How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 41

The choir of Bayeux is a masterpiece of Norman Gothic erected by Robert des Ableges (1206-31), who died a crusader, and by the two successive bishops. In the nave those prelates surmounted the Romanesque lower walls with Gothic windows and vaulting; a bal.u.s.trade marks the division between the dissimilar parts. They reinforced the facade towers, and made five western doorways--although the church behind possessed only three aisles.

The student who would comprehend at a glance the difference between the aesthetic equipoise of the Ile-de-France and the sumptuous Gothic of Normandy can do nothing better than to place side by side the pictures of Bayeux' choir and the curving transept end of Soissons. Those whose taste has been formed by English minsters may prefer Bayeux, those whose loiterings have made them familiar with the cradle-land of the national art of France will find their ideal in the cla.s.sic restraint of Soissons. Scarcely a square foot of Bayeux' choir is unadorned. Each spandrel is pierced by trefoils and quatrefoils, and at the apse the triforium spandrels are entirely covered with foliage. There are acutely pointed arches, and arches under arches. Mold has been added to mold, and each roll molding has its own colonnette. There are carved friezes at different levels, and the horizontal line is still further accentuated by bal.u.s.trades. At the sanctuary curve double pillars stand one behind the other. Even the vault web is decorated with the portraits of bishops. As the choir surmounts Odo de Conteville's crypt it is raised above the procession path. Some of its side chapels open, one on the other, above a dividing wall, as in the Gothic choir of the Abbaye-aux-Hommes at Caen, an arrangement repeated with beautiful effect at Coutances. At the birth of the apse are turrets; there are corner towerettes with staircases on each of the western belfries.

The Norman facade, as a rule, is very plain, lacking rose window and galleries, and with undeveloped portals. Two marked stories usually divide it--that of the entranceway and the big window story over it.

Often the towers are disengaged awkwardly from the ma.s.sive, nor is the transition from shaft to pyramid accomplished with subtlety. Yet the Norman church has great compensations to offer. Few edifices in the cla.s.sic region of the Oise, Seine, and Marne present a more complete exterior than this chief church of Bayeux that stands so proudly over the flat little city, unenc.u.mbered by houses, raised on a dignified platform where the ground slopes to the east.

The cathedral's transept is Rayonnant Gothic of the XIV century, in which day were added the various side chapels whose tracery is geometric. When Jeanne d'Arc had given France a new soul, Bayeux raised its lordly central tower "to praise G.o.d in the sky." It was undertaken by a wealthy prelate, Louis d'Harcourt (d. 1479), of the same family as the bishop who had built the Romanesque wall of the nave. He planted his Flamboyant octagon on the square XIII-century lantern, but the actual top story of the transept-crossing tower is modern. Bayeux almost lost her notable beacon in the XIX century, when fissures appeared, and a zealous restorer thought to demolish it whereas all that was needed was consolidation. The ancient Romanesque piers at the four corners of the _croisee_ were found incased in XIII-century masonry.

Opposite the cathedral in the town library is an invaluable historical doc.u.ment, the Bayeux Tapestry,[367] the oldest extant large amount of the art of design in the mediaeval centuries. Many a vicissitude it has had: lost from view till Montfaucon, the learned Benedictine of St.

Maur's reform, unearthed it in 1720, and again, during the Revolution's disorders, used as covering for ammunition carts till an enlightened citizen redeemed it. Originally it comprised one seamless piece, just sufficient to encircle the nave of Bayeux Cathedral, for which, indubitably, it was made. Every summer solstice, on the dedication day of Odo's church, it adorned the cathedral, "the toilet of St. John," it was named, a very simple toilet, for, though called a tapestry, it is really a drab linen band twenty inches wide, two hundred and thirty feet long, with the design alone worked in worsted of eight colors.

The scheme is the perjury of Harold and its punishment, hence its suitableness as an embroidery for a church. It begins with Harold and ends with his death at Hastings. His oath of allegiance to William, given at Bayeux, is pictured. Odo is shown saving the Normans from retreat at the battle of Hastings. Some have thought he would not have dared to glorify himself till after the death of his brother, William.

