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Title: How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and
Thirteenth Centuries

Author: Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly

Illustrator: Paul de Leslie

Release date: December 22, 2012 [eBook #41687]
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOW FRANCE
BUILT HER CATHEDRALS: A STUDY IN THE TWELFTH AND
THIRTEENTH CENTURIES ***

How France Built Her Cathedrals

Soissons Cathedral.
The Transept’s Southern Arm (c. 1180)

How France Built
Her Cathedrals

A Study in the Twelfth
and Thirteenth Centuries

By
ELIZABETH BOYLE O’REILLY
Honorary Member of the Société Française d’Archéologie
Author of “Heroic Spain” Etc.

Illustrated With Drawings By
A. PAUL DE LESLIE

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

How France Built Her Cathedrals
——
Copyright, 1921, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
A-W

Contents

CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
I. WHAT IS GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE? 16
Gothic architecture the logical fulfillment of
Romanesque—Origin of Romanesque
architecture—Romanesque basilicas modified
by the liturgy—Horrors of the IX and X
centuries in France—Rebirth of the builders’
energy after the year 1000—Cluny, the
civilizing force of the X and XI centuries—
Various regional Romanesque schools of France
—Normandy, Burgundy, Auvergne, Poitou,
Languedoc, Provence, and the Franco-Picard
school—Birth of Gothic art—An undecided
question where the first diagonal-crossing ribs
were used—Germany’s and Italy’s claims—
Claim of England—The Ile-de-France Picard
region, the classic land of Gothic—Gothic
architecture not a layman’s revolt against
monkish Romanesque—The architects of the
Gothic cathedrals—No heretical tendencies in
Gothic sculpture—Origin of the term Gothic—
XVII- and XVIII-century scorn for Gothic
architecture—Modern French school of
mediæval archæology.
II. ABBOT SUGER AND ST. DENIS-EN-
FRANCE 43
Evolution from Romanesque to Gothic—St.
Denis’ abbatial, the first important Gothic
monument—Some early-Gothic churches in the
Ile-de-France—Morienval, the first Gothic-

vaulted ambulatory extant (c. 1122)—Church of
St. Étienne, at Beauvais (c. 1120)—St. Germer-
en-Flay built from 1150 to 1175, yet less
advanced than St. Denis—Poissy’s church of St.
Louis (c. 1135)—How Abbot Suger built his
abbey church at St. Denis—St. Denis’ school of
glassmaking, the leader for fifty years—
Dedication of St. Denis on June 11, 1144,
consecrated the national art—Who Suger was
and how St. Bernard converted him—What is
left of the abbey church which Suger built—
Reconstruction of St. Denis by St. Louis, 1231
to 1280—Pierre de Montereau, its architect—
Tombs in St. Denis’ abbatial—Deviation of the
axis not symbolic—Some happenings in St.
Denis during the XII and XIII centuries—
Charles Péguy’s verses, linking St. Denis, St.
Geneviève, and Jeanne d’Arc.
III. PRIMARY GOTHIC CATHEDRALS 74
Cathedral of Noyon, first built of Gothic
cathedrals (c. 1150)—Noyon’s communal
charter, the first of known date, 1109—
Cathedral’s nave, a vessel of most perfect
proportion—Exceptional among French
cathedrals, its transept’s rounded ends—Noyon
has retained its annexes—Its chapter house,
built about 1240—Noyon city destroyed, 1918
—Cathedral still stands.
Cathedral of Senlis, second of the Gothic
cathedrals, begun about 1153—Sculpture at
Senlis’ west portal (c. 1180) marks a date in
imagery—Cathedral tower, the “pride of the
Valois land”—Transept’s façades of the best
Flamboyant Gothic art—What the World War
did to Senlis.

Cathedral of Sens, begun about 1160—Sens’
ancient see, governed by notable men in the XII
and XIII centuries—How they found out who
was the architect of the cathedral—St. Thomas
Becket in Sens, 1164, and again from 1166 to
1170—St. Louis married in Sens Cathedral,
1234—Glory of Sens’ stained glass.
Cathedral of Laon, begun about 1160—Fallacy
of the “town-hall” theory—Cathedral of
springtime foliage—Oxen on Laon’s towers—
Origin of the square east end of Laon Cathedral
—Laon’s communal struggle—Famous XII-
century school of Anselm de Laon—Laon city
shelled by the French, but its cathedral unhurt.
Cathedral of Soissons almost a ruin—Desolation
of Soissons in World War—Soissons’ southern
arm of transept ends in a hemicycle (c. 1180)—
Is the most exquisite thing in France—The
crusading bishop-builder, Nivelon de Chérisy.
Some important Primary Gothic churches:
Abbatial of St. Remi at Rheims (c. 1170)—Its
superb XII-century glass wrecked in the World
War—Abbatial of Notre Dame at Châlons-sur-
Marne (c. 1160)—Pioneer in fenestration—First
to use pillars between chapels and ambulatory
—Church of St. Quiriace at Provins (c. 1160)—
Provins, residence of the counts of Champagne
—Its international fairs frequented by mediæval
Europe—Collegiate of St. Yved, at Braine (c.
1200), between Primary Gothic and the Era of
Great Cathedrals—Individual plan of its choir-
chapels—St. Leu d’Esserent, on the Oise, the
best type of the small churches in the classic Ile-
de-France—Its forechurch shows transition
work (c. 1150)—Primary Gothic work to be

