Day before yesterday I got permission to come down to Bourges where the
great cathedral of St. Etienne is. It is the third best cathedral in
France, and is simply magnificent. I stayed till yesterday afternoon,
and then returned to camp. Bourges is fifteen miles from Avord. Then I
found we had _repos_ and did not go to class till tomorrow evening, so I
came right back to Bourges on the first train. I will have been in the
town two days and a half—well, nothing could be better. The town is
built upon gentle slopes which fall away from the cathedral in its
center. Houses are here ranging from just before the war back to 1200
A.D., perhaps further. Hundreds of architectural treasures are hidden in
its narrow streets. A town of 45,000, it contains more good
architectural designs than Chicago. But the cathedral—oh, how wonderful!
I went straight to it, led by its towers showing above the house tops,
and when it came into full view I stopped still and held my breath.
Ponderous, massive, standing elegant, magnificent, mounting upward,
delicate, airy in the skies. It held me and pressed so upon my feelings.
What was it? The wonderful spirit of endeavor and faith and love of a
hundred generations trying to please their God. The genius of seven
centuries bending its power to produce a single masterpiece and then the
endeavor of one small human being to grasp all this and hold it in one
glance—as the sound of a hundred thousand voices cheering their parting
army. It made me want to cry. I walked all around it twice. I took
pictures of it from every angle in case something should happen to it or
me. Then I went in. Oh, why try? It cannot be described. No wonder they
kneel. My thoughts whispered to each other in awe. Faint glows in
rainbow hues from the gorgeously stained windows played in the distance
among the forest of columns. Across the altar, which seemed like a dwarf
shrine in a giant citadel six candles twinkled, as if to demonstrate the
smallness of the life of man. There before the altar knelt a priest,
small, with bowed head. Then there was a stir in the air, slight at
first, but growing with rising and falling crescendo, and the monotonous
drone of the chant echoed and reechoed among the columns till it filled
the whole vault, and then died away into religious silence. I turned and
mounted the winding stair into the bell tower, counting the steps—four
hundred and six—four hundred and seven—oh, here was something that I
could grasp and describe. There were four hundred and seven six-inch
steps. The tower was two hundred and four feet high.
The fine old warden of the keys told me he couldn’t take me over the
place without a permit from the architect of the city, so I went to the
architect’s home, only to find him out. When I returned to the
cathedral, disappointed, the old man said that if I would return at nine
in the morning he would take me through. At nine in the morning we
started. We started up the tower and branched off at one of the little
doors into the clerestory that led all around the inside of the church
nave. Here we saw the organ. From here we mounted a dark, uneven passage
within the walls which brought us out to the lowest stage of the roof,
where the bases of the flying buttresses rest. We traversed the gutter,
which was really a promenade, to the choir end of the cathedral. Here
again we wound up a circular stairs within a great buttress pier and
came out on the little narrow stair cut right up the flying buttress
span to the main roof. Here we entered another little door, and found
ourselves right in the garret over the altar. Under my feet was the
great span of the main vault, and over my head the original joinery of
the great peaked roof. In the darkness of the garret we passed great old
windlasses for lowering the huge candelabra which hung in the nave. We
traversed the garret to where through a little door a shaky scaffolding
led over a deep pit to the tower of the prison. Here, again, was a huge
chamber lighted by narrow slits in twenty-foot walls. We descended again
and at every landing was a narrow cell which came to a point in a small
slit which admitted light and indentation in the stone on which to sit.
It was uncanny. It was a relief to come again to the day, where the
bright sunlight played upon gargoyles and grotesques hiding in the
carved stone.
Such a feast of the imagination! I could sit down now and write a novel
laid in the confines of that pile. Then a fellow whom I met and I went
down and explored the crypt. There were unlit shrines and unaired vaults
which ended by a wall one could not see over, and the air was cool and
damp and so bad a match would not burn. We went out to breathe fresh
air, and dream in the sun.