How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 17

RHEIMS SINCE 1914

How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people. How is she become a widow, she that was great among the nations.--JERIMIAH: _Lamentations_.

Designer infinite!

Ah! must Thou char the wood e'er Thou canst limn with it?

--FRANCIS THOMPSON, _The Hound of Heaven_.

In the first days of September, 1914, after the battle of the Marne, the Germans evacuated Rheims, which they had occupied for little over a week. Before they quitted the city, some cans of inflammable liquids, with bundles of straw, were set on the roof of the cathedral, and there they were found and made note of officially by Frenchmen who ascended the towers to hang out the Red Cross flag. The destruction of Rheims Cathedral was planned deliberately and in cold blood it was carried out.

No military excuse for the crime is possible, since General Joffre made a formal statement that at no time were the church towers used as posts of observation.

From the heights a few miles away the enemy opened fire on the city. It is said that Baron von Plattenburg ordered the bombardment. General von Haeringen is also cited as an executioner of Rheims Cathedral. On September 17th and 18th the church was riddled with projectiles. Between dawn and sunset, on September 19th, over five hundred of them struck the mammoth church. About four o'clock on that fateful day, Sat.u.r.day, September 19, 1914, the timber roof caught fire from an inflammable bomb. In less than an hour flames were devouring the wooden scaffolding which, by ill luck, because of repairs in progress, framed part of the edifice. Fire lapped and calcined the outer walls, obliterating the kings and the angels and the saints, wiping out all the loving handicraft of the old stonecutters. Once again molten lead ran in the streets of Rheims. Fire lapped the sculptured screen inside the western doors, and the lovely lavish chiseling has become a blurred, amorphous ma.s.s. Projectiles tore through the gaping windows and crashed against the opposite walls. Some of the burning timber from the overroof fell through the apertures of the vault's keystones and ignited the straw spread on the pavement for the wounded German soldiers who had been left behind when the invaders evacuated the city.

Let an eyewitness relate the burning of Rheims Cathedral: "It stood enveloped in flames, one towering flame itself. Before the outrage something surged unchained at the root of our being. Our cathedral! Our hearts broke as we watched its desecration. An aged woman of the city intoned solemnly: 'This will bode them no good!' ('_Ca ne leur portera pas bonheur!_') We stood in groups watching with fierce anger the conflagration. We walked, we spoke, but like automatons, for our souls were groaning with anguish. Our cathedral! _Premiere page de France!

Geste des aeux! Legs des siecles devenant aujourd'hui, en ce poignant martyre, l'hostie nationale!_" Suddenly word came that the German wounded inside the church must be saved. The archpriest of the cathedral, Canon Landrieux (to-day a bishop), called for aid from the onlookers. He was answered by angry murmurs: "What! must we then risk our lives to save these bombarders of hospitals, these incendiaries of cathedrals?" Then a young girl's voice rose, trembling with tears: "_On est de France, nous autres!_" And instantly men stepped forward to aid the heroic priest save their enemies from the flaming furnace.

Poor martyred Rheims! Its once illuminated western front is battered and corroded past restoral, and is falling flake by flake. With a touch of the finger the stone crumbles into dust. The towers are mutilated. One after another the rapt and fearless angels on the b.u.t.tresses have been toppled down. As the incessant rain of fire and iron came from the northeast, the transept's northern entranceway is wrecked--its historic statues mere unsightly stumps. Never again will the hardy lesson of the Last Judgment be preached at the ruined portal.

No more will the triple-winged seraphim chant hosannas in the great western rose. No coming generations of travelers will carry away an undying memory of the sunset hour in the great church, when the western inclosure became a resplendent sheet of flame, and those who paced up and down the basilica gazed with awe at that majestic spectacle of Art and Faith. The XIII-century windows of the clearstory are pulverized; scarcely a fragment is left of the forty lancets of the nave where, in superimposed rows, the kings of France stood, with the archbishops who had crowned them, big-eyed barbaric images, so intense of hue that one remembers them as blood-red rubies. The loss of the windows of Rheims has been expressed poignantly by Pierre Loti, who spent a Sunday in October, 1915, in the cathedral. He found the silence of death within its ravaged walls that for centuries had echoed the music of the liturgy. Only a cold wind now and then made fitful psalmody. When it blew strongly he could hear a patter as of delicate light pearls. It was the falling to oblivion of what still remained of the ancient windows.

