How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 19

The cathedral of Beauvais derived directly from Amiens, and no expression of the Gothic principle was ever carried farther. It consists of a mammoth choir and transept. As the height of the edifice is three times its width, the nave which now is lacking would need to have been of enormous length. Instead of that much-needed nave, there nestles under the truncated west end a modest little Carolingian edifice called the _Ba.s.se-OEuvre_, built by the fortieth bishop of Beauvais, Herve (987-998). The small cubic stones and occasional courses of brick tell of the antiquity of this, the best-preserved monument in France, dating before the year 1000.[140] Most of the Romanesque churches of the Oise copied it. Scarcely, however, had the Ile-de-France Picard Romanesque school developed than the privileged region gave birth to the national art.

In 1227 Beauvais planned a new cathedral, spurred on thereto by the magnificent nave rising in neighboring Amiens. But the works were not started till 1247, for the bishop, more a feudal baron than a pastor, was for a time entirely engrossed in mercenary wars in Italy and in quarreling with Blanche of Castile, the queen-regent. Finally Bishop Milon began his cathedral in Beauvais on a scale beyond the resources of the diocese. Despite his own and the chapter's generous donations, and the exemption of workmen and all building material from taxes, the choir was not finished till 1272, two years after the choir of Cologne.

Scarcely was it done when, in 1284, its upper vaulting fell; a few years earlier a partial collapse had occurred. To remedy the disaster new piers had to be inserted between the old ones, which explains the sharp-pointed arches of the pier arcade. Only in the ambulatory, which was untouched by the falling masonry, is the original vaulting to be found. The required addition of flying b.u.t.tresses was no improvement to the symmetry of the exterior. Instead of being able to proceed to the erection of a nave, forty years were wasted in repairs.

Then came the calamities of the Hundred Years' War when building activities flagged all over France. Never again were profiles to be virile. The apogee hour of Gothic was forever past. With English, Burgundian, and French troops roving the country, Beauvais was kept on the alert. In 1429, the citizens, roused by Jeanne d'Arc's success at Orleans, expelled their bishop, who was in sympathy with the foe, and was none other than the unworthy Pierre Cauchon, soon to sit as miscreant judge at the Maid's trial in Rouen. Two years after Jeanne had been burned, Beauvais was besieged by English troops, and so gallant was the behavior of the women of the city, notably Jeanne Hachette, that forever after was accorded to them the right to march in the place of honor in all processions, directly behind the clergy. When the Duke of Burgundy, England's ally, besieged the city in 1472 he burned the episcopal palace, to which the two st.u.r.dy towers near the _Ba.s.se-OEuvre_ originally belonged. Once more the women of Beauvais fought side by side with the men, while the children and the aged gathered in the cathedrals to supplicate Heaven for protection.

No city in the land had better cause to rejoice over peace and the invader's expulsion than Beauvais. And nowhere did Flamboyant Gothic take on n.o.bler expression than in the stately transept now added to the cathedral, a masterpiece worthy to be joined to the giant choir. On its north front worked Martin Chambiges, who gave to Troyes and Sens their admirable facades. Over-ornamentation was a pitfall for the late-Gothic masters, but not for Chambiges, who kept Beauvais' strong lines of construction un.o.bliterated by lavish detail.

Flamboyant Gothic was essentially a decorative art. Therein only did it differ from preceding schools, for it developed no new principles of construction. Because of the flamelike undulations of its window tracery, the Norman archaeologist, M. de Caumont, who had brought into use the name Romanesque, invented the equally useful term Flamboyant.[141] Capricious, overladen, disturbingly restless, this final phase of the national art may often be (it has been called more terrestrial than celestial), it was inclined to exhibit its technical dexterity; but none the less it was keenly alive and a vast improvement on the over-formalized geometric Rayonnant Gothic to which it succeeded.

In both, the profiles were prismatic, fluid, and weak. Discipline which made for robustness was forever lost.

A century before the characteristics of Flamboyant art developed in France, they were in use in England, and there called Curvilinear or Decorated Gothic. Window mullions undulated, arches were crowned with reversed curves and sculptured finials, secondary, connecting ribs were added to the vaulting, bases were elongated, there were interpenetrating molds, hanging keystones, piers without capitals, and such new models for foliate sculpture as the deeply indented leaves of parsley and curly cabbage. When capitals were given up, the ribs died away weakly in the piers. The Gothic of England had changed to its cold Perpendicular phase by the time that the architects across the Channel adopted the features called Flamboyant in France.