The tapestry was made, probably, from 1067 to 1077, immediately following the successful conquest of England, and is a contemporary, therefore, of the _Chanson de Roland_, composed by a Norman anterior to the First Crusade. The embroidery was done before 1085, since the Conqueror's seals of that date show armor similar to that pictured in the canvas; the sequence of the scenes indicates they are subsequent to Wace's poem (c. 1160).

Critics have thought, from the inscriptions, that Anglo-Saxons made the tapestry. It is known that the textile art flourished in Kent, the province ruled by Odo; in Normandy, too, the industry was popular. M.

Leve, in the most recent monograph of this precious legacy from the past, contends that a Norman who was favorable to William the Conqueror made it, and that the popular attribution to Queen Matilda is not unlikely. She may have had the work done as a gift for Bayeux Cathedral while Odo was still in royal favor. The war-like bishop died as a crusader journeying East, and lies buried in Palermo Cathedral. The people despised Odo, and would openly mock as he pa.s.sed, "Fie on the bishop who married adulterous King Philip to adulterous Bertrada de Montfort."

A century after Harold's oath to Duke William, in Bayeux, and in the same hunting-seat, at Bures, near the city, occurred a scene of pa.s.sion whose consequences were momentous. Bishop Henri de Beaumont was at work on the cathedral's transept and upper nave when Henry II came to Bayeux to spend the Christmas season of 1170. For seven years western Christendom had watched his feud with the exiled primate of Canterbury.

The lesser people of France and England considered that the prelate defended their liberties by his defense of church liberty. For how, they asked, can a churchman rebuke lay injustices if he owes his position to the very culprits he should censure?

A pretense of reconciliation between Henry and his whilom intimate had recently been brought about. Becket felt its hollowness, since none knew better than he that the Angevin monarch's besetting sin was duplicity and a merciless vindictiveness when his will was successfully crossed.

As he parted with the king he had looked steadily at him, saying, with meaning: "I think I shall never see you again," and Henry Plantagenet had cried, vehemently, "Do you take me for a traitor?" Soon after word was brought to the king that Becket, newly arrived in England, was again stirring up difficulties. Henry flew into one of his madman pa.s.sions hereditary in his blood from Fulk Nerra, from the Conqueror, too; frenzied words broke from him, their purport being the upbraiding of his followers that he lacked a friend to rid him of this upstart priest.

Immediately four of his courtiers started for England, and as December of 1170 closed, Canterbury Cathedral was the scene of a b.l.o.o.d.y a.s.sa.s.sination.

Becket dead was more formidable than Becket alive. Frightened by the indignation roused by the murder, Henry conceded what the primate had contended for. The Canterbury martyr became a frequent theme with the mediaeval artist. At Coutances, Chartres, Angers, and Sens are medallion windows that relate his story. Twice he is honored in Bayeux Cathedral, in the sculpture of the southern portal and in a window of the transept.

The popular voice of Europe canonized St. Thomas, and his grave at Canterbury became the loadstone of an international pilgrimage. The XIV-century poet has related how Merrie England rode down to Kent in the first spring days, when that Aprille with his shoures sweet hath pierced to the root the drought of Marche, and with the new-liveried year the _wanderl.u.s.t_ awakes:

Then longen folk to goon on pilgrimages ...

And specially, from every shires ende Of Englelond, to Caunterbury they wende, The holy blisful martir for to seke That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.[368]

THE CATHEDRAL OF COUTANCES[369]

Art is the stammering of man driven from his terrestrial Paradise but not yet arrived at the heavenly Paradise. Ever has he recalled, ever will he recall, the lost beauty. He is fallen: beauty's sanctuary is shut to him, but the exile traces a sketch of his original home in the strange land where he finds himself. Does not art fill in the intellectual life the same place that hope does in the moral? Art is man's trial to embody his ideals, it is a presentiment and a souvenir.--ERNEST h.e.l.lO, _Philosophie et Atheisme_.