The hammer of Odin and of Thor has gone on beating down relentlessly the national church, and a Berlin poet has sung, exultantly: "The bells sound no more in the two-towered Dom. We have closed with lead, O Rheims, thy house of idolatry." Rheims was hated of old. In its cathedral of 1119 Calixtus II, of the blood of the Capetians, had excommunicated the would-be autocrat of Europe, the German emperor, who had proved himself an unnatural son, a treacherous neighbor, and one who laid sacrilegious hands on holy things. As the pope p.r.o.nounced the sentence the four hundred prelates gathered in the cathedral dashed down their candles. Yes, Rheims was hated.

Every check to the invader's troops in the trenches was immediately revenged on the defenseless church. _Rheims Cathedral bombarded_ became a tragically recurrent line in the war's official bulletin. On October 14, 1914, a hole, meters wide, was torn in the most beautiful of Gothic apses. On February 21 and 22, 1915, the bombardment surpa.s.sed in savagery the horrors of the fateful September 19th. On March 29, 1915, a German airship dropped inflammable bombs on the choir, and before many months of this rain of iron and fire the masonry roof began to give way.

During the half year preceding the armistice a veritable avalanche of sh.e.l.ls fell on the stricken city, where remained only a few hundred of its hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants. From June 15 to June 28, 1918, over sixteen thousand sh.e.l.ls fell on Rheims, and, strange to tell, amid it all Dubois' statue of Jeanne d'Arc mounted on her charger on the cathedral parvis stood unscathed.[121] On July 5th eight sh.e.l.ls crashed into the western entrances; and so on runs the sinister record.

"We wait for a chastis.e.m.e.nt equal to the crime," is the word of Enlart, the archaeologist. And the world's heart echoes the verdict. When on that fatal September day of 1914, the staggering almost unbelievable report first spread over France, "Rheims Cathedral is in flames"--many a strong man wept on the streets of French cities, and throughout the tragic night of the conflagration the French soldiers, camped over the plains for miles, watched in anguish the destruction of their patrimony, of their ancestress cathedral, _l'holocauste de la patrie_. In Jeanne's century it had taken a long and cruel war and the sacrifice of her who was the incarnation of France to remake the stricken soul of the nation, and again an overwhelming martyrdom was needed to set right the grievous _pitie_ there was in the country of France.

The city of Rheims is to-day a shapeless ma.s.s, resembling a place wrecked by ancient barbarism. The archiepiscopal palace, whose two-storied chapel was built by the same hands that laid the choir stones of Notre Dame, is entirely demolished. The cathedral, though ravaged irreparably, still towers above the ruined city. Had Amiens been subjected to the same bombardment as Rheims, it would have collapsed long ago. It is the surplus strength of Rheims' foundations, somewhat criticized by architects, that has saved the church from utter destruction. Notre Dame of Rheims was built for eternity.

The mystic wonder of the severed head of St. Nicaise has been repeated.

Immolated Rheims has stirred anew the latent crusading blood. "Honor"

and "sacrifice" and all the brave words of the days of chivalry are again on the lips of Frenchmen, and many a scoffer has been beaten to his knees by the same spirit which actuated the generations who built the cathedrals and, building them, welded a nation's unity. Those who committed the sacrilege of Rheims forgot that when mankind is robbed of a heritage it sets the criminal in the pillory of history. To-day Rheims Cathedral lies wounded on the field of honor; Rheims Cathedral is forever the symbol of a people's resurrection. _a la peine!... a l'honneur!_

AMIENS CATHEDRAL[122]

There have been, in humanity's story, only two great schools of art--that of Greece, and that of the Gothic era. For only then was expressed the ideas and the religious spirit of the peoples that gave birth to them. The Greeks rendered the Pagan spirit, the Pagan emotion; they left us the Parthenon. The Gothic School rendered the Christian idea, the Christian spirit. It has left us Notre Dame of Amiens.--eMILE LAMBIN.[123]

The terrors and the thunder of the World War menaced Amiens through the long four years, but the grand doctrinal temple, almost superhuman in its majesty, was spared the fate of Rheims, Soissons, and the n.o.ble church of St. Martin at Ipres, begun in the same twelvemonth as itself.

The statues at the portals of Amiens have seen pa.s.s the great personages of the mediaeval centuries. The kings of this world felt honored to visit the church of Our Lady and St. Firman. Its reconciliation Ma.s.s put the seal on a treaty of goodwill between France and England, and united the English ruler with his rebellious people; St. Louis, the peace maker, prayed in its sanctuary. On its very enemies it imposed veneration. When Charles le Temeraire attacked the city in 1471 he ordered his troops to respect the cathedral.