M. Camille Enlart has developed the idea that the last phase of the national architecture was a product of the English occupation during the Hundred Years' War, that from elements of decoration introduced by England, the French composed a style which differed somewhat only from that in vogue across the Channel from 1300 to 1360. In France, flowing tracery and ogee arches were not used before 1375. France need feel no diminution of her claim of leadership in Gothic architecture because she adopted, for her XV-century traits, certain decorative details developed first by others, since the Gothic of England was originally of French derivation.

The theory of an English origin for French Flamboyancy is contested by M. Anthyme Saint-Paul, who thought that from the same elements of XIII-century Gothic one country developed its own Curvilinear style and the other its own, Flamboyant Gothic.[142] M. de Lasteyrie agreed with the thesis that there is a French origin for French late-Gothic manifestations. That Flamboyant art is in part indigenous and partly of foreign derivation is probably nearest the truth. Certainly sporadic cases of florid features appeared in French art during the XIII and XIV centuries, but it is clear that in various places long held by the English there appeared the first or the fullest expression of late-Gothic art.

Before the Flamboyant Gothic transept of Beauvais was finished, the foreign Renaissance had arrived in France. And it showed here in the richly sculptured doors. The sibyls, all ten of whom are represented, are, as pagans, kept outside the church. With skilled gradation the carving grows deeper and bolder toward the top of the doors, farthest away from the eye. Jean Le Pot carved the southern doors in faultless taste. He was a gla.s.smaker as well, and in St. etienne's church are his windows beside those of his father-in-law, Engrand Le Prince, who, with his sons Jean and Nicholas, made the north and south rose windows of the cathedral and its splendid Peter and Paul window. Their tree of Jesse, in St. etienne's choir, is considered a masterpiece of color and design.

To-day a Le Prince window in any French city is a matter of civic pride.

The old saying ran: "The choir of Beauvais, the nave of Amiens, the portals of Rheims, the towers of Chartres" make the most beautiful cathedral in the world. One hundred and fifty feet high curve the upper vaults of Beauvais choir. Beneath them could be set the belfries of Notre Dame of Paris. As at Bourges, the lofty aisle possesses its own triforium and clearstory, but here the clearstory of the central choir has not been dwarfed as a result of the stupendous pier arcades.

Beauvais dared to make its upper windows eighty feet high. Think what its interior would be had it retained the original stained gla.s.s! Its towering choir windows would scintillate like those of Sainte-Chapelle, since it was the Paris school that supplied XIII-century Beauvais.

Such a sweep of fragile gla.s.s was possible because the play of thrusts and counterthrusts had been calculated to a certainty. Technically, Beauvais is the extreme expression of the Gothic theory. It perfected the pier by making it elliptical, widest where fell the greatest strain, north and south. It is said that its error lay in certain false bearings, that some of the intermediate b.u.t.tresses were balanced half on air without direct ground supports. That may have been temerarious, since building material of perfect quality is required when chances are taken. Certainly Beauvais pushed to its rigid consequences the law of equilibrium, allowing no excess in the supporting members, but it was not a builder's folly.

M. de Lasteyrie has called its plan a _chef-d'oeuvre_ of lightness.

Though the architect pushed his technique to the extreme limit of the law of thrust and counterthrust, he did not pa.s.s beyond the possible, and had he employed the hard, resistant stone of Burgundy the history of the cathedral church he built would not be a tale of disasters. What brought about the collapse of Beauvais' vaults was the use of inferior stone.

Sometimes one feels in the hardihood of this cathedral a trace of everweening pride, as if its cert.i.tude of excelling tended to virtuosity. The stupefying ascending lines, strong-willed and carried out with science, seem as much to vaunt the enterprise of their builder as pay homage to the Creator. Some of the lesser churches, that humbly and tentatively reached out toward perfection, make a deeper appeal than does stupendous Beauvais. Was man meant for the superlative on earth?

And one remembers that Bishop Milon de Nanteuil was a proud man of the world, very unlike that true pastor of souls, Maurice de Sully, who with unpretentious diligence raised Notre Dame of Paris. Such criticisms would be silenced, perhaps, had Beauvais a nave from which could be viewed its overwhelming choir. Truncated as it now is, it is necessary to crane the neck in order to see its clearstory windows. So colossal a thing should be led up to gradually; it cries out insistently for its missing nave.

