How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 29

ALBI CATHEDRAL[234]

Laissons-nous aller de bonne foi aux choses qui nous prennent par les entrailles et ne cherchons point de raisonnements pour nous empecher d'avoir du plaisir.--MOLIeRE.

The city which gave its name to the terrible episode of the XIII century lies forty miles east of Toulouse. The local saying is, "Who has not seen the cathedral of Albi and the tower of Rodez has seen nothing."

Albi Cathedral yields to none in its gaunt majesty. It stands apart in one's visions of travel, as unique a memorial of past history as the Mount of the Archangel off the coast of Normandy, as Vezelay looking out over the soft valleys of Burgundy, as Le Puy on its basaltic pinnacles.

Never was a monument more absolutely itself.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Albi Cathedral (1282-1399). A Midi Fortress Church_]

Unfrequented Albi was once in the stir of life, and over its stone bridge, built nine centuries ago, have pa.s.sed the notable folk of the Middle Ages[235] as they wended their way to Santiago Compostela, whither all the world was going in those days. Time-scarred houses border the reddish Tarn; dark, decayed streets climb the hill. At a curve of the river, bastions and ramparts rise in terraces to a fortified episcopal palace and--crowning all--the enormous bulk of the cathedral. Its long, stark wall strikes the sky in a formidable straight line. The west facade is a ma.s.sive donjon, four hundred feet above the Tarn. No welcoming west portals here, no extended transept arms of sacrificial mercy, no soaring b.u.t.tress, no leaping pinnacles. Not the lore of Christ, "Do as you would be done by," seems to have inspired Albi, but the Hebraic spirit of breaking one's enemies' bones, as if the Jehovah of the Old Testament, outraged by Albigensian blasphemies, here a.s.serted himself in a temple that would forever be a looming menace for heretics.

Albi's forbidding structure rose between those two harsh epochs--the Albigensian Crusade and the Hundred Years' War. Its aggressive ma.s.s was planned by a most aggressive churchman, Bernard, Cardinal de Castanets, the city's learned bishop detested of the people as their uncompromising feudal master, as well as a spiritual chief so harsh in his inquisitorial functions that a pontifical commission was appointed, in 1306, to repair his excesses. In 1282 Bernard de Castanets laid the first stone of Albi Cathedral and for twenty years he and the chapter contributed a twentieth of their revenues. The church was finished by the sixty-fifth bishop, Guillaume de la Voulte, in the last years of the XIV century.

To approach the cathedral at its apse end is not so picturesque as from the river side, but it is formidable enough. The prodigious apse rises abruptly, imperiously, from the town square. One fairly shivers beneath its Tolosan brick walls, overtowering and overpowering, broken merely by a few narrow windows--surely the narrowest ever made in a Gothic church--and by uniform bastion-tower b.u.t.tresses. Gargoyles, of as alien an aspect as those of the Jacobins' at Toulouse, crane their gaunt necks from the upper walls, as if asking what manner of Gothic this is.

Albi Cathedral is the meridional interpretation of the national art. The traditions of Rome held tenaciously in southern France, where builders disliked to show the machinery by which their edifices stood. The b.u.t.tresses at Albi are in larger part hidden within the church under the guise of walls between the side chapels. The flying b.u.t.tress is uncommon in the Midi. Like Rome again, with her preference for an unenc.u.mbered floor s.p.a.ce, Albi's immense interior is unbroken by aisles. The vault's diagonals spring over a width of sixty feet--a span unrivaled by any in the north. Albi Cathedral is a vast hall three hundred feet long, one hundred feet high, not high enough for its length, perhaps, but few will regret having the marvelous frescoed ceiling, "the missal of St.

Cecilia," brought nearer to the eye.

The tutelary of this fortress-church is the gentle patroness of music.

Half the fascination of Albi comes from its convincing inconsistencies.

It would seem that not Cecile--doubly feminine and gracious under her French name--but Michael Archangel with a brandished sword, should guard this rugged pile. As if the good people of Albi felt the incongruity, they added, long after Bishop de Castanets' day, a southern portal preceded by a porch, the baldaquin, with all its elaborate Flamboyant tracery executed in a creamy-white marble in which surely Cecile, saint though she was, must have felt a personal satisfaction. An architect of genius set that marble porch of Albi against its red time-dulled walls, 'alabaster on corall'; one takes liberties with Chaucer's rime:

And southward in a portal on the wall Of alabaster white on red corall An oratorie riche for to see, In honor of the Roman Cicily.

