How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 8

CHAPTER III

Some of the Primary Gothic Cathedrals: Noyon, Senlis, Sens, Laon, Soissons

_C'est vers le Moyen age enorme et delicat,_ _Qu'il faudrait que mon coeur en panne naviguat._ _ ... Roi, politicien, moine, artisan, chimiste,_ _Architecte, soldat, medecin, avocat,_ _Quel temps! Oui, que mon coeur naufrage rembarquat._ _Pour toute cette force ardente, souple, artiste!..._ _Guide par la folie unique de la Croix_ _Sur tes ailes de pierre, o folle Cathedrale!_ --PAUL VERLAINE, _Sagesse_, IV.[40]

St. Denis' abbatial was an object lesson in the new art, and the bishops returned to their dioceses to emulate it. Two of Suger's personal friends, the bishops of Noyon and Senlis, were the first to rebuild their cathedrals. Already during the Romanesque stage the cathedral of Sens had been initiated; it now was to be carried on according to the new system of building. At Laon was begun a splendid Gothic edifice. At Soissons, a new cathedral was started by that masterpiece of Primary Gothic, the transept's southern arm. And many a lesser church now rose: the collegiate at Braine, the abbey church of St. Leu d'Esserent, and two abbatials in Champagne as imposing as cathedrals, St. Remi at Rheims, and Notre Dame at Chalons-sur-Marne. Also in Champagne is the Primary Gothic church of St. Quiriace at Provins.

The cathedral of Paris was also begun in the primary stage of the national art. But Notre Dame of Paris must have a chapter to itself.

Before its main parts were completed, Gothic architecture had reached its culminating point. With it ended the primary group and opened what we shall call the Era of the Great Cathedrals, though let it be remembered that all such divisions are arbitrary and made use of merely for clearness. From its first a.s.sured steps to its apogee, from the middle of the XII century to the middle of the XIII, the sequence of Gothic architecture is welded too logically to be defined by cut-and-dried nomenclature.

During the XII century, the Gothic cathedrals retained Romanesque features, such as deep tribunes over the side aisles, which gave them a wall elevation in four stories--pier arcade, tribune, triforium (to veil the lean-to roof over the tribune), and clearstory. At first it was common usage to encircle the cl.u.s.tered shafts at intervals with stone rings, but by the XIII century the desire for an unbroken ascending line had grown stronger, and the employment of such horizontal bands died out. The simultaneous use of both round and pointed arch is found in all five of these Primary cathedrals; but after the opening of the XIII century, semicircular and equilateral arches rarely were used at the same time in a church. Slowly, as if with reluctance, the new architecture dropped favorite traits of the old school. Sculpture continued longest faithful to Romanesque traditions.

Noyon, Senlis, Sens, Laon, and Soissons--it seems rash to treat of such a bevy of churches in one chapter, when students have made a single cathedral their life work. The pa.s.sing traveler is encouraged by one fact: each big French church, once seen, remains a clear-cut memory, for each possesses a distinct personality. To confuse one cathedral with another is impossible.

It is an instinct deeper than mere fancy to choose a season aesthetically right for a first visit to such sanctuaries. For these Primary cathedrals the fitting occasion is that fugitive hour when the leaves are multiple yet half transparent still, only partly veiling the virile framework of the tree. In them is the evanescence of spring, the slenderness of adolescence and its virginal restraint, that something of youth's severity, that something of youth's radiance which is joy, but not abandonment to joy.

There is something sacred in the modest sobriety of the earlier Gothic churches.... But what words can express their unimaginable charm! If all true art is but a symbol, a prefiguring of the mystery, these churches veil and reveal the coming harmonies of the Beyond as it never before was revealed and veiled. We speak of Chartres as a recollected holiness; the stones of Rheims were made majestic for royal pageants; Amiens is a _sursum corda_. And yet there is something in the first fugitive hour when Romanesque and Gothic met that makes a deeper appeal to the soul.

No Greek, in portico or sepulchral tablet, conceived beauty of lovelier proportion, of more heart-piercing simplicity, than some of the earlier churches of the national genius.

When in the French towns the word pa.s.sed from mouth to mouth, on a tragic day of September, 1914, that Rheims Cathedral was in flames, there were many who asked breathlessly: "And St. Remi? What of St.

Remi?" And when the invaders burst upon Senlis, many who knew the lovely springtime Gothic church of St. Leu d'Esserent trembled for its fate.

Over the birthplace of the nation's unity of language and architecture has poured a pitiless rain of iron and fire, a destruction akin to desecration.[41] Cradle and necropolis!