found at Étampes, Vendôme, Fécamp, Rouen,
Lisieux, Angers, Mantes, Paris.
IV. NOTRE DAME OF PARIS AND OTHER
CHURCHES OF THE CAPITAL 126
Notre Dame, begun in 1163—Its exterior
unsurpassed, the west façade a classic—
Scholastic training of its bishop-builders—
Summa of the supreme scholastic, Aquinas, like
a Gothic cathedral—Thirty thousand students
then in Paris University—Bishop Maurice de
Sully (1160-96) built Notre Dame—Bishop
Eudes de Sully made the portals of the west
façade—Bishop Pierre de Nemours died a
crusader, before Damietta, 1219—Bishop
Guillaume d’Auvergne finished the north tower
(1228-49)—All the prelates building Paris
Cathedral good and able men—Their sincerity
lives in its stones—First architect unknown—
Jean and Pierre de Chelles made the transept
and apse chapels—Sculpture of Notre Dame
masterly—Sainte-Chapelle built by St. Louis,
1246 to 1248—St. Julien-le-Pauvre a
contemporary of Notre Dame’s choir (c. 1180)
—Same noble sculptured capitals—Three
Benedictine abbey churches of Paris show early
trials of Gothic vaulting—St. Germain-des-Prés,
St. Martin-des-Champs, St. Pierre-de-
Montmartre—St. Louis and his friend, Joinville
—Louis IX illuminated his kingdom with fair
churches—On his first crusade spent five years
in the East, 1248 to 1259—From 1254 to 1270
worked for his people—Death of St. Louis on
the crusade of 1270—His characteristics:
justice, pity, other-worldliness—Inimitable
charm of Joinville’s Histoire de St. Louis—
Describes his friendship with the king in

Palestine—Joinville’s old age and death in
1319.
Mantes’ collegiate of Notre Dame is Primary
Gothic—A contemporary of Paris Cathedral—
Perhaps by the same architect—Its chapel of
Navarre one of the best works of Rayonnant
Gothic.
Meaux Cathedral, a difficult architectural page to
decipher, owing to reconstruction—Begun in
1170, but rebuilt radically after 1270—Bossuet,
its greatest bishop (1681 to 1704)—Meaux, the
cathedral for the Te Deum of victory—Battle of
the Marne, 1914, waged at the city gates.
V. ERA OF THE GREAT CATHEDRALS:
CHARTRES, RHEIMS, AMIENS 169
Cathedral of Chartres—Bishop Fulbert’s
Romanesque Notre Dame burned in 1194—His
vast crypt, of 1020, still exists—Bishop
Geoffrey de Lèves built the tower of Chartres,
called the most beautiful in the world (1145)—
Making of the three western portals (c. 1155)—
Gothic cathedral begun after the fire of 1194—
Primary Gothic west façade escaped the fire—
Jehan de Beauce crowned the northwest tower,
1506 to 1513—Sculpture of the transept portals
and porches, 1220 to 1260—Chartres excels all
cathedrals in the wealth of its stained glass,
chiefly of the XII and XIII centuries.
Cathedral of Rheims, begun by the crusader,
Bishop Albéric de Humbert, 1211—Its
architects recorded in the pavement labyrinth—
Its west façade the culmination of Gothic art—
Coronation of Charles VII in 1429, Jeanne
d’Arc present—Astounding sculptural wealth of

this “Cathedral of the Angels”—Martyrdom of
Rheims in the World War.
Cathedral of Amiens, the Parthenon of Gothic art
—Bishop Evrard de Fouilloy began it, 1220—
Designed by Robert de Lusarches—Its sculpture
the peer of Rheims and Chartres—Its portal of
the Vierge Dorée (c. 1280).
VI. SIX OF THE LESSER GREAT CATHEDRALS:
BOURGES, BEAUVAIS, TROYES, TOURS,
LYONS, LE MANS 211
Cathedral of Bourges—Only XIII-century
cathedral without a transept—Inner aisle has its
own triforium and clearstory—Chevet built by
St. Guillaume, 1200 to 1209—Over main portal
is best Last Judgment (c. 1275)—Bourges
famous for its stained glass—Jean, duc de
Berry, and Jacques Cœur, the late-Gothic art
patrons of Bourges—Their gifts to the cathedral
—Orléans Cathedral destroyed by Calvinists
(note).
Cathedral of Beauvais—A mighty fragment: only
a choir and transept—Begun in 1247, derived
directly from Amiens—Transept façades
masterpieces of late-Gothic—Is Flamboyant
Gothic of English origin?—Le Prince family of
glassmakers.
Cathedral of Troyes—Its choir built by Bishop
Hervé, 1206 to 1226—Martin Chambiges
designed the Flamboyant west façade—
Magnificent XIII- and XIV-century windows of
Troyes Cathedral—St. Urbain’s church begun
by Pope Urban IV in 1262—Carried the Gothic
principle of equilibrium to its limit—Churches
of Troyes treasure-houses of stained glass and
sculpture—Cultivated court of Champagne’s

rulers—To the Gothic school of Champagne
belongs the Cathedral of Châlons-sur-Marne—
Châlons another center for stained glass.
Cathedral of Tours—Choir begun about 1210—
Has the classic note of the Touraine landscape—
Cathedral windows set up between 1260 and
1270—Venerable ecclesiastical souvenirs of
Tours—Tours, the center for the Region-of-the-
Loire school of sculpture—Michel Colombe,
last of the great Gothic artists, worked here—
Environs of the city rich in Flamboyant Gothic.
Cathedral of Lyons—Lyons boasts an apostolic
succession for its bishops—Early Christian
martyrs of Rome’s chief city in Gaul—St.
Martin d’Ainay’s abbatial dedicated in 1107—
Cathedral choir late XII century—With Vienne
Cathedral (note) it alone in France used
incrustations—Nave of Lyons Cathedral
building through the XIII century—Stained
glass of Lyons of exceptional quality—All
Christendom was represented at the Ecumenical
Council held in Lyons Cathedral in 1274—
Church of Brou built by Marguerite of Austria
(note)—Moulins Cathedral and Souvigny’s
abbatial and tombs (notes).
Cathedral of Le Mans—XII-century nave built
by notable prelates—Bishop Hildebert de
Lavardin (1097 to 1125) a poet and scholar—
Guillaume de Passavent made the Angevin
vaults (c. 1150)—Geoffrey the Handsome,
nicknamed Plantagenet, and his son, Henry II of
England, born in Le Mans—Trinité church at
Vendôme (note)—Le Mans’ Gothic choir built
from 1218 to 1254 by Bishop Geoffrey de
Loudon—Le Mans ranks next to Chartres and
Bourges for its wealth of stained glass—