To ascend to the marble baldaquin one pa.s.ses under a fortified sculptured gateway, erected by the Dominican bishop of Albi, Dominique de Florence (1392-1410). The marble portal and porch were executed under Bishop Louis I d'Amboise (1472-1502) and his successor, Louis II d'Amboise (1502-11) his nephew, belonging to an enlightened family all of whose members excelled in affairs, war, letters, and art, leaving their memorials at Chaumont on the Loire, their feudal seat, at Cluny, Paris, Clermont, Gaillon, and Rouen.

Louis I d'Amboise also adorned the interior of his cathedral by the sumptuous screen of white stone that surrounds the choir, leaving a pa.s.sageway between it and the side chapels. The rood-loft, or _jube_ (so called because from its balcony the clerk chanted _Jube Domine dicere_ before the gospel), is sculptured with the ermine of Anne of Brittany and the lilies of France, being made about 1499, when Anne wedded Louis XII. Bishop Louis at Albi was brother of the king's prime minister, Cardinal Georges d'Amboise.

Originally the choir screen of Albi was painted in colors. While the accessories indicate that the Italian Renaissance was obtaining headway in France, the images derive from the short, overdraped Franco-Flamand figures of Dijon. Perhaps the stonecutters who made Albi's choir wall came direct from Cluny, where a late-Gothic chapel, on which had worked Abbot Jacques d'Amboise, was adorned with prophets and apostles, each with his suitable text. On the inner wall of Albi's choir screen are sculptured homely but charming little angels, and the twelve apostles holding scrolls inscribed with phrases of the _Credo_. Old Testament personages, who only heralded the Messiah, were not admitted to the _sanctum sanctorum_; the vestibule was their proper place. Prosper Merimee called Albi's screen "a splendid folly before which one is ashamed to be wise." Inside and out it is exuberant with sculpture, though its extravagant caprices do not stifle a very real religious feeling in the images. Such a profusion of delicate ornament led the modern critic to suspect that the choir wall was modeled in cement, not chiseled in stone, but when a Sorbonne geologist a.n.a.lyzed the substance it was found to be a fine-grained white stone that grows harder with time.

Everywhere in St. Cecilia's cathedral is fragile loveliness set side by side, as an afterthought, with stern forcefulness. Bishop Louis II d'Amboise brought from Italy a group of artists to paint the panels of Albi's cyclopean vaulting, and the work accomplished by those men of northern Italy, from 1509 to 1512, remains the most splendid color decoration of the Middle Ages in France. Michael Angelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling in those same years. Languedoc produced another superb array of color, the windows of Auch Cathedral,[236] and we must not forget that the greatest of all Renaissance gla.s.sworkers, the friar who filled Arezzo with glory, was a Midi Frenchman.

Amid Albi's arabesques the artists from Bologna and Modena inscribed their names, and some young lovers wrote "Antonia, mia bella," and "Lucrezia Cantora, bolognesa." The frescoes give the genealogy of Christ. They recall Perugino, Francia, and Pintoriccio. Never was blue background more marvelous--a strong rare hue neither indigo nor Prussian nor peac.o.c.k, but a blending of them all in a cerulean depth of color--an art as entirely lost to posterity as the blue background of Suger's windows. Chemical a.n.a.lysis has busied itself with Albi's frescoes, too; but though the blue color of the vault panels was found to be obtained from the precipitation of salts of copper by carbonate of pota.s.sium, how to produce a similar hue to-day remains unsolved. Over the blue background wind lovely arabesques, and the saints portrayed are stately Italians of the Renaissance. The diagonals and transverse arches are colored in old-gold. On the western wall of the church a XV-century fresco was painted directly on the bricks, a Last Judgment copied from popular woodcuts of the day, with the punishments of the seven deadly sins pitilessly set forth. The painting was ruthlessly cut into when a chapel was introduced under the western tower. The side chapels of Ste.

Cecile are illuminated in gold and color like a Book of Hours. Never was there a church of such contrasts: within--a shrine of warm, polished, over-splendid beauty, and without--the most rugged feudal challenge of the Middle Ages.

CARCa.s.sONNE[237]

It is the first sharp vision of an unknown town, the first immediate vision of a range of hills, that remains forever, and is fruitful of joy within the mind ... that is perhaps the chief of the fruits of travel.--HILAIRE BELLOC.

