How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 38

Laurence had crossed the Channel to plead with Henry Plantagenet for certain of his flock in disgrace (1180). Arriving at Eu's convent, then belonging to the congregation of St. Victor, he felt a premonition of his approaching death, and exclaimed, as he crossed the threshold, "Here is my abode of rest forever." He was worn out in the struggle to uphold the weak against the strong in those difficult years of the Anglo-Norman seizure of the eastern coast of Ireland. As his end drew near a monk suggested that he make his testament. "I thank G.o.d that I have nothing to bequeath," he said.

So impressive was the death of Archbishop Laurence in Eu monastery that the little people of the Lord soon began to pray beside his tomb. When the monks reconstructed their church they placed the saintly man's relics in the new crypt. From 1186 to 1226 the choir, transept, and one bay of the nave were built without interruption, in a Gothic more of the Ile-de-France than regional, though the placing of towers between transept and choir and the central lantern followed the Norman tradition.

Archbishop Laurence O'Toole was canonized in 1225, and to the joyous ceremony when his relics were set above the high altar came the archbishop of Rouen--then building his cathedral, and Bishop Geoffrey, the "shining man of Eu by whom the throne of Amiens rose into immensity." For eight days the throng pressed to pray near the relics of the canonized Irish prelate, and with the gifts that poured in the monks were able to finish their nave by 1230. It is a gem of Norman Gothic, sober, elegant, of perfect unity. The first plan called for tribunes over the aisles, as in the choir. Before they were constructed, however, the idea was given up, but it was decided to keep the arches by which the tribunes would have opened on the middle church. The same effect of false tribunes had been used earlier in the nave of Rouen Cathedral.

In 1426 lightning caused the collapse of the central tower, and in the reconstruction of the transept and choir, undertaken after the invaders were driven from Normandy, Flamboyant work was set side by side with Primary Gothic. From 1511 to 1534 rose the transept's florid south facade. After the Revolution the church of St. Laurent was restored by the Orleans family, who own the chateau and park at Eu.

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL[331]

Chaque peuple a son ange, disait Daniel le prophete. Le notre ne peut pas, meme indignes nous delaisser.... Plus encore que Saint Jacques etait le patron des espagnols, Saint Michel voulut etre le Baron de France. Il mit les trois lys dans ses armes et fit pa.s.ser sur le royaume l'eclair de son glaive. Avoir suscite Jeanne d'Arc et par elle libere la France.... Voila bien le plus beau miracle d a l'archange. Il const.i.tue pour le pays une promesse de perennite.--JOSEPH LOTTE (born in Normandy, 1875; killed in the World War, 1914).

Surpa.s.sing all the abbeys of Normandy is the outpost of the archangel that lies offsh.o.r.e, at the junction of Normandy and Brittany, a conicle ma.s.s of "rock on rock, keep on keep, century on century," sand-locked one hour, and the next rising from the Atlantic. _Tremor immensi oceani_ is the motto of the Mount. Before the days of crusaders it was one of Europe's chief points of departure for the Eastern pilgrimage. Like Jerusalem, it has been one of the sites of the earth that has impressed itself with historic signification on the imagination of mankind.

Many have felt the kindred spirit of the _Chanson de Roland_ and the granite, military monastery. They are both of the same high lineage. To the paladin Roland, dying at Roncevaux, as he held up his right glove to G.o.d, his suzerain, there came, to fetch his soul to Paradise, the very special St. Michael of the Mount that stood in peril of the sea, in _periculo maris_.[332] Scholars think that the most virile, the most heroic of the _chansons de geste_, wherein already was _la douce France_ loved beyond the regional cradle, was composed by a Norman who lived in the marches within the cult of the Angel of the Peril.[333]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Hall of the Knights at Mont-Saint-Michel (1203-1228). Second Story of the Merveille_]

Alas, in our day Mont-Saint-Michel-au-peril-de-la-Mer is in very deadly peril of the land, for it looks as if the covetousness of financiers was to defraud France of this rock of glory "_qui s'emeut et s'acheve en priere_." Dikes and dams, to reclaim coast lands, will before long cause the historic crag to rise from green woods as it did some geological periods ago.

