How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 33

Jeannin's att.i.tude in 1572 was all the more meritorious because Burgundy had suffered acutely from the Calvinists, who invited their co-religionists from Germany to fight their fellow citizens. In 1569 a band of the invaders left behind them a trail of four hundred burned villages. Cluny was attacked, and Citeaux was sacked from top to bottom; to-day some XIV-century debris is all that marks the mother house of the Cistercian Order. The destruction of Citeaux was irreparable for art, since during centuries its abbatial was the St. Denis of the first Capetian dukes who ruled Burgundy. The leading families of the province felt it an honor to be buried at Citeaux. In its church was once the splendid tomb (now in the Louvre) of the seneschal of Burgundy, Philippe Pot (d. 1494). The effigy of the baron in armor is carried on the shoulders of eight black, cowled figures--a further development of the _pleurant_ type of tomb.

In a chapel of Autun Cathedral is a beautiful modern statue of Pope Gregory the Great, presented to Cardinal Perraud (1882-1906) of the French Academy, as bishop of this ancient city whose prelate in the VI century had entertained Augustine and his monks on their way to missionize England. Cardinal Vaughan of Westminster was the donor of this grateful souvenir.

THE HOSPITAL AND ROMANESQUE COLLEGIATE AT BEAUNE[282]

L'art du Moyen age--aussi ennemi de l'art academique fige dans ses moules conventionnels que du desordre materialiste--est une esthetique tres simple, tres certaine, tres puissante et tres libre. Cette esthetique n'invoque pas un ideal abstrait; elle impose le culte de la realite, de la plus humble comme de la plus eclatante; elle pourrait s'appeler un realisme trancendant, respectant la forme telle que Dieu l'a faite, et en meme temps la transfigurant par la grand frisson de l'au-dela.--ROBERT VALLERY-RADOT.[283]

The Hospital of the Holy Ghost, built by Chancellor Nicolas Rolin from 1444 to 1457, is a gem of the province, reminding us of the close union of Burgundy and the Netherlands under the four great dukes of the West.

The third of those rulers, Philippe le Bon, patronized Jean Van Eyck, as did the enterprising man who was the duke's chancellor during forty years. For a church at Autun, Rolin ordered of Van Eyck, in 1425, the magnificent Madonna now in the Louvre in which he kneels as donor--a shrewd, hard-featured, capable man.

For his new hospital at Beaune he commissioned Roger Van der Weyden to paint, in many panels, the Last Judgment now in the little museum of the establishment, but originally installed in the large raftered hall.

After the Van Eyck's Adoration of the Lamb it was the most important work of Flemish art undertaken. Philippe le Bon is portrayed in it twice, and so is the donor. The outside of the panels is painted in monochrome--what the French call _camaeu_ from its cameo effect, and the Italians call chiaroscuro. When this superb painting hung at the end of the hospital hall that ended in a chapel like the XIII-century hospice at Tonnerre, the patients could see it from their beds. The Hotel Dieu at Tonnerre had been founded by Marguerite of Burgundy, in 1293. After the death of her husband, Charles d'Anjou, whose cruelty roused the Sicilian Vespers, she retired to the city of which she was hereditary countess, and with two other dethroned ladies, the Empress of Constantinople and the Countess of Tripoli, gave herself up to good works. _La bonne Reyne_, the people called this princess who pa.s.sed her days serving the sick poor in a hospital where the spirit of the Beat.i.tudes ruled. None was dismissed from its door without new cloak and shoes. To-day the great rafter-covered hall at Tonnerre lies empty; the raising of its pavement has somewhat impaired its proportion.

Beaune's hospital hall, that indubitably copied Tonnerre's, serves still the charitable purpose for which it was founded. Its quiet courtyard is a vision of Flanders. In the kitchen the ancient iron crane of the fireplace is ornamented with I.H.S.; the Middle Ages made even work artistic. On feast days, such as Corpus Christi, the quaint half-timber hospice is hung with beautiful XV-century tapestry. It is deemed an honor for the leading families of the region to count one of its members among the nuns whose service is for a few years, after which they may return to their own people.

