Cathedral Cities of France Part 5

The first count, Ingelgar, received his dominion from Charles the Bald, in about 870. After him comes Fulk the Red, who enlarged his father's borders beyond the river; Fulk the Good, the scholar who defended his learning with the well-known proverb, "An unlettered king is but a crowned a.s.s," a saying which spread beyond his own realm and found favour at the court of England; and the warlike Geoffrey of the Grey Tunic, who repelled the Breton and Aquitanian incursions and fought in Frankish and German wars besides. Geoffrey it was who gave to the line the famous Fulk the Black, the first count who appears to any great extent in French history--the history, that is, of France proper, at that time apart from the great duchies on her boundaries. His wars with Odo filled a great part of his reign, and brought him down as far as the Loire, where, through the alliance of a count of Perigueux, Tours became his for a short time; also Saumur, after the victory of Pontlevois. On two occasions he turned pilgrim; and he is also found at Rome, applying to the Pope for consecration of his new monastery near Loches, which Hugh of Tours, whose see Fulk had robbed, refused to consecrate unless the stolen lands were restored. Naturally the Gallican Church resented this destruction of their privileges; the full wrath of the episcopate was p.r.o.nounced against the recreant count, and a legend adds that in further punishment a wind came from heaven and blew down his newly-built church. How this uncanonical behaviour must have vexed the shades of Fulk the pious! Fulk Nerra was followed by Geoffrey, self-christened the Hammer. He rebelled against his father during his lifetime, but after his death continued the war with Chartres, and actually got possession of Tours, the one city for which every Angevin strove. Count Thibaut was formally deprived of the city by royal command, and it was handed over to Geoffrey, under the favour, the superst.i.tious chroniclers make haste to add, of Saint Martin. Notwithstanding this royal grant, Henry, the Frank king, seems to have been perpetually at war with Geoffrey, and even to have called in feudal service of the Norman duke to aid him against the Angevin count. William himself was no friend to Anjou. The mastery over Maine was a bone of contention to the two great powers on its north and south borders; and when Geoffrey obtained the guardians.h.i.+p of little Count Hugh, and came into immediate contact with Normandy, a definite struggle arose. Geoffrey aimed at the two outposts of William's territory, Alencon and Domfront. Alencon, through the treachery of its lord, surrendered to him; Domfront was also disaffected, and for a moment it seemed as though the land of the great Norman were to be invaded by his southern neighbour. But William was prepared for any emergency. He marched straight to Domfront, where Geoffrey had already stationed his troops, and laid siege to it. He remained before the town for some time before news came of the advance of Geoffrey himself; and when the Count at last arrived, he sent word of his readiness to give battle. But when the morning broke upon the Norman host, drawn up before the fortress all expectant of a battle with the Angevins, lo! no enemy was to be seen. Geoffrey, whose surname of Hammer by no means maligned his prudence, had thought better of the scheme in the night, and retired with all his men. The Norman writers, of course, set this down to cowardice. But one would like to hear the other side of the story. "Here, and throughout the war, the lions stand in need of a painter, or rather their painters suddenly refuse to do their duty. We have no Angevin account of the siege of Domfront to set against our evidently highly coloured Norman picture."

"The French yearning to make everything new" has done its work in Angers, but though Fulk, Geoffrey, Rene, and the rest would be at a loss to recognise their old capital in the trim modern town, enough remains to show us what has been. No city standing as Angers does on rising ground above a wide river, with a ma.s.s of castle bastions sloping up the hill, could fail to have made history in its day. The modern town may be disposed of in a few words--it is clean and full of life, and altogether very far removed from the "black Angers" known to our ancestors. This mediaeval and grim-sounding t.i.tle, reminiscent of dungeons and tyrant princes, probably either meant that the ancient town was closely and squalidly built, or else referred to the dark slate with which the country abounds, and which might well have been used for building purposes all over the town, as we still see it in some houses by the river.