Citadel, palace, cloister, church, and town, the Mount is a thing of romance that not all the vulgarity of daily tourist crowds can tarnish.

Charlemagne himself chose its tutelary archangel for the national patron saint, and the cowled guardians here were in truth through long centuries what the great emperor called monks: "Knights of the Church, of the willing va.s.salage and chivalry of Christ."

The Northmen destroyed the ancient shrine. Then Richard the Fearless, grandson of the pirate Rollo, placed on the rock the sons of St.

Benedict, trained at St. Wandrille. Richard II, in 1017, came to the Mount to ask a blessing on his union with Judith of Brittany, whose beauty was such that the old chronicle exclaimed _corpore et moribus usque ad miraculum elegantem_. The duke's marriage gift enabled the monks to supplant their Carolingian church by a bigger one. The discarded X-century chapel was discovered in 1909 by M. Paul Gout, the Mount's latest historian. Until 1780 it had been used as Notre Dame-sous-Terre, but during the building of the foundations for the ugly west facade of the upper church it was walled up.

With Richard the Good's donation, Abbot Hildebert II erected his new church on the very summit of the rock, but as there was not sufficient level s.p.a.ce, he built out from the hillcrest a platform of masonry to support the nave. From William of Volpiano's school at Fecamp came skilled journeymen. The church at Mont-Saint-Michel was begun in 1020, and still building in 1057. Abbot Roger I, formerly chaplain to William the Conqueror, erected the nave. William prayed at the Mount before undertaking the conquest of England, and the abbot fitted out for him an entire fleet.

In 1103 the northern wall of the Romanesque nave collapsed one night as the monks were chanting matins in the choir. It was restored immediately in the same style, and Abbot Roger II took the opportunity to reconstruct the monks' quarters. Above the crypt called Aquilon (c.

1112) he built a cloister, which later was vaulted with diagonals, and over that _promenoir_ was made a dormitory on the same level as the church. During the years that followed the Mount was governed by a man of genius, Robert de Torigni (1153-80), whose chronicle is the most important history of France for that epoch. In the _promenoir_ he entertained, at a banquet in 1158, his sovereign, Henry II, and Alienor of Aquitaine. They chose him as G.o.dfather for their daughter, who, later, as queen of Castile, built the convent church of Las Huelgas by Burgos. Abbot Robert was a pupil of Bec, whose higher standards of intellectual life he brought to the Mount, where he formed a library, built monks' quarters, and added western belfries to his abbatial, though the facade of his day no longer exists.

As the XIII century opened, Normandy became once more a part of the royal domain, after being three centuries under dukes of its own. When Rollo's strong breed ended in the debased John Lackland, the northern province gladly accepted Philippe-Auguste as ruler. How whole-heartedly, how unreservedly French it became it was to prove by its heroic resistance to the English invaders during the Hundred Years' War.[334]

In the frays of 1203, fire had spread from the town that hugged the rock's edge, to the monastic buildings on the summit. Philippe-Auguste, always wisely conciliatory toward new subjects, contributed toward the restorations. With the gift from the king under whom most of the Gothic cathedrals of France were begun, Abbot Jourdan (1191-1212) built the supreme architectural work of the citadel, what is called the Merveille, and a marvel indeed are its three stories that rise, one above the other, hall over hall, two hundred feet in height above the sea, ridged heavily outside by stout b.u.t.tresses and graced within by pillars, arches, and a sky-gazing cloister.

From the brain of some unknown cowled genius sprang this _male_ and splendid conception, built in the very prime of Gothic. Who else but one enamored of meditation would have set his cloister atop of his monastery under the open sky, or have opened on that courtyard of peace a monks'

refectory, where, in a flooded stillness of light, the brethren could sit pondering as they listened to one of their number reading from the stone lectern the book which is the spirit of Bernard of Clairvaux incarnate: "Give all for all; seek nothing; call for nothing back. Thou shalt be free in heart and the darkness shall not overwhelm thee." And around them there spread the wide horizon of the sea one hour, of the white ashes of sand the next.

