How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 30

The tocsin sounded its lamentable notes of alarm over all the land of France. Fire? No. _War._ The voice of the bells long condemned to silence by the authorities suddenly rang out everywhere. From the high belfries spread the warning, and no one worried now to refuse to G.o.d, to the Inexplicable, the right of speech. From G.o.d's house alone came to France, waiting in tense agony, the announcement of the most terrible catastrophe that ever fell like an avalanche on humanity. Sunrise to sunset from east to west, from north to south rang out the coming of War, the world's misery.--JEAN AICARD, on how the World War opened in the Midi.[243]

In Montpellier is a stately terrace called the Peyrou, built in the artificial, distinguished style of Louis XIV, from which one looks out on a most lovely landscape of Midi fertility.[244] Here Mistral in 1878 read his vibrant ode to the Latin race, _la race lumineuse, la race apostolique_, and a generation later the people gathered here to listen to the belfries far and near ring out over that peaceful Claude Lorraine scene the hour of unity in battle array, for all Frenchmen--Latin and Celt and Frank. No longer a Midi and a North. The time was past for race hate or conquest to pose as a crusade. The time had come to end the silencing of Christian steeples under the guise of freedom. As one man, Midi and North sprang up in answer to the tocsin of August, 1914.

What to-day is the cathedral of Montpellier was built from 1364 to 1367 as a monastery church, so that it hardly falls within our scope. But if architecturally the city of Montpellier is of lesser importance, it has been for long centuries the intellectual stronghold of the Midi, and we know that cathedrals are built with more than stones. Montpellier's school of medicine was famous in the XII century. The city was free of Albigensian taint; no trading town was more flourishing during the XIII century. At the hour that the northern barons invaded the Midi, the heiress of Montpellier, whom the king of Aragon married for her dowry and immediately deserted, gave birth to one who was to build more churches than any monarch in Christendom. Twelve candles were set up in the chief church of Montpellier, each with the name of an apostle, and when the candle called James burned the longest the child was named Jaime. An inscription on the Tour du Pin, a vestige of the city ramparts that originally had twenty-five such towers, records the birth of Jaime el Conquistador, the scourge of Islam, the conqueror of Valencia and the Balearic Islands, and the builder of six thousand churches. His father was one of the victors of Las Navas de Tolosa, in 1212, where a vital blow was struck at Moorish domination in Spain; yet he was killed in the very next year in Languedoc, fighting on the heretic side.

Peter of Aragon looked on the Albigensian Crusade as a northern war of conquest, and if outsiders were to win new lands why had he not the same right. Jaime's mother fled to Rome, the sole court of arbitration then in Europe, and when she died there, she left her son the ward of Innocent III.[245] The pope compelled Simon de Montfort, who held the child as hostage, to return him to his Spanish subjects. Jaime's tutor was that Languedoc knight, St. Peter Nolasco (d. 1258), who founded the Order of Mercy to redeem captives from Moslem prisons, but no saint-tutor or saint-neighbor could tame this fierce young eagle, the scion of the French Midi and the Spanish Pyrenees. From the time he buckled on his sword as a boy, to his death in 1276, the weapon never left his side. He cut off the ear of the bishop of Gerona who had rebuked his free living, for Jaime's domestic relations were on a par with those of the Languedoc lords and of his Mahommedan neighbors.

The church which now is Montpellier's cathedral consists of a modern choir of the meridional type, without ambulatory or flying b.u.t.tresses, and a nave built as an abbatial by Guillaume de Grimoard, the best of the Avignon popes, Urban V. The nave is a wide, unaisled hall, with small clearstory windows. Even when the Midi used diagonals, says M.

Enlart, it remained faithful to Romanesque traditions. At the west facade is an ungainly canopy held up by two round turrets of solid stone, the sort of thing which is a builder's notion, not the design of an architect. Urban was disappointed when he found that his architect from Avignon had erected a big chapel rather than a church. When he came to Montpellier in 1367 the new edifice was almost finished. He was honored as never man was before by any city. The townspeople marched out to meet him, every guild and corporation in the ranks, the lawyers carrying the image of the newly canonized St. Yves of Brittany. When the pope's visit ended, half the population walked for miles with him into the country, and the town authorities escorted him all the way back to Avignon.

