gives the impression of an unpleasant conglomeration of styles. It is
not a fortress church, yet it was evidently built for defence; it is
Gothic, yet the lightness and grace of that art are sacrificed to the
massiveness and resistive strength, imperatively required by southern
Cathedrals in times of wars and bellicose heretics. The whole building
seems a compromise between necessity and art.
It is, however, a notable example of the Gothic of the South, and of the
modifications which that style invariably underwent, through the
artistic caprice of its builders, or the political fore-sight of their
patrons, the Bishops.
The facade of Saint-Nazaire of Beziers has a Gothic portal of good but
not notable proportions, and a large and beautiful rose-window. As if to
protect these weaker and decorative attempts, the builder flanked them
with two square towers, whose crenellated tops and solid, heavy walls
could serve as strongholds. Perhaps to reconcile the irreconcilable,
crenellations joining the towers were placed over the rose-window, and
at either end of the portal, a few inches of Gothic carving were cut in
the tower-wall. The result is frank incongruity. And the traveller left
without regret, to look at the apse. It cannot be denied that the
clock-tower which comes into view is very square and thick; but in spite
of that it has a simple dignity, and as the apse itself is not florid,
this proved to be the really pleasing detailed view of the Cathedral.
The open square behind the church is tiny, and there one can best see
the curious grilled iron-work, which in the times of mediaeval outbreaks
protected the fine windows of the choir and preserved them for future
generations of worshippers and admirers. It was after noon when the
traveller finished his investigations of Saint-Nazaire; and as the
southern churches close between twelve and two, he took dejeuner at a
little cafe near-by and patiently waited for the hour of re-opening. Had
there been nothing but the interior to explore, he could not have spent
two hours in such contented waiting. But there was a Cloister,--and on
the stroke of two he and the sacristan met before the portal.
[Illustration: "THE CLOCK-TOWER IS VERY SQUARE AND THICK."--BEZIERS.]
In describing their "monuments," French guide-books confine themselves
to facts, and the adjectives "fine" and "remarkable"; they are almost
always strictly impersonal, and the traveller who uses them as a
cicerone, has a sense of unexpected discovery, a peculiar elation, in
finding a monument of rare beauty; but he is never subjected to that
disappointed irritation which comes when one stands before the
"monument" and feels that one's expectations have been unduly
stimulated. The Cloister of Beziers is a "fine monument," but as he
walked about it, the traveller felt no sense of elation. He found a
small Cloister, Gothic like the Cathedral, with clustered columns and
little ornamentation. It was not very completely restored, and had a
sad, melancholy charm, like a solitary sprig of lavender in an old
press, or a rose-leaf between the pages of a worn and forgotten Missal.
In the Cloister-close, stands a Gothic fountain; but the days when its
waters dropped and tinkled in the stillness, when their sound mingled
with the murmured prayers and slow steps of the priests,--those days are
long forgotten. The quaint and pretty fountain is now dry and
dust-covered; while about it trees and plants and weeds grow as they
may, and bits of the Cloister columns have fallen off, and niches are
without their guarding Saints.
[Illustration: "THE QUAINT AND PRETTY FOUNTAIN."--BEZIERS.]
By contrast, the Cathedral itself seems full of life. Its interior is an
aisle-less Gothic room, whose fine height and emptiness of column or
detail give it an appearance of vast and well-conceived proportions.
Except the really beautiful windows of the choir, which are a study in
themselves, there is very little in this interior to hold the mind; one
is lost in a pleasant sense of general symmetry. As the traveller was
sitting in the nave, a few priests filed into the choir, and began, in
quavering voices, to intone their prayers, and in the peacefulness of
the church, in the trembling monotony of the weak, old voices, his
thoughts wandered to the stirring history which had been lived about the
Cathedral, and within its very walls. For Beziers was and had always
been a hot-bed of heretics. Here in the IV century, long before the
building of the Cathedral, the Emperor Constantius II forced the
unwilling Catholic Bishops of Gaul to join their heretical Aryan
brethren in Council; here the equally heretical Visigoths gave new
strength to the dissenters; and here, again, after centuries of
orthodoxy which Clovis had imposed, a new centre of religious storm was
formed. It was about this period, the XII and XIV centuries, that the
Cathedral was built; and it is perhaps because of the strength of those
French protestants against the Church of Rome, the Albigenses, that its
essentially Gothic style was so confused by military additions. At the
beginning of the troublous times of which these towers are reminders,
Raymond-Roger of Trencavel, the gallant and romantic Lord of
Carcassonne, was also Viscount of Beziers; and contrary to the fanatical
enthusiasm of his day, was much disposed toward religious toleration;
therefore in the early wars of Catholics and Protestants the city of
Beziers became the refuge not only for the terrified Faithful of the
surrounding country, but for many hunted Protestants. In the XIII
century, the zeal of the Catholic party, reinforced by the political
interests of its members, grew most hot and dangerous. Saint Dominic had
come into the South; and in his fearful, fiery sermons, he not only
prophesied that the Albigenses would swell the number of the damned at
the Day of Judgment, but also advocated that, living, they should know
the hell of Inquisition. Partisans of the Catholic Faith were solemnly
consecrated "Crusaders" by Pope Innocent III, and wore the cross in
these Wars of Extermination as they had worn it in the Holy Wars of
Palestine. In 1209 their army advanced against Beziers, and from out
their Councils the leaders sent the Bishop of the city to admonish his
flock.