Pacing the lovely skyward cloister one has time to brood on life and death, on G.o.d and one's own soul; it refutes a hundred calumnies against monastic life just by being what it is. Serious men enamored of voluntary seclusion carved it unstintingly and set its columns quaintly in triangular order. Love and science contrived the diffused, soothing luminousness of the brothers' dining hall. The present gable windows there are innovations. Originally when one entered one could discern no window, and yet light was everywhere. The side walls, that from the door appear to be blind arcades, are in reality a succession of narrow panel windows--thirty to a side--deeply recessed in stone embrasures that are triangular in shape, because they serve the purpose of b.u.t.tresses. To have carried the exterior b.u.t.tress ridges to such a height as is this refectory, set audaciously up in the sky on the Merveille's third story, would have been an awkward procedure; so the nameless monk-architect, because he was a XIII-century man, let his genius lead him, and, "master of the living stone" that he was, contrived a supreme beauty of decoration out of a structural necessity.

The Merveille was erected under a succession of abbots, in one consecutive radiant effort, from 1203 to 1228--a t.i.tan's work. Each of its three stories is divided into two halls; on the ground floor are the almonry, where the pilgrims fed, and a groin-vaulted cellery or storehouse; the top story, as we have seen, consists of open cloister and monks' refectory; and between the upper and lower stories are two of the most vigorous halls ever built; that over the almonry called the Salle des Hotes because in it were entertained the guests of the monastery, and that to the west, over the cellery, acquiring the name Salle des Chevaliers, from the Order of the Knights of St. Michael, whose members met here. The latter is divided by rows of stout pillars, and served as the common room of the community, where the tireless scholar-scribes illuminated missals and copied ma.n.u.scripts.

The charter for the military Order of the Archangel, founded in 1469 by Louis XI, welded the name of St. Michael, whom every good Frenchman knew kept a specially friendly eye on France, with that of Jeanne the Maid, who had quitted Domremy-on-the-Meuse because the voice of her dear archangel rang insistent in her ear: _Fille De, va! Je serai a ton ayde.

Va!_ It was St. Michael who first roused her to the sense of the great misery there was in the kingdom of France, and in her hour of victory after Orleans she spoke of going to the rescue of the besieged Mount in Normandy. At her trial in Rouen she dwelt on the comfort he had given her.[335] He appeared to her, she said, in the guise of "_un tres vrai prud'homme_"--the term loved of St. Louis, who once told Joinville that to be _prud'homme_ meant to be knight in heart, as well as outward bearing. "I believe the words of St. Michael who appeared to me," said Jeanne, at her trial, "as firmly as I believe that Our Lord Jesus Christ suffered death and pa.s.sion for us. And what leads me so to believe is the good counsel, comfort, and good doctrine St. Michael gave me."

On the completion of the Merveille, the monks continued building. They had finished the officiality hall by the entrance gate of the monastery before the visit of St. Louis to the Mount in 1254, when he came to return thanks for his safety during his late crusade. The XIV century added more defenses till the rock became the most forceful example of mediaeval military architecture. Strong walls were needed during its siege by the English who invaded Normandy under Henry V. The Mount's abbot, Robert Jollivet, whose name figures among the well-paid judges at Rouen in 1431, allied himself with the victorious foreigners who had quickly overrun the province. His monks repudiated him, led by their prior, Jean Gonault. Defended by the gallant knight Louis d'Estouteville, they endured the longest siege recorded in history, 1415 to 1450, when, as Jeanne had proclaimed, the invaders were "_boutes tous hors de France_."[336]