The attractive side of Angers is that facing the water, and the river is quite worthy of the town on its banks, though Mr. Henry James does censure the "perversity in a town lying near a great river, and yet not upon it." It is true that Angers has not got as far as the Loire; but it has what is next best, a tributary of the great river--a wide placid flow, which makes no mean show here, spanned as it is by three fine bridges. Looking upstream from the lowest bridge one sees the old and the new together; the clean well-to-do water-front, pleasant boulevards, and a bright little quay with every house the pattern of its neighbour; and above this the black ma.s.s of the castle, whose solid hugeness makes the crowning towers of Saint Maurice look as if they were cut out of paper, so delicately and sharply defined are they against the sky. Down river there is a long and sunny path, broad green meadows and a stretch of country beyond, and little fis.h.i.+ng boats dotted about on the water.

But what Angers has of the best is its castle, though it be "the work of intruding Kings," Philip Augustus and Louis IX., and not of the Angevin counts. It is, indeed, more ma.s.sive than picturesque--"it has no beauty, no grace, no detail, nothing that charms or detains you; it is simply very old and very big--so big and so old that this simple impression is enough, and it takes its place in your recollections as a perfect specimen of a superannuated stronghold." The huge grim bastions, girded with iron bands as though to give added strength to their already giant-like solidity, and the deep moat, filled in old days by the waters of the Maine, stood there for a very real and terrible use, and even now are a splendid example of how men in the Middle Ages defended themselves against all comers. The very steepness and plainness of the vast walls prevented an enemy from gaining any foothold, even supposing him to have crossed the moat in safety. But this great house of defence now gives on to a modern boulevard; a kitchen-garden occupies the moat, and sends the scent of thyme and rosemary up through those loop-hole windows, whose most peaceful prospect of old was the black, silent water below, and whose usual occupants were armed men with cross-bows, or boiling lead, or something equally quieting to the unwary spirit attempting to scale those unscalable ramparts.

In the heart of the town is a very comfortable little inn at the sign of the "Cheval Blanc." The house has a quiet and rather old-fas.h.i.+oned atmosphere, perhaps a relic of past days, as the inn itself has stood there since the sixteenth century, though the present building is quite modern. Another relic--though the term hardly suits such a hale and hearty person--is a delightful old waiter, who has been at the Cheval Blanc for forty years, and wears on his coat with the greatest pride a minute piece of _tricolor_--the recognition of thirty years' service.

Close to the Cheval Blanc is the Prefecture, and this contains a hidden treasure in the shape of an old cloister, which runs along one side of the court. This cloister was not discovered until 1836, but the remains themselves date from the twelfth century, and are of extraordinary interest, not merely from their antiquity, but also from the immense variety of subject sculpture which adorns them. There are several bays of round-headed arches, and from their capitals and mouldings dragons and toads, snakes and winged lions, glare and wriggle at the visitor in a grotesque medley. In some cases Scriptural subjects are represented--there is notably the murder of the Innocents, a marvellously preserved and realistic fresco, reminiscent both in treatment and colour scheme of some of the Bayeux tapestry; the killing of Goliath by David, and the presentation of his head to Saul; and inside a very modern council-room, a wonderful allegory representing the defeat of Vice by Virtue. The Lamb, enhaloed, is in the centre; beneath are two lions tearing apart a wild boar; and in the jambs are virtues, armed with s.h.i.+eld and sword, trampling upon demon vices--men struggling with wild beasts--and adoring angels swinging censers. This is partly coloured, and the sculpture is very fine, great attention being given to detail.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ANGERS]

Freeman declares the city of Angers to be the headquarters of the Angevin style of architecture, and quotes as a noticeable example of that style the Cathedral of St. Maurice, which differs at least as widely from that of the French churches as from that of Normandy. The object of the Angevin architect was breadth, and he has sacrificed both length and height to the attainment of his end. The view from the west doorway of St. Maurice shows a well-known example of what is termed the "hall plan"--a single wide nave, having choir and transepts, but without ambulatories or aisles. That the church originally had aisles, however, is evident from a plan of Saint Maurice given in Mr. Lethaby's "Mediaeval Art"; they were removed, it is a.s.sumed, in order to simplify the construction of the vault. The great relieving arches of the nave as it now stands are divided into three bays only. "In everything," Freeman says, "the tendency is to have a few large members rather than many small ones. There is a certain boldness and simplicity about this kind of treatment; but there is also a certain bareness, and an Angevin church looks both lower and shorter than it really is." The vaulting of the roof here follows the same sub-domical design as that of Notre Dame de la Coture at Le Mans. The stained gla.s.s is perhaps the best feature of the church as far as actual beauty goes; some of it dates from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and both in nave and choir it is very fine, particularly in the windows of the apse and in the rose window of the north transept. The tapestry which hangs in the nave and transepts represents scenes from the Apocalypse, and is very fine Arras work of the fourteenth century.