Urban V had been educated in Montpellier and he loved its university, in which for years he had taught law in the school where Petrarch studied.

He renewed the departments of law and art, put new life into the famed medical school (which to-day is housed in the former bishop's palace, fortified with propped machicolations), and founded a college for the free maintenance of a certain number of students. To this day Montpellier reveres him.

All over Christendom this energetic Midi baron endowed inst.i.tutions of learning, supported hundreds of students, and built monuments. He founded the universities of Prague, Cracow, and Vienna, re-established that of Orvieto, made a school of music at Toulouse, began the cathedral of Mende,[246] near his birthplace, and in Ma.r.s.eilles rebuilt St.

Victor's, where he had been abbot,[247] and where remains his towering tomb. At Avignon he continued the making of its walls of defense, for it was a day when the lawless _Grandes Compagnies_ roved over France.

Urban was too wise a man not to perceive that his continued residence at Avignon was a detriment to the papacy, and he made a valiant effort to return to Rome. There, too, he was no sooner established than he initiated works of art.[248] Broken by the disorders round him with which he had not strength to cope, he returned to his beloved southern France, where he died almost immediately, in 1370. His successor, Gregory XI, inspired by St. Catherine of Siena, who journeyed to Avignon in 1376, was to be the pontiff who ended what Italy, sick to death, called "the Babylonian captivity."

Montpellier was not a bishopric till 1536, when the see was removed from Maguelonne here, and no sooner was the new see established when the city was sacked twice--in 1561 and again in 1565. Every tomb in the present cathedral was violated. Were its walls lined with those old-time memorials they would appear less bare. Neither side was distinguished by amenity in those long years of civil strife.

Maguelonne, the original bishopric, lies six miles from Montpellier on the Mediterranean. In ancient days it was a little island of volcanic formation, then in time an island in a swamp, connected artificially with the mainland. Climb to the flat stone roof of the ancient cathedral of St. Pierre, almost the only monument left standing here where civilization has followed civilization, and look across the lagoons that lie between France and the solitary dead city. Europe and the present seem no longer to exist in this the most aloof, self-effaced, most philosophic spot in the world.

Maguelonne had known all the peoples in their pride. During fifteen hundred years it played its part--Celt, Phoenician, Greek, and Roman ruled here in turn. Visigothic Wamba besieged it. Islam held it under the name of Port Saracen till Charles Martel drove the sea robbers from their stronghold by destroying the city; only the new church of St.

Peter was saved. For the following three centuries Maguelonne lay deserted. Then in 1037 Bishop Arnaud undertook to restore the city, and the cathedral he rebuilt was blessed in 1054. Prosperity soon returned under a republican form of government, with the bishop as president.

Maguelonne became an asylum for exiles and a retreat for scholars. Urban II blessed the island in 1095. When Pope Gelasius II, driven from Rome, landed at St. Gilles in 1118, he soon sailed thence for Maguelonne, and hither came Alexander III in 1162.

The cathedral of St. Pierre stood up a very rock of defense against the corsairs of Spain and Africa. On its flat stone roof engines of war were placed. The present XI-century church replaces that of Charles Martel's day; over an arm of its transept occurred one of the pre-Gothic early uses of diagonals. The transverse arches of the nave are slightly pointed. On the lintel of its portal of creamy-white marble--Cla.s.sic, Saracenic, Romanesque, and Gothic, with doorjamb bas-reliefs of Peter and Paul, key and sword--were inscribed by Bernard de Trevies in 1178 some Latin verses still legible:

Ye who seek life's port to gain enter now this sacred fane.

If ye pa.s.s these gates within, ye may break the chains of sin, So to pray thou must not fail, all thy cruel sins bewail; Know that all thy sins and fears may be washed away in tears.[249]

The cathedral of St. Peter was spared in the second annihilation of Maguelonne, which took place after the religious wars, when Richelieu's policy was to level every possible fort that rebellion might use. Stone by stone the other monuments of the city were carried away. When the ca.n.a.l from Cette to Aigues-Mortes was built, in 1708, Maguelonne became a useful quarry. St. Peter's church now stands alone, embalmed as in amber, preaching the sobering lesson, _Sic transit gloria mundi_.