The collegiate church of Notre Dame at Beaune is a typical Burgundian Romanesque edifice of the XII century, to which the following century added a graceful open narthex of two bays. It possesses seventeen embroidered panels relating Our Lady's life, presented in 1500 by the Chanoine Hugues le Coq, and held to be among the most lovely tapestries in France, evoking memories of Memling and the Flemish primitives.

AVALLON, MONTReAL, FLAVIGNY, AND FONTENAY[284]

L'esprit humain, pousse par une force invincible, ne cessera jamais de se demander: qu'y a-til au dela? Il ne sert a rien de repondre: au dela sont des es.p.a.ces, des temps, ou des grandeurs sans limites.

Nul ne comprend ces paroles. Celui qui proclame l'existence de l'infini acc.u.mule dans cette affirmation plus de surnaturel qu'il n'y en a dans tous les miracles de toutes les religions. La notion de l'infini dans le monde j'en vois partout l'inevitable expression. Par elle, le surnaturel est au fond de tous les coeurs. L'idee de Dieu est une forme de l'idee de l'infini. Tant que le mystere de l'infini pesera sur la pensee humaine, des temples seront eleves au culte de l'infini. Et sur la dalle de ces temples, vous verrez des hommes agenouilles, prosternes, abimes dans la pensee de l'infini. Ou sont les vraies sources de la dignite humaine, de la liberte, et de la democratie moderne, sinon dans la notion de l'infini devant laquelle tous les hommes sont egaux?--LOUIS PASTEUR (1822-95; born in Burgundy).[285]

The hill town of Avallon, above the gorge of the Cousin, with a square that would do honor to any capital, makes a convenient center from which to explore various Burgundian churches. Its own church of St. Lazare still possesses the apse and absidioles of the edifice blessed by Paschal II in 1107. The remainder of the church was built in mid-XII century, and the portal (in five orders richly carved, with channeled and twisted columns) belongs to the end of the century. A copy of Avallon's door is in the Trocadero Museum at Paris where it can be compared at close range with the two other notable Romanesque portals of the province--those of Autun and Vezelay. The interior of St. Lazare is excessively plain, having a high expanse of unbroken wall over the pier arches, with the clearstory opened merely by little circular windows.

Twenty miles from Avallon is the church of Montreal, like a feudal fort guarding one of the main pa.s.sageways from Champagne. The lord of Montreal was among the few hundred barons who returned from the dire experience of famine, treason, and death which was the Second Crusade, on which had set forth a hopeful hundred thousand knights and pilgrims.

In the latter part of the XII century he built Montreal's collegiate church, one of the earliest Gothic ventures in the province, showing a simultaneous use of Romanesque and Gothic vaulting. Its two westernmost bays were added early in the XIII century. The beautiful alabaster reredos of the XV century, and the carved choir stalls, are well worth studying. Beyond Montreal, to the north of Avallon, lies Tonnerre's hospital hall and to the south can be visited the abbatial at Saulieu and the XIII-century castle of Chastellux, a son of which ancient house fought in America with Rochambeau and was the good friend of George Washington.[286]

To the east, at Flavigny, set picturesquely on a hill near the last stronghold held by the Gauls against the Romans, stood one of the most interesting of abbey churches, of which portions of the XIII-century sanctuary remain, a few arches of the nave, and a Carolingian crypt built by the abbot who ruled here from 755 to 768, hence that subterranean chamber can claim to be the oldest dated monument extant in France. Over the choir of Flavigny was a cupola, and the Lady chapel was an XI-century octagon like that which William of Volpiano constructed for his abbey at Dijon. This precious Benedictine abbatial was destroyed in the XIX century. At Flavigny are two ancient parish churches. What is now the Pension Lacordaire was the Dominican convent opened in 1849 by that brilliant son of Burgundy, with funds donated by his admirers of Dijon.