Chapter Ten

TOURS AND BLOIS

So much has been said and written of the Loire country during the past fifty years that the modern writer has very little ground left to him, unless it be to avoid calling it the "Garden of France." Yet over-written as it may be, Touraine has not lost any of the charm and romance which must always attach to a wide sunny land, watered by a great river, and "peopled"--one might almost say--by chateaux, every one of which has set its mark upon French history. Certainly there is something very delightful, because so unlike anything else in France, in the endless vista of grey-green levels--here and there a group of slim s.h.i.+vering poplars or a flash of sunlight upon the wide waters of the Loire, which winds in and out of the flats like a great lazy s.h.i.+ning serpent--flying sometimes into a sudden rage and flooding the land, or subsiding sulkily amongst high banks and stretches of dry sand.

It is these moods and tempers of the great river that prevent any navigation upon its waters; other smaller rivers--the Seine, for instance, and our own Thames--are alive with craft of every kind; but here, on the great boundary stream between north and south, which seems made for a waterway to the sea, no busy steamers ply up and down with the tide--no barges and market boats disturb the calm of its wide reaches. There never was, for its size, such an erratic and useless river; yet we can afford to forgive it, for the sake of the land which it waters and the cities on its banks.

The impression one carries away from Tours is one of wideness, and brightness, and suns.h.i.+ne--shaded by one or two ancient corners. It is above all things a town really lived in and appreciated by its inhabitants, many of whom are English. Tours is, or used to be, a famous educational centre, and for the sake of education, or economy, or both, whole families have migrated there, besides the unmistakably English students who have been grafted on to a family to learn French. And the river-side shows, if not a strenuously busy, at least a very sociable side of the town life, especially in the summer evenings, when the Tourangeaux, native and adopted, leave the white houses and busy streets, and use their river bank for a pleasant walk.

It is curious how in France each step towards the south seems to be a step further in French history. First there is Normandy, the land of the early Northern warriors, with the fierce blood untamed in their veins; then Maine and Anjou, recalling the days of our own Plantagenet kings, and the close connection of France with England; while Touraine brings back to us the craft of Louis XI. and the magnificence of Francois Ier. Tours itself, however, has never been content to lie fallow for long; ever since some Roman emperor transported it from the right bank of the Loire to the left, and made it the capital of Lugdunensis Tertia, the town has had an important part a.s.signed to it, and has played out that part to the full. Though in old days Tours was only half of the place, the _cite_, the _bourg_, built round the tomb and shrine of Saint Martin and first called by his name, was of equal if not greater importance, from the many pilgrimages to the resting-place of the great saint. This is easily understood when one considers in what veneration Saint Martin was held by the Gauls and their descendants. Saint Gatia.n.u.s, the first bishop of Tours, began the good work in the third century, but to Martin is due the subsequent spread of Christianity, not only in Touraine but all over France, so that he really shares with Saint Denis the honour of patron saint. Born of pagan parents in Pannonia, Martin became a catechumen at ten years old, and five years later was forced, much against his will, to enter the army. After his final conversion and baptism, however, he left it to become the eager disciple and co-worker of Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers; and in 371 he was consecrated Bishop of Tours. The legend of Martin's conversion is well known (at any rate it may be found commemorated in the painted windows of churches all over France)--how the young soldier stationed outside the gate of Amiens shared his cloak with a pa.s.sing beggar, and how the following night Christ appeared to him in a vision, making known to the angels of Heaven this thing done to Himself as to one of "the least of these."

[Ill.u.s.tration: TOUR DE L'HORLOGE, TOURS]

After Martin's death at Candes his relics were brought to Tours, and in the fifth century Saint Perpetuus built a splendid basilica round the shrine. This church became the nucleus of the _bourg_ of Martinopolis, known to the Middle Ages as Chateauneuf. Side by side with the church a monastery sprang up, and in the reign of Charlemagne the famous scholar Alcuin became abbot and founded there his school of theology. Late in the tenth century the basilica was destroyed by fire; two centuries later saw the completion of its successor, but this again, after suffering many evils from Huguenot and Revolutionist hands, disappeared under the First Empire to make a pa.s.sage-way for the Rue des Halles.