In 1429, during the memorable siege, the Romanesque choir of Mont-Saint-Michel's abbey church collapsed. It was impossible then to rebuild it; they had even to sell their altar vessels to carry on the defense. When Normandy was again a part of France the erection of a new choir was undertaken by the abbot of the Mount, who was none other than the distinguished Cardinal Guillaume d'Estouteville, the chief agent in the vindication of Jeanne d'Arc's memory. His layman brother had directed the defense of the Mount during many years. In 1450 were laid down the crypt's nineteen mammoth piers, among the most powerful ever planted. The upper church reached its triforium story by 1469, the year when Louis XI came to the rock to establish his new Order of knighthood, and about 1513 the choir was completed. Many hold it to be superior to all other late-Gothic works in France. There are no capitals, the moldings die away in the shafts, the triforium is glazed. It belongs to the fleeting splendor of Flamboyant art, but without capriciousness.

There is no overexuberance, no virtuosity in this vigorous, glad memorial of the nation's reconquered freedom:

Sainte Jeanne went harvesting in France, And oh! what found she there?

The brave seed of her scattering In fruitage everywhere.

And where her strong and tender heart Was broken in the flame, She found the very heart of France Had flowered to her name.[337]

Building activities at the embattled abbey ceased after the erection of its beautiful florid choir. The evil consequences of commendatory abbots--those named by royal whim--bore bitter fruit from end to end of France in the relaxed spiritual life of the monasteries. The XVII-century reformers of the Congregation of St. Maur found the Mount's abbot to be a princeling of Lorraine, five years of age. Those scholarly Benedictines carried on excellent research work in local history, but to their neo-cla.s.sic generation Gothic art was a sealed book.

Deplorable changes went on during three hundred years: an apsidal chapel of the church was made into a staircase, irregular windows were opened in the halls of the Merveille, the cloister was planted as a garden, to the deterioration of the lower structures, and when, in 1776, fire weakened the abbatial, its three westernmost bays were demolished and the present ugly facade put up. After the Revolution pillaged the monastery it became a state prison called Mont Libre, and so continued until 1863. The church was floored midway to serve as a convicts' hat factory. The modern restoration of Mont-Saint-Michel has been, like that which saved the palace of the popes at Avignon, a truly national benefit.

THE CATHEDRAL OF ROUEN[338]

One can say that nothing great ever was accomplished in the Church without women bearing a part. A host of them stood among the martyrs in the amphitheater; they disputed with the anchorites the possession of the desert. Constantine set up the Labarum on the Capitol, and St. Helena raised the True Cross on the walls of Jerusalem. Clovis, at Tolbiac, invoked the G.o.d of Clotilda.

Monica's tears won the conversion of Augustine. Jerome dedicated the Vulgate to the piety of two Roman ladies, Paula and Eustochium.

The first lawmakers of monkish life, Basil and Benedict, were seconded by their sisters, Macrina and Scholastica. The Countess Matilda held up the tottering throne of Gregory VII. The wise judgment of Queen Blanche dominated the reign of St. Louis. France was saved by Jeanne d'Arc. Isabella of Castile led in the discovery of the New World. And in times closer to our own we see St. Teresa mixing with bishops, doctors, and the founders of Orders by which the reform in Catholic ranks was operated. We see St. Francis de Sales cultivating like a rare flower the soul of Madame de Chantal, and St. Vincent de Paul pa.s.sing over to Louise Marillac the most admirable of his designs, the establishment of the Sisters of Charity.--FReDeRIC OZANAM.

So much for the abbey churches of Normandy. Many another might be described, but with six Gothic cathedrals to consider, one must refrain.

Of the six--Rouen, Lisieux, evreux, Seez, Bayeux, and Coutances--that of Rouen shows the earliest Gothic work and its character is more French than Norman, as if the river, flowing down from Paris, carried with its waters the characteristics of the art life astir on the banks of the Seine, Oise, Aisne, and Marne.

