How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 31

Seigneur, pour tant d'aversites, de ma.s.sacres, d'incendies; pour tant de deuil sur notre France, pour tant d'affronts sur notre front,

Seigneur, desarme ta justice!

Jette un regard par ici-bas; et enfin ecoute les cris de meurtris et des blesses!...

Seigneur, nous voulons devenir des hommes; en liberte-- tu peux nous mettre!

Gallo-Romans et fils de n.o.ble race, nous marchons droit dans notre pays.

--(Literal French translation of Mistral's "Psaume de la penitence," 1870.)

The western portal of the cathedral at Arles, less carefully executed than that at St. Gilles, was begun at the end of the XII century and finished in a couple of generations. Both were inspired by the same local cla.s.sic influences of Rome and the subsequent Gallo-Roman development. The large statues, eminently architectural, at the famous door of St. Trophime, are as st.u.r.dy and squat as the images on early Christian tombs. Two of those ancient tombs, of the V and VI centuries, have been turned to ecclesiastic usage in this very church, as baptismal font and altar, and across the square from the cathedral many others can be studied in the Museum of Arles. The strong Byzantine influences apparent in St. Trophime's sculpture recall that Arles was the favorite residence of Constantine. From northern Italy came the animal-caryatides idea.

St. Trophime's Romanesque entrance leads into a somber church under whose barrel vault reigns a mellow gloom.[257] Begun before the middle of the XI century, it was reconstructed in the XII century; the painfully narrow high side aisles are covered by quarter circles that b.u.t.tress the central vessel, whose undergirding arches are slightly pointed because the pre-Gothic masons had learned that the thrust of a broken arch was less. The XV century built the insignificant choir (without the vestige of a capital), exceptional only in having the sole ambulatory and radiating chapels in Provence. A prelate of the Grignan family built a chapel projecting from the transept, for, not far away, in Dauphiny, is the chateau of Grignan, where Madame de Sevigne died while staying with her daughter; one knows that she and XIII-century Blanche of Castile had been friendly.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Mediaeval Cloister of Arles_]

St. Trophime's cloister, among the most beautiful in France, building from the XII to the end of the XIV century, is the fairest Christian monument of Arles.[258] This Midi art expands in the sunlight and grows melancholy under a masonry roof. Arles was a free town when it was begun, with its own podesta and consuls like a flouris.h.i.+ng commercial city in Italy. About 1150, the north gallery was commenced, and the one to the east soon followed. The angle pier is composite (c. 1180), with St. Trophimus standing between St. John and St. Peter, the latter being sculptured in marble. The storied capitals of the cloister are exceedingly interesting. In the second half of the XIV century the west walk was begun, and almost immediately was followed by the south gallery, which is similar to it save for slight details. The cloister was completed under Bishop Jean de Rochechouart (1390-98).

Arles, like Lyons, claims a direct apostolic origin. A tradition says that St. Trophimus, her first bishop, was the disciple of the gentile of Ephesus, whom St. Paul mentioned in his epistle to Timothy. For centuries before the popularity of the Saints of Bethany legends in the Midi, St. Trophimus was revered. Pope Zosimus, in the V century, called Arles "the source from which flowed all over Gaul the rivulets of the Faith." Gregory of Tours voiced another tradition concerning St.

Trophimus when he named him as one of the seven evangelists sent by Pope Fabian into Gaul in 250. At any rate, whether he lived in the first century or the third, St. Trophimus was the first bishop of Arles, and it is right that its primate church should be dedicated to him.

Arles, from which flowed over Gaul the rivulets of the Faith, is a city of ruins, and yet most gracious in aspect; _Arles la blanc_, Joinville called it as he sailed by on his way to the Sixth Crusade; _Arles la Grecque_. The women walk as n.o.bly as the matrons of antiquity here where "the copper coins of Rome's republic and the gold of the emperors gleam in the sun amid the springtime wheat." "I tell you, and you can well believe me," sings Mistral, "that the damsel of whom I speak is a queen, for, know you, she is twenty years old and she is Arlesienne.... She descended with lowered eyes the steps of St. Trophime, and the stone saints by the portal blessed her as she pa.s.sed, for she was ineffably good." There are books so typical of their race, or this period, that they belong to all time, and by them posterity can learn more of the basic forces that build monuments than from many a learned treatise.