Two towers--the church originally had five--now look mournfully at one another across the busy, narrow street: the Tour de l'Horloge, square and solid, with a leaded roof capped by a small eighteenth-century dome, and the taller Tour Charlemagne, so called for the rather insufficient reason that Charlemagne buried his third wife, Luitgarde, beneath its base. These are the sole relics of the ancient _culte_ of Saint Martin; though to his memory in latter days a new basilica has reared itself on the other side of the street.

Until the days of the League, the kings of France always found an attraction in the sunny Touraine meadows, and occupied themselves a good deal with Tours itself. On the outskirts of the town is the village of Plessis-les-Tours, where stood the famous fortress of Louis XI., who lived, plotted and died within its walls; here also Louis XII. was proclaimed "father of his people," and here Henri III. and the King of Navarre met together for a common defence against the League. To an Englishman the name naturally a.s.sociates itself with Quentin Durward, and calls up a picture of the grim fortress so vividly described by Walter Scott, with its triple moat and high palisades, its dark walls and turreted gateways, defended by three hundred Scottish arches, and the donjon tower "which rose like a black Ethiopian giant, high into the air." The castle of Plessis was in old days a terror to the countryside; the surrounding forest was a perfect network of man-traps, and the intruder, were he fortunate enough to avoid these, had no chance of escape from the arrows of the Scottish guard in their iron "swallows'

nests" upon the walls. Hardly less mysterious, indeed, is the central figure within these grim surroundings--Louis himself, whose character, with its strange mingling of guile and religious fervour, unfathomable craft and childish superst.i.tion, baffled the men of his own day as it has baffled posterity. He was feared by those who served him, and he was obeyed, because a terrible alternative awaited the disobedient; but he was neither loved nor understood. Of love, indeed, he had little need, and it was not his pleasure that men should understand him.

Very little, however, remains to-day of the "verger du roi Louis" to show that it was once the home of kings. It has gone the way of most of the "illusions ... in the good city of Tours with regard to Louis XI.,"

and only a few fragments and "inconsequent lumps" share with some modern buildings the site of this royal prison of Plessis-les-Tours.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. GATIEU, TOURS]

The western facade of Tours Cathedral, with its two small towers, is a noticeable example of the waning Gothic style. The detail is so "charmingly executed as almost to induce the belief, in spite of the fanciful extravagance which it displays, that the architects were approaching to something new and beautiful when the mania for cla.s.sic detail overtook them." Looking eastward from the west door one notices the northerly trend of the Cathedral's axis, commencing from the transept arches. The choir spreads outward at its first bay, the side walls not following the alignment of the body of the church. The gla.s.s is both abundant and magnificent in the nave lights, and the enormous clerestory windows display it to the greatest possible advantage.

Unfortunately, the fine rose window in the north transept is marred by the cutting across of a vertical pillar, inserted as a support to the crest of the arch. In both transepts the triforium arches present a curious and novel arrangement, the reason for which is not very apparent. The arches are in a double plane, but the openings are not directly one behind another.

The pier arches of the nave are plain, with simple panel-like spandrils, the piers themselves supporting a very large clerestory and glazed triforium. In the latter the heads of the arches are filled in with rich Flamboyant tracery, either in imitation of the fleur-de-lys, or with varieties of wheel tracery in double plane. The choir is much earlier than the nave, and its bays show a beautiful proportion and harmony in its members, the whole elevation being supported on cl.u.s.tered columns with stalk capitals and square abacus. In the apse the tracery is a slight variant from that of the choir; the arch-heads are here filled in with trefoil instead of quatrefoil tracery. On the north side of the Cathedral are the remains of some cloisters, joined to the main body by two flying b.u.t.tresses.