If the exterior aspect of Bayeux is admirable, that of Coutances Cathedral is superb. The high hill of the town is its pedestal. Few architectural views in France are finer than the silhouette of Coutances against the sky. And when its crowning cathedral is seen rising from a mist, it appears to ride the clouds like a mighty ship--a vision of Norman energy as memorable as the Mount of the Archangel off this very coast, in the bay of St. Michael.

As the archives of Coutances Cathedral were destroyed by the Huguenots, doc.u.mentary proof of its date is lacking. Midway in the XIX century even serious students contended that this Apogee Gothic edifice was the church dedicated in 1056 by a hero of Hastings' battle, Bishop Geoffrey de Mowbray. Like Odo of Bayeux, the sword, not the crozier, should have been his emblem. He was the holder of two hundred lordships. He it was who, in Westminster Abbey, in 1066, mounting a tribune, asked the cowed Anglo-Saxons if they would consent that Duke William of Normandy a.s.sume the t.i.tle, king of England, and the next day an enormous tax was imposed on the conquered race as "joyous tribute" to their new rulers. Geoffrey gave up residence in his Norman see to be castillan of Bristol, but, taking part in Odo's intrigues, he was driven from the country with the cry, "Gallows for the bishop!"

This ambitious baron-prelate obtained donations for his Romanesque cathedral when he journeyed in southern Italy and the East, where ruled his Norman kinsmen. When the archaeologists Bouet, A. de Dion, and Abbe Pigeon found parts of Geoffrey's church englobed in the present nave and facade of Coutances, the heated controversy over the date of the cathedral ceased. The core of each facade tower is Bishop Geoffrey's, as are some of the piers in transept and nave, and the nave's upper wall (re-dressed as Gothic about 1230). The tribune of the fighting bishop lies unused behind the present triforium, whose wall arcades plainly show a succession of transformations.

The Romanesque cathedral was injured by fire in 1218. Bishop Bivien de Champagne planned a new church which his successor, Hugues de Morville (1208-38), started. That prelate, and his two successors, built the choir with its double aisles of different height, and the central tower carried on triumphal piers of multiple molds. "What inspired idiot dared fling those stones toward the sky!" exclaimed the great engineer, Vauban, before the lantern of Coutances. The transfused gentle light that falls from its windows tranquilizes the entire church. Even the laie-haunted Viollet-le-Duc likened it to St. Christopher bearing the Christ Child before an image of the Virgin, in her honor. Joinville would have called it prayer in action.

The _Deus absconditus_ impression conveyed by the mystical choir of Coutances is another of its ravishing qualities. As at Bourges and Le Mans, the inner aisle is so high that it possesses its own triforium and clearstory; however, it avoided the stunted aspect of Bourges' main clearstory by omitting the triforium altogether in the central vessel.

The choir of Coutances has retained more of the warmth of atmosphere that induces piety of soul than any other Norman cathedral, save that of Rouen. Not mere brilliant talent, but genius and faith, built it. It is almost triple-aisled, inasmuch as columns were planted in the outer aisle slightly before the walls that divide the radiating chapels.

Throughout the church are these lesser arrangements that charm--such, the opening of the nave's chapels, one on the other above the dividing walls. The ends of the transept have tribunes like many Romanesque churches of the duchy. There are the usual Norman characteristics of a double-walled clearstory with different tracery in each wall, friezes of sculptured foliage, bal.u.s.trades, acutely pointed arches, pierced ornament, and a generous multiplication of molds, each with its own support.

Two architects designed the church; one made the nave and the other--thought by M. Lefevre-Pontalis to be the same Thomas Toustain who planned the apse of Le Mans Cathedral--constructed the choir, lantern, transept, and perhaps the spires of the western towers. Under Bishop Jean d'Essay (1251-74) the cathedral was finished. Louis IX was the guest of that prelate when he came to render thanks at the national shrine of St. Michael for his safe return from Palestine.

The west facade of Coutances is very Norman: plain portals, no rose window, and a staircase on a corner of each belfry. The lines of the towers rise uncrossed by horizontal bar from ground to tapering point.