To the northeast of Avallon, at Fontenay, near Montbard, is the oldest extant Romanesque church of the Cistercian Order, built from 1139 to 1147, on land given by the lord of Montbard, the maternal uncle of St.

Bernard; on his mother's side St. Bernard was of the blood of Burgundy's first line of Capetian dukes. The great abbot of Clairvaux himself conducted hither the twelve monks who were to found the new house and reclaim the marshy region; and for his brethren of Fontenay he wrote his treatise on Pride and Humility.

The first small sanctuary at Fontenay was soon replaced by the actual one, built on the same lines as the church at Clairvaux, which no longer stands. Both followed the Cistercian plan; no tower; no triforium nor clearstory; uncut capitals; the east end rectangular; square chapels opening on the eastern wall of the transept. Funds for the new constructions at Fontenay were provided by a wealthy English prelate who had retired here, Evrard de Montgomery, of the Arundel family, who, while bishop of Norwich, completed the long Norman nave of that cathedral. In 1147 the church was consecrated by Pope Eugene III, St.

Bernard being present. As it was frequent in Cistercian monasteries to make a specialty of some branch of manual work, Fontenay conducted a forge, and the ma.s.sive XII-century building which housed it still stands. The forge, the abbey church, and the refectory to-day comprise part of a paper factory whose proprietor has taken a patriotic pride in restoring these precious monuments of ancient Burgundy.

THE PRIMARY GOTHIC ABBATIAL AT PONTIGNY[287]

Whatever draws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me and from my friends be the frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue.... That man is little to be envied whose patriotism does not gain force on the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.--DR.

SAMUEL JOHNSON.

The oldest Gothic church in Burgundy is the Cistercian abbatial at Pontigny. "Cradle of bishops and asylum of great men," Pontigny is _parfumee de souvenirs_, to use a charming stilted French phrase. It was the first daughter of Citeaux, founded in 1114. When a pious canon of Auxerre proposed to endow a house of the new Order, the abbot of Citeaux, St. Stephen Harding, came to overlook the site on the confines of Champagne, and then sent twelve monks to found the house, under the leadership of Hugues de Macon, kinsman and childhood friend of St.

Bernard.

The Cistercians had not the Benedictines' weakness for a n.o.ble site, but if they planted their monasteries in a marsh--as at Fontenay and Pontigny--their agricultural industry soon made the desert bloom. The earlier Cistercian churches obeyed St. Bernard's ascetic admonitions for architecture, a Puritanism that became monotonous in the Italian churches of the Order. In France the Cistercians ceased to adhere to church simplicity, raising sanctuaries such as Ourscamp, Longpont, and St. Julien-le-Pauvre at Paris.

No towers adorned Pontigny, and stained gla.s.s was eschewed, but the leaded design of the grisaille windows is so lovely that, as M. Andre Michel has said, "one could not be poor with more n.o.bility." The architect of Pontigny made skillful use of certain essential constructive features to obtain his decorative effects. Thus, though monastic sobriety was followed by omitting the triforium, the bare wall between pier arches and clearstory was relieved (at the sanctuary curve) by carrying down the moldings from the upper windows; and in the procession path a fifth rib was introduced into each vault section, which rib fell on a corbel set above the entrance to each of the radiating chapels--a constructive subtlety by which was produced a graceful wall arcade.

The present abbatial was begun a generation after the foundation of Pontigny, with funds contributed by Thibaut the Great, Count of Champagne. The transept, which is Romanesque, rose from 1150 to 1160.