The iron grip has held cloistral Noyon that was only too content to be forgotten in its distinguished retirement. The proudest mediaeval thing in France, Laon set with feudal arrogance on its high hill, has been long years in chained captivity. For seven centuries the faithful bulls on Laon's towers have looked out, like sentinels, over the city. With dread forebodings they stood in their captivity, aware that the angel guard set about Rheims Cathedral had pleaded in vain, that the tower of Senlis, pride of all the Valois country, had been selected as a target by the invaders' guns. And Bamburg and Limburg, Halberstadt and Magdeburg, had copied Laon Cathedral in the old days when the _opus francigenum_ aroused emulation, not hate, across the Rhine.

Month after month, year after year, the sh.e.l.ls rained on Soissons; town and cathedral lie in ruins. The fair cities of this inmost heart of France have been desolated, the loyal places that hastened to open their gates to Jeanne d'Arc when she rode by with her king from the coronation in Rheims--Senlis and Laon, Soissons and Compiegne,[42] and Crespy-en-Valois, the countryside that greeted her with such love that she said she hoped to be buried among such good folk, among these _chiers et bons amis les loyaulx Franxois habitons les bonnes villes_.[43] Always in the vanguard of battle were these ancient cities of France, always the boulevard of the capital, yet the wars of centuries had respected their churches. Future ages will read of the glorification of brute force by the invaders who refused to take pity on Soissons, Noyon, and Rheims, when they stand before the giant amorphous 1913 memorial at Leipzig. Therein speaks the Prussian purpose as distinctly as, in Gothic cathedrals, speaks the idealism that sent the old and young crusading, and spurred man on to "the bravest effort he ever made to save his soul."

Tragic irreparable early churches of France! Like martyrs in the arena, you have been laid low, one after the other.... But martyrs leave undying memories. If loved before with an almost unfair preference, you are sacred now. Rheims, Soissons, Noyon, and Senlis--your names have become sacramental.

NOYON CATHEDRAL[44]

Vous entendrez rugir une de ces batailles Ou les peuples entiers se mordent aux entrailles, Un combat formidable aux cris desesperes, Dont parleront longtemps les hommes effares; Car nous saurons de moins, si notre France expire, Lui creuser un tombeau plus large qu'un empire.

--LOUIS BOUILHET.

Most of the cathedrals of France have an early history following the same general lines. Each may be said to have pa.s.sed through a Merovingian stage, and to have rebuilt itself larger and finer in Carolingian times.[45] The inroads of the Northmen pirates and the conflagration of timber roofs wrecked most of the cathedrals, so that a third and often a fourth reconstruction went on during the Romanesque era--the century and a half that followed the year 1000. When the evolution of Gothic art was accomplished, there were few churches that were not renewed. It has been said that never before had such a n.o.ble frenzy of building seized on mankind.

In the short biography traced here of each cathedral, seldom will an account be given of former edifices, but rather the story of each church as it now stands. While some portion may be Romanesque, it is uncommon to find any Carolingian vestige remaining.

The bishop of Noyon took the initiative set by Abbot Suger at St. Denis.

He was the first to start a cathedral in the new way just as Noyon can boast that hers was the first communal charter of which there is record.

In 1109 the liberal Bishop Baudry granted the town its franchise, without the turbulent scenes by which other cities were to wrench theirs from their feudal proprietors. "Know then, all Christians, present and future, that by advice of priests, knights, and townsman I have established a commune in Noyon," begins the bishop's parchment. Many a neighboring city modeled its charter on that of Noyon.

The quiet towns on the Oise played a precocious part in what Gratry calls "the big historic effort at justice which occurred in the XII century, the strong will to get out of barbaric chaos which began our era, and which, eight hundred years ago, started the impulses of modern progress." From city to city the communal movement quickened. France began to be covered by a.s.sociations for mutual aid, and the winning of city charters and the creation of guilds went hand in hand with the intellectual ferment in the schools and the creation of a national architecture.

A second Carolingian cathedral of Noyon was replaced in the XI century by a Romanesque one which was burned in 1131, when the city was laid in ashes. At that time, Pope Innocent II was visiting a lord of the region, a cousin of Louis VII, and the brother of the bishop of Noyon, Simon de Vermandois. The pope wrote to various French prelates enjoining on them to help Noyon in its disaster. Bishop Simon must have built part of the walls of the present choir, but as he accompanied Louis VII on the Second Crusade, and died in the East, it was his successor, Bishop Baudouin II (1148-67), friend of Suger, friend, too, of St. Bernard, who really inaugurated the present cathedral about 1150. He sacrificed in large part what was already done of Bishop Simon's choir in order to put it into character with the newly expounded principles of architecture.

The choir of St. Denis was his direct model, and he obtained from Abbot Suger some of his masons; the profiles and ornamentation at Noyon are identical with those of St. Denis.