Rayonnant-Flamboyant transept of the XIV and
XV centuries—The groups at Solesmes a final
expression of Gothic sculpture (1495 to 1550)
—Collegiate church at St. Quentin, in size a
cathedral, XIII-century choir—Villard de
Honnecourt, probably the architect of St.
Quentin.
VII. PLANTAGENET GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE 285
Plantagenet Gothic fused the cupola of Aquitaine
and the diagonals of north—Lasted a hundred
years, from 1150 to 1250—For clearness
divided into three periods: I. Heavy diagonals,
II. Eight slight branches, III. Multiple ribs—
English fan tracery a derivation of Angevin
Gothic.
Cupola churches of Aquitaine: St. Front at
Périgieux, begun after a fire, 1120, and finished
by 1180—Cahors Cathedral has Romanesque
portal of beauty (note)—Cathedral of
Angoulême, begun 1109—Its façade a notable
page of French decoration—Rich façades
distinguish Poitou’s Romanesque school—
Fontevrault abbey church, built in the first half
of the XII century—Plantagenet tombs at
Fontevrault—Aliénor of Aquitaine buried there
in 1204 beside her husband, Henry II, and her
son, Richard Cœur-de-Lion—Aliénor’s
descendants notable builders of churches.
Cathedral of Angers—Its nave vaulted with
First-Period diagonals, about 1150—Anjou
rulers a remarkable race—Fulk Nerra, the great
builder, died 1040—Choir of Angers Cathedral
extended after 1274—In the nave is XII-century
glass of St. Denis derivation—Cathedral’s
Apocalypse tapestries—Fortress of Angers,
built by St. Louis, 1228 to 1238—Church of

Toussaint had a ramified vault of the Third
Period—St. Jean’s hospital hall, endowed by
Henry II, a gem of Plantagenet art—Choir of St.
Serge, 1220 to 1225, a masterpiece of lightness.
Saumur—Another center for the study of
Plantagenet Gothic—Historical fête called the
Non-Pareille took place in its castle in 1241—
St. Pierre’s church shows different kinds of
Angevin vaults—Church of St. Martin at
Candes, a Plantagenet masterpiece—St. Florent-
les-Saumur shows one of the first eight-branch
vaults—Puy-Notre-Dame and Asnières
beautiful examples of Plantagenet art (note)—
Plantagenet vaults at Le Mans, Vendôme,
Chinon, and Tours.
Cathedral of Poitiers, begun by Henry
Plantagenet and Aliénor of Aquitaine, 1160—In
adopting the gracious Plantagenet vaulting it
remained true to Poitou’s Romanesque
traditions—XII-century Crucifixion window the
most glorious in the world—Spirit of Poitiers’
bishops, St. Hilary and Fortunatus, inspired it—
Church of Ste. Radégonde is Plantagenet
vaulted—St. Hilaire’s abbatial has curious
octagonal cupolas—St. Jean’s baptistry, the
oldest building in France, dating from the IV
century—Clement V at Poitiers in 1307 carried
on the Templars’ process—Hall of the count’s
palace rebuilt by Duke Jean de Berry—Jeanne
d’Arc examined there in 1429, found to be sent
of God.
VIII. GOTHIC IN THE MIDI 329
Cathedral of Clermont-Ferrand, begun in 1248—
Gothic of the north, translated with a Midi
accent—True character of Auvergne shown in
its Romanesque churches—Notre Dame-du-

Port, the classic type of Auvergne’s
Romanesque school—Abbey church of La
Chaise Dieu, begun by Clement VI, 1344—
Contains incomparable tapestries (note)—First
Crusade proclaimed at Clermont by Urban II,
1095—Riom’s Sainte-Chapelle, of the XIV
century—Madonna of the Bird a masterpiece of
late-Gothic imagery—Romanesque Cathedral of
Le Puy (XII century) one of the most venerable
shrines in France.
Cathedral of Bordeaux, like the city itself, is of
the north and the south—Nave is composite and
difficult to read—Clement V (d. 1314) built the
Rayonnant Gothic choir—In the Romanesque
church of Ste. Croix appeared the first diagonals
of the region—Charlemagne laid Roland’s
olifant on the altar of St. Seurin—St. Bertrand-
de-Comminges Cathedral built by Clement V—
Cathedral of Bayonne (note).
Cathedral of Toulouse consists of two
inharmonious parts—Unaisled nave with
Angevin vaults building while Simon de
Montfort besieged city—Gothic choir begun in
1275—Chief monument of Toulouse is the
abbey church of St. Sernin (begun 1075)—
Languedoc then excelled in sculpture:
Moissac’s portal and cloister (note)—Toulouse
a center for brick architecture—Its Jacobins’
church begun in 1229—St. Dominic’s mission
in Languedoc—Albigensian Crusade.
Albi Cathedral, the incarnation of the Midi wars:
meridional Gothic—Aggressive Bernard de
Castanets began it in 1282—Flamboyant and
Renaissance riches were added to St. Cecilia’s
cathedral—Frescoes of its vault have never been
surpassed (1509 to 1512)—Its choir screen