Such a book is Voragine's _Golden Legend_, such a book is the _Rationale_ of Durandus. The _Barzas-Breiz_ teaches us to comprehend Carnac and the Calvaries of Brittany. Even so the soul of Provence has been interpreted by her own Mistral, who loved "the perfume of the ancient days when on the banks of the Rhone flourished a refined civilization that for a time bore the name, the Kingdom of Arles, but that really, through all the successive revolutions, was naught else but the direct survival, on French soil, of Rome's civilization."[259]

ST. MAXIMIN[260]

The cement, without which there can be no stability of the walls, is made of lime, sand, and water. The lime is fervent charity which joineth to itself the sand--that is, undertakings for the temporal welfare of our brethren. Now the lime and the sand are bound together in the wall by an admixture of water. Water is the emblem of the Spirit. And as without cement the stones cannot cohere, so neither can man be built up in the heavenly Jerusalem without that charity which the Holy Ghost worketh in them. The stones are built by the hands of the Great Workman into an abiding place in the Church: whereof some are borne and bear nothing, as the weaker members; some are both borne and bear, as those of moderate strength; and some bear and are borne of none save Christ the Corner Stone. All are bound together by one spirit of Charity as though fastened with cement, and these living stones are put together in the bonds of peace.

--BISHOP GUILLAUME DURANDUS of Mende (1220-96), _Rationale_.[261]

The bourg and church of St. Maximin lie about thirty miles east of Aix-en-Provence. Some rich Gallo-Roman n.o.ble of the V or VI century had his estate here, thinks Monseigneur d.u.c.h.esne, on which he built a funereal chapel and crypt according to custom. That crypt with its early Christian sarcophagi is now under the church of St. Maximin, though why that saint is honored in the locality is not known. The first record of the site occurred when the estate was pa.s.sed over to the monks of St.

Victor's at Ma.r.s.eilles, who built a priory here (1038), and chose Maximinus as its tutelary. It was only when some fertile brain, in Vezelay, said that St. Maximinus was one of the Lord's seventy-two disciples, and had accompanied Mary Magdalene to Provence, that Aix-en-Provence began to claim him as her first bishop. For two centuries Provence allowed Vezelay to boast of the possession of the Blessed Magdalene's remains. During Saracen inroads she had lost the relics of Lazarus and his sister, so the Burgundian church told her.

Finally--we are quoting Monseigneur d.u.c.h.esne, not a Midi savant--a patriotic Provencal whose mind was as fertile in inventions as the chronicler at Vezelay, arranged a rediscovery in 1279, in the crypt of St. Maximin, of the Magdalene's relics, whereupon the pilgrimages to Vezelay ceased.

Before witnesses and the ruler of Provence, Charles II d'Anjou (nephew of St. Louis), was opened one of the sculptured tombs in the Gallo-Roman n.o.ble's funeral crypt now under the nave of St. Maximin. In the sarcophagus was found a ma.n.u.script, in a wooden coffer, relating that in the year of the Incarnation, 716, on December 6th, under King Odoin, the body of Mary Magdalene had been moved from its alabaster tomb, in this same crypt, to the plainer tomb of St. Sidonius, in order to save it from those felons, the Saracens. The uncritical mind of the age accepted the obvious forgery as genuine. It was worded in XIII-century, not VIII-century Latin, the use of the term Incarnation for dating was an anachronism, and no such king as Odoin ever existed. Why should it have been expected that Saracens would spare one tomb more than the other, asks the courageous Monseigneur d.u.c.h.esne. But why feel too critical of the pious fraud, since the genuine enthusiasm it aroused led to the building of the most imposing Gothic church in Provence and the one most pure in style, an edifice that inspired the imposing modern church of St. Vincent de Paul at Ma.r.s.eilles.

