar of this Church lies buried one whose spirit
suggests the Christ, a Bishop, yet a simple priest, whose life deserves
more words than does the whole of Saint-Jerome, once his
Cathedral-church. He was a Cure of Brignoles, one of those keen, yet
simple-hearted and hard-working priests who often bless Provencal towns.
He had no great ambitions, no patronage, no ties except a far-off
brother who was an upstart general of that most upstart Emperor,
Napoleon. One day while the priest was pottering in his little
garden,--as Provencal Cures love to dig and work,--a letter was handed
him, marked "thirty sous of postage due." He was outraged. His shining
old soutane fell from the folds in which he had prudently tucked it, he
shrugged his shoulders and protested,--"A great expense indeed for a
trivial purpose. Where should he find another thirty sous for his poor?
He never wrote letters. Therefore by no argument of any school of logic
could he be compelled to receive them. Obviously this was not for him."
The unexpected letter was one for which his brother had asked and which
Napoleon had signed, a decree which made him Bishop.
Long afterwards this simple, saintly prelate saved a man from crime, and
history relates that this same man died at Waterloo as a good and
faithful soldier fighting for the fatherland. His benefactor, that loyal
servant of Christ and His Church, soon followed him in death, and unlike
many a Saint whom this earth forgets his memory lives on, not only in
the little city of the snow-clad Alps, but in the hearts of those who
read of his good deeds. For Monseigneur Miollis of Digne is truly
Monseigneur Bienvenu of "Les Miserables," and only the soldier of
Waterloo was glorified in Jean Valjean.
[Sidenote: Forcalquier.]
If it is difficult to picture sleepy, stately Aix as one of the most
brilliant centres of mediaeval Europe, and the garrisoned castle of
Tarascon filled with the gay courtiers and fair ladies of King Rene's
Court, it will be almost impossible to walk in the smaller Provencal
"cities," and see in imagination the cavalcades of mailed soldiers who
clattered through the streets on their way to the castle of some
near-by hill-top, my lord proudly distinguishable by his mount or the
length of his plume, a delicate Countess languishing between the
curtains of her litter, or a more sprightly one who rode her palfrey and
smiled on the staring townsfolk. It is almost impossible to conceive
that the four daughters of Raymond Berenger, a Queen of the Romans, of
France, of Naples, and of England, were brought up in the castle of the
little hillside hamlet of Saint-Maime Dauphin. Provence is quiet, rural,
provincial; a land of markets, busy country inns, and farms; not of
modern greatness nor of modern renown. Its children are a fine and busy
race, no less strong and fine than in the land's more stirring times,
but they live their years of greatness in other, "more progressive"
parts of France, and the Provencal genius, which remains very native to
the soil, is broadly known to fame as "French." Like some rich old wine
hidden in the cellars of the few, Provence lies safely ensconced behind
Avignon and Arles, and only the epicures of history penetrate her hills.
Her mediaeval ruins seem to belong to a past almost as dead and ghostly
as her Roman days, and to realise her Middle Ages, one must leave the
busy people in the town below, climb one of the hills, and sitting
beside the crumbling walls of some great tower or castle, watch the hot
sun setting behind the low mountains and lighting in a glow the bare
walls of some other ruined stronghold on a neighbouring height. The
shadows creep into the valleys, the rocks grow grey and cold, and the
clusters of trees beside them become darkly mysterious. Then far beneath
a white thread seems to appear, beginning at the valley's entrance and
twisting along its length until it disappears behind another hill. This
is the road; and by the time the eye has followed its long course,
daylight has grown fainter. Then Provence takes on a long-lost
splendour. To those who care to see, cavalcades of soldiers or of
hunters come home along the road, castles become whole and frowning, the
dying sun casts its light through their gaping window-holes, as light of
nightly revels used to shine, and a phantom Mediaevalism appears.
One of the powerful families of the country, the Counts of Forcalquier,
sprang from the House of Berenger in the XI century, and a hundred and
fifty years later, grown too great, were crushed by the haughty parent
house. More than one hill of Eastern Provence has borne their tall
watchtowers, more than one village owed them allegiance, and a large
town in the hills was their capital and bore their name. And yet not a
ruined tower that overlooks the Provencal mountains, not a village,
gate, or castle--Manosque or old Saint-Maime,--but speaks more vividly
of the old Counts than does Forcalquier, formerly their city, now a mere
country town which has lost prestige with its increasing isolation, many
of its inhabitants by plagues and wars, and almost all of its
picturesque Mediaevalism through the destructiveness of sieges.
Long before this day of contented stagnancy, in 1061, when Forcalquier,
fortified, growing, and important, claimed many honours, Bishop Gerard
Caprerius of Sisteron had given the city a Provost and a Chapter, and
created the Church of Saint-Mary, co-cathedral with that of Notre-Dame
of Sisteron. Not contented with this honour, Forcalquier demanded and
received a Bishopric of her own. Her hill was then crowned by a Citadel,
her Cathedral stood near-by, her walls were intact. Now the Citadel is
replaced by a peaceful pilgrims' chapel, the walls are gone, Saint-Mary,
ruined in the siege of 1486, is recalled only by a few weed-covered
stumps and bits of wall, and its title was given to Notre-Dame in the
lower part of the town.
No Cathedral is a sadder example of architectural failure than
Notre-Dame of Forcalquier because it has so many of the beginnings of
real beauty and dignity, so many parts of real worthiness that have been
unfortunately combined in a confused and discordant whole. If, of all
little cities of Provence, Forcalquier is one of the least unique and
least holding, its Cathedral is also one of the least satisfying. It is
not beautiful in situation nor in its own essential harmony, and the
fine but tantalising perspectives of its interior may be found again in
happier churches.