equally noted—Auch Cathedral has famous
XVI-century windows (note)—Cathedral of
Rodez possesses a notable Flamboyant tower
(1510 to 1526) (note)—Carcassonne Cité has
been too much restored—Its ci-devant cathedral
of St. Nazaire the best of XIV-century Gothic—
Like a reliquary of colored glass—Carcassonne
town has typical Midi Gothic churches.
Narbonne Cathedral, consisting of a vast Gothic
choir, begun in 1272—Its mechanical skill cold,
but still Gothic of the grand style—Lovely XIV-
century glass—Sack of Béziers, 1209—
Perpignan Cathedral and Elne’s cloister (note)
—Abbey church of Fontfroide allied with
Poblet in Catalonia (note).
Montpellier Cathedral, formerly an abbey
church, built by Urban V, XIV century—Jaime
el Conquistador, mighty builder of churches,
born in Montpellier, 1208—Mende Cathedral
and St. Victor’s abbatial at Marseilles built by
Urban V (note)—Maguelonne, former cathedral
of diocese, now the most aloof spot in Europe—
Aigues-Mortes, begun by St. Louis, completed
by his son—Fortress unspoiled by restorations
—Both crusades of Louis IX sailed thence—St.
Gilles’ abbey church, partly a ruin, interesting to
archæologists; building from 1116—Noted
portal of St. Gilles inspired Trinity Church,
Boston—Loyalty of Provence to its Saintes-
Maries traditions—Les Saintes-Maries church a
pilgrim shrine (note)—St. Martha’s church at
Tarascon (note).
St. Trophime Cathedral at Arles—Portal
influenced by Gallo-Roman sculpture—Its
cloister the fairest Christian monument in the
city—Ruins of Montmajour near Arles—

Frédéric Mistral should be one’s companion in
Provence—Expresses the regional soul—St.
Maximin church the best Gothic monument in
Provence—Begun by Charles II d’Anjou in
1295—Cathedral of St. Sauveur at Aix-en-
Provence is composite—Its south aisle
originally a separate Romanesque church, XII
century—Good King René gave the triptych by
a French primitif—Avignon’s great day was the
XIV century under seven meridional popes,
1309 to 1377—Palace of the Popes built from
1335 to 1358—Grandest fortress-palace in the
world.
IX. THE GOTHIC ART OF BURGUNDY 410
Burgundy excelled in monastic architecture—
The cradle of three great cloistral centers—
Luxeuil, Cluny, Cîteaux—Luxeuil, founded by
St. Columbanus (610), reorganized the VII
century—Cluny, Christendom’s supremest
monastic congregation, founded 910—St.
Hugues of Cluny (1049 to 1109) trained the
leaders who remade Europe’s civilization—
Peter the Venerable, abbot from 1120 to 1156,
continued building Cluny’s vast church—
Abélard died in a Cluny house, 1142—
Revolution destroyed the glorious abbatial
church—Paray-le-Monial, the favorite priory of
Abbot Odilo (d. 1049) of Cluny, initiator of the
Truce of God—Its Romanesque church has
fluted pilasters (XII century)—Autun
Cathedral’s Romanesque portal the ancestor of
the sculptured doors of Gothic cathedrals—
Abbey church at Saulieu (note)—Beaune’s
collegiate of Notre Dame has lovely tapestries
—Hôtel Dieu at Beaune (1444 to 1457),
founded by Nicolas Rolin, contains Roger van
der Weyden’s best work—Hospital hall at

Tonnerre (founded 1293) the prototype for
Beaune’s hospice—Fontenay, the oldest
Romanesque Cistercian church extant—
Dedicated by Eugene III in 1147—Avallon’s
church of St. Lazare blessed by Paschal II in
1107—Has a well-known Romanesque
entranceway.
Some Primary Gothic churches in Burgundy—
Montréal’s collegiate can be visited from
Avallon—Built by a returned crusader late in
the XII century—Pontigny’s abbatial the oldest
Gothic in Burgundy—Its nave (1160 to 1180),
with bombé vaults, was begun as Romanesque
—Its choir used structural features as
decorations—Three archbishops of Canterbury,
St. Thomas Becket, Stephen Langton, and St.
Edmund Rich, found refuge at Pontigny—
Vézelay’s abbatial of the Madeleine the
stateliest church in Burgundy—Its Romanesque
nave and Gothic choir belong both to the XII
century—Its imaged portico (c. 1132) a supreme
work of French sculpture—Second Crusade
preached by St. Bernard at Vézelay, 1146—
Philippe-Auguste and Richard Cœur-de-Lion
rallied here for the Third Crusade, 1191.
Burgundy’s best Gothic monuments—Collegiate
of Notre Dame at Semur a gem of the
Burgundian school, begun about 1225—Its
sculpture exceptional—Auxerre Cathedral
begun in 1215, the model of Gothic churches in
the province—Auxerre’s sculpture and its
opaline glass rank with the first—Bishop
Jacques Amyot (d. 1593) restored the cathedral
after the Calvinists sacked it—Cathedral of
Nevers has an apse at both west and east ends
(note)—Dijon, the capital of Burgundy, led in

art, under its four great dukes, 1364 to 1477—
Flemish-Burgundian school began modern
imagery—Dijon’s cathedral of St. Bénigne,
formerly an abbatial, is mediocre late-XIII
century—Crypt of St. Bénigne begun 1001—
Oldest monument of the Romanesque
renaissance—William of Volpiano, abbot of St.
Bénigne, initiated the revival of architecture
after the year 1000—Rebuilt Tournus abbey
church (note)—Church of Notre Dame, Dijon,
is a gem of Burgundian Gothic (1220-1240)—
Its subtleties of construction have never been
excelled.
St. Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux (d. 1153), born
near Dijon, the greatest son of Burgundy—His
reform laid the spiritual foundations of Gothic
cathedrals—His puritanic taste in architecture
made Cistercian churches bare and simple—
Cistercian Order, founded 1099, instrumental in
spreading Gothic over Europe—St. Stephen
Harding, its practical founder, welcomed St.
Bernard at Citeaux in 1113—Five hundred
Cistercian monasteries founded in Europe
before the middle of XIII century—Spirit of St.
Bernard, greatest of Cistercians, lives in the
Imitation of Christ.
X. GOTHIC ART IN NORMANDY 472
Monastic architecture best expression of Norman
character—Normandy, like Burgundy, was a
land of monasteries—Bernay’s abbey church an
ancestress of Norman Romanesque (note)—Bec
Abbey, the Cluny of Normandy—Lanfranc
made the school of Bec world-noted—At Bec,
St. Anselm began the philosophical movement
of the Middle Ages—William of Volpiano
pioneer in the rebirth of architecture in the