Fatality seemed always to pursue Beauvais. After terminating a n.o.ble Flamboyant transept, the ambitious citizens were lured into the scheme of a central tower, when a church of such height should have at its crossing merely a slender spire. Instead of proceeding to build a nave, they raised a lantern that lacked merely a few feet of the enormous height of St. Peter's dome in Rome. It was a day of tower building in France, and Beauvais, ever hopeful beyond its resources, thought to outvie all others. On feast days lights were hung in its spire's open stonework for the illumination of the entire countryside. For five years only the giant beacon stood. On Ascension Day of 1573, just after the congregation had left the church to walk in procession, the tower fell with an appalling noise, covering the whole town with dust. Only one bay of the nave has been built, its piers have disappearing moldings, amorphous profiles, and no capitals whatever. Beauvais stands a ma.s.sive fragment, and there seems little chance that the truncated church will ever be completed.

THE CATHEDRAL OF TROYES[143]

With travail great, and little cargo fraught, See how our world is laboring in pain; So filled we are with love of evil gain That no one thinks of doing what he ought, But we all hustle in the Devil's train, And only in his service toil and pray; And G.o.d, who suffered for us agony, We set behind, and treat him with disdain.

Hardy is he whom death doth not dismay.

The feeble mouse, against the winter's cold Garners the nuts and grain within his cell, While man goes groping, without sense to tell Where to seek refuge against growing old....

The Devil doth in snares our life enfold.

Four hooks he has with torments baited well; And first with Greed he casts a mighty spell, And then, to fill his nets has Pride enrolled, And Luxury steers the boat and fills the sail, And Perfidy controls and sets the snare.

Thus the poor fish are brought to land.

--COUNT THIBAUT IV of Champagne.[144]

Beneath the present choir of Troyes Cathedral are Gallo-Roman walls, and a succession of edifices have stood on the same site. From the cathedral of the V century started the bishop, St. Loup, "the friend of G.o.d," when he went forth to check Attila the Hun, "G.o.d's scourge," and the barbarian was touched by spiritual fear and retired. That same good bishop of Troyes was the companion of St. Germain of Auxerre, on the notable journey north, when they blessed the gentle child Genevieve in a village near Paris, marking her as a vessel of election.

Probably the cathedral immediately preceding the present one was in large part early-Gothic. Fire wiped it out, in 1188, and preparations for a new basilica were started by the energetic Bishop Garnier de Trainel, who went on the Fourth Crusade, and was among those, says Villehardouin, who scaled the walls of captured Constantinople along with his friend Nivelon, the bishop-builder of Soissons.

The first stone of the new cathedral at Troyes was laid in 1206 by Bishop Herve (1206-23), an able man who had been advanced by the observant prelate of Paris, Eudes de Sully. For almost twenty years Bishop Herve worked on the choir, considered one of the best chevets in France. During his episcopate Troyes was a brilliant center of European trade and culture. Blanche of Castile and young Louis IX pa.s.sed some time in the city when Thibaut IV the Singer, related to the royal line, was attacked by the clique of rebellious barons who plotted against the boy king. There had been considerable romancing about the volatile, inconstant Thibaut's admiration for Queen Blanche, who was a married woman before he was born. His own mother, Blanche of Navarre, another of the able women rulers of that day, gave generously to the new cathedral of her capital city.

In 1228 a storm damaged the rising structure, necessitating years of tiresome repairs. Pope Urban IV, as a native son of Troyes, contributed.

During the last forty years of the XIII century the transept was building. It showed traces of English feeling derived perhaps from Edmund Plantagenet, a son of the builder of Westminster Abbey, who had married the dowager Countess of Champagne. His ward Jeanne, Thibaut the Singer's granddaughter, inherited the countship of Champagne, the kingdom of Navarre, and by marriage became the queen of France.

Slowly during the XIV and XV centuries, one bay of the nave was added to another; the changes from the precise lines of Rayonnant tracery to the undulating mullions of the Flamboyant day are easy to follow. The long delays were caused by lack of funds and the repeated need for consolidating the parts already built. The soil on which the church stood was unsuitable, and from the first, security was jeopardized by using the soft, native stone in those parts of the edifice which were out of sight, in order to economize on the firm stone imported from Burgundy.