To most travellers in France the town of Blois is a.s.sociated with a chateau rather than with a cathedral; it is one of a group of towns known and visited for the historic piles which tower above their grey roofs--Amboise and Chambord, Langeais and Chenonceaux, Chaumont and Montrichard. We count Blois with these rather than with the towns famous for their churches, and the bishopstool comes rather as a surprise, or as a thing unconsidered. The Cathedral, built in the seventeenth century and dedicated to St. Louis, occupies a magnificent position, overhanging the grey water-front of the Loire in a fas.h.i.+on which seems to call for some n.o.bler building. However, although built according to a curiously mixed design in b.a.s.t.a.r.d Gothic and Renaissance, there is a certain sense of proportion in the interior of the church, the vaulting being especially simple and broad in effect. The nave consists of nine bays, with a low clerestory, terminating in stone panels, which occupy the place usually a.s.signed to the triforium, and are left in the rough with a view to subsequent enrichment by sculpture. The examples of adornment at the east end, however, make one feel that the church has been mercifully spared any further fantasies from the chisel of the Renaissance sculptor.

Far better is the Church of St. Nicolas, whose twin towers stand out dark and sharp midway between the water-front and the overhanging ma.s.s of the Chateau. It belongs to the tenth and eleventh centuries, and has not been much restored except by whitewash, which covers most of the interior, but allows a good deal of old work to be seen, especially in the north aisle, where, near the pulpit, we find round-headed windows very deeply splayed. The nave has five bays, and a blind triforium, consisting of an arcade of four small arches in each bay, the last two eastward having only three arches set in the blind wall. These last bays are much ruder than the others, especially on the south side. The clerestory has twin lights, with a rose in the head of the arch, as is seen in the Cathedral at Chartres. The transepts are good, and the little corbel-tables running the whole way round, form a series of those grotesque and curiously unecclesiastical faces of men and beasts which we find so often in early church sculpture. In this particular series a gridiron plays a prominent part, which is curious, as the church appears to have no connection with Saint Lawrence. Behind the choir is an old chapel dedicated to Saint Joseph, which has a Romanesque apse; and it is noticeable that in this part of the church the roof groining is simple--that is, without ribs. In the lantern, which is in the form of a cupola, each pendentive is terminated by the figure of a saint in its niche.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BLOIS]

High above Saint Nicolas a steep flight of steps leads up to the great Chateau which has made history for the town below. The most striking view is from the other side, where the magnificent "aile Francois Ier" rises in imposing fas.h.i.+on above the high road; but the entrance is in the Louis XII. wing to the east, and here the beautiful inner court opens out a varied display of richness. The eastern wing itself contains the private apartments of Louis XII. and his wife, Anne de Bretagne--these are now converted into a local museum and picture gallery--and the lower storey is in the form of an arcade, with unrestored capitals of the fifteenth century. Facing this is the wing of "ruled lines and blank s.p.a.ces," constructed by Gaston d'Orleans, brother of Louis XIII., upon the foundations of a wing erected by his ancestor, the poet-duke Charles, whom Henry V. took prisoner at Agincourt, and whose son became Louis XII. The old castle of the Counts of Blois had been sold to the Orleans family by the last of the line in 1397, and the new possessors, each in his day, occupied themselves in restoring and embellis.h.i.+ng it. So zealous indeed, in this respect, was Duke Gaston, that, had not fate intervened, not only the west wing but the entire building would have been pulled down to make way for his plans. Happily for posterity, this devastation never took place, and the Francois Ier wing, the chief treasure of the Chateau, is still preserved to us much as it was at the end of the sixteenth century, at which time Blois may be said to have reached the zenith of its fame in the history of France. The Chateau was then a royal residence, and the roll of its inhabitants forms a long list of ill.u.s.trious names, foremost among which stand those of Catherine de Medici and Charles IX., Henri III., and the King of Navarre, and the famous Henri de Guise, who met his death here through the suspicion and jealousy of the king, his cousin. In the Guise tragedy the chief interest of the Chateau appears to centre. Dark hints concerning "le Balafre" are thrown out during the progress through a succession of dim, empty rooms--council room and bed-chamber, oratory and private closet, some flooded with suns.h.i.+ne, others dark with the strange misty curtain that age will sometimes hang across an old chamber, and through whose thin veil one seems to see the shades of those old-time kings and queens, walking, plotting and praying as they did when the Chateau was alive with the tread of men. All this appears to lead up to the scene of the Guise murder, and as the guide reaches the royal bed-chamber and points through a doorway here and down a pa.s.sage there, one seems to have reached the heart of the tragedy.