duchy—Jumièges, the first Norman church of
architectural pretension, begun 1040—Only
vestiges remain of St. Wandrille abbey—Caen,
the Mecca of Norman Romanesque and the
queen city for towers—Three good towers at St.
Pierre-sur-Dives—St. Georges de Boscherville
the best type of Norman Romanesque—
Fécamp’s Primary Gothic abbatial rose after the
fire of 1169—Gothic abbatial at Eu built after
the death of St. Laurence O’Toole, 1180—
Mont-Saint-Michel the greatest of Norman
abbeys—Its Merveille (Gothic halls), building
from 1203 to 1228—Choir of Mont-Saint-
Michel, the best work of Flamboyant Gothic,
begun 1450.
Rouen Cathedral, not local in character—Its
tower of St. Romain begun in 1145—Its
transept façades and Lady chapel XIV-century
Rayonnant work—Abbatial of St. Ouen a gem
of Rayonnant Gothic—No city richer than
Rouen in Flamboyant Gothic monuments—
Trial of Jeanne d’Arc at Rouen in 1431 and her
Rehabilitation in 1456.
Lisieux Cathedral the earliest Gothic cathedral in
Normandy—Begun after 1160 as Ile-de-France
Gothic—Its Lady chapel built by Bishop Pierre
Cauchon, Jeanne d’Arc’s venal judge.
Évreux Cathedral not homogeneous, but has
much charm—Its choir (1298-1310) a gem of
Rayonnant Gothic—XIV century’s best array of
glass in its choir.
Séez Cathedral modest in size—Norman in style
—Its choir a forerunner of Rayonnant Gothic—
Has XIV-century windows.

Bayeux Cathedral the Gothic of the duchy at its
best—Romanesque part of its nave remarkable
—Bishop Odo, brother of the Conqueror, built
the crypt, and of his time is the Bayeux Tapestry
—Choir of Bayeux a masterpiece of
Normandy’s elaborate Gothic.
Coutances Cathedral loveliest in Normandy,
begun after the fire of 1218—Its three towers
notable—Aisles of choir are of different height.
Gothic art of Brittany—Brittany more a land of
shrines than cathedrals—Her religious soul best
expressed by her Calvarys—XIII-century
cathedral at Dol has fine eastern window—
Cathedral at Nantes possesses the last great
work of Gothic sculpture—Cathedral of
Quimper very Breton in spirit—St. Pol-de-Léon
Cathedral entirely complete—The Kreisker is
Brittany’s grandest tower—St. Yves of Brittany
helped build Tréguier Cathedral.
Summing up—Gothic art gave way before the
pagan Renaissance and the contempt for
legends roused by the Reformation. In the
World War France again displayed the spirit that
had built cathedrals. Unquenchable idealism of
the French race.
INDEX: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P,
Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Y, Z 583
BIBLIOGRAPHY: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, J, K, L, M,
N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W. 605

Illustrations

[Click on the image to view an enlarged version.
Images located within paragraphs have been
moved slightly to ease reading. (note of etext
transcriber.)]
Soissons Cathedral. The Transept’s Southern
Frontispiece
Arm (c. 1180)
Poissy. An Early Example of Gothic Vaulting
Facing p.
(c. 1135) 54
St. Denis-en-France and Its Royal
”
Mausoleums 68
Noyon’s Chapter House (1240-1250) Page 83
Senlis’ Tower (c. 1230-1250) Facing p. 90
The Interior of Laon Cathedral (XII
”
Century). View from the Tribune Gallery 98
The Oxen on Laon’s Towers ” 106
Notre Dame of Paris. View from the South Page 127
Notre Dame of Mantes (1160-1200). The
Facing p.
Contemporary of Paris Cathedral 162
The Cathedral of Meaux, Viewed from the
”
Nave’s Aisle 168
The Cathedral of Chartres (1194-1240). The
Page
Southern Aspect 178
The Angel Apse of Rheims (c. 1220) ” 196
The Transept of Amiens Cathedral (1220-
Facing p.
1280) 204
The Apse of Bourges (1200-1225) ” 214
St. Urbain at Troyes (1264-1276) ” 236
Le Mans Choir (1217-1254). The Double
”
Aisles 270
Angoulême Cathedral. A XII-century Cupola ” 290
Church of Aquitaine with a Typical Façade of

Poitou’s Romanesque School
The Plantagenet Tombs at Fontevrault ” 298
The Plantagenet Gothic Choir of St. Serge at
”
Angers (1220-1225) 312
Notre Dame du Port at Clermont-Ferrand.
Typical XII-century Church of Auvergne’s ”
Romanesque School 338
Le Puy in Old Auvergne ” 344
The Jacobins’, or Dominicans’, Church at
”
Toulouse (XIII Century) 358
Albi Cathedral (1282-1399). A Midi Fortress
”
Church 370
The Mediæval Cloister of Arles ” 398
The XI-century Sanctuary of Cluny as It Was
Facing p.
Until the Revolution 414
Vezelay’s XII-century Abbey Church of the
”
Madeleine 436
Notre Dame at Dijon (1220-1245). Burgundian
”
Gothic 452
The Crypt of the Abbaye-aux-Dames at Caen
”
(1059-1066) 484
Belfry of St. Pierre at Caen (1308-1317).
Prototype For the Gothic Towers of ”
Normandy and Brittany 490
The Hall of the Knights at Mont-Saint-
Michel (1203-1228). Second Story of the ”
Merveille 500
The Choir of Bayeaux Cathedral (1210-1260).
”
Typical of Normandy’s Elaborate Gothic 546