All the inhabitants were summoned to meet him, and they gathered in the
choir and transepts of the Cathedral,--the only parts which were
finished at that time. One can imagine the anxious citizens crowding
into the church, the coming of the angered prelate, whose state and
frown were well calculated to intimidate the wavering, and the tense
silence as he passed, with grave blessing, to the altar. In a few words,
he advised them of their peril, spiritual and material; he told them he
knew well who was true and who false to the Church, that he had, in
written list, the very names of the heretics they seemed to harbour.
Then he begged them to deliver those traitors into his hands, and their
city to the Legate of the Holy Father. In fewer words came their answer;
"Venerable Father, all that are here are Christians, and we see amongst
us only our brethren." Such words were a refusal, a heinous sin, and
dread must have been written on every face, as without a word or sign of
blessing, the outraged Bishop swept from the church and returned to the
camp of their enemy.
The Crusaders' Councils were stormy; for some of the nobles wished to
save the Catholics, others cried out for the extermination of the whole
rebellious place, and finally the choleric Legate, Armand-Amaury, Abbot
of Citeaux, could stand it no longer, and cried out fiercely, "Kill them
all! God will know His own." The words of their Legate were final, the
army attacked the city, and--as Henri Martin finely writes,--"neither
funeral tollings nor bell-ringings, nor Canons in all their priestly
robes could avail, all were put to the sword; not one was saved, and it
was the saddest pity ever seen or heard." The city was pillaged, was
fired, was devastated and burned "till no living thing remained."
"No living thing remained" to tell the awful tale, and yet with time and
industry, a new and forgetful Beziers has risen to all its old prestige
and many times its former size; the Cathedral alone was left, and its
most memorable tale to our day is not that of the abiding peace of the
Faith, but that of the terrible travesty of religion of the
twenty-second of July, hundreds of years ago.
[Sidenote: Narbonne.]
"Narbonne is still mighty and healthful, if one is to judge from the
activities of the present day; is picturesque and pleasing, and far more
comfortably disposed than many cities with a more magnificently imposing
situation." These words, which were running in the traveller's mind,
grew more and more derisive, more and more ironical, as he walked about
Narbonne. Not in all the South of France had he seen a city so
depressing. Her decline has been continuous for the long five hundred
years since the Roman dykes gave way and she was cut off from the sea.
Agde, almost as old, displays the decline of a dignified, retired old
age; Saint-Gilles-du-Gard was as dirty, but not a whit as pretentious;
Nimes was majestically antique; Narbonne, simply sordid.
It is sad to think that over two thousand years ago she was a second
Marseilles, that she was the first of Rome's transalpine colonies, and
that under Tiberius her schools rivalled those of the Capital of the
world. It is sadder to think that all the magnificence of Roman luxury,
of sculptured marble--a Forum, Capitol, Temples, Baths, Triumphal
Arches,--stood where dreary rows of semi-modern houses now stand. It is
almost impossible to believe in the lost grandeur of this city, and that
it was veritably under the tutelage of so great and superb a god as
Mars.
The eventful Christian period of Narbonne was very noted but not very
long. Her melancholy decay began as early as the XIV century. Of her
great antiquity nothing is left but a few hacked and mutilated carvings;
of her ambitious Mediaevalism, nothing but an unfinished group of
ecclesiastical buildings. Long gone is the lordly "Narbo" dedicated to
Mars, gone the city of the Latin poet, whose words repeated to-day in
her streets are a bitter mockery, and gone the stronghold of mediaeval
times. There remains a rare phenomenon for cleanly France,--a dirty
city, whose older sections are reminiscent of unbeautiful old age,
decrepit and unwashed; and whose newly projected boulevards are
distinguished by tawdry and pretentious youth.
In the midst of this city, stands a group of mediaeval churchly
buildings, the Palace of the prelate, his Cathedral, and an adjoining
Cloister. They are all either neglected, unfinished, or re-built; but
are of so noble a plan that the traveller feels a "divine wrath" that
they should never have reached their full grandeur of completion, that
this great architectural work should have been begun so near the close
of the city's prosperity, and that in spite of several efforts it has
never been half completed. It is as if a fatality hung over the whole
place, and as if all the greatness Narbonne had conceived was
predestined to destruction or incompletion.