While the upper vaulting of Chartres was being finished and the choir of Rheims was building, there was laid the first stone of Notre Dame of Amiens in 1220. Amiens is the Gothic cathedral par excellence, recognized from the first as a masterpiece--the Parthenon of Gothic--and immediately taken as a model. The cathedrals of Tours and of Troyes, already begun, were now continued like the big church of Picardy. The Sainte-Chapelle in Paris was modeled on the Lady chapel of Amiens. The cathedrals of Clermont, Narbonne, Rodez, and Limoges are "daughters of Amiens." Its influence extended to the church of St. Sauveur at Bruges, to the cathedral of Prague, and to the choir of Cologne, the latter being almost a replica.[124]

Amiens carried the Gothic principle of equilibrium farther than Rheims.

The aisles were made higher, the bays wider, the points of ground support fewer, and the piers less heavy. No energy was wasted. Each part was made just strong enough. To go beyond this culminating point of constructive boldness was inevitably to decline.

No one has better summed up the amplitude of this inspired church than M. Georges Durand, its latest historian, whose monograph is a model: "A vast s.p.a.ce inundated with air and light has here been covered by stone vaults, as light and solid as possible; those vaults have been raised to a height never before attained; no longer any walls; the solidity of the edifice is a.s.sured by a play of pushes and resistances; flying b.u.t.tresses exactly meeting the necessary spot to counterbut the great vault; the system of equilibrium perfectly known, and applied with a rigor and audacity unbelievable; the least possible sharpness given to transverse arches; the collaterals raised to a great height--all contribute to give this interior its expression of immensity."

Amiens is a "triumphal chant." The "vast s.p.a.ce inclosed" produces an impression that is confounding. When first you step inside the western doors of Amiens, you pause in awe. The emotion felt has the efficacy of a prayer.

The edifice is prodigious and appears so; only St. Sophia, Cologne Cathedral, and St. Peter's at Rome cover larger areas. Now in St.

Peter's each detail was enlarged in proportion to the giant scale chosen; thus, a cherub would have a thigh the size of an elephant's. The result is that the great church appears less than its real size. The method of the mediaeval architect was precisely opposite. He saw no advantage in making his edifice appear smaller than it really was. He observed that no matter how big a tree might grow, its leaves were no larger than those on smaller trees. The mediaeval architect took for his scale of measurement the height of man. His doorways were made for man to walk under. In the bases of his piers, in the triforium arches, in the normal size of his sculpted flora and fauna, he recalled to the eye the scale of a man, his chosen _ech.e.l.le_: "And he measured the wall thereof ... the measure of a man, which is of an angel."[125] No matter how large a Gothic church might be, the statues decorating it did not increase in scale. To those who prefer a cathedral of the north there will always seem to be a touch of the artificial, of the _tour de force_ in St. Peter's.

The name of the master mind who designed the cathedral of Picardy was Robert de Lusarches, recorded in a labyrinth formerly in the nave's pavement, as were his two successors, Thomas de Cormont and his son Renaud. The occasion for a new structure was the fire of 1218 which partly destroyed the Romanesque cathedral. As its old choir was preserved sufficiently to serve for a while longer, the new cathedral was begun by the nave, not the usual procedure. The nave rose in one supreme effort; from start to finish its plan never deviated. It has been taken as the typical masterpiece. "The facade of Paris, the tower of Chartres, the sculpture of Rheims, the nave of Amiens" is a popular summing up.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Transept of Amiens Cathedral (1220-1280)_]

By 1236 the nave of Amiens was finished, whereupon the Romanesque choir was replaced by a Gothic one whose plan had been drawn by Robert de Lusarches at the same time with that of the nave. His feeling for proportion was unfaltering; the relation between every part of his church is perfect. The interior elevation in three vertical stories was to become cla.s.sic--a pier arcade--which is one-third of the entire height, and of the remaining upper wall a clearstory which occupies two-thirds and a triforium one-third. The church is three times as wide as the side aisle is high, and height and span correlate with length.

Subtlety of calculation is seen everywhere. The perspective view became a kind of cla.s.sic type. As you gaze down the church toward the curving east wall which closes the vista, you see beneath the pier arcades of the _sanctum sanctorum_ the windows of the apse chapels behind; they appear to fill the apertures symmetrically, whereas at Beauvais, where the side aisle is exceedingly high, the windows of the chapels rise to merely half the height of the pier arches. The cathedrals of Tours and Clermont followed the more satisfactory arrangement of Amiens.