In 1295 Charles II d'Anjou[262] (1285-1309) began St. Maximin, which he pa.s.sed into the care of the Dominicans. Abbe Albanes has discovered that the architect's name was Jean Bandier. During two centuries the Angevin rulers of Provence continued the church, and good King Rene finished it before he died in 1480. As the first plans were adhered to, the edifice possesses unity save for a few Flamboyant windows in the aisles. Those side aisles of St. Maximin are almost as high as the central vessel; they braced the main span and did away with the need of flying b.u.t.tresses. Traits of Midi Gothic are the exceedingly narrow windows, the lack of a triforium, and uncut bands for capitals, though the omission of sculpture may be due to the fact that the abbatial belonged to a mendicant Order, vowed to poverty. St. Maximin's piers soar majestically from pavement to vault springing, nor has n.o.bility of proportion been sacrificed in its severe granite interior.

AIX-EN-PROVENCE[263]

Le desordre des malheureux est toujours le crime de la drete des riches.--VAUVENARGUES (1715--47; born in Aix-en-Provence).

The cathedral of St. Sauveur is a composite edifice needing skilled archaeologists to decipher it. Its semicircular apse, without ambulatory or chapels, was begun by Bishop Rostan de Noves. Its nave, of the XIV century (with typical capitals whose foliage is disposed in two bands), shows vestiges of a far more ancient church. The nave's north aisle is neo-cla.s.sic. The south aisle, called _Corpus Domini_, is Romanesque, and was held to be the ancient cathedral, since it conforms to the cla.s.sic type of the regional Romanesque school, such as the Dom at Avignon.

M. Labande has demonstrated that this pre-Gothic portion of Aix Cathedral was originally a church for the laity, built between 1150 and 1180 and dedicated to St. Maximinus, and that it was planted along the side of a church for the canons, dedicated to Notre Dame in 1108.

Vestiges of this latter church are the ancient parts in the actual nave of St. Sauveur.

The _Corpus Domini_ has its own sculptured doorway, and three bays covered by a barrel vault carried on pointed arches. Over the fourth bay is a shallow cupola ridged with eight pilasters in a manner inherited from ancient Rome. Cla.s.sic, too, are the columns now arranged to form a baptistry.

Aix was the capital in Provence of the art-loving Anjou princes of the Capetian line. Under them in 1476 was begun St. Sauveur's beautifully restrained Flamboyant Gothic facade and tower. In the nave is a stone reredos of 1470 called the Tarasque, from the dragon of St. Martha represented in it, and under King Rene's inspiration was made the splendid triptych of the Burning Bush by the French _primitif_, Nicolas Froment, born in Avignon, but impregnated with the Flemish spirit of Van Eyck. King Rene kneels in one panel, and his second wife, Jeanne de Laval, in the other; the outer side of the folding panels is painted in grisaille. The Burning Bush was taken as a symbol of the Virgin's integrity. The carved doors at the west entrance of St. Sauveur, rich with prophets and sibyls, are ranked with the noted doors of Beauvais and Rouen.

While the church of St. Maximinus, or the present south aisle of St.

Sauveur, was building, a student at the University of Aix, across the way from its cathedral, was St. Jean de Matha (1156-1213), one of those good men of history who accomplished a great work but are overlooked by posterity. In Aix he pa.s.sed his leisure waiting on the poverty-stricken sick. Then he went up to the Paris schools to perfect himself in theology, and good Bishop Maurice de Sully, then building Notre Dame, became interested in him, and with the prior of St. Victor's, after attending the young Midi n.o.ble's first Ma.s.s, prophesied that this was a soul chosen of G.o.d. Because Jean de Matha had been born in the south, a witness of Islam's piracies, he vowed himself at his first Ma.s.s to the redemption of Christian captives. His fellow student at Paris, Innocent III, approved the new Trinitarian Order called popularly Maturins because their Paris house was dedicated to St. Maturin. So rapidly did it spread that before long it had fifty houses in far-off Ireland, and as many in England. In its annals are the names of all the western nations. Jean de Matha, until his death, pa.s.sed backward and forward to Africa. When the first boatload of redeemed captives landed at Ma.r.s.eilles a cry of thanksgiving rose in Christendom. Sometimes a brother of the Order would remain in a captive's place, when his funds for ransoming prisoners gave out. In Granada, Maturins were martyred. In the year 1260 five thousand Christians were redeemed from Islam prisons by these devoted men. And for five centuries the good work went on, so that we hear of Trinitarians freeing Christians from Mohammedans in the reign of Louis XIV. Cervantes was released from African captivity by the sons of St. Jean de Matha, else we would have no _Don Quixote_. All through the dark episodes of the Albigensian wars these lives of un.o.btrusive Christian charity endured. Their deeds have not been trumpeted to the winds. I dare say the historian who rings the changes on the _Tuez-les-tous_ phrase never heard of St. Jean and his Maturins.