In 1157, the relics of St. Eloi, Noyon's noted VII-century bishop, a skilled goldsmith and prime minister for King Dagobert, were transferred to the new sanctuary, probably because it was then completed. In the time of Bishop Baudouin III, who died in 1174, the transept was finished, as well as the bays of the nave near it. Noyon's western limb rose during three campaigns of work, as is indicated by differences in its details, but in main part the nave is a work of the final quarter of the XII century.

The cathedral was finished by the westernmost bay of its nave, its capacious porch, and the southwest tower, under Bishop etienne de Nemours (1188-1222), who had three brothers, also bishops and builders, at Paris, at Meaux, and at Chalons, the sons, all four of them, of a lord chancellor of France. In Noyon, Bishop etienne was a sound administrator; he was favorable to the munic.i.p.ality, regulated the town's moneys, and built a hospital. Philippe-Auguste sent him to Denmark to escort to France the unfortunate Princess Ingeborg, who was to be his second wife. The bishop was buried as a benefactor in the abbey of Ourscamp, four miles from Noyon, farther down the Oise, which house was a foundation of Bishop Simon de Vermandois, though only vestiges of its XII-century parts remain.[46]

During the last decade of the XIII century a terrible fire raged for two days in Noyon Cathedral. The vaulting throughout the church, save in the choir aisle, had to be reconstructed. For the s.e.xpart.i.te system, which embraces two bays, and has six branches from the keystone of each vault section, was now subst.i.tuted the barlong plan, where diagonals cover one bay. The early-Gothic architects took up with enthusiasm the Normans' s.e.xpart.i.te plan, but after using it for half a century they most sensibly returned to the quadripart.i.te system as better suited to their needs. The s.e.xpart.i.te vault calls for piers of alternating strength, since on the heavier pier fall diagonals and transverse arch, and only a transverse arch on the intermediate pier.

Noyon Cathedral had from its start planned for a s.e.xpart.i.te vault by building its ground supports of alternating strength. Its piers, therefore, became illogical when a barlong vaulting was erected after the fire of 1193. And one regrets that it has not its original stone roof, since the correlations in this hardy first cathedral are elsewhere very perfect. Throughout the church are details of subtle charm. There is a slight bending out, like a horseshoe, of the archivolts of the pier arcade, which archivolts are severely plain. Usually from the abacus of a main pier rise five cl.u.s.tered shafts to the level of the vault-springing, two to catch the diagonals, two for the longitudinal or wall arches, and one for the transverse arch. Noyon showed constructive agility in concentrating its wall ribs and diagonals on a single shaft, which meant only three cl.u.s.tered colonnettes from main piers to vault-springing.

Each cathedral in France possesses a few traits peculiar to itself.

Noyon is unique in having both ends of its transept terminate in hemicycles, like a Rhenish church.[47] The Romanesque school of the Rhine had derived the feature from the early chapels of Rome. Probably Noyon's transept apses came from retaining the foundations of the previous cathedral. A church which was long in the jurisdiction of Noyon--the cathedral at Tournai--still possesses its Romanesque transept with semicircular ends. Cambrai Cathedral, destroyed by the Revolution, once had a similar pre-Gothic transept; its choir, built from 1220 to 1237 in the golden day of the national art, was an irreparable loss.

Noyon Cathedral showed another Germanic trait in what may be called a western transept, made by the lower stories of the facade towers and the middle section of the first bay.

The nave of Noyon is a n.o.ble vessel, with an interior four-story elevation of happier proportions than was achieved in the transept. No longer do annulets bind the cl.u.s.tered shafts, thus breaking the ascending line as in the choir. Throughout the church is to be found the simultaneous use of round and pointed arches, and, curiously enough, it is the lower stories, pier arcade, and tribune, that used the pointed arch; in the triforium and clearstory the arches are semicircular.

Everywhere the sculptured capitals are of rare beauty. The Romanesque acanthus leaf is found in juxtaposition with the Gothic crocket.

Noyon is exceptional in having retained its annexes: the treasure hall built by Bishop Baudouin II, the chapel of the episcopal palace, a half-timber library, and a beautiful chapter house (c. 1240). This latter, opening on a fragment of the cathedral cloister, is a hall divided into two aisles by a row of slender pillars, the type preferred by the French, whereas in England the circular hall whose vault ribs were gathered on a central pier was more popular. Noyon's chapter house was built by Bishop Pierre Chalot, who died at sea, off Cyprus, on St.

Louis' crusade of 1248.

When in late-Gothic times Noyon was adding chapels and side aisles, her master-of-works was Jean Turpin, who at Peronne--pitiful Peronne la Pucelle entirely a ruin to-day--erected a Flamboyant Gothic church which was a veritable gem.