While the walls of the nave were mounting, the master-of-works began to prepare for a Gothic vault over the princ.i.p.al span. The lower windows were round-headed; the upper ones used the pointed arch. As the keystone of the diagonals was raised far above the arches framing each section, a p.r.o.nounced _bombe_ shape resulted. From 1160 to 1180 this transitional nave of Pontigny was building, and the most famous of the English exiles, who sought the hospitality of Pontigny, must have watched the works. The choir, as first erected, had a rectangular eastern wall after the usual manner of Citeaux's churches. Then, from 1170 to 1200, the present choir was erected with Gothic ambulatory and radiating chapels.[288] Alix of Champagne, daughter of the abbey's generous patron, and mother of the French king, Philippe-Auguste, was buried in the new choir, in 1208. From 1207 to 1213 Pontigny harbored a second archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, of Magna Charta fame. During the studious years he pa.s.sed here he divided the Bible into chapters for the first time, and even the Greeks accepted his rulings. In later life Archbishop Langton often looked back to this byway of Burgundy; "his garden, his solace, his abode of peace," he called it.

His predecessor at Pontigny was St. Thomas Becket, one of the outstanding figures of the XII century, whose story is told in many a French window and sculptured group. If ever an Englishman was all of a piece it was that son of a Rouen merchant settled in London. During his life as a courtier Becket was so lavish in grandeur that when he pa.s.sed through France as Henry II's amba.s.sador, the countryside turned out to see him, since few were the king's retinues that could equal his. When Henry raised him to the highest post in the English Church he instantly dropped luxury. He stood firm as a rock in defense of ecclesiastical rights against the king's attempt at Church supremacy. Tennyson's "Becket" says, "I served King Henry well as Chancellor; I am his no more, and I must serve the Church."

To the end of time such a character will be discussed; some for, some against, him; admired he certainly was by that sincerest and cleverest of men, John of Salisbury, who lived in his intimacy.[289] Both in England and France the populace felt that Becket was the champion of their civic rights by his defense of church independence--then the only supreme court against lay tyranny. Undeviatingly and enthusiastically they supported him all through his seven years' exile. One of the articles of the Clarendon Const.i.tutions which Henry Plantagenet tried to impose on English ecclesiastics was that no peasant could become a priest without his lord's permission. The poet voiced the indignant outcry: "Hath not G.o.d called us all, bond or free, to his service?"

When Henry II, with his usual Angevin bad faith, duped his new archbishop into a promise to maintain the customs of the kingdom, and thereupon proceeded to revive obsolete customs, Becket, repenting the concessions he had made, fled, in 1164, to Sens, to lay the case before Alexander III. The pope decided that certain of the Clarendon propositions were impossible for any churchman to accede to. The abbot of Pontigny offered hospitality to the persecuted primate and Becket stayed with him till 1168, conforming to the severe Cistercian Rule. He quitted the Burgundian monastery when Henry, in a burst of vindictive anger, threatened to shut up every house of the white monks in England as well as in his continental possessions if they harbored the rebellious churchman. Soon after Becket's arrival at Pontigny, the irate king sent thither the primate's relatives and friends, turned out to beggary, in order that their plight might oppress the archbishop's spirit.

The third exile from Canterbury, and the saint who has given his name to Pontigny's abbatial, was a gentler spirit. St. Edmund Rich knew France as well as his native region of Oxford, having studied in Paris University and taught there for years. It is told how his mother, Mabel, sent him to the foreign schools with a hair shirt and a cord whip in his gripsack in order that he might learn to chastise and thus curb himself.

She was a merchant's wife, and alone reared her family, to enable her husband to follow the call he felt for the cloister; two of her daughters died the saintly abbesses of Catesby. At the knee of that XIII-century mother the little Edmund, as a child, recited every Sunday the entire book of Psalms. While lecturing at Oxford he initiated the study of Aristotle. In Paris, St. Edmund watched the cathedral of Notre Dame perfecting itself, and at Salisbury, while treasurer, he a.s.sisted at the laying of the corner stone of the Gothic cathedral in 1220.