There, in the long council-room, the Balafre stood, warming his hands by the fire, when the message came that the king awaited him in a cabinet at the far end of the wing; here, in an ante-room close by, Henri III.

lifted the curtain and watched the enemy to his death; there in the dark, narrow pa.s.sage--too narrow even to allow of his drawing sword--Guise found himself caught like a rat in a trap; here, in the king's own chamber, he doubled back for safety, and met his death at the foot of the royal bed. It is all very thrilling and very real; and little as there is to love in Henri de Guise, one cannot but pity the man for the manner of his death; and there seems nothing but justice in the murder of the king himself a short time afterwards. This second tragedy took place outside the old dungeon, a gloomy round tower with cross-barred windows and a heavy iron door, behind which the Cardinal de Guise, brother of the Balafre, suffered imprisonment at the hands of his jealous cousin. In the centre of the dungeon floor is a trap door, which, considering the general atmosphere of the place, one naturally a.s.sociates with an oubliette, but which more probably represented the head of a well, run up through the building in order that the inhabitants of the castle should not suffer from want of water in siege time.

It is curious to note that the historical description to which the visitor listens to-day as he follows his guide through those empty chambers at Blois is almost exactly the same as that given a hundred and twenty years ago. Arthur Young, travelling in France in 1787, paid a visit to Blois, and gives the following account of the Chateau and its history: "We viewed the castle for the historical monument it affords that has rendered it so famous. They show the room where the council a.s.sembled, and the chimney in it before which the Duke of Guise was standing when the king's page came to demand his presence in the royal closet; the door he was entering when stabbed; the tapestry he was in the act of turning aside; the tower where his brother the cardinal suffered, with a hole in the floor into the dungeon of Louis XI., of which the guide tells many horrible stories, in the same tone, from having told them so often, in which the fellow in Westminster Abbey gives his monotonous history of the tombs."

Chapter Eleven

CHARTRES

"Chartres," says Mr. Henry James, "gives us an impression of extreme antiquity, but it is an antiquity that has gone down in the world." It may be this very decadence that has kept Chartres within itself and prevented it from growing out into a large pretentious city. Many other places which rival it in age and a.s.sociation have either swept away all traces of their antiquity, or else preserved it in dignified contrast to the modern mushroom town. Chartres has done neither. It is scarcely more at the present day than a quaint country town with a very old-fas.h.i.+oned air, a place of steep, twisting streets and quiet little market-squares, the cathedral rising like a giant from the very midst of the houses.

Round the town runs a boulevard, known as the Tour-de-Ville, and interesting for the fact that it follows the line of the mediaeval defences--ramparts that kept many enemies at bay when Chartres was a power in the kingdom of France. Here and there parts of these defences are still standing, and one fragment in particular forms the foundations of an old convent. Another remnant of the old fighting days is the Porte Guillaume, one of the city gates, built when the march of the English forced every French town to keep itself under bolt and bar. Two round towers, embattled and machicolated, flank a low archway, and to complete the mediaeval effect, the ancient fosse still remains before the gate, not gra.s.s-grown or choked with rubbish, but filled with a clear stream, just as it might have been in old days.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHARTRES FROM THE NORTH]

