restoration was apparently a replacement of a great deal of old work,
with only slight modifications of the original inspiration. A large
door, decorated with sculpture and bearing a strong analogy to the
Portail Royal of Chartres, was opened in the middle of the south aisle.
Further changes were made in the early part of the thirteenth century,
when the ancient apses were destroyed, and the admirable choir, as we
now see it, was built--“a masterpiece of effect”--with its encircling
chapels radiating like the petals of a flower. The vaulting approaches
in construction the “cupola inspiration”; but here, as at Angers and
Poitiers, it is an example of only the last traces which remain to us of
the domical design.
Besides the Cathedral there are two churches worthy of note--Notre Dame
de la Coûture, in the eastern quarter of the town, amongst the shops and
markets; and Notre Dame (sometimes called St. Julien) du Pré, across the
river in the far west. The latter church, in spite of having been a good
deal restored, is extremely interesting. In the nave hangs a little
printed history, which tells us that the church was founded by the first
bishop of Le Mans, Saint Julian, sent as a missionary by Saint Peter. In
honour of his great master Julian built a basilica, which was enlarged
by Saint Innocent in the sixth century and restored about 1050. In the
fifteenth century both church and monastery suffered from fire; two
centuries later the pious Benedictines made some alterations, but
during the Revolution the church was sacked and burnt, and the crypt,
together with the tombs of Saint Julian and Saint Hadouin, entirely
destroyed. The task of restoration was left to the faithful in the
nineteenth century. In spite of the modern work, however, the church
contains a great deal that is very interesting and undoubtedly ancient.
The nave pillars especially, with their carved capitals, are worth
individual notice. In those of the north aisle, from west to east, we
find portrayed:
No. 1. Animals caught in a thicket, turning their heads over their
shoulders to free themselves from the branches. Notice here how the
volute at the corner has suggested to the sculptor a human face.
No. 2. Leaves and curiously twisted arabesques.
No. 3. The same in a simpler form.
No. 4. Volutes and grotesque heads at the angles.
No. 5. [South aisle, east to west] gives a kind of rope-work, with
volutes and human-headed dragons.
No. 6. Is much the same as No. 3.
No. 7. Flat _applique_ leaves, volutes and ball-flowers; and in
No. 8. We return to the wild animals. Both aisles are arcaded on their
outer walls; on the north we find arches ornamented with ball-flowers,
on the south an arcade of some interest, as showing the immense
variety of design in its capitals--dragons, fir-cones, arabesques, and,
strangest of all, winged lions, with a most Assyrian air. Apart from the
capitals, the architecture of the church is quite simple, and whoever
rehandled it has done so much in keeping with the old work. The windows
are round-headed: the clerestory consists of single lights, and the
triforium is a blind arcade.
[Illustration: NÔTRE DAME DE LA COÛTURE, LE MANS]
Notre Dame de la Coûture--the name originally referred to the _Cultura
Dei_--is an old Benedictine foundation, dating from the sixth century,
but destroyed during the Revolution; the church, however, remains, with
most of the old work intact, the two square fourteenth-century towers
rising in quaint contrast to the modern buildings around them. Between
the towers a remarkable Last Judgment confronts the visitor from the
west doorway. The central figure, Justice, weighs a sinner in the
balance, and apparently finds him wanting, if one may judge by the angle
of the scales and the expectantly gleeful attitude of a devil amongst
the “goats” on the left hand. Of the interior, the choir is the oldest
part, and here we find eleventh-century work, especially in the crypt,
which contains the tomb of the founder, Saint Bertrand, and shows the
rudely carved capitals and square-edged arches of an age before
architects had blossomed out into beauty of sculpture and design. The
same simplicity characterises the choir, which has four bays and a
_chevet_ of five-round arches, with massive piers, and the abacus square
and voluted at the angles. The vaulting of the _chevet_ is terminated by
figures of saints, which rest upon the shafts of the clerestory windows.