Worsted in the struggle to right crying abuses in English church affairs where the king kept bishoprics vacant for his financial profit, and the queen filled the sees with her own unpopular foreign relatives, the archbishop, accompanied by his chancellor, St. Richard, was on his way to Rome to remonstrate. He thought it wrong to condone further by his presence evils he was powerless to correct. He paused in Burgundy, and there death came to him in 1243. To-day his tomb stands over the high altar of the abbey church named St. Edme, in his memory. Puritan Bernard most certainly would not approve the gymnastic-limbed angels that decorate the present Renaissance tomb of St. Edmund, but one fears that he would give his sanction to the whitewash that disfigures the interior of the interesting Primary Gothic church.

To the canonization ceremonies at Pontigny in honor of St. Edmund of Abingdon came St. Louis (who had known him well in Paris) and Blanche of Castile, and notables such as the archbishop-builder of Bourges Cathedral, and St. Richard, now become bishop at Chichester, in which cathedral his tomb was destroyed, in 1538, by order of Henry VIII. Few spots in France are more entirely apart from the come-and-go of modern life than is forgotten Pontigny, _parfumee de souvenirs_.

THE ABBATIAL OF VeZELAY[290]

Il y a des lieux qui tirent l'ame de sa lethargie, des lieux enveloppes, baignes de mystere, elus de toute eternite pour etre le siege de l'emotion religieuse ... l'heroique Vezelay, le mont Saint-Michel, qui surgit comme un miracle des sables mouvants ...

lieux qui nous commandaient de faire taire nos pensees et d'ecouter plus profond que notre coeur. Silence! les dieux sont ici! Il y a des lieux ou souffle l'Esprit.--MAURICE BARReS, _La colline inspiree_.[291]

The supreme excursion from Avallon is that to Vezelay, ten miles away.

One can drive to it or walk to it, since no railway touches the valley which once was the beaten thoroughfare for Christendom marching to crusades. A good way to approach it in the proper spirit of pilgrimage is to walk from the station at Sermizelle with the church of St.

Magdalene as the lodestar to guide one's steps. Vezelay has the aspect of a hill city of Umbria. The abbey church, Gothic in its choir, Romanesque in its nave, transition in its forechurch, and practically all of it of the XII century, crowns the hill like a cathedral.

"_Le grand nom de Vezelay sonne aux oreilles avec une sauvage poesie. La majeste du site est digne de la splendeur du monument._"[292] Always afterward will you remember this abode of reverie with that uplift of the heart which high art and high thoughts arouse. Like loved sites in Umbria, this, too, is "one of the earth's oases of spiritual rest and refreshment."

The abbey was founded in the IX century by Girard de Roussillon[293] of _chanson de geste_ fame, but its position as a leading pilgrim shrine was not established till Abbot Geoffrey was installed in 1037. Only then did the relics of the Magdalene appear here, given, it was claimed, by Charles Martel as reward for Burgundian aid during Saracen inroads in the Midi. Monseigneur d.u.c.h.esne thinks that from Vezelay started the legends so loved in Provence, that the privileged family of Bethany, with others who had known the Lord, fled from persecution in Syria to the mouth of the Rhone about A.D. 40. Up to the XI century the Christian world had accepted Ephesus as the burial place of the Magdalene, and the tomb of Lazarus was claimed by Cyprus. In 899 the Emperor Leo VI had removed both bodies to Constantinople, where he built a church for them.

Not a trace of the tradition concerning the Bethany sisters and brother is to be found in France before Vezelay monastery claimed the possession of the relics of the Magdalene and dedicated its church to her.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Vezelay's XII-century Abbey Church of the Madeleine_]

The founder of Vezelay freed its abbot of the control of local bishop or baron by establishing him as feudal proprietor of the town. The result was that the history of the abbey was a stormy one. The neighboring proprietors, resenting the abbot's independence, excited against him the townspeople who had grown rich from the fairs held during the pilgrimages. The burghers chafed at their serfdom to the monastery, and in 1106, during riots, they murdered Abbot Artaud. He probably was the builder of the Romanesque choir to which was originally attached the actual nave, since there is record of a dedication ceremony at Vezelay in 1104. As the archives were burned by the Calvinists in 1560, no precise dates exist for the church, but M. Lefevre-Pontalis thinks that the crypt under the choir is of Abbot Artaud's time.