Autric.u.m of the Carnutes held an important position in Gaul, ranking very near the great capital of the Senones. In pre-Christian times it was a famous Druidic centre; but with the advance of Christianity, Savinian and Potentian, the patron saints of Sens, extended their mission to Chartres, converted the inhabitants, and built their first church, according to tradition, upon a Druid grotto. Later on, the town pa.s.sed into the possession of a line of counts, who were a very powerful factor in mediaeval France. The first Theobald or Thibaut is said to have purchased his domain from the sea-king Hasting, who had penetrated beyond the coast and colonised the lands around the river Eure. His son and successor, Thibaut le Tricheur, lived in a state of constant war with Normandy, and seems to have been regarded as a kind of evil influence by the old Norman chroniclers, whose hero in Thibaut's day was naturally their own Richard the Fearless. Another of the line was the famous Odo, whose ambition went beyond his own states of Chartres and Blois, and aimed at kings.h.i.+p in Burgundy and even in Italy. Through the greater part of his reign he carried on also the struggle with Normandy which had raged so fiercely in Thibaut's time, besides the standing war with the Angevin line, represented by Fulk the Black. It was, as Freeman says, the fact of this common enemy in the house of Chartres which first brought Anjou and Normandy into direct contact and perhaps laid the foundations of Anjou's subsequent connection with England. Chartres, like Nevers, was made a duchy under Francois Ier; later it pa.s.sed into the Orleans family, whose nominal appanage it has remained ever since, the eldest son bearing to this day the t.i.tle of "Duc de Chartres." It is also interesting to notice that Henri de Navarre broke the long succession of coronations at Rheims by being crowned King of France in Chartres Cathedral, three years after the town had opened its gates to his army in 1591. Some three hundred years later another enemy appeared outside the walls, and once again Chartres found itself in the hands of a foreign power. Mr. Cecil Headlam, in his very interesting "Story of Chartres," gives a description of the Prussian occupation, part of which may be quoted here as showing the foresight of the Mayor, who in this terrible time, when the whole French nation seemed utterly demoralised, thought rather of the safeguard of the city and its one great monument, than of the doubtful and dearly-won glory of a protracted defence.

"It was on Friday, September 30, 1870, that the Prussian soldiers appeared for the first time near Chartres. Three weeks later Chateaudun fell, after a desperate and heroic defence, for which that picturesque and ancient town paid the dear price of failure. Two days later the enemy marched in force upon Chartres. The _tirailleurs_ and _mobiles_ and troops of the National Guard, who endeavoured to defend the town, after vain marching and counter-marching, with the same generous ardour and utter ineffectiveness as had distinguished the movements of the other armies before the disasters of Wissembourg, Worth and Sedan, returned exhausted. Without firing a shot they had been rendered incapable of fighting. Fighting in any case would have been useless. It was wisely decided to capitulate, and on the 21st the Mayor and Prefect of the Department drove out to Morancez to save the city and Cathedral, by surrendering them to General von Wittich, from the inevitable destruction of which Chateaudun had given them a terrible example. What they saw on their way of the French defence and the Prussian advance convinced civilians and military men alike that it was impossible to hope to defend Chartres."

At the head of the Rue St. Jean, where it leads into the Place du Chatelet, one obtains the first and best view of the two beautiful spires at the west end of the Cathedral. The southern tower, dating back to the twelfth century and conceived in a style which harmonises with the broad and ma.s.sive design of the whole building, is an example of what was contemplated as a finish to the other towers of the Cathedral.

The northern tower, built in 1507 by Jean le Texier, well deserves its reputation as the most beautiful Gothic spire ever designed. "The one, fas.h.i.+oned by the Byzantine chisel, sprang into complete being in the heroic ages of faith in the days of war ... the other rose, after a long peace, under the hands of the still Christian architects of the Renaissance, when all dangers and difficulties had been surmounted."

On contemplating the plan on which Chartres Cathedral was built one is struck with the enormous s.p.a.ce which has been allotted to the choir.

Here the new religious cult finds its earliest expression, greater provisions are made for its ceremonials, larger s.p.a.ces are given both in choir and transepts for its gorgeous ritual than we find in Paris, Soissons or Laon. Bishops, priests, deacons, choristers and serving-men needed a wider platform for the ministration of the sacred rites of the Church, and especially to this end was the Cathedral planned out. It is said that its construction was carried out with incredible rapidity in the desire to meet the pressing requirements of the people, who demanded that the Cathedral should be not only the house of prayer for the bishop and his canons, but essentially the mother church of the humblest of her wors.h.i.+ppers.

The prevalence of a style, more or less uniform, with its main attributes harmonious and congruous, is the resultant of these forces working together. The completion of the Cathedral was carried out about 1240, and in 1250 were added the two porches at the entrance to the transepts. The sacristy was built in the thirteenth century, and a century later the little chapel of Saint Piat was attached to the eastern apse. The shortness of the nave is attributed to the desire to utilise the foundations of the old crypt for the choir and not to extend the building farther westward than the two existing towers. Between these two points, the walls of the crypt and the western towers, the nave had to be constructed and without any possibility of further extension.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHARTRES]

No less than nine spires were originally designed and their towers actually commenced. What a magnificent effect would have been produced had they been completed! Standing on the high ground of the city, Chartres with its cl.u.s.tering pinnacles would have been one of the wonders of Christendom. The magnificent gla.s.s of the thirteenth century is so deep in tone that upon entering the building one is conscious of a darkness that can almost be felt, so much at variance with the effect of the interior of most large French Cathedrals.