In the last days of Gothic architecture the dislike of the horizontal line was to be carried to such an extent that even the capitals, which the custom of all nations had approved for three thousand years, were eliminated. At Amiens a sane balance was kept. Under its triforium runs a deeply carved band of foliage broken only at the triumphal arches of the transept-crossing. Only there does the ascending line rise un.o.bstructed from pavement to vault. And yet no church ever soared more confidently. The very hall-mark of genius is Amiens' strong horizontal leaf garland--just the needed touch to give variety to regularity as grandiose as this. In the nave the frieze was cut before the posing of the stones, but in the choir the sculpture was done _in situ_.

The fenestration of this cathedral of St. Louis' reign shows the national art in its prime. The glazed triforium is a kind of pedestal for the clearstory, with which it is bound in a single composition by means of continuous mullions. The original gla.s.s was of the Sainte-Chapelle type, made by the Paris school which led in the second half of the XIII century, and were it still in existence the interior of Amiens would be a gorgeous sight. Only vestiges have survived; in some of the choir chapels are patchwork panels of ancient fragments. No one denies that the light enters this cathedral too profusely for the mystic seclusion beloved of the soul.

The prelate who laid the foundation stone of Amiens in 1220 was Evrard de Fouilloy, cousin of that archbishop of the great house of Joinville who was a builder at Rheims. Intimate with Innocent III, connoisseur in notable men, the bishop of Amiens was one of the many building prelates who attended the Lateran Council whose seances must often have appeared like an _Amis des Cathedrales_ reunion. Bishop Evrard's splendid bronze tomb, cast at one flow, escaped the smelting pot of the Revolution, and with that of his successor, Geoffrey d'Eu, who chanted the first Ma.s.s in his cathedral in 1236, the year of his death, is now placed under the pier arcades of the nave. "Here lies Evrard," runs the inscription, "a man compa.s.sionate to the afflicted, the widows' protector, the orphans'

guardian, who fed the people, who laid the foundations of this structure, to whose care the city was given." The hand of the bishop is raised in a grave gesture of power. The image of Geoffrey d'Eu is less personal. "Bright-shining man of Eu," runs his epitaph, "by whom the throne of Amiens rose into immensity." The saintly bishop used to encourage even the beggars to give their penny toward raising the new house of G.o.d.

By 1245 bells were placed in the western towers; then came a lull in the work, from 1247 to 1257, for the bishop had accompanied St. Louis to the holy wars. Louis IX was in Amiens on several occasions and his Sainte-Chapelle at Paris proved his admiration for the cla.s.sic church.

As the XIII century closed, a chapel was added to Amiens by her bishop, the learned Guillaume de Macon, a personal friend of St. Louis, and present at his death in Tunis, 1270. The son and successor of Louis IX sent Guillaume to Rome to solicit his father's canonization. During the XIV century other side chapels were added, and in the one erected by Bishop La Grange, from 1373 to 1375, appeared for the first time in France some of the characteristics of Flamboyant Gothic--the flame tracery and ramified vaulting. As early as 1270, however, Amiens had made a sporadic use of supplementary ribs, in the square over the transept-crossing, employing them there, no doubt, in order to break up the immense expanses of infilling.

Though the cathedral of Amiens has lost its stained gla.s.s, it has retained that other glory of decorative art--its sculpture. The three western entrance arches, in nine orders, are sovereign compositions.

Probably as a scheme of dogmatic theology Amiens is even more complete than Chartres or Rheims. The main facade, with its strong b.u.t.tress lines unbroken from ground to tower, would be the grandest of all the Gothic frontispieces had it been completed as first planned. But only in its lower stories is it of the XIII century, and the towers scarcely rise above the enormous parallelogram.

At the trumeau of the central door stands _le Beau Dieu_ of Amiens, of stronger personality than that of Rheims, a Christ of the West more than the East. "He is the master, wise, steadfast, fraternal, with the patience and the human sympathy that comprehend man's eternal weaknesses."[126] He treads on monsters that symbolize Satan and Sin: "Thou shalt walk upon the asp and the basilisk; the lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under foot."[127] About him stand the best loved of all the saints, the apostles--plain, primitive men in whose upturned foreheads shines the serenity of cert.i.tude. We are His witnesses, they seem to be saying, and our testimony we sealed _usque ad sanguinem_: "That which we have seen and have heard we declare unto you...." "We were eyewitnesses of His greatness...." "This Voice we heard brought from heaven...." "These things we write to you that you may rejoice and your joy be full." The prophets and patriarchs at Amiens' portals lack the a.s.surance of joy which shines in the faces of the humble men chosen for the hierarchy of the New Law; the earlier ones had not themselves seen and heard and touched.