How France Built Her Cathedrals

How France Built Her Cathedrals

INTRODUCTION
E may live without architecture, and worship without her, but
we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how
lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation
writes and the uncorrupted marble bears. There are but two
strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture, and
the latter in some sort includes the former, and is mightier in its reality; it is
well to have, not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands
have handled and their strength wrought and their eyes beheld, all the days
of their life.”[1]
So wrote John Ruskin in one of his flashes of genius, and never was
word truer. Architecture is the living voice of the past. Architecture is
history. By architecture the forefathers from whom we come relate to us
their progress in knowledge, their prowess in handicrafts, their economic
conditions, their sorrows, their rejoicings, their aspirations. They wrote it
down, those men and women whose blood is our blood, on great stone
pages of perennial beauty for us to read—if only we would. By architecture
we are linked in a grand solidarity with all that has gone before, with the
proud periods of history that thrill us as we read, and with the tragic
outbreaks of the oppressed that sadden our spirit.
Whenever men have set themselves to forget this solidarity, their first act
has been to fling themselves in frenzy on cathedral and city hall. In 1914
they forgot it, and mighty Rheims fell. They forgot that Bamburg had
learned its imagery from Rheims, that German Norbert, revered of St.
Bernard, had helped France in the days when Gothic art was in formation,
that he died bishop of Magdeburg, and Magdeburg is a Primary Gothic
cathedral in the land which frankly called the new architecture opus
francigenum. Would the civic halls of Noyon, Arras, St. Quentin, and Ypres
lie in ruins if Frankfort and Lübeck had remembered?
In 1793, man again thought to set up a barrier between himself and his
past, and he shattered the art treasures of a thousand years and tore down
the cathedrals of Cambrai, Arras, and Avranches; he tore down Cluny, the
greatest Romanesque church in the world, Cluny the civilizer, that had

removed from agriculture its stigma as serfs’ work. Man fancied that to
shatter and demolish was to build.
Again in 1562, a date most tragic in the annals of Gothic architecture,
men tried again to rear a wall of hate between themselves and the
generations gone before, and the cathedral of Orléans met the fate of Cluny
and Cambrai, and from end to end of France images were decapitated, and
ancestors’ tombs wrecked impiously—even the tombs of spiritual ancestors
who with painful journeyings afoot had brought the gospel light. Whether
you go to chapel or to temple to-day, to meetinghouse or to cathedral,
whether you worship under the open sky, be you a reader of Marx or of
Aquinas, you were robbed most piteously of your patrimony in 1562, in
1793, in 1914.
How is it to be prevented again? By trying to make the monuments of
the past loved, by relating the tale of their building, by telling the life story
of the builders. If we know them we must surely revere them, and when we
have learned to know and to love, we have learned to be liberal.
Archæology is to teach us to remember. Those who have gone before have
passed on to us cathedral and town hall; it is our obligation to transmit them
intact to those who come after. They are not ours to destroy. Art is the high-
water mark reached by civilization; art does not speak in English, or in
German, or in the Latin tongue, but in a language understood of all peoples
and all times. To destroy a great monument of the past is to betray
civilization. It was proved in 1914 that erudition is not safeguard enough,
nor is enthusiasm, sighs 1793, nor purpose to reform, admits 1562. We must
comprehend intelligently our own personal solidarity with the past. We
must never look at a noble building without proudly realizing that we had a
hand in its making. Battles then can rage around cathedrals without danger
of their destruction. As in golden amber, the past will preserve them, the
past which is yours and mine and everyone’s heritage.
It is a right instinct which makes a man treasure the home he has had
transmitted to him through several generations. How much more—when
loyalty is roused by an XVIII-century or a XVII-century habitation—should
emotion be felt for what was reared from 1140 to 1270 by the very
generations who began for us of to-day most of the big things we value: our
universities, our literature, our political freedom, our prosperous trade.

Now in the making of these infinitely precious things, France played the
leading role. Put partisan feeling aside and acknowledge it honestly. “I
believe,” said Ruskin, in a lecture at Edinburgh, in 1853, even before the
new science of mediæval archæology was formulated, “that the French
nation in the XII and XIII centuries was the greatest nation in the world,
and that the French not only invented Gothic architecture, but carried it to
its noblest developments.”
French Gothic churches are a fountainhead, and should rank first.
Because of them we have Westminster, Ely, and Lincoln, we had Tintern,
Melrose, Mellifont, Holycross. They built the Burgos, Toledo, León,
Seville, and Belem, which have given wings to the soul of the Peninsula.
Because of the French cathedrals we have Cologne, Magdeburg, and
Halberstadt, Vienna, Prague, Upsala, Siena, Florence, and Milan.
By her lyrics, her epics, and her architecture, France was the inspiration
of Europe in the XII and XIII centuries. With his sword, the crusader
carried compass and rule. Those indefatigable wanderers, Cluny, Cîteaux,
and the men of Prémontré and Chartreuse carried with them the chisel and
the Book. Then as now the commercial traveler was a valiant propagandist;
in 1181 a cloth merchant of Assisi, returned from trading in France, where
he had seen the cathedral of Lyons rising, or perhaps that of Paris, or that of
Poitiers, and he had passed under wonderful new-imaged portals in the
Midi and in Burgundy; so, in memory of beautiful things, he chose to call
the son born to him, Francis, and the boy grew up to love and to chant the
lyrics of France and named himself “God’s little troubadour.”
Backward and forward has moved the ebb and flow of races and their
arts. When Celts from conquered Britain passed over to Armorica they
carried with them the Arthurian cycle; Teutonic tribes, strong in bone and
tissue, poured into Gaul a very avalanche; masterful Norsemen populated
the seacoasts; and before the recording of time the Oriental and the Latin
had made their home in the land between the northern seas and the big
inland water of commerce. Does such history seem too remote to be of
emotional value? Are personalities lacking? Not so in the missionary days
of Columbanus and Benedict, first hewers of the cathedrals’ foundation
blocks, for never came a great movement of building activity that did not
tread in the steps of spiritual regeneration. Your forefathers and my
forefathers came into France to help her, to bring her art and letters in her
dark hour. They came to teach and they came to learn, to succor and to find