AIGUES-MORTES[250]

Aigues-Mortes! Consonnance d'une desolation incomparable! Dans le train si lent a traverser la Camargue je m'imagine ces mornes remparts qui depuis sept siecles subsistent intacts. J'evoque ces mysterieux Sarrasins, ces legers Barbaresques qui pillaient ces cotes et fuaient, insaisis, meme par l'histoire. Aigues-Mortes, le vieux guerrier qu'ils a.s.saillaient sans treve, est toujours a son poste, etendu sur la plaine, comme un chevalier, les armes a la main, est fige en pierre sur son tombeau.--MAURICE BARReS.[251]

"I propose that we inst.i.tute a pilgrimage," sighed Rodin, "to all monuments _de plein air_ yet spared by restoration." Aigues-Mortes' big quadrangle set on the dead lagoons is precisely as it came from its builder's hand in the reign of Philippe III, son of St. Louis. No destructive restoration has ever chipped away the time stain of centuries. So shrunken is the little town of to-day, within those imposing ramparts with their fifteen towers and nine gateways, that it is as weird an experience to encircle the walls within as to make the solitary tour without.

No sooner did St. Louis take the crusaders' vow, in 1244, when he began to look about for a concentration camp on the southern coast. He was suzerain only in the south of France. Narbonne had its own counts and so had Provence; St. Gilles and Adge were in the Toulouse countship, and the Montpellier coast was under Aragon. Practically only swampy Aigues-Mortes was available. St. Louis purchased it from the monks of Psalmodi, and reconstructed an old tower on the site which had served as a fort during piratical attacks. The grand Tour de Constance, now standing outside the quadrangle fortification, is the only part of Aigues-Mortes of Louis IX's day. He deepened the tortuous ca.n.a.l of eight miles that led to the sea, since Aigues-Mortes never was directly on the Mediterranean. The Genoese architect, Boccanegra, who constructed the ramparts for Philippe III, followed the type of fortified town in the Orient; Aigues-Mortes especially resembled Antioch.

On both his crusades St. Louis started from his fort on the dead waters.

When in 1248 the crusaders saw the low-lying spot so like the pestilential coasts of the East, many a heart felt oppressed. Again in 1270 the king's army arrived at Aigues-Mortes. Finding his transport ships delayed, Louis IX thought it best to move his warriors to the more healthful site of St. Gilles. There he held brilliant court, to keep up the idle army's spirit, and at the tourneys excelled his Provencal queen's nephew, the future king of England, Edward I. The crusaders left their mark on the walls of St. Gilles.

ST. GILLES[252]

Noms des Morts pour la Patrie, Qu'on vous trie Selons vos provinces; puis, Pour propager votre culte, Qu'on vous sculpte Sur la borne et sur le puits!...

Mais d'abord, que votre zele Vous cisele Sur les maisons memes d'ou Pour aller vers le martyre, Ils partirent Dans le soleil du mois d'aot.

... On lira sur la corniche Pauvre ou riche: "_Mort pour nous ... un tel ... un tel...._"

Trois fois, tous bas, comme on prie, On s'ecrie: "_Morts pour nous ... pour nous ... pour nous!_"

--EDMOND ROSTAND (1868-1918; born in Ma.r.s.eilles).[253]

To this day on the stones of St. Gilles' abbatial are the graffiti of ships and warriors--a king among them--scratched by the swords of St.

Louis' crusaders before they crossed to their death in Africa, 1270. The sadly dilapidated bourg which is St. Gilles to-day played a prominent part in the important centuries of the Middle Ages. Many were the popes and kings who visited it to venerate the tomb of the VIII-century hermit, aegidius, from Athens, whose cult was widely spread over western Christendom, as many a church image and window showing the holy man and his fawn remain to tell.

The counts of Toulouse were the chief patrons of the abbey. On the First Crusade, Raymond IV of Toulouse bore the t.i.tle Count of St. Gilles.

Raymond VI held here, in 1208, an interview with the papal legate, Guy de Castelnau, the after-consequences of which precipitated the Albigensian wars. Angry words were uttered by the count when the legate rebuked him for shielding the heretics, and the next day the legate was murdered by one of the count's retainers as he was about to cross the Rhone. Thereupon Innocent III declared the Albigensian Crusade. In the following year Raymond VI performed penance before the church door of St. Gilles--the last public canonical penance of the Middle Ages. The disasters of the house of Toulouse diminished the abbey's building funds.