Several times during the difficulties of reconstruction, the cathedral chapter turned for advice to noted masters--to Raymond du Temple, Charles V's architect, and to Andre de Dammartin, patronized by the king's brothers of Berry and Burgundy. Work ceased altogether during the English occupancy.

Then in 1429 the city opened its gates to Charles VII on his way to be crowned at Rheims. Jeanne d'Arc, during her trial in Rouen, told of an incident of their entry into Troyes. Some of the townspeople were fearful lest the heroine of Orleans came of the devil, so they had a holy preacher march out to exorcise her. Scattering holy water and making repeated signs of the Cross, Brother Richard approached the Maid.

"Draw near without uneasiness," Jeanne a.s.sured him, in her pleasant manner. "I won't fly away."

The city by its reception of the king evinced eagerness to wipe out the infamy of the Treaty of Troyes, signed here in 1420 by Queen Isabeau of Bavaria, wherein she repudiated her son Charles VII and gave France over to the foreign invader. The people's renewed hope and self-respect expressed itself in some of the most lovely Flamboyant foliage ever chiseled--the deeply undercut leaf.a.ge on the gable of the north portal (1462-68).

Work on the cathedral was taken up with energy after Jeanne, carrying her standard, had hallowed the streets of Troyes. As the XV century closed, the nave's radiant late-Gothic windows were installed. They are of the _Biblia pauperum_ type, and are surprisingly like big translucent woodcuts. They tell the story of Daniel, Tobias, Joseph and his brethren, Job--a window especially to be noticed--some parables, too, and edifying legends. The scenes are set quite as they appeared in the mystery plays, the costumes being not of Syria, but of the very stuffs and damasks bought in their own international fairs. The same masters of Troyes, Verrat, G.o.don, Lyenin, Macadre, who signed a rose window of Sens transept, put their signatures here.

Bible stories such as these suit the layman's part of a church, for they serve to hold the attention of the average man. In the choir of Troyes are thirteen large windows of an earlier day, profounder in color and more spiritual in suggestion. They are like a jeweled cloistral screen around the Holy of Holies. In the upper central windows are the Pa.s.sion scenes, and on either side rise tier on tier of martyrs who witnessed to the Faith--bishops, abbots, and a few important personages, such as Pope Innocent III, Bishop Herve, the builder, and the archbishop of Sens, the learned Pierre de Corbeil. On one side of the choir Henry I, emperor of Constantinople, of the house of Champagne, is pictured, and Philippe-Auguste, suzerain of Champagne. And opposite in the fourth window are donjons and fleurs-de-lys showing that the queen-regent, Blanche of Castile, was generous here as elsewhere.

The upper choir windows of Troyes allowed more light to pa.s.s than had their immediate predecessors, the lancets of Chartres. Their colors were clear and bright; only such stone mullions were used as were absolutely required for the support of the gla.s.s. The eight lateral windows of the upper choir belong to the XIII century, the five at the eastern curve to the XIV century. In the lower choir are various ancient windows, liberally restored, the Tree of Jesse, of Byzantine character, being the best. Two hundred years later another Tree of Jesse was made by Lyenin,[145] for the clearstory of the nave. It gave Christian folk a feeling of pride to record the Lord's high ancestry according to Isaias and the Acts. This cathedral of Troyes was one of the first to glaze its triforium, even before St. Denis' abbatial. The present triforium lights are, in most part, modern.

By 1504 the clearstory windows of the nave were all in place. Among their donors was represented a mayor of Troyes with all his family. The golden-hued west rose was put up in 1546. And even into the XVII century the vitrine art of this exceptional city maintained its high traditions of five hundred years. In 1625 Linard Gontier made the _Pressoir_ window, the swan-song of good Renaissance gla.s.s. There is a translucent picture of Our Lady in the nave's south aisle, with stars leaded into holes that were cut out of an entire plate of gla.s.s; any apprentice who could perform that difficult feat of glazing was promoted to be a master craftsman.[146]

For the building of the cathedral's west front, the chapter, in 1506, called on the noted late-Gothic master, Martin Chambiges, who had made his reputation with transept facades at Beauvais and Sens. Together with other artists, his son, Pierre (who won fame with Senlis' transept facade, and who, in 1539, began the chateau of St. Germain-en-Laye), carried on Troyes' frontispiece during fifty years, so that its imagery--badly damaged by the Revolution--shows the ermine of Anne of Brittany, the porcupine of Louis XII, and the salamander of Francis I.