The Cite of Carca.s.sonne was long one of the most formidable fortresses of Europe, covering the route from ocean to sea and guarding a pa.s.s into Spain. These Pyrenean provinces of France gave Joffre and Foch to the World War. The lower walls of the Cite were of Rome's building; above came the Visigothic defenses; then St. Louis extended the fortifications and his son completed them.

Within its double belt of walls and half a hundred towers is the precious little church of St. Nazaire, once of cathedral rank. Its western front was never opened by a portal because it stood near what were long the outer ramparts. The Romanesque nave is small and dark, without triforium or clearstory, and with high aisles that b.u.t.tress the tunnel vault of the princ.i.p.al span, whose transverse ribs are slightly pointed. Piers and columns alternate. The materials to build this early church were blessed by Urban II in 1096 in the same month that he dedicated the new choir of St. Sernin at Toulouse. St. Nazaire was an entirely Romanesque church when Simon de Montfort ruled the Cite for ten years. In this church St. Dominic married Amaury de Montfort to a princess of Dauphiny. St. Dominic had held a public controversy of eight days with the heretics of Carca.s.sonne in 1205, before the coming of the northern barons, and in St. Nazaire he preached the Lent of 1213. Simon de Montfort was buried temporarily in St. Nazaire, and there exists in a nave chapel a sculptured stone which some have thought to be part of his sepulcher, but which is more probably from the tomb of a brother of Count Raymond of Toulouse, who, having sympathized with the northern barons, was slain in consequence. The curious stone shows the engines of war described in the _Chanson de la Croisade_, and the costumes of that period.

Under Bishop Radulph (1255-66), who built the Gothic chapel beside the south arm of the transept, permission was obtained to replace the ancient transept and choir by a new one. Bishop Radulph won forgiveness for those citizens of Carca.s.sonne who were expelled from the fortress in 1262, because they had conspired against the crown with one of the Trencavel dynasty, their old rulers, and the builders of the Cite's chateau. Louis IX, who governed Carca.s.sonne through a seneschal, allowed the exiles to start the present town of Carca.s.sonne beyond the river, in the plain below the citadel.

The erection of the Gothic half of St. Nazaire took place under Bishop Pierre de Roquefort (d. 1321) during the first twenty years of the XIV century. To him we owe the radiant gla.s.s lantern which is St. Nazaire's transept and choir, a structure that is really a big transept with seven chapels, equally high, along its eastern wall, the central of which chapels, and the longest, serving as choir. The windows in the chapels rise to the roof, and are filled with clear and brilliant gla.s.s ranked with the best of the XIV century; those in the first two chapels excel the others. Two windows show the arms of Pierre de Roquefort. St.

Nazaire was one of the last to use the legend-medallion type of window; henceforth, in each panel, a single figure was placed in an architectural setting.

The seven eastern chapels of the transept open one on the other above a low dividing wall, and standing out from those walls, so that a narrow pa.s.sage is made between them and the transept, are detached piers that rise powerfully from pavement to vault-springing. Above their capitals the molds die away in the column--a very early use of a Flamboyant characteristic. The two pillars flanking the entrance to the choir are decorated, midway up, with statues under canopies sculptured by northern artists before 1320.

Archaeologists declare that the Gothic part of the Cite's ancient cathedral are the perfection of XIV-century construction, elastic in every part, each part fulfilling its own separate function. The ogival principle could not be carried farther. It is thought that some architect of the north made the plan, which local masons executed. The only Midi trait is the flat, tiled roof.

Modern restoration has overhauled the citadel of Carca.s.sonne too radically. Imperiously set though it is, does it grip the imagination as entirely as Aigues-Mortes, lying flat on marsh lands, its time-stained walls untouched? Often in France one echoes Pius IX's response to Baron de Croze, who proposed the restoration of the Coliseum: "Dear Son, I have read your memoir and I thank you for it; but do you not know that there are two sorts of vandalism, one which consists in destroying, the other in restoring? Never has the Coliseum been so beautiful as in its moving contrast of past splendor and magnificent present decay. To restore it is to annihilate the work of centuries, to recompose an ordinary pastiche with no _eclat_."

Not that Carca.s.sonne, as redressed by M. Viollet-le-Duc, is deficient in _eclat_; it has too much of it. It is a vision of a feudal fortress too carefully prepared, too deliberately made ready for the tourist.