The discussions over the date of St. Gilles have been of importance because of its relation to the school of Provencal sculpture of which the most notable monument is its triple portal. Before St. Gilles'

western end is a ma.s.s of composite imagery, of different dates and material, yet composing an architectural unit. Six bays of the nave are covered by a masonry roof of the XVIII century; only the piers and side walls of the edifice are ancient. Beyond the nave lie the ruins of the choir, in which has been installed an open-air archaeological museum.

Did the choir of St. Gilles still stand, it would be the best Gothic monument in the south of France, exceptional in possessing an ambulatory and radiating chapels. At its entrance still exists a spiral staircase, the _vis de St. Gilles_, the first of its kind constructed, which many a mason of the Middle Ages journeyed hither to see. The steps compose an annular vault, winding like a corkscrew.

According to M. Labande, the choir of St. Gilles was built from 1140 to 1175, and at first there was no intention of vaulting it with diagonals.

As the walls rose, however, a Gothic vault was prepared for. The nave, whose capitals have well-cut acanthus leaves, was erected from 1175 to 1209. It could not have been finished when in 1265 Clement IV rebuked his fellow citizens of St. Gilles for their delay in completing their church. Clement had been a local lawyer--a Romanesque house is still pointed out as his--by name, Guy Fouquet, or Fulcodi. The death of his wife caused him to embrace religion. When raised to St. Peter's chair, such was his dread of nepotism that he wrote to his daughters they were not to expect matches any more important than if he were a simple knight; we learn that the well-admonished young ladies failed to obtain any husbands at all. This pope, whom St. Louis called "_notre aime et feal Guy_," instigated the crusade of 1270, which was a.s.sociated in the hour of its departure with his own town.

Despite his exhortation, St. Gilles' choir was joined to its nave only in the XIV century, as is proved by the rows of Rayonnant Gothic foliage on the capital of the nave's easternmost bay. The XVI-century religious wars devastated the abbey, which now was held by Calvinists, now by Catholics; and finally the Huguenots, after using the church as a citadel, ordered that it be razed. The tower was mined and its fall wrecked all around it, but the arrival of the king's troops saved the edifice from entire destruction; as the masonry roof had collapsed, a b.a.s.t.a.r.d-Gothic restoration of the nave was undertaken from 1650 to 1670.

Then came the Revolution; the choir was sold and its stones carted away.

So dead seemed all appreciation of the national art that the const.i.tutional cure of St. Gilles clamored for the demolition of the famous triple portal, as its images "were insupportable reminders of past servitude, recalling the odious feudal regime, displeasing to lovers of liberty and equality." Till the middle of the XIX century the church was abandoned.

During excavations in 1765 a chamber, or bay, of rough workmanship was unearthed in the crypt, and in it was found a tomb inscribed as that of St. Gilles. This is all that remains of the church in which Urban II blessed an altar in 1096. On a b.u.t.tress of the crypt an inscription states that its foundation was laid Easter Monday of 1116. The abbey had been damaged by an irate count of Toulouse, and Calixtus II asked Peter the Venerable to send from Cluny a new abbot to reorganize things.

The crypt's north and west walls rose first, but the work was dropped and taken up several times. All the vaulting, whether groin or diagonals, was an afterthought, for all the piers have been rearranged for the masonry roof they now support. Only a few of the westernmost bays of the crypt used diagonals, and as their profiles are the same as those in the choir, building from 1140 onward, they are probably contemporary. Inscriptions on the outer west wall of the crypt prove that in 1142 people were buried there, which would indicate that the present stair to the west portal was not yet arranged. Perhaps for a time they were not sure of making an upper church above the s.p.a.cious bas.e.m.e.nt. By 1209 that upper nave was built, because Innocent III buried his murdered amba.s.sador beside the tomb of St. Gilles, and when Raymond VI had performed public penance before the portal, we are told that he was brushed against by the crowd, and escaped through the lower church, pa.s.sing his victim's new tomb.

The imaged portal of St. Gilles, which inspired the porch of Trinity Church, Boston, is a composite ma.s.s of imagery begun in the XII century and continued till St. Louis' day. Pilfered fragments were made use of, as was only natural in a region where Rome had left many monuments. Some of the pillars are the fluted marbles of antiquity; others are of granite. Fourteen columns and fourteen large images of apostles and angels give unity to the composition, as does the continuous wide frieze.