There is no triforium, its position being taken throughout the church by
corbel tables in the form of human and animal faces. The nave consists
of a single wide body without aisles, and set in the blank wall are
three large bays of relieving arches, their space being filled in with
curious old tapestry, in which appears a medley of Biblical subjects,
pastoral and hunting scenes, and Chinese pagodas.
This quiet little church was in the very centre of the furious street
fighting which followed the first rush into the city of the Prussian
troops, and fulfilled its sacred mission of giving shelter to the
wounded and comfort to the dying who lay stretched in the neighbouring
streets of the town. “We entered,” says the war correspondent of _The
Times_, “the picturesque old church of Notre Dame de la Coûture,
interesting from its quaint mixed architecture, its old choir and
vaulted walls, and were told by the meek-looking priest who sadly showed
us over it, and was busy cleaning it as we entered, that no fewer than
six hundred wounded had passed the night in it.”
Chapter Nine
ANGERS
If Le Mans marks the first stage from Normandy upon the southward road,
Angers may certainly be counted as another stepping-stone to the lands
of the Loire--another landmark in our own history--another city upon a
hill, and yet differing from all the hill cities before it. We are now
in what Freeman calls “before all things the land and the city of
counts,” the city which gave to history the name of Fulk the Black,
warrior and pilgrim and enemy of Odo of Chartres; of Geoffrey the
Hammer, who strove with the Conqueror at Domfront and Alençon; of René
the minstrel and of Margaret his daughter, who carried to England the
spirit of the old Angevin line, and fought with the strength of two for
the inheritance of her husband, meek, scholarly Henry of Windsor, for
whom the shield of faith had more significance than the shield of the
warrior.
The house of Anjou cannot but have an interest to an Englishman, since
it is the parent stock of our longest dynasty. Long before it came
through Normandy into contact with England it held its own, however, in
Gaul, Roman and Frankish. The Andecavi, who settled on the Maine, were
an important tribe, and their city was of equal importance. In 464 the
Saxons wandered down from Normandy and overran Anjou, but their
occupation was merely temporary, and left no traces in city or people,
as did the Saxon colonies at Bayeux and in England; and when this one
cloud has cleared off, an open field is left for the history of the
counts. Now the Counts of Anjou may be said to stand very near the head
of the list of all the rulers in France at this early time--a long list,
which numbers many important names, Hughs and Roberts of Paris, Williams
and Richards of Normandy, Thibauts of Champagne--yet against whose feats
of arms and feats of policy the Angevins can measure theirs almost one
by one. “The restless spirit of the race showed itself sometimes for
good and sometimes for evil, but there was no Count of Anjou who could
be called a fool, a coward, or a _fainéant_.”
The first count, Ingelgar, received his dominion from Charles the Bald,
in about 870. After him comes Fulk the Red, who enlarged his father’s
borders beyond the river; Fulk the Good, the scholar who defended his
learning with the well-known proverb, “An unlettered king is but a
crownéd ass,” a saying which spread beyond his own realm and found
favour at the court of England; and the warlike Geoffrey of the Grey
Tunic, who repelled the Breton and Aquitanian incursions and fought in
Frankish and German wars besides. Geoffrey it was who gave to the line
the famous Fulk the Black, the first count who appears to any great
extent in French history--the history, that is, of France proper, at
that time apart from the great duchies on her boundaries. His wars with
Odo filled a great part of his reign, and brought him down as far as the
Loire, where, through the alliance of a count of Périgueux, Tours became
his for a short time; also Saumur, after the victory of Pontlevois. On
two occasions he turned pilgrim; and he is also found at Rome, applying
to the Pope for consecration of his new monastery near Loches, which
Hugh of Tours, whose see Fulk had robbed, refused to consecrate unless
the stolen lands were restored. Naturally the Gallican Church resented
this destruction of their privileges; the full wrath of the episcopate
was pronounced against the recreant count, and a legend adds that in
further punishment a wind came from heaven and blew down his newly-built
church. How this uncanonical behaviour must have vexed the shades of
Fulk the pious! Fulk Nerra was followed by Geoffrey, self-christened
the Hammer. He rebelled against his father during his lifetime, but
after his death continued the war with Chartres, and actually got
possession of Tours, the one city for which every Angevin strove. Count
Thibaut was formally deprived of the city by royal command, and it was
handed over to Geoffrey, under the favour, the superstitious chroniclers