In the lower town are the typically meridional churches of St. Michel, the actual cathedral of Carca.s.sonne, and St. Vincent whose aisleless hall is the widest in the Midi--a span of sixty-eight feet. Even when using diagonals, the south kept true to its favorite Romanesque traditions. Neither church has a triforium, the apse windows are long and narrow, over the entrance of each chapel is an eight-lobed rose, and the b.u.t.tresses are disguised as walls between the side chapels. The tracery is Rayonnant. St. Vincent was built after the Black Prince burned Carca.s.sonne in 1355. At its sculptured portal was placed a statue of the newly canonized saint-king, Louis IX, under whom this modern Carca.s.sonne was founded.

NARBONNE CATHEDRAL[238]

Que chaque homme console un homme, Fa.s.se un bien, donne une pitie, Ne t'occupe pas de la somme: Ce pain sera multiplie.

--JEAN AICARD (born in the Midi, 1848).

At Narbonne one is at the very heart of the Midi. It is an ancient mother city of Europe, a capital of Celtic Gaul. Surpa.s.sed by nothing in the Roman world, Narbonne kept its pre-eminence under both pagan and Christian Rome. It became the seat of the Visigothic royal line, and of their Moorish conquerors. Charlemagne made it a fortified outpost, and during the Middle Ages it was the richest of trading centers, a third of whose population was Jewish. In 1311, the same covetous king who abolished the Templars banished the Jews, to whom Charlemagne had given the freedom of this town for their support of his cause against Islam.

To-day one walks its dust-white streets with a strange sensation of loneliness. Narbonne is a dead city.

When in the latter part of the XIII century the great Gothic cathedral of St. Just was begun, there seemed no reason why so flourishing a trading center could not succeed in the enterprise. Unlike Beauvais, where the chief church was from its inception out of all proportion to the population, Narbonne could easily have erected a nave to complete its mighty choir. In 1272 was laid the first stone of St. Just Cathedral.[239] Then there occurred here what happens to all rivers that communicate with the sea by means of lagoons: gradually the salt lakes silt up till they become marshes through which the river winds tortuously till suddenly it breaks a new path to the sea. In 1320 occurred this catastrophe for Narbonne. The Roman dike gave way and the river Aude left its ancient bed, quitting Narbonne to flow toward Courson, where it still is. The stagnant waters bred disease, and the metropolis, greeted by Sidonius Apollinaris for its salubrity, _Salve Narbo, potens salubritate_, became a pestilential site. Narbonne sank into silent decay. Over the shrunken city stands the ghostly fragment of the great cathedral, surpa.s.sed in height only by Beauvais and Amiens.

St. Just was begun in 1272, and three years later the cathedral of Toulouse was started on a plan and with profiles so closely resembling Narbonne's chief church that one master may have designed both. Both derive immediately from those northern Gothic churches translated with a meridional accent, the cathedrals of Clermont, whose choir was finished in 1265, and of Limoges, begun in 1273.

The Midi shows in Narbonne Cathedral in the simplified triforium which is framed by wall s.p.a.ces, as are the clearstory windows, in the extremely high pier arcades, and in the stout b.u.t.tresses that are disguised as dividing walls between the side chapels. The capitals are mere uncarved bands, and over them certain molds die away in the pier.

M. Anthyme Saint-Paul's theory was that even in the XIII century began the evolution which was to end in Flamboyant Gothic. He pointed out, in Narbonne's chapels, windows with Rayonnant tracery side by side with flamelike undulations. M. Enlart thinks we cannot be sure that they were done at the same time. An unusual and graceful aspect was achieved in the choir's northern aisle by the setting of piers beyond the dividing walls of the chapels, making a kind of double aisle like that in the transept of St. Nazaire at Carca.s.sonne.

An architect named Henri is cited as master-of-works at Gerona Cathedral whose chevet, begun after 1312, resembles that of St. Just. Henri was a name uncommon in the Midi. It is thought that he was the original architect of Narbonne. His successor at Gerona, Jacques de Favari or Favers, a name of the central plateau of France, is known to have directed the works of Narbonne's chief church. Catalonia, Aragon, and Languedoc were allied in architecture as in tongue. Poblet in Catalonia is directly the daughter of the abbey at Fontfroide, six miles from Narbonne.[240] The Gothic influence of Narbonne spread to the isles in the Mediterranean, to southern Italy and Cyprus.