The least local of Normandy's cathedrals, Our Lady's church at Rouen, has a magnetism distinctly its own--from its florid romantic west front, the most lavish screen ever set up, to the imposing sentry columns that guard its sanctuary. The northwest tower is Normandy's best Primary Gothic, the southwest tower the supremest belfry that sprang up to commemorate the freeing of France from foreign yoke. The facades of the transept and the Lady chapel (whose tombs mark dates in the art history of France) rank with perfect Rayonnant work. Its storied windows are among the richest ever dight by mediaeval guildsmen.

Not but that a dozen flaws might be picked in the metropolitan church at Rouen. Were it to be strictly ranked among French cathedrals, it could not be placed among the foremost. But it has gone on embellishing itself century after century with a self-respect so sincere that few care to dispute its claim to stand in the front rank.

On a first visit to Rouen many an amateur prefers the regularity of St.

Ouen's abbatial, which in size equals Westminster Abbey.[339] St. Ouen, the cla.s.sic of Rayonnant design, geometric in tracery, accentuating the ascending line, coldly perfect in construction, possessed still the true _sursum corda_ of Gothic, though the art was fast crystallizing into formulas. The capitals were lessened, and the glazed triforium united to the clearstory in a single composition. Made of fine-textured gray stone St. Ouen is a stately vessel, but, add the critics, "its uniform excellence is average." Gothic lore has not degenerated, but has simply gone too far in the development of its principles, says the mechanical artistry of the last built of the great monastic churches of France, planned before the tragedies of the Hundred Years' War had petrified the national genius.[340]

The cathedral of Normandy's capital is not uniform, but its excellence surpa.s.ses the average. It is not h.o.m.ogeneous, its proportions are not absolutely harmonious, but it has profundity, personal character, and flashes of genius. The better it is known the deeper grows affection for it, which is not the case with St. Ouen. In the latter one feels that the cult is the main concern; in the cathedral there is piety of heart.

The early history of Sainte-Marie at Rouen follows the usual course.

Norse marauders wrecked the ancient cathedral. Rollo, the first duke, endowed another which was radically reconstructed under an XI-century archbishop, a son of Duke Richard II. In 1063, that Romanesque church was dedicated by Archbishop Maurille (whose tomb is in the present ambulatory) in the presence of William the Conqueror and his good Matilda. Vestiges of the Romanesque edifice are in the first bay of the choir aisle. In it were interred the prodigious Rollo, the Norwegian sea-robber, who sacked half Normandy, sailed up the Seine to terrorize Paris, and up the Loire to overrun Auvergne and Burgundy, and yet, no sooner was he granted the duchy of northern France than the buccaneer gave way to a ruler whose laws were so respected that golden bracelets were left exposed and remained unstolen for years in the forest of Roumare. Rollo was baptized a Christian in Rouen, in 912, and there he wedded a Carolingian princess. When his son, William Longsword, died in 945, he was wearing a gold key that opened a casket containing a monk's robe for his burial; the new rulers were swift to comprehend that monasteries were the chief civilizers in that formative age.

Near Rouen, in 1087, died the Conqueror, sixth in descent from Rollo.

"Pirate jostled statesman" in him, too. Mortally wounded at Mantes, he was brought to the priory of St. Gervase--beneath which suburban church still exists intact a V-century crypt--and as he heard the bells of Rouen Cathedral ringing, there rose to haunt him the curses, not loud but deep, of the oppressed Anglo-Saxons, and most piteously he pet.i.tioned the Queen of Heaven to draw Her Son's attention to all the religious houses he had built for the people's good on both sides of the Channel. No sooner was he dead than his retainers stripped and robbed him, and through private charity he was carried to his horror-inspiring burial at Caen.

To Rouen, because of its generosity to him in his captivity, Richard Coeur-de-Lion bequeathed his heart. In 1203 the last duke of Normandy, John Lackland, fled from Rouen after the murder of his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, of which the popular voice accused him. Philippe-Auguste entered the city in triumph in 1204, and the building of the new Gothic cathedral started apace.