[Illustration: "THE DOOR OF THE CLOISTER."--NARBONNE.]
Of the three structures, the least interesting is the former Palace of
the Archbishops. This is now the Hotel-de-Ville, and as all the body of
the structure between the towers of the XII century was built in our day
by Viollet-le-Duc, very little of the old Palace can properly be said to
exist. Besides its two principal towers, a smaller one, a gate, and a
chapel remain. Viollet-le-Duc has constructed the Hotel-de-Ville after
the perfectly appropriate style of the XIII century, but its stone is so
new and its atmosphere so modern and republican that the traveller left
it without regret and made his way up the dark, steep, badly-paved
alley-way which leads to the door of the Cloister.
This Cloister, which separated the Palace from the Cathedral, is now
dreary and desolate and neglected. Like the Cathedral, it is Gothic,
with sadly decaying traces of graceful ornament. The little plot of
enclosed ground, which should be planted in grass or with a few flowers,
is a mere dirt court, tramped over by the few worshippers who enter the
Cathedral this way. Two or three trees grow as they will, gnarled or
straight. The sense of peaceful melancholy which the traveller had felt
in the Cloister of Beziers is wanting here. This is a place of deserted
solitude; and with a sigh for the beauty that might have been, the
traveller crossed the enclosure and entered the church by the
cloister-door.
[Illustration: "THIS IS A PLACE OF DESERTED SOLITUDE."--NARBONNE.]
Architecturally dissimilar, the fate of this Cathedral is not unlike
that of Beauvais. Each was destined to have a completed choir, and each
to remain without a nave. At Beauvais the addition of transepts adds
very materially to the beauty of the Cathedral. At Narbonne no transepts
exist. There is simply a choir, which makes a very singular disposition
of the church both religious and architectural. Entering the gates which
lead from the ambulatory to the choir, the traveller found that
Benediction had just begun. On his immediate right, before the altar all
aglow with lights, were the officiating priests and the altar-boys; on
his left, in the choir, was the congregation in the Canons' stalls;
and at the back, as at the end of a nave, rose the organ.
The traveller walked about the ambulatory, and leaning against the
farthest wall, tried to view the church, only to be baffled. There was
no perspective. The ambulatory is very narrow and the choir-screen very
high. The impressions he formed were partly imaginative, partly
inductive; and the clearest one was that of sheer height, straight,
superhuman height that is one of the unmatchable glories of French
Gothic. Here the traveller thought again of Beauvais, and wished as he
had so often wished in the northern Cathedral and with something of the
same intensity, that this freedom and majesty of height might have been
gloriously continued and completed in the nave. Such a church as his
imagination pictured would have been worthy of a place with the best of
northern Gothic. Now it is a suggestion, a beginning of greatness; and
its chief glory lies in the simplicity and directness of its height.
Clustered columns rise plainly to the pointed Gothic roof. There is so
marked an absence of carving that it seems as if ornamentation would
have been weakening and trammelling. It is not bareness, but beautiful
firmness, which refreshes and uplifts the heart of man as the sight of
some island mountain rising sheer from the sea.
The exterior of the Cathedral, imposing from a distance, is rather
complicated in its unfinished compromise of detail. In the XV century,
two towers were built which flank the western end as towers usually
flank a facade; and this gives the church a foreshortened effect. Of
real facade there is none, and the front wall which protects the choir
is plainly temporary. In front of this wall there are portions of the
unfinished nave, stones and other building materials, a scaffolding, and
a board fence; and the only pleasure the traveller could find in this
confusion was the fancy that he had discovered the old-time appearance
of a Cathedral in the making.
The apse is practically completed, and one has the curious sensation
that it is a building without portals. Having no facade, it has none of
the great front entrances common to the Gothic style; neither has it the
usual lateral door. The choir is entered by the temporary doors of the
pseudo-facade; the ambulatory is entered through the Cloister, or a
pretty little Gothic door-way which if it were not the chief entrance of
the church, would properly seem to have been built for the clergy rather
than for the people who now use it. If these portals are strangely
unimportant, their insignificance does not detract materially from the
stateliness of the apse, which is created by its great height--one
hundred and thirty feet in the interior measurement--and the magnificent
flying-buttresses.
These flying-buttresses give to the exterior its most curious and
beautiful effect. They are a form of Gothic seldom attempted in the
South, and exist here in a rather exceptional construction. Over the
chapels which surround the apse rise a series of double-arched supports,
the outer ones ending in little turrets with surmounting crenellations.
On these supports, after a splendid outward sweep, rest the abutments of
the flying arches. These have a fine sure grace and withal a lightness
that relieves the heaviness imposed on the church by the towers and the
immense strength of the body of the apse. They are the chief as well as
the most salient glory of the exterior, and give to the Cathedral its
peculiar individuality.
[Illustration: "THESE FLYING-BUTTRESSES GIVE TO THE EXTERIOR ITS MOST
CURIOUS AND BEAUTIFUL EFFECT."--NARBONNE.]
Apart from its buttresses, Saint-Just has little decorative style. Its
crenellations and turrets are military and forceful, not ornate. For the
church had its defensive as truly as its religious purpose, and formerly
was united on the North with the fortifications of the Palace, and
contributed to the protection of its prelates as well as to their
arch-episcopal prestige.
In spite of the fostering care of the French government, the Palace, the
Cloister, and the Cathedral seem in the hands of strangers. The
traveller who had longed to see them in their finished magnificence
realised the futility of this wish, but he turned away with another as
vain, that he might have known them even in incompletion, when they were
in the hands of the Church, when the Archbishop still ruled in his
Palace, when the Canons prayed in the Cloister, and the Cathedral was
still a-building.
[Sidenote: Perpignan.]
Perpignan, like Elne, is in Rousillon. The period of her most brilliant
prosperity was that of the Majorcan dominion in the XII century. Later
she reverted to Aragon, and was still so fine a city that for two
hundred years France coveted and sought her, until she finally yielded
to the greedy astuteness of Richelieu and became formally annexed to
the kingdom of Louis XIII. Perpignan is a gay little town, much affected
by the genius and indolence of the Spanish race. Morning is work-time,
noon-tide is siesta, but afternoon and evening were made for pleasure;
and every bright day, when the sun begins to cast shadows, people fill
the narrow, shady streets and walk along the promenade by the shallow
river, under the beautiful plane-trees. The pavements in front of the
cafes are filled with little round tables, and here and there small
groups of men idle cheerfully over tiny glasses of liqueur and cups of
cool, black coffee; perhaps they talk a little business, certainly they
gossip a great deal. Noisy little teams filled with merry people run
down from the Promenade to the sea-shore; and after an hour's dip,
almost in the shadow of the tall Pyrenees, the same merry people return,
laughing, to a cooler Perpignan. In the evening, they seek the bright
cafes and the waiters run busily to and fro among the crowded little
tables; the narrow streets, imperfectly lighted, are full of moving
shadows, and through the open church-doors, candles waver in the fitful
draught, and quiet worshippers pass from altar to altar in penance or in
supplication.
All the old buildings of the city are of Spanish origin. The prison is
the brick, battlemented castle of a Majorcan Sancho, the Citadel is as
old, and the Aragonese Bourse is divided between the town-hall and the
city's most popular cafe.
The Cathedral of Saint-Jean, which faces a desolate, little square, was
also begun in Majorcan days and under that Sancho who ruled in 1324. At
first it was merely a church; for Elne had always been the seat of the
Bishopric of Rousillon, and although the town had suffered from many
wars and had long been declining, it was not shorn of its episcopal
glory until there was sufficient political reason for the act. This
arose in 1692, and was based on the old-time French and Spanish claims
to the same county to which these two cities belonged.
[Illustration: "ALL OF THE OLD BUILDINGS OF THE CITY ARE OF SPANISH
ORIGIN."--PERPIGNAN.]
Over a hundred years before Charles VIII had plenarily ceded to
Ferdinand and Isabella all power in Rousillon, even that shadowy feudal
Suzerainty with which, in default of actual possession, many a former
French king had consoled himself and irritated a royal Spanish brother.
Ferdinand and Isabella promptly visited their new possessions, and made
solemn entry into Perpignan. Unfortunately the Inquisition came in their
train, and the unbounded zeal of the Holy Office brought the Spanish
rule which protected it into ever-increasing disfavour. In vain Philip
III again bestowed on Perpignan the title of "faithful city," which she
had first received from John of Aragon for her loyal resistance to Louis
XI; in vain he ennobled several of her inhabitants and transferred to
her, from Elne, the episcopal power. The city was ready for new and
kinder masters than the Most Catholic Kings, and in 1642 the French were
received as liberators.
During all these years the Cathedral had grown very slowly. Commenced in
1324, over a century elapsed before the choir was finished and the
building of the nave was not begun until a hundred years later. The High
Altar, a Porch, and the iron cage of the tower were added with equal
deliberation, and even to-day it is still unfinished. The most beautiful
part is the strongly buttressed apse; the poorest, the unfinished
facade, which has been very fitly described as "plain and mean." Looking
disconsolately at it from the deserted square, scarcely tempted to go
nearer, the traveller was astounded at the thought that for several
centuries this unsightly wall had stared on generations of worshippers
without goading them into any frenzy of action,--either destructive or
constructive. His only comfort lay in the scaffolding which was building
around it, and which seemed to promise better things.
[Illustration: "THE UNFINISHED FACADE."--PERPIGNAN.]