refuge. They came in the persons of Celtic Columbanus, Brieuc, Malo,
Fiacre, Malachy, and holy Laurence buried at Eu, as English Alcuin,
Stephen Harding, John of Salisbury, and Saint Edmund Rich buried at
Pontigny. They came as German Radegund and the saintly Bruno and
Norbert, as Italian Benedict, Fortunatus, Hildebrand, William of Volpiano,
Lanfranc, Anselm, Aquinas, and Bonaventure, as Spanish Dominic, and
Portuguese Anthony. They came from Egypt with Maurice and his Thebans,
from the Levant with Irenæus and Giles, from Hungary with Martin the
soldier. And the story of each one of them is recorded in the churches that
stand in France to-day. Without architecture we would have forgotten them.
With the ebbing and flowing of the tide in the affairs of men, a day
arrived when the big people and the little people of Normandy, Poitou,
Anjou, and Flanders passed in large numbers into Great Britain and Ireland
in the wake of the Conqueror and of Henry Plantagenet, so that the very
names we bear are those of the cathedral builders.
Who has not watched the widening ripples of water spread from a
center? Even so is each one of us a center whence in ever-widening circles
stretch out our progenitors, embracing more and more men, more and more
women, rippling over the pitiful barricades of 1793, sweeping over the
factions of 1562, till by the time the widening ripple has reached the age of
St. Louis, the age of Suger, it is scientifically impossible that we, in our
very own forefathers, were not building some of the eighty cathedrals and
three hundred great minsters with which France was then clothing herself as
with a white mantle of churches. We were chatelaine, and burgher’s wife,
we were villein’s daughter and knight’s son, and side by side we harnessed
ourselves to carts and dragged in the blocks for the tower at Chartres and
the belfry at Rouen, and the canticles we sang during our voluntary
servitude passed into the stones and are still chanting there—if only we
would listen. No visionary notion this, but science and history. By
architecture we remember.
Of our kin was the bishop who sacrificed his revenue to rear God’s
house. Of our kin were the architects, masters of the living stone, who with
inspiration conceived their shrines of Notre Dame and were trained soundly
enough in mason craft to achieve their dreams; of our kin were the artisans
who put up the serene images at cathedral doors for the edification of the
people, and chiseled with warm, loving touches the running bramble of the
roadside. Even botany is to be learned in mediæval cathedrals. Not a leaf

that grows in Champagne to-day but was carved on the walls of Rheims
seven hundred years ago. Against the big capitals of Paris Cathedral they
laid the broad plantain leaf of the marshy Oise, then, seeing around them
that indigenous acanthus, the uncurling fern, they carved it, too, and as they
grew adept with chisel they wrought ivy and vine leaf, parsley and holly,
and in time, intoxicated with their skill, they undercut the rich foliage and
serrated the lobes and curled the leaf edges, till summer ran riot in stone and
the architectural line was well-nigh lost sight of in sheer joy of nature’s glad
livery.
The cathedrals of France are an enduring appeal to man’s high faculty of
imagination. In them we go crusading again. We scale the walls of
Constantinople with doughty Bishop Nivelon, builder of Soissons
Cathedral, we are ransomed from Saracen captivity with Bishop Albéric,
builder of Rheims. We repent of our black feudal deeds with Fulk Nerra,
and when we have finished our footsore penances in Holy Land, we punish
ourselves in our purses, raising costly abbeys in Anjou and Touraine. On
our Eastern pilgrimage we have seen visions of Oriental color, and,
remembering them, we lighten our sober churches of the north with
translucent mosaic tapestries. We dot our Western land with circular Holy
Sepulcher temples. It is said that Suger, builder of the first great Gothic
church in the world, maker of jeweled windows over which science sighs in
despair of emulation, used eagerly to inquire of travelers returned from the
East had they seen aught, even in St. Sophia itself, to surpass his St. Denis’.
We are rightly sure that our new art surpasses all others. We may borrow,
but our borrowings are creations.
By architecture in happy promiscuity we crowd to the international fairs
of Champagne. We elbow and we jostle to see what our diligent brothers,
the art-loving Flemish burghers, have brought for exchange, or what things
beautiful the merchants from south of the Alps have to barter. To-day, at
Troyes, we are astounded by the gathering of art treasures in that lesser-
known city, and we wonder at the mighty rampart walls at Provins. Then we
remember. It is architecture that will not let us forget what efficient traders
we were in the XIII century.
By architecture we are Benedictines at Cluny, white monks at Fontenay,
of Prémontré at Braine. Again we pace in meditative cloisters, we tuck up
our robes to delve in mother earth to make the desert bloom, we illumine
parchment pages, we teach the plain-chant to children, we cast bells, each

with its own entity, each a living voice for the people, named with its own
name.
By architecture we are one of the thousands athirst for knowledge, who
gather at the feet of abstruse debaters in the schools of Bec, Auxerre,
Rheims, Orléans, Laon, Chartres and Paris, king’s son seated on the rush-
strewn pavements next to peasant’s son, both equally convinced that the
most thrilling of all sciences are philosophy and theology. Books are scarce;
as yet no printing press; we must wander far to gather crumbs of learning;
our strong young brains are intact, prepared for service by long ages of
active bone and muscle; with avidity we seize on problems so knotty that
the learned ones of 1920 fear to touch them. “The time of big theories is the
time of big results.” It is we, in the person of the Scholastics who built Paris
Cathedral, and Laon, the intellectual,—churches disciplined, sober and
strong. It is we the multitudinous scholars of the Middle Ages who built
Chartres, the wise mystic, and opalescent Auxerre, and Châlons on the
Marne of Victory. And lest the hungry generations tread us down, we
inscribed our loved subtleties on their walls, and at their portals placed
images of the Liberal Arts.
By architecture we join one side or the other in the eternal struggle of
Might and Right. Sometimes in atonement we spend the revenues secured
by heedless Might on minster or cathedral. By pain and struggle we have
won our city charter, and we are proud to record in God’s sight and man’s
what thrifty burgesses we are, what trained journeymen. To work is to pray,
say the cathedral windows set up by furriers, butchers, vintagers, and farm
laborers. To work is as fine a thing as to fight at Roncevaux and Mansurah,
as did our next-door donor neighbor here. The little people of the Lord are
as grateful in his sight as the noble prud’hommes. Le bon Dieu likes to be
shown how a tailor cuts his cloth and a baker bakes his bread just as well as
to be entertained with pilgrimage adventures or the story of a canonized
saint. Are we not saints in the making if only we can get the better of that
prowling felon, the devil, whom we have set up over our church door with
pitchfork and caldron as a warning to the unwary?
“O men and women of to-day”—appeal the windows at Chartres and
Bourges and Tours—“you whose blood is our blood, who without our
struggle would have no ordered government, no self-ruling cities, no trade
to bind land with land in the sanity of peace, no arts and crafts, why not
learn to read our story? There are those unable to decipher a line of our