A fire in which hundreds perished occurred in 1120. The present nave could not have been in use before then. When it was completed the builders proceeded to erect a forechurch of three bays, and between it and the nave was opened the famous portico which has been called worthy of Paradise. Innocent II, in 1132, blessed the new parts of the abbatial. He had lately consecrated the cathedral of Piacenza, and at Pavia in that same year was blessed San Pietro-in-Ciel-d'Ore. North and south of the Alps the same energies were astir, but no sculpture of that period in Italy equals that of Vezelay. The date of the imaged portal of Ferrara Cathedral is 1135, and that of St. Zeno at Verona, 1183.

The nave at Vezelay had no triforium, nor was there a tribune over the aisles. However, in the narthex they built upper galleries, under whose lean-to roof was concealed a quarter-circle wall that did the work of a continuous flying b.u.t.tress. The princ.i.p.al span was still further counterb.u.t.ted by the side aisles themselves. Over the easternmost bay of the narthex appeared a vault section with Gothic ribs, but the diagonals were more decorative than functional; the vault web of rubble in a bed of mortar was molded on a temporary frame like a groin vault. Pointed arches were employed in the main arcade of the forechurch.

Vezelay's capitals rivet attention, so dramatic are the Bible stories related--the suicide of Judas, David and Goliath, Absalom, Moses, some symbolized vices and virtues, too, and a few _genre_ studies. The capital of the fifth pier on the north side of the nave shows field laborers who carry cones which some say were used for scattering grain, and others think were for the vintage, or for honey-gathering; the same agricultural scene was represented at Cluny. Vezelay even ornamented with sculpture some of the bases of its piers.

The triple doors between narthex and nave are a supreme work. At the middle trumeau stands John the Baptist, he who was sent before to prepare the way, the announcer as well as the witness. On the disk which he holds was once carved the Lamb of G.o.d who taketh away the sins of the world. Observe that the trumeau was made narrow at its base, in order to let pa.s.s the pilgrim throngs. At each side of the door stand a few apostles, and among them M. Viollet-le-Duc cited St. Peter as one of the earliest attempts to escape the stereotyped Byzantine models by portraying individual expression in imagery.

In the tympanum is the Pentecost, or perhaps it may be called more exactly the Messiah's mandate to the apostles: Go, teach all nations.

Christ is surrounded by a gloria, and the Greek cross of his nimbus symbolizes divinity. From his outstretched hands spread rays which touch the head of each apostle. The explanations of the lintel stone have been various. It would seem to represent the strange peoples of the world to be won by Gospel preaching. Around the tympanum are eight medallions, thought to interpret John the Evangelist and the seven churches of Asia he exhorted.

In 1136 an Auvergne n.o.ble, Pons de Montboissier, became abbot of Vezelay (d. 1161), when the forechurch was practically finished, but without doubt while its statuary was in progress, for certain uncut sides of the capitals prove that the stones were set up in the rough and carved _in situ_. Under Abbot Pons, Vezelay emanc.i.p.ated itself from Cluniac rule.

He was the brother of Peter the Venerable of Cluny, who had become prior of Vezelay at twenty years of age. In vain the amenable Peter counseled Pons to show a more conciliatory spirit toward the restless townsmen, but Pons was as stubbornly convinced of the righteousness of his monastery's privileges as is many a modern landlord who holds vast areas among the unlanded millions. He held a stiff head against popular demands, the trouble grew aggravated, and the embittered burghers pa.s.sed beyond their first fair demands and compromised their cause. Abbot Pons was driven out, but returned a victor after Louis VII had investigated the case and imposed a heavy fine on the citizens. Some have thought that the penalty money was expended on the elaborate sculptures of the abbey church. The people might oppose their feudal master, but they were aware that their material prosperity came from the pilgrimage church of the monastery, and each Burgundian was proud to show the visiting strangers the region's exceptional ability in stonecutting.