AVIGNON[264]

In abandoning Rome, their cradle, in departing from the venerated tomb of the Prince of the Apostle, in ceasing to reign on the site consecrated by the blood of martyrs, the popes failed to value the prop those august memories were for them. In their voluntary exile on the banks of the Rhone the popes were controlled by the king of France. Villeneuve's high towers, a French stronghold, threw too protective a shadow over the papal palace of Avignon.--L.

SALEMBIER.

Architecturally Avignon does not fit into our category, but who can close a chapter on the Midi and not mention, among gems, this diamond?

There is no more imposing, no more magnificent a palace in the world than that of the XIV-century popes at Avignon.

Romanesque architecture is represented by the Dom and the bridge built by _freres-pontifes_ over the Rhone (1177-85) under the inspiration of the shepherd boy St. Benezet. Many a time has the river carried away its bays. The chapel on the bridge shows the work of three epochs, part being of Little Benedict's time, part of 1234, and an apse of 1513.

Notre Dame-des-Dom, as it was first built, belonged to the usual type of a Midi Romanesque church (1140-60), but to it have been added chapels and neo-cla.s.sic decorations.[265] The west porch of the cathedral can claim to be one of the first conscious revivals of cla.s.sic art in France, inspired by a Roman triumphal arch in neighboring Carpentras.

Originally the inner walls of the porch were frescoed by Simone Martini of Siena, a friend of Petrarch. That humanist spent many years in Avignon, and it was at the door of the church of St. Clara that he first saw Laura, in 1327. If the Avignon popes employed Italian painters, their architects and sculptors were mainly local.

Avignon's great day was under the seven Roman pontiffs who lived here in succession during sixty-eight years, a period disastrous to the interests and prestige of the Church, but fecund for the art life of southern France. All seven of the popes were meridionals.

Clement V (1305-13), whom the patriotic Italian poet places in h.e.l.l for his subservience to the French king, was the first to take up his residence in Avignon, but his building enterprises were elsewhere, at Bordeaux and St. Bertrand-de-Comminges, and he chose to be buried near Bordeaux, at Uzeste, his native place, where his tomb was mutilated in 1577. Clement is pictured on the walls of the Spanish chapel in Santa Maria Novella at Florence. Neither his statue at the chief portal of Bordeaux Cathedral nor his effigy on his tomb is a portrait.

After an interval he was succeeded by John XXII (1316-33), born in Cahors, where a tower of his palace still stands, as well as the most beautiful bridge of the Middle Ages, which he helped to build. John had been educated at Cahors, Montpellier, and Paris; he had taught law at Toulouse, and from 1310 was bishop of Avignon, so that he made it his permanent residence when elected to the papacy at seventy-two. John was an organizer of genius; he founded Perugia University and reformed those of Paris, Cambridge, and Oxford. The great treasure he left was the fund drawn on by his successors for the erection of their palace. His tomb in the cathedral of Avignon is like an immense reliquary, excessive lace stonework and pinnacles, though if some of the sixty statues that once embellished it remained, there would naturally be more character in the ornamentation. The tomb has recently been claimed as a late-Gothic west-of-England work, similar to monuments at Exeter and Tewksbury.