Archbishop Maurin began Narbonne Cathedral after the tragic crusade of St. Louis in 1270. He had vowed that if ever again he saw the fair land of France he would offer thanksgiving by rebuilding his church. The corner stone and relics were sent by Pope Clement IV, originally a lawyer at St. Gilles, and then archbishop of Narbonne, whose crumbling cathedral of Charlemagne's time he had purposed to replace by a Gothic one, when his translation to the papacy intervened.

The apse chapels were built first. The main parts of the choir are the work of Archbishop Gilles Aycelin de Montaigu, (1292-1311), a n.o.ble of Auvergne, brother of the bishop who was building Clermont Cathedral and who had himself been a canon at Clermont. He also began the cloister, and to his own residence added a donjon tower. It is thought that the episcopal palace at Narbonne served as prototype for the palace of the popes at Avignon. In modern times, between its ancient towers a town hall has been constructed. In 1311 Gilles Aycelin was transferred to the see of Rouen, and Rouen's archbishop, Bernard de Farges (d. 1341), a nephew of the pope who built the choir of Bordeaux Cathedral, took his place at Narbonne, where he completed the giant choir. Services were held in it in 1320.

The truncated western end of the cathedral is a depressing sight. Work stopped after the completion of the east wall of the transept, whose window apertures had later to be filled in; by the XV century all hope of completing the church was abandoned, and two west towers were raised.

In the XVIII century the plan to build a nave was revived and part of the city ramparts were thrown down to allow for its extension. One bay of the proposed structure was begun in b.a.s.t.a.r.d Gothic, and then the enterprise collapsed. The present entrance is through a door contrived in one of the apse chapels. The exterior of that apse was fortified.

From one turreted b.u.t.tress pile to the other was maneuvered a crenelated gallery, and originally the pa.s.sage communicated with the bishop's palace.

Although sadly needing a nave, Narbonne's choir is a proud and n.o.ble vessel. Critics have called it a work of mechanical skill more than of imagination. Its science is beyond cavil, each thrust being exactly counterb.u.t.ted. Profiles, however are angular and there is a painful lack of sculpture. If, technically, Narbonne's chief church is somewhat hard and dry, it has retained sufficient of the emotional quality of Gothic, what has been called its _sursum corda_, to belong to the grand tradition of the national art. Moreover, one can kneel reverentially on the very steps of the altar instead of being kept at a stately distance.

In the clearstory are the loveliest XIV-century windows in France, like rare-toned etchings or delicate spider-web, time-stained lace. As there is color in them, it is inexact to call such windows grisaille, but the subdued note of grisaille gla.s.s predominates.

Between Narbonne and Spain lies Perpignan's XIV-century[241] cathedral, and Elne's cloister, called a work of supreme elegance by the critical Prosper Merimee, and to the east at Beziers is a fortified cathedral with ma.s.sive towers, begun in 1215 and building through the XIV century; it has good stained gla.s.s of this latter period.

One's interest in Beziers centers in the terrible ma.s.sacre of 1209, the opening act of the Albigensian Crusade. Not that the mere sacking of a city would have roused such horror. In the course of its history eight ma.s.sacres had occurred in Beziers. It was a day when such acts were the accepted methods of warfare and the northern leaders had discussed whether it were not good tactics to start their campaign by terrorization. It was the slaughtering of the citizens in the churches to which they had fled for sanctuary that violated the general standards.

Witnesses of the sacking of Beziers say that while the chiefs of the besieging army were considering how to spare those in the city who were not Albigensian, an a.s.sault was started through the skirmish of lawless hangers-on of the crusading army and a few townspeople. In the confusion that followed, the northern knights rushed to arms and the city was captured. A XX-century wrecking of the Louvain-Dinant-Termonde type followed, and some twenty thousand perished.

Modern scholars doubt that the famous _Tuez-les-tous_ remark, attributed to Abbot Arnaud of Citeaux, who died archbishop of Narbonne, was ever uttered. He is accused of saying, "Kill them all, G.o.d will know his own," when asked how the orthodox were to be told from the heretics. No contemporary chronicle mentions it and Albigensian historians would certainly have flung such words at the crusaders; equally would an ardent admirer of Simon de Montfort, who wrote his _Gestes_, have lauded the sentiment, if one is to judge by other happenings he thought praiseworthy. Neither enemy nor friend mentions the _Tuez-les-tous_ phrase. It first occurs in the history of a German monk at Bonn, long after the Midi crusade, and the pages of that chronicler are so filled with discredited a.s.sertions that little he says should be taken seriously.

MONTPELLIER AND MAGUELONNE[242]