Notre Dame at Rouen is a.s.sociated closely with the return of Normandy under French rule. On Easter night, 1200, fire ravaged the city and its chief church. Whether the cathedral then wrecked was that blessed in 1063 by Bishop Robert de Maurille is uncertain. Some think that it was a Romanesque choir and transept which were burned, and a recently built Primary Gothic nave. It may have been an entirely new Gothic church which was destroyed. At any rate, the northwest tower, named after the VII-century bishop, Roma.n.u.s, and the side doors of the main facade escaped the fire. The preservation of the tower was due, probably, to its position beyond the side aisle. The doors, built about 1180, are ornamented with Oriental incrustations such as are to be seen in the cathedral at Genoa, with which seaport Rouen had trade links.

The Tour Saint-Romain, whose prototypes were the towers at etampes, Vendome, and Chartres, was long counted as the oldest Primary Gothic work extant in Normandy, with the chapter house at St. Georges de Boscherville and the chapel of St. Julien, Pet.i.t-Quevilly.[341] But as many archaeologists now say that the Gothic vault of St. etienne's nave at Caen may be 1130 just as well as 1160, and that there are still earlier diagonals in the duchy, it remains an open question where the oldest extant ogival work of Normandy is. Mr. John Bilson claims that the diagonals of Lessay's choir pre-date any in the Ile-de-France.

However the controversy over the priority of diagonals may be decided, the tower of St. Romain is the first Norman monument that shows the incontestable influence of Gothic of the Ile-de-France type.

The spirit of religious ardor that expressed itself in the northwest tower of Rouen Cathedral was described by Bishop Hugues d'Amiens in a letter, in 1145, to a brother prelate. He tells how volunteers were quitting Normandy to aid in the making of the new tower at Chartres: "In like manner, a large number of the faithful of this, our diocese, and of neighboring regions, put themselves to work on the cathedral church, their mother, forming a.s.sociations to which no one is admitted unless he has confessed his sins, fulfilled his penances, laid down at the foot of the altar every enmity and revenge, and become reconciled with his enemies in a true peace. Under the lead of one in the band, who is chosen as chief, the people drag heavy wagons in humility and silence."

The writer of this famous letter had been a monk of Cluny, and while ruling the see of Rouen he taught school there; he had inherited the traditions of Bec's scholarship through Anselm of Laon. The lower hall of the cathedral tower then begun is considered faultless. Before the close of the century the upper hall was completed, but the belfry story was not added till the late-Gothic day.

After the fire of 1200 work on the new cathedral was pushed on with energy. A master called Jean d'Andely is cited as the architect, a native, probably, of Les Andelys farther up the Seine, where there are two churches so closely resembling the cathedral of Rouen that they are doubtless from the same hand.[342] Another architect, named Enguerrand, is mentioned as quitting work on the cathedral of the capital in 1214, to undertake the abbatial at Bec. A keystone of Notre Dame, of the date 1233, is inscribed by one Durand, mason. He is thought to have been the son-in-law of the original architect, Jean d'Andely.

The first plan of Rouen Cathedral called for tribunes over the aisles, but the idea was given up in order to have the side aisles twice as high as originally designed. The arches by which the tribunes would have opened on the central vessel were retained, however, as was done later with the false tribunes of the abbey church at Eu. In the side aisles, resting on the capitals of the nave's piers, are ringed colonnettes that rise to the ledge above--a ledge constructed to catch the tribune's diagonals (which never were built). By this graceful expedient they cloaked architectural members prepared but not used. The pa.s.sageway carried from pier to pier above the main arcade of the nave is exceptional. An apsidal chapel projects from each arm of the transept, as in the Romanesque edifices of the region.

The archbishop under whom Notre Dame of Rouen was begun was Walter of Coutance, _Gautier-le-magnifique_ (1184-1207), who willed his fortune to the cathedral, since it was he, devoted public servant of the Plantagenets, and long the chief justice of England, who had urged the chapter to sell its treasure to help ransom Coeur-de-Lion from captivity after the Third Crusade. He himself went as hostage into Germany in order that Richard might be released before his full ransom was raised. Learned, liberal, and affable, Bishop Walter was a man of whom all spoke well.