"Ponder them well," old Villard de Honnecourt would have said before the faithful sentinel towers of Coutances, that seem planted "like the spear of a man-at-arms." This severe church front was not meant for romance like the facade of foreign-trading Rouen, or for royal pageants like that of wine-growing Rheims. The basic forces that lead to architectural character were different here. Northern men in an outpost of France facing the dangers of the sea, built the facade of Coutances, men who had won this province by the sword, who with the sword were seekers for new conquests to the north, to the south. Taken with the central tower, the belfries of Coutances compose an unequaled group. The apse exterior is equally admirable; the flying b.u.t.tresses, as at Notre Dame, at Paris, clear both aisles of the choir by a single hardy leap.

The adventurers of Normandy who made the brilliant, if ephemeral, kingdoms of Apulia, Sicily, and Antioch, were the sons and grandsons of a Norman knight called Tancred de Hauteville,[370] whose manor lay not far from Coutances. The people have chosen to call certain statues on their cathedral's northern outer wall by the names of Roger and Robert de Hauteville, and their descendants of the next generation--Bohemund, who used the Holy Wars to push his own fortunes, and his cousin, Tancred, the idealist of the First Crusade. Probably the "Tancred"

statues--which now are restorations--were intended by the XIII-century sculptors for Hebrew kings. In the southern kingdoms founded by the stalwart offshoots of a simple knight of Normandy, the local architectural traits predominated, but such Norman influences appear as the central lantern and intercrossing arches (at Monreale), acutely pointed arches, and lobed rosettes cut in the spandrels (in the hospital at Palermo), west towers with corner staircases in turrets, an aisle preceding the chapels that open on the east wall of the transept (the cathedral of Cefalu, c. 1145). There are Norman traits in the cathedrals of Bari and Barletta, the latter having false tribunes like those of Eu and Rouen.[371]

At Coutances the XIV century added side chapels to the cathedral. During a siege in 1356, English stone bullets damaged the church; Charles V had it restored and fortified. Bishop Silvester de Cervelle (1371-86) built the Lady chapel, some lateral chapels, and added to the facade its only ornamentation--the colonnade connecting the towers. When Jeanne d'Arc's good name was to be vindicated, a bishop of Coutances was named by Rome as one of the three judges in the process of rehabilitation. "Would to G.o.d," exclaimed the pope, "that I had bishops of Coutances. The Church would be well governed." Olivier de Longueil, _vir gravis_, _vir bonus_, _vir mutis_ (like his own cathedral), was endowed with the ideal qualities for a judge--independence and firmness. His boyhood friends were the Estouteville brothers, one the defender of the Mount, and the other the most active agent in the clearing of the Maid's name.

The cathedral of Coutances suffered much in the religious wars. So devastated was it in 1562, when from end to end of Normandy, as at a given signal, priests were slaughtered at the altar, tombs violated, church windows broken, and images shattered, that it lay long unused.

The collapse of some vault sections made a thorough restoration necessary.

To the south of Coutances, at Avranches,[372] once stood another cathedral of Normandy, begun in 1109, dedicated in 1120, and later changed to Gothic. It was exceptional in having no transept. An inscription in the street marks the spot where, before its northern portal, Henry II of England did public penance in 1172, and received absolution from the papal legate for his guilt in the murder of St.

Thomas Becket. Alas! like the cathedrals of Cambrai and Arras, the Revolution brought about the ruin of Avranches. "_L'egalite s'etait faite dans les ruines_," says one of its biographers. After the sacking of 1794 the historic church collapsed. Ruskin has n.o.bly lamented its loss: "Did the cathedral of Avranches belong to the mob who destroyed it any more than it did to us who walk in sorrow to and fro over its foundations?"

THE GOTHIC ART OF BRITTANY[373]

Chez les Bretons un double courant: l'esprit de liberte, l'esprit de tradition; et pour les concilier, les pousser tous deux vers un meme but et vers un but superieur, la flamme, la pa.s.sion de l'ideal, si ardente chez nos bardes et nos saints, si vivante, si puissante toujours dans l'ame bretonne, et qui l'a jetee tout entiere dans la religion de l'ideal par excellence: la foi du Christ. Liberte, tradition, ideal: voila le triple facteur de la vie intime et de la vie publique, de la vie nationale des Bretons.--LeON SeCHe.