St. Gilles' images, strong and short like the figures on the Gallo-Roman sarcophagi near the mouth of the Rhone, are perfectly proportioned to the place they occupy, cold, impersonal figures, more architectural than sculptural, the fruit of an old art, not the beginning of a new tradition, as was the theory of Herr Voge, who would trace to Provence the origin of French Gothic sculpture. M. de Lasteyrie contended that the Porte Royale at Chartres--first of the Gothic portals, last of the Romanesque--with its long, slender figures in whose visages expression has been attempted, descends from the imaged portals of Burgundy, not from St. Gilles or St. Trophime, but from a nascent rather than a dying art tradition. The Lombard school gave to St. Gilles its lion caryatides, a very popular feature at church doors; Lanfranco, who remade Modena's cathedral in 1099, had been the first to plant pillars on the backs of lions, perhaps copying some lost work of antiquity.

"A world in itself," said Prosper Merimee of St. Gilles' sculptured portal. Under the biblical scenes of the frieze animals crouch and crawl. Some of the frieze groups, such as the Flagellation, are full of spirit, and must be of later date than certain other stiff archaic figures. The Kiss of Judas with its grimacing soldiers is probably a XVII-century restoration. The only time that the Expulsion from the Temple was treated in the older work was here. The sisters Martha and Mary and their brother Lazarus, with Mary Jacobi and Mary Salome, are all imaged at St. Gilles' door. The tradition of their arrival in Provence was gaining in favor every day while this portico was making.

The savants inform us, though not patriotic Provencal savants, that no mention of the saints of Bethany is to be found in Provence before the middle of the XI century. Monseigneur d.u.c.h.esne of the Inst.i.tute of France, who takes saints out of their niches as boldly as any Bollandist, tells us that it was the monks of Vezelay in Burgundy who first imagined the arrival in southern France of Mary Magdalene, in order to explain how it was they possessed her relics, the lodestar of their pilgrim shrine. Then, gradually, the legend grew till it was a remarkably full boatload that landed, in A.D. 40, at Les Saintes-Maries,[254] where the Little Rhone, on which stands St.

Gilles, enters the Mediterranean: the risen Lazarus, whose relics were claimed by Autun in 1144; Martha, whose relics appeared at Tarascon in 1187 and caused a new church there to rise;[255] Marcella, the waiting woman of Martha and Mary; Maximinus, one of Our Lord's disciples; Simon the leper; St. Sidonius; Joseph of Aramathea; and the Blessed Virgin's sisters, Mary Jacobi, mother of James the Less, and Mary Salome, mother of James and John, and their dark handmaiden Sara, who became the patroness of gypsies.

Monseigneur d.u.c.h.esne says that a grotto dedicated to the Virgin in the mountains east of Ma.r.s.eilles came to be regarded, by gradual unconscious fabrication, as the Sainte Baume where Mary Magdalene pa.s.sed years of penitence, for the Midi wove the story of St. Mary the Egyptian with the saint of Bethany. All these holy people who had known the Lord fled from Syria after the martyrdom of St. Stephen and found asylum in southern France. The savants can prove what they will; while in Provence, in the "kingdom of sentiment," one believes every word of it. Read Mistral's _Mireille_ and dare to be a skeptic! Under the leaden skies of Paris you may take the Inst.i.tute's learning seriously. But gazing at _la grand bleu_, the frequented highway between Syria and Gaul when Roman Emperors ruled both, you say to yourself that it all _could_ have happened. For hundreds of years the people of Provence have been made better and happier because they have believed that the historic family of Bethany who entertained the Lord were entertained by them.

ST. TROPHIME AT ARLES[256]

Seigneur, des lois et voies antiques, nous avions quitte; l'austerite, vertus, coutumes domestiques, nous avions tout detruit, demoli....

Seigneur, nous sommes tes enfants prodigues; mais nous sommes tes vieux chretiens: que ta justice nous chatie, mais au trepas, ne nous laisse point....

Seigneur, au nom des pauvres gens, au nom des forts, au nom des morts--qui auront peri pour la patrie, pour leur devoir, et pour leur foi!...