His successor, Benedict XII (1333-42), was the pope who really began the Avignon palace which was to be completed in twenty-five years. While abbot of Cistercian Fontfroide, he had watched Narbonne's episcopal palace rising, and there are decided likenesses between it and the papal residence on the Rhone. Both were fortresses eminently of the Midi, not of Italy. Of Benedict it is related that when his father, a baker in the comte of Foix, came to visit him, dressed richly by courtiers who thought to save the pope's _amour propre_, the pope declined to recognize him till he garbed himself humbly. His was a complex character. He spent vast sums lavishly on his palace, bringing artists from Italy to decorate its walls and ceilings. His tomb, that had resembled his predecessor's, exists only in a few arcades housed in the Musee Calvert. The tomb called his in the cathedral is a composite affair. There is a statue of Benedict XII in the crypt of the Vatican.

The next pontiff, Clement VI (1342-52), a Limousin lord of great lineage, more knight than churchman, made the most beautiful parts of the papal palace, the conclave gallery, the Audience Chamber, the Pontifical Chapel over it, and the tower called St. Jeane whose chapels, _sotto_ and _sopra_, were decorated by Martini. Petrarch had praised Clement for his liberality toward the Jews, who, driven out of other countries, found a home here, "_povres Juifs ars et escaces par tout le monde excepte en la terre d'eglise dessous les clefs des papes_." For his burial Clement VI rebuilt, in the Forez mountains, the church of his former abbey, La Chaise Dieu, in the center of whose choir he placed his own sumptuous monument, whose forty-four statuettes represented his great relatives. In the religious wars of the XVI century the mausoleum was sacked and only the pontiff's marble effigy now remains.

Clement VI purchased the city of Avignon from Queen Joanna of Naples of the Anjou house. The Comtat-Venaissin, but not Avignon, formed part of the possessions that fell to the French Crown on the death of Alphonse of Poitiers and his wife in 1271. Philippe III gave it to the popes, to whom it had been promised by the last count of Toulouse.

The papal palace was finished by Innocent VI (1352-62), another Limousin. He made the tower applied to the south wall of audience hall and church, and he added to the city's fortifications. Across the Rhone he began the Chartreuse, later called Val de Benediction, a vast structure carried on by his family as a hereditary obligation.[266]

To-day it is a ma.s.s of desolate ruins, and the pope's mutilated tomb is now housed in the hospice at Villeneuve-les-Avignon.

Urban V (1362-70), "_moult saint homme et de belle vie_," says Froissart, was a patron for art and letters throughout the Midi. At Avignon he continued the fortifications. His work is to be found in Montpellier Cathedral, also at Mende, St. Flour, and Ma.r.s.eilles, where his mausoleum towers in St. Victor's abbatial. His attempt to re-establish the papacy in Rome failed, but his successor, Gregory XI--Count Roger de Beaufort, a nephew of Clement VI--went back definitely in 1377 to the Holy City, where a bas-relief on his tomb, in Santa Francesca Romana, records his triumphal entrance. The consequences of the long exile were deplorable. Immediately came the Great Schism of the West, during which some of the doubtful pontiffs resided at Avignon.

After their return to Rome the popes governed their small Midi princ.i.p.ality by viceroys till at the time of the Revolution it pa.s.sed to France. The palace was turned into a prison and barracks; when a local antiquarian society begged that they might be allowed to preserve the precious frescoes of Simone Martini in the chapels of Clement VI, the military governor replied that such notions were contrary to military custom. Happily the Palace of the Popes is now a national monument, and its judiciously accomplished renovation is one of those restorals against which no one can cavil.

CHAPTER IX

The Gothic Art of Burgundy[267]

_Be strong in humility and humble in authority: Be austere in tenderness and tender in austerity: Be amiable in sorrow and grave in prosperity._ --ST. COLUMBa.n.u.s' Ant.i.theses.

Burgundy, "a country placed on Europe's highways," was a land of monasteries. They dotted the fertile province. There were "prodigious Cluny," and Vezelay "the superb," scenes of historic gatherings; at Auxerre was St. Germain's monastery; at Dijon, the abbey of St. Benigne, pioneer in the Romanesque renaissance of the region. There were Citeaux, the mother house of missions over the entire Christian world, Pontigny, that harbored three archbishops of Canterbury, Fontenay with its industrial forge, Tournus, Saulieu, Paray-le-Monial, and Flavigny, that reminded Chateaubriand of Jerusalem set on its hill. Up and down the land the _laus perennis_ never ceased.