Brittany was a late comer in the national art and much is it to be regretted, for had her building energies been aroused during the Romanesque epoch, her storm-worn granite rock would have then best expressed her regional character. Among the few Romanesque works of Brittany are the crypt of Nantes Cathedral; the nave of St. Aubin's church within the corselet of stone at Guerande; a stalwart central tower over monastic Redon--cradle of Breton history-making, St. Gildas de Rhuys, which M. Lefevre-Pontalis places in the first quarter of the XI century; the church of the Holy Cross, at Quimperle, radically remade after the fall of its tower in 1862 (the Gothic-rib masonry roof beneath that tower dating before 1150); a Templar's church at Loctudy; the Breleverez church beside Lannion. Equally rare are Brittany's Gothic monuments of the first part of the XIII century, Dol Cathedral being one of the few. As the era of Apogee Gothic drew to a close the cathedrals at Quimper, St. Pol-de-Leon, and Treguier were rising. So was that rude ma.s.s of granite, the cathedral at St. Brieuc, and the churches of Rosporden and Guingamp.

In the XIV century was built the Kreisker tower, parent of a generous progeny. Sea-going people are lovers of high towers, and Brittany is dotted with them. Over the flat, bleak land of Leon the _clochers a jour_ are a glory. With pa.s.sion the Breton admired his landmarks. As he sailed home from long months in the northern fisheries, they were the first signals of welcome. To express his affection, he sometimes inscribed the Canticle of Canticles on his tower: "Who is this that cometh up from the desert flowing with delights?" No village felt itself too humble to attempt an imitation of the Kreisker at St. Pol-de-Leon.

By far the greater number of Breton churches belong to the Flamboyant Gothic day, and at that time the most energetic builder was Finistere, the far-western stronghold called Armorica before the Celts from Britain fled in the V and VI centuries from invading Saxons to the inviolate refuge of these other dwellers by the sea. St. Jean-du-Doigt was built from 1440 to 1513, and when almost completed, Anne, d.u.c.h.ess of Brittany and twice queen of France, visited it to pray for a cure. Her daughter, Claude, also queen of France, was equally generous to the shrine. St.

Jean's Pardon of the Fire, in the latter days of June, is one of the five big Pardons of Brittany.

Anne of Brittany's device, the ermine, is carved on many a facade of France. Both her husbands were notable art patrons. For her Charles VIII rebuilt the chateau at Amboise, and for her Louis XII began the chateau at Blois, and at Loches made an oratory that bears her name. The _Book of Hours_ of Anne of Brittany has never been surpa.s.sed. It was for her a liberal education to live in contact with her second husband's minister of state, Cardinal Georges I d'Amboise, who is said to have employed practically every Flamboyant and Renaissance architect and sculptor of the time on his chateau at Gaillon, and whose tomb in Rouen Cathedral retains much of the truly French spirit of Michel Colombe's school.

Brittany benefited artistically by the royal marriages of her last d.u.c.h.ess: Anne gave the Breton Colombe the opportunity to make his _chef-d'oeuvre_--the splendid ducal tomb in Nantes Cathedral.

The ermine of Anne of Brittany adorns the lintel of Folgoet, to which she added a tower, after her visit in 1505. That stately late-Gothic collegiate church, standing in a little Breton village above Landerneau, possesses an apostle porch--a feature popular in Brittany--a richly sculptured _jube_ of three arcades, and altars of green Kersanton granite. On one of its altars the corporation of masons carved compa.s.s, rule, and hammer. And in like manner, as emblems of patriotic service, might be inscribed the names of the twelve villagers who, at personal sacrifice, when their church was to be demolished in 1808, bought it as a gift for their commune. On many a shrine can modern Finistere inscribe the names of those of her sons who fought for their country in the World War. Just as it was given Breton sailors of the XV century to raise the siege of Mont-Saint-Michel, so at Dixmude, in the autumn of 1914, they checked the drive toward Calais of other invaders of French soil.