illumined pages who will assure you that we were sunk in gross
superstition, that our sole religion was the worship of bits of cloth and bone.
Yes, even from the halls founded by good Robert de Sorbon (in order that
youth with its lean purse might get a free education) the erudites marshal
against us every human frailty of our hardy, enterprising times. And yet, in
unparalleled marvels of stone and glass we have recorded the deepest
sentiments of mankind. But having eyes, they see not. Come then, you, and
interpret us. Come, and through us, remember.”
Each great cathedral is pleading to us by the alluring half-smile of its
angels, by the dignified images of reverent personages at its entrances, by
each gargoyle, each faithful guardian that has craned his neck for ages to
keep rain water from the precious walls. Cease to be so superior to the
legends and dreams we set forth, they seem to be saying. We know just as
well as you that the apostle St. Thomas did not have all the adventures
raising fairy palaces in India which we put to his credit in our windows and
tympanums, even though good Bishop James of Voragine, in his cycle of
church feasts, our iconographic chart—Legenda Aurea—relates it. The holy
Jerome, close to the desert and the origin of things, real and apocryphal,
warned us not to be too credulous. But symbols and legends are the breath
of art, as art alone realizes through expression, the supersensual visions of
mankind. Are there not millions of good Christian folk in India to-day? Her
first evangelist builded better than ever we can relate by our imagery.
We are not at all dull, plead the waiting cathedrals. Encyclopædias they
call us. Yes, we had our little weakness for symmetry, for the mystic beauty
of numbers, for gathering into “Mirrors” all the knowledge of the world.
But how admirable is our Mirror of Morals, with virtues and vices
contrasted; how interesting our Mirrors of Nature and of History that tell
the story from Genesis to Revelations, and that set the marvels of the skies
and man’s dumb fellow creatures, the beasts, side by side on the walls of
the house of worship, with David and Isaias, St. Peter and St. Paul,
Charlemagne and Louis. And our Mirror of Knowledge—how profound it
is: not as enemies but as allies would it show forth science and religion. We
are no more dull than the Bible is dull, than the Divina Commedia is dull.
We satisfy the subtlest intellects; alike the lettered and the unlettered enjoy
us.
Each French cathedral and each minster makes its own special plea.
Lyons reminds us, in windows of apocalyptic radiance, that her first bishops

came from John the Apostle, that Christian blood flowed in her forum as
generously as in Rome’s Coliseum. Of the very stones of the Amphitheater,
hallowed by her martyrs, is her cathedral built, and the architectural
methods of the north and the south are welded here in the ancient central
city of Gaul whence rayed out the linking highroads of Rome.
At Tours, the charity of Martin to a beggar is recorded many a time, for
it civilized middle Europe. Slow, steady, and deep were the accumulations
of culture by the Loire of measured horizons and classic restraint. A tower
named of Charlemagne recalls that Saxon Alcuin filled the schoolrooms of
St. Martin’s Abbey. A chiseled tomb reminds us that here worked the last
sculptor of the Middle Ages (loyal to its humble and profound Christian
traditions), as well as the first artists of the imported pagan Renaissance.
At Le Mans and Angers, at Fontevrault, with its tomb of Henry
Plantagenet, who gave us our jury system, speak those fighting
progressives, the Angevin rulers; and all their love of the arts and of
adventure endures in the exotically beautiful development which we call
Plantagenet Gothic. An unlettered king is an uncrowned ass, said a X-
century count of Anjou.
At Poitiers, city of St. Hilaire who fought the Arians, is the most glorious
window in the world—Christ triumphant on the Cross, and again we walk
in procession to the strain of Bishop Fortunatus’ hymn, and we read the
Church Fathers in Greek and Hebrew in Queen Radegund’s cloister.
Aquitaine’s line of troubadour dukes, passionate sinners, and prodigious
repenters lives in every church in the old hill city, from the cathedral
wherein Aliénor blended the indigenous art of her own Poitou with the
Plantagenet suppleness of her Angevin husband, to the cupola-covered
abbatial of St. Hilaire, where her son, Richard the Lion-hearted, was
installed as duke.
At Caen we live with the Conqueror and Matilda in their penitential
abbey-churches, full of thought and purpose, the architecture of hieratic
pre-eminence which Normandy passed on to England. At Coutances, the
cathedral walls record the Tancreds, so the people say; close by was the
eyrie of that eagle brood who set up kingdoms in Italy and the Orient. At
Rouen we mutter with the crowd in the market place that a grievous shame
it is to burn a saint as a witch, and in reaction, soon we are to rear
monuments whose every line is jubilant freedom. At Rheims we are

crowned kings in a cathedral so sumptuous that on coronation days it
needed no tapestries to adorn its walls. At Clermont and at Vézelay we don
the crusaders’ insignia with cries of enthusiasm. The lavish art of Bourges
tells of Jacques Cœur’s largess, the princely merchant who financed the
army that