make haste to add, of Saint Martin. Notwithstanding this royal grant,
Henry, the Frank king, seems to have been perpetually at war with
Geoffrey, and even to have called in feudal service of the Norman duke
to aid him against the Angevin count. William himself was no friend to
Anjou. The mastery over Maine was a bone of contention to the two great
powers on its north and south borders; and when Geoffrey obtained the
guardianship of little Count Hugh, and came into immediate contact with
Normandy, a definite struggle arose. Geoffrey aimed at the two outposts
of William’s territory, Alençon and Domfront. Alençon, through the
treachery of its lord, surrendered to him; Domfront was also
disaffected, and for a moment it seemed as though the land of the great
Norman were to be invaded by his southern neighbour. But William was
prepared for any emergency. He marched straight to Domfront, where
Geoffrey had already stationed his troops, and laid siege to it. He
remained before the town for some time before news came of the advance
of Geoffrey himself; and when the Count at last arrived, he sent word of
his readiness to give battle. But when the morning broke upon the Norman
host, drawn up before the fortress all expectant of a battle with the
Angevins, lo! no enemy was to be seen. Geoffrey, whose surname of Hammer
by no means maligned his prudence, had thought better of the scheme in
the night, and retired with all his men. The Norman writers, of course,
set this down to cowardice. But one would like to hear the other side of
the story. “Here, and throughout the war, the lions stand in need of a
painter, or rather their painters suddenly refuse to do their duty. We
have no Angevin account of the siege of Domfront to set against our
evidently highly coloured Norman picture.”
“The French yearning to make everything new” has done its work in
Angers, but though Fulk, Geoffrey, René, and the rest would be at a loss
to recognise their old capital in the trim modern town, enough remains
to show us what has been. No city standing as Angers does on rising
ground above a wide river, with a mass of castle bastions sloping up the
hill, could fail to have made history in its day. The modern town may be
disposed of in a few words--it is clean and full of life, and
altogether very far removed from the “black Angers” known to our
ancestors. This mediæval and grim-sounding title, reminiscent of
dungeons and tyrant princes, probably either meant that the ancient town
was closely and squalidly built, or else referred to the dark slate with
which the country abounds, and which might well have been used for
building purposes all over the town, as we still see it in some houses
by the river.
The attractive side of Angers is that facing the water, and the river is
quite worthy of the town on its banks, though Mr. Henry James does
censure the “perversity in a town lying near a great river, and yet not
upon it.” It is true that Angers has not got as far as the Loire; but it
has what is next best, a tributary of the great river--a wide placid
flow, which makes no mean show here, spanned as it is by three fine
bridges. Looking upstream from the lowest bridge one sees the old and
the new together; the clean well-to-do water-front, pleasant boulevards,
and a bright little quay with every house the pattern of its neighbour;
and above this the black mass of the castle, whose solid hugeness makes
the crowning towers of Saint Maurice look as if they were cut out of
paper, so delicately and sharply defined are they against the sky. Down
river there is a long and sunny path, broad green meadows and a stretch
of country beyond, and little fishing boats dotted about on the water.
But what Angers has of the best is its castle, though it be “the work of
intruding Kings,” Philip Augustus and Louis IX., and not of the Angevin
counts. It is, indeed, more massive than picturesque--“it has no beauty,
no grace, no detail, nothing that charms or detains you; it is simply
very old and very big--so big and so old that this simple impression is
enough, and it takes its place in your recollections as a perfect
specimen of a superannuated stronghold.” The huge grim bastions, girded
with iron bands as though to give added strength to their already
giant-like solidity, and the deep moat, filled in old days by the waters
of the Maine, stood there for a very real and terrible use, and even now
are a splendid example of how men in the Middle Ages defended themselves
against all comers. The very steepness and plainness of the vast walls
prevented an enemy from gaining any foothold, even supposing him to have
crossed the moat in safety. But this great house of defence now gives on
to a modern boulevard; a kitchen-garden occupies the moat, and sends the
scent of thyme and rosemary up through those loop-hole windows, whose
most peaceful prospect of old was the black, silent water below, and
whose usual occupants were armed men with cross-bows, or boiling lead,
or something equally quieting to the unwary spirit attempting to scale
those unscalable ramparts.