Never was the meaning of the Messiah's coming set forth more sublimely than in this archetype cathedral. The soul of the Middle Ages had brooded over the Gospels till it had pierced to their spiritual sense.

"The house of the Lord built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone in whom all the building being framed together, growing up into an holy temple in the Lord."[128]

When the apostles were placed at the cathedral doors, the tradition was to have St. Peter stand to the right of his Master, and St. Paul to the left; the latter was subst.i.tuted for Matthias, elected to Judas' place.

St. Peter, tonsured, carried the key and a cross; his beard was short and curly. St. Paul bore a sword, since his Roman citizenship had saved him from death by crucifixion; he was represented with a bald forehead and a long beard. St. Andrew carried the peculiar-shaped cross on which he died; St. Bartholomew a knife, emblem of his martyrdom.

At the western doors of Amiens is an Annunciation group in which the Virgin is the prototype of the gentle _Ancilla Domini_ at Rheims. The St. Elizabeth of the Visitation group is a n.o.ble aged woman; the St.

Simeon of the Presentation has been called the _Nunc dimittis_ in person. Local saints are in a position of honor at the right-hand door, the chief here being St. Firman, the first bishop of Amiens, and the pioneer who preached the Word in Picardy, where he was martyred in 289.

On his tomb rose the first cathedral of the city. His statue at the trumeau is a masterpiece of its period.

In his _Bible of Amiens_,[129] Ruskin gives enlightening interpretations of the quatrefoils adorning the wall under the big images at the western entrance. Little genre studies of agricultural life typify the seasons, and the vices and virtues are rendered with movement and subtlety. There is a connection between certain of the small bas-reliefs and the large statues standing above them.

About 1288 they carved the images at the transept's southern portal.

Fifty years had elapsed since the making of the western entrance, and already the early reverential awe had pa.s.sed away. Our Lady is now shown as a radiant young matron whose smile is somewhat mannered, but to call the charming _vierge doree_ "the soubrette of Picardy," as did Ruskin, is an absurd exaggeration. The apostles are no longer of the ideal type.

They are mediaeval schoolmen, debating some point of dialectics.

Each century was to add to the sculpture of Amiens. Andre Beauneveu, an ill.u.s.trious French-Flemish master, made b.u.t.tress statues of Charles V and his sons, realistic portrait work. The king was one of the four Valois brothers who were, with the Avignon popes, the chief art patrons of the XIV century. As Amiens Cathedral suffered comparatively little during the two cataclysms which emptied the churches of France, it is still a museum of treasures. When, in 1562, the Huguenots, sword in hand, rushed into the church to shatter the altars, the town's tocsin sounded and the citizens a.s.sembled in such numbers that they saved their church. Again, during the Revolution, when brutal soldiery began to mutilate the choir screen's groups, the women of Amiens who lived about the cathedral l.u.s.tily beat the vandals with chairs. Of course the Revolution set up here the usual altar with its living G.o.ddess of Reason, Marat's bust was honored, and over the portal was inscribed the grandiloquent boast: "Fanaticism is destroyed: Truth triumphs."

The tombs, bas-reliefs, and paintings were left intact, as well as the famous carved stalls finished in 1522. In the choir-screen sculpture of XVI-century Gothic the Renaissance had only just begun to appear. St.

Firman's mission was related quaintly--no prudery shown in the scene of the baptism of Amiens' first Christians. The life of St. John the Baptist was set forth because crusaders had brought his relics to this church from Constantinople. The tourist guide enjoys leading his clients behind Amiens' sanctuary to show them a plump little cupid weeping a marble tear over the tomb of some good canon who founded a local orphanage. M. Durand remarks that for one who appreciates the magnificent bronze tombs of the bishop-builders, or the realistic late-Gothic groups of the choir screen, there are ten who are moved by that ba.n.a.l little _ange pleurant_.

In the transept are some marble slabs inscribed with the names of the presidents of a religious-literary a.s.sociation called Puy-Notre-Dame.

Such Puys (from podium, or platform) were poetic contests that sprang up in the XIV century, with the disappearance of the wandering minstrels, and they led in turn to a real literary movement.[130] At Amiens it was the custom each year for a new picture in honor of Notre Dame to be presented to her church, and at the festival a poem was read in her praise. Eventually statues were subst.i.tuted for pictures, which explains the wealth of XVII-century sculpture in the side chapels and aisles of Amiens Cathedral. A number of the ancient paintings have been placed in the Museum of the city, whose walls have been embellished by Puvis de Chavannes' _Ave Picardia nutrix_.