Brittany, with her profound cult of the dead, will consecrate one of her n.o.blest Calvaries to the memory of Dixmude's heroes:

Que ces noms soient sur l'eglise!

Qu'on les lise Sur le granit des piliers ...

Que, sur la roche severe D'un Calvaire, Solitairement inscrit, A travers la pastorale Vesperale Le nom du mort pousse un cri![374]

Other Flamboyant Gothic monuments of the ancient duchy are the choir of the cathedral of St. Pol-de-Leon; the cloister, porch, and central tower of Treguier Cathedral; the chapel of Notre Dame-des-Portes at Chateauneuf-du-Faou; Notre Dame in the little city of Vitre, that claims to be, with Avignon, the most entirely mediaeval walled town in France; St. Jean and Notre Dame at Lamballe, which latter XIII-century church, with foundations hewn out of the solid rock, was rebuilt and fitted with XVI-century windows; St. Melaine, at Morlaix, rebuilt, 1482, and possessing a towering baptismal font of carved wood; and Notre Dame at Kernascleden, between Le Faouet and Guemene, the work of two brothers named Bail.

The making of stained gla.s.s flourished in the later Middle Ages at Quimper, Treguier, and Vannes. Good windows are to be found at Dol, Quimper, Guerande, Ploermel (where the church has a rich Flamboyant facade pignon), at Kergoat, Moncontour, Les Iff (where the donors were the Laval-Montmorency family), at Plelan, Plogonnec, and at Penmarc'h, whose Pardon of the Rosary occurs on the first Sunday of October.

Because the popular gatherings called pardons are among the basic forces that have helped to mold the architecture of the ancient duchy, they are important for the student of the builder's art.

The late-Gothic churches that cover Brittany are rich in ecclesiastical furniture, carved baptismal temples, and panels sculptured with the quaint usages of burial and marriage, or with agricultural scenes, such as those at St. Goueznon (1615), at Bannalec (1605), at La Roche-Maurice near Brest, and at Notre Dame-la-Grace, near Guingamp, the latter two churches possessing some "storied windows richly dight." At Kerdevot is a wooden reredos, at Roscoff a very beautiful alabaster one of the XV century; at Lambadec a _jube_ dated 1480; at St. Fiacre-du-Faouet (whose pardon comes on the first Sunday of July) a rood-loft of richly carved wood, unfortunately painted in crude colors; at Quimperle, in the church of Ste. Croix, that is fashioned in memory of the sepulcher shrine at Jerusalem, is a _jube_ almost wholly of the Renaissance.

Because of her pardons, Brittany's religious ceremonies took place largely in the open air, even as each of her tribes, each _plou_, in prehistoric times had gathered around her solemn menhirs and dolmens.

Hence the Breton made much of churchyards, placing in them his Calvaries, profound expressions of a people's emotions carved primitively in the regional coa.r.s.e granite. The Lord's Pa.s.sion had vivified the Celtic soul ever since Christianity took possession of it.

As granite is unyielding to sculpture, many a Breton turned to wood to express his verve, carving his church beams like the prow ends of ships.

Morlaix[375] is a good center from which to visit many of the notable revered places. Close by, in the village of Plougonven, is the oldest Calvary extant (1554). A few miles away is that of St. Thegonnec (1610), a shrine invoked for the cure of beasts, where beneath a statue of Our Lady is inscribed: "We beg you, _Madame Vierge_, to accept our first bull." Near the church is one of the isolated chapels called ossuaries in which were gathered the bones of the past generations when they had had their turn in the churchyard's consecrated ground. The chapel bears an inscription from Maccabees: "It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins."

Bedrock in the Breton is his instinct to join his progenitors and his descendants in a permanence of spiritual emotion.[376] No other people of the earth risk life more freely than these frequenters of the deep-sea fisheries; nowhere is the cult of the dead more tenacious, because it is considered that they who have fallen asleep with G.o.dliness have great grace laid up for them.