In the heart of the town is a very comfortable little inn at the sign of
the “Cheval Blanc.” The house has a quiet and rather old-fashioned
atmosphere, perhaps a relic of past days, as the inn itself has stood
there since the sixteenth century, though the present building is quite
modern. Another relic--though the term hardly suits such a hale and
hearty person--is a delightful old waiter, who has been at the Cheval
Blanc for forty years, and wears on his coat with the greatest pride a
minute piece of _tricolor_--the recognition of thirty years’ service.
Close to the Cheval Blanc is the Préfecture, and this contains a hidden
treasure in the shape of an old cloister, which runs along one side of
the court. This cloister was not discovered until 1836, but the remains
themselves date from the twelfth century, and are of extraordinary
interest, not merely from their antiquity, but also from the immense
variety of subject sculpture which adorns them. There are several bays
of round-headed arches, and from their capitals and mouldings dragons
and toads, snakes and winged lions, glare and wriggle at the visitor in
a grotesque medley. In some cases Scriptural subjects are
represented--there is notably the murder of the Innocents, a
marvellously preserved and realistic fresco, reminiscent both in
treatment and colour scheme of some of the Bayeux tapestry; the killing
of Goliath by David, and the presentation of his head to Saul; and
inside a very modern council-room, a wonderful allegory representing the
defeat of Vice by Virtue. The Lamb, enhaloed, is in the centre; beneath
are two lions tearing apart a wild boar; and in the jambs are virtues,
armed with shield and sword, trampling upon demon vices--men struggling
with wild beasts--and adoring angels swinging censers. This is partly
coloured, and the sculpture is very fine, great attention being given to
detail.
[Illustration: ANGERS]
Freeman declares the city of Angers to be the headquarters of the
Angevin style of architecture, and quotes as a noticeable example of
that style the Cathedral of St. Maurice, which differs at least as
widely from that of the French churches as from that of Normandy. The
object of the Angevin architect was breadth, and he has sacrificed both
length and height to the attainment of his end. The view from the west
doorway of St. Maurice shows a well-known example of what is termed the
“hall plan”--a single wide nave, having choir and transepts, but without
ambulatories or aisles. That the church originally had aisles, however,
is evident from a plan of Saint Maurice given in Mr. Lethaby’s “Mediæval
Art”; they were removed, it is assumed, in order to simplify the
construction of the vault. The great relieving arches of the nave as it
now stands are divided into three bays only. “In everything,” Freeman
says, “the tendency is to have a few large members rather than many
small ones. There is a certain boldness and simplicity about this kind
of treatment; but there is also a certain bareness, and an Angevin
church looks both lower and shorter than it really is.” The vaulting of
the roof here follows the same sub-domical design as that of Notre Dame
de la Coûture at Le Mans. The stained glass is perhaps the best feature
of the church as far as actual beauty goes; some of it dates from the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and both in nave and choir it is very
fine, particularly in the windows of the apse and in the rose window of
the north transept. The tapestry which hangs in the nave and transepts
represents scenes from the Apocalypse, and is very fine Arras work of
the fourteenth century.
Chapter Ten
TOURS AND BLOIS
So much has been said and written of the Loire country during the past
fifty years that the modern writer has very little ground left to him,
unless it be to avoid calling it the “Garden of France.” Yet
over-written as it may be, Touraine has not lost any of the charm and
romance which must always attach to a wide sunny land, watered by a
great river, and “peopled”--one might almost say--by châteaux, every one
of which has set its mark upon French history. Certainly there is
something very delightful, because so unlike anything else in France, in
the endless vista of grey-green levels--here and there a group of slim
shivering poplars or a flash of sunlight upon the wide waters of the
Loire, which winds in and out of the flats like a great lazy shining
serpent--flying sometimes into a sudden rage and flooding the land, or
subsiding sulkily amongst high banks and stretches of dry sand.