The battle of giants, foreseen in the poet's dream, twice engulfed Noyon during the World War. From the first occupation by the enemy the city escaped without serious injury. Then in March, 1918, began the Germans'

desperate advance on Paris. At the end of the month the mayor of Noyon quitted the city, the last to leave. And in September he was the first to re-enter Noyon after the second battle of the Marne had driven back the invaders. He found his town a ruin. Not a single building had escaped injury, and only ten days earlier a photograph taken from a French airship had shown that the Renaissance Town Hall and Noyon's chief square were intact; few monuments had suffered from the occasional bombardments by the Allies. The Hotel de Ville had been built in the dawn of the cla.s.sic Renaissance, and its fine facades retained much of the Gothic spirit. Before their departure the invaders blew up the town; not even Calvin's birthplace was spared. Hardly 10 per cent of the houses of this amiable little city that asked only to be left unmolested by the fever and fret of new things are to-day worth reconstruction.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Noyon's Chapter House (1240-1250)_]

As if by a miracle, the cathedral and a side street named for the old goldsmith bishop, St. Eloi, were preserved. The cathedral roof is pierced by sh.e.l.ls in a dozen places and the northern tower and the porch between the towers are smashed, but the interior is but slightly damaged. In one of the side chapels a vandal fired his pistol many times at a picture of the Saviour. Perhaps it was the memory that Noyon's rounded transept ends and forechurch were Germanic which saved the cathedral. Better is it to remember by a Radegund, by a Charlemagne, than by Odin and Thor.

THE CATHEDRAL OF SENLIS[48]

To-day a.n.a.lysis has seized on all things, and it is leading us to death. Man, we must not forget, lives intellectually by synthesis.... If archaeology is to make known the monuments of the past, it ought, before all else, to try to make them loved, for, given the uncert.i.tude of the future, it is in that love that they will find their only chance of safety.

--eMILE LAMBIN.[49]

Senlis was the second begun of the Gothic cathedrals. The most fecund region for early essays in the nascent national art lay between Senlis and Noyon. Thibaut, bishop of Senlis, was present at Abbot Suger's deathbed in 1151. Filled with the ambition to replace his half-ruined church by a Gothic one, he began, about 1152, the new works, and once more the abbey church of St. Denis was the model. Some of Senlis'

original vaults remain over side aisles, tribune, and apse chapels.

Their intersecting ribs show a certain inexperience, and in places semicircular diagonals still are used. The framing arches of each section are lower than the keystone of the diagonals, which imparts a _bombe_ shape to the vault. As the masons acquired skill in the making of Gothic stone roofs, this domical form died out; by stilting, by depressing, and by pointing the arches was the difficulty solved. Like Noyon, Senlis played a part in the early history of France. The Merovingian and Carolingian kings and those of the House of Capet frequented the little city in order to hunt in the forests of the Oise.

Louis VII made Senlis his favorite residence, and when the new cathedral was undertaken he allowed donations to be collected over the entire kingdom.

When Bishop Thibaut died, the succeeding prelates, Henri and Geoffrey, continued to give largely of their revenues to the new works, but the progress was slow. Senlis was a small diocese for so big a monument.

About the time that the choir was finished, 1180, the sculpture of the central-western portal was set up, a gem of Primary Gothic, though sadly damaged by time. It marks a date in French mediaeval sculpture. On the lintel is related the Death of the Virgin and her a.s.sumption, in the tympanum her Coronation. Senlis was the first to use this ordinance which the XIII century frequently repeated; we find it at Chartres'

north portal, and at the entrance under the northwest tower of Notre Dame at Paris.

M. emile Male with his usual happy phrasing speaks of the lyric beauty of the lintel stone at Senlis.[50] It was partly inspired by the _Golden Legend_ of the good Bishop James of Genoa, which in its turn had used the apocryphal gospels freely.[51] The legend relates that at the deathbed of Our Lady, the Apostles gathered, and St. John cautioned them: "Be careful when she is dead that no one weeps, lest the people, seeing our tears, be troubled, and say, 'They fear death, who preach the Resurrection.'" For three days Our Lady rested in her tomb in the valley of Jehoshaphat, then came her Divine Son, with angels, singing the Canticle of Canticles, to escort her to Paradise. The old sculptor of Senlis has depicted the touching reverence with which the angels bend, to lift from the tomb their future Queen of Heaven. Their gesture of eager love is one of the exquisitely delicate conceptions of mediaeval sculpture.

While they were carving the west portal there came to Senlis a touching figure, the young mother of the future Louis VIII, Isabelle, daughter of Baudouin V of Flanders, who claimed direct descent from Charlemagne; through her the blood of the Carolingian line pa.s.sed into the third dynasty of France. She was to die, at nineteen, almost repudiated by Philippe-Auguste, because her people declined to support one of his projects. In Senlis Cathedral this gentle grandmother of St. Louis walked barefooted, candle in hand, beseeching a.s.sistance from the Mother of G.o.d with such humility that the beholders wept. She founded a chapel in the cathedral.