The two porches placed outside the transept doors are the subject of a panegyric from the pen of Viollet-le-Duc. He considers them as the most beautiful and harmonious additions ever made to an existing building, and their architects proved themselves to be artists of the very first rank. No more beautiful specimen of a portal of the thirteenth century can elsewhere be found to exist; glorious and rejoicing in colour and in gold, and of surpa.s.sing sculpture and full of impressive and solemn statuary.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RUE DE LA PORTE GUILLAUME, CHARTRES]

Near Chartres there are two small towns which might well be taken in a day's excursion; both are connected with Chartres historically and both have a certain interest of their own certainly not devoid of attraction to one in search of antiquities. One is Chateaudun, whose fall during the war of 1870 was, as has been quoted above, the signal for the surrender of Chartres; the other is Vendome, the towns.h.i.+p of the ancient feudal county. From Chartres it is Chateaudun that lies first in our road. It is a straight, neat little town--most of the streets cut one another at right angles--and the smoke of the Franco-Prussian war still seems to hover about the place; one of its chief memories, indeed, is the great fight in October, 1870, when a bare thousand _franc-tireurs_ of the national guard kept the town for half a day against a Prussian army of ten times their strength, and the quiet market-square--now called the Place du 18 Octobre--was transformed into a battle-field. All the heroism that the day called forth, however, could not save the town from being sacked and burnt--the last of a long series of conflagrations, lasting from the sixth to the nineteenth century, that has won for the little town its cheerful, hopeful motto: "Extincta revivisco." Certainly Chateaudun has risen from the flames with a fresh lease of its quiet life, but it has been completely modernised, and except for a few narrow alleys sloping down towards the river, which would seem to have escaped the general devastation, there is little that does not belong to to-day. This is, however, making an exception of the Chateau overlooking the Loire; a great exception, since at present all that there is to see in Chateaudun consists in this square pile on the brow of the hill; the rest, whatever it may once have been, is only a memory; and even the Chateau itself hardly seems a part of the town, since it is not until we have left the little white-painted streets behind that we realise its existence, and then it comes as a gigantic surprise; a huge, square, turreted ma.s.s, on its platform of rock, looking away over the rolling meadow lands, untroubled through all the years of siege and conflagration. Thibaut le Tricheur, Count of Champagne, built it in the tenth century; it was rebuilt in the twelfth century, and again by its seigneur, the famous "b.a.s.t.a.r.d of Orleans," one of the most devoted followers of Joan the Maid. Finally, under Louis XII., Francois d'Orleans-Longueville applied himself to fresh renovations, and built the splendid facade overhanging the Loire.

Considering that the Duc de Vendome has always been a t.i.tle of some importance in France since the early part of the sixteenth century, and the Comtes de Vendome a power in the feudal world before that, one might feel rather surprised not to find the town itself presenting a more imposing aspect. Vendome is a picturesque place, but it is more of a long straggling village than anything else, and it is only the ivied ruins on the cliff that take one back--with a stretch of imagination, it must be confessed--to the days of feudalism. Vendome was originally, it is thought, a Gallic towns.h.i.+p under the name of Vindocinum; it was then fortified by the Romans, evangelised by Saint Bienheure, and finally became the seat of a feudal count about the end of the tenth century. In 1030 was founded the abbey of La Trinite, whose church is one of the first "monuments" of Vendome. It dates from the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries; the beautiful Transition facade is well worth notice, and so is the belfry tower, separated from the church and tapering up to a tall stone spire. Inside the church there are some fine choir stalls of the fifteenth century, of which the carving of the _misericordes_ is very interesting in its variety and quaintness of design.

The Loire at Vendome divides into several small streams, and in walking through the town one appears continually to be crossing a succession of bridges and coming upon fresh pictures of clear green water fringed by low-roofed houses and dark _lavoirs_ with their curtains of snowy linen.