Troyes, with its record of four hundred years, was, of all the cathedrals of France, the longest in building.

In spite of its double aisles, its wide transept, its n.o.ble, deep choir, and its astounding wealth of storied windows, it is clear when standing before the Flamboyant Gothic front of this chief church of Champagne's capital, that it is a cathedral of secondary rank. The flaw here is one of proportion. With such width--and this is the widest cathedral in France--the church should be thirty feet higher. However, no traveler with harmony in his soul thinks of technical criticism once he steps across the threshold and walks beneath the joyous terrestrial windows of the nave and the seraphic lights of the sanctuary.

ST. URBAIN AND OTHER CHURCHES AT TROYES[147]

Madame, je vous le demande, Pensez-vous ne soit peche D'occire son vrai amant?

Ol voir; bien le sachiez.

S'il vous plait ne m'occiez; Car, je vous le dis vraiment, Quoique l'amour soit tourment, Si vous m'aimez mieux vivant.

Je n'en serai point fache.

--THIBAUT IV of Champagne, in lighter mood.

St. Urbain's famous collegiate church, a forerunner of XIV-century Rayonnant Gothic, was founded by a son of Troyes, who sat in Peter's chair, Urban IV. He tells us that "in the desire that the memory of this our name might remain forever in the city of Troyes even after the dissolution of our body," he began, in 1262, a church on the site where his father's shop had stood, choosing for its tutelary the saint-pope, Urban, who had succored the early martyrs in Rome. His father was a prosperous shoemaker in the day when tradesmen gave princely gifts to their parish churches. Urban IV himself had been a choir boy in Troyes Cathedral.

He died before his church was finished, but his nephew, Cardinal Pantaleone Ancher, continued the edifice, which was completed in 1276.

Urban's successor, Clement IV, also a Frenchman, patronized the new works at Troyes. While the choir and transept were done by one generation, many a century was to pa.s.s before the westernmost bay and facade were finished.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _St. Urbain at Troyes (1264-1276)_]

In archaeological circles St. Urbain is noted, Viollet-le-Duc being the first to discuss its ingenuity. As construction it is a small masterpiece, a model of elasticity, perhaps the lightest and most fragile of all Gothic edifices. To an economy in stone we owe this structural feat. Were the principle of equilibrium pushed a step farther, metal, not stone, would be required. Ground supports have been lessened, and flying b.u.t.tresses attenuated to the last limit. Despite its science, St. Urbain is not doctrinaire, but immaterial and seductive. On first entering it Montalembert exclaimed, "_Quelle delicieuse eglise!_"

The architect, Jean Langlois, here created the most elegant form of Rayonnant window tracery. At his porch appears the first French arch of double curvature, the earliest interpenetration of archivolts. We know his name because in 1267 a papal bull summoned him to account for sums advanced on the edifice, and Jean was not forthcoming, because he had disappeared in the East, crusading. The chief church at Famagusta, in Cyprus, begun in 1300--the only completed French-Gothic cathedral of the XIV century--shows such a.n.a.logies with St. Urbain at Troyes that apparently Langlois' architectural influence had spread in the Orient.

M. Lefevre-Pontalis has called Troyes' lantern church inundated with light one of the most original monuments of the Middle Ages. Ten feet above the ground its walls change to opalescent gla.s.s. No grisaille is more exquisitely decorated with natural foliage outlines; set in the expanses of the opal-tinted white gla.s.s are colored medallions of extreme beauty. The lower row of lights around the choir are of this character. Above them, and almost a part of them, are the choir's upper windows--big prophets and patriarchs with the Crucifixion in the center--transition windows between legend-medallion gla.s.s, and the XIV century's single figures in a vitrine architectural frame. The arms of France, Champagne, and Navarre appear in the borders of the choir windows.

The transeptal chapel to the north of the choir shows in its quatrefoils some interesting heads of men, women, and children. From the windows of the south transeptal chapel some panels were stolen, but St. Urbain's cure, Abbe Jossier, a learned enthusiast, was able, by sending photographs all over France, to trace his lost panels in a private collection, and it is to be hoped they may be returned.