It is these moods and tempers of the great river that prevent any
navigation upon its waters; other smaller rivers--the Seine, for
instance, and our own Thames--are alive with craft of every kind; but
here, on the great boundary stream between north and south, which seems
made for a waterway to the sea, no busy steamers ply up and down with
the tide--no barges and market boats disturb the calm of its wide
reaches. There never was, for its size, such an erratic and useless
river; yet we can afford to forgive it, for the sake of the land which
it waters and the cities on its banks.
The impression one carries away from Tours is one of wideness, and
brightness, and sunshine--shaded by one or two ancient corners. It is
above all things a town really lived in and appreciated by its
inhabitants, many of whom are English. Tours is, or used to be, a famous
educational centre, and for the sake of education, or economy, or both,
whole families have migrated there, besides the unmistakably English
students who have been grafted on to a family to learn French. And the
river-side shows, if not a strenuously busy, at least a very sociable
side of the town life, especially in the summer evenings, when the
Tourangeaux, native and adopted, leave the white houses and busy
streets, and use their river bank for a pleasant walk.
It is curious how in France each step towards the south seems to be a
step further in French history. First there is Normandy, the land of the
early Northern warriors, with the fierce blood untamed in their veins;
then Maine and Anjou, recalling the days of our own Plantagenet kings,
and the close connection of France with England; while Touraine brings
back to us the craft of Louis XI. and the magnificence of François
Ier. Tours itself, however, has never been content to lie fallow for
long; ever since some Roman emperor transported it from the right bank
of the Loire to the left, and made it the capital of Lugdunensis Tertia,
the town has had an important part assigned to it, and has played out
that part to the full. Though in old days Tours was only half of the
place, the _cité_, the _bourg_, built round the tomb and shrine of Saint
Martin and first called by his name, was of equal if not greater
importance, from the many pilgrimages to the resting-place of the great
saint. This is easily understood when one considers in what veneration
Saint Martin was held by the Gauls and their descendants. Saint
Gatianus, the first bishop of Tours, began the good work in the third
century, but to Martin is due the subsequent spread of Christianity, not
only in Touraine but all over France, so that he really shares with
Saint Denis the honour of patron saint. Born of pagan parents in
Pannonia, Martin became a catechumen at ten years old, and five years
later was forced, much against his will, to enter the army. After his
final conversion and baptism, however, he left it to become the eager
disciple and co-worker of Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers; and in 371 he was
consecrated Bishop of Tours. The legend of Martin’s conversion is well
known (at any rate it may be found commemorated in the painted windows
of churches all over France)--how the young soldier stationed outside
the gate of Amiens shared his cloak with a passing beggar, and how the
following night Christ appeared to him in a vision, making known to the
angels of Heaven this thing done to Himself as to one of “the least of
these.”
[Illustration: TOUR DE L’HORLOGE, TOURS]
After Martin’s death at Candes his relics were brought to Tours, and in
the fifth century Saint Perpetuus built a splendid basilica round the
shrine. This church became the nucleus of the _bourg_ of Martinopolis,
known to the Middle Ages as Châteauneuf. Side by side with the church a
monastery sprang up, and in the reign of Charlemagne the famous scholar
Alcuin became abbot and founded there his school of theology. Late in
the tenth century the basilica was destroyed by fire; two centuries
later saw the completion of its successor, but this again, after
suffering many evils from Huguenot and Revolutionist hands, disappeared
under the First Empire to make a passage-way for the Rue des Halles.
Two towers--the church originally had five--now look mournfully at one
another across the busy, narrow street: the Tour de l’Horloge, square
and solid, with a leaded roof capped by a small eighteenth-century dome,
and the taller Tour Charlemagne, so called for the rather insufficient
reason that Charlemagne buried his third wife, Luitgarde, beneath its
base. These are the sole relics of the ancient _culte_ of Saint Martin;
though to his memory in latter days a new basilica has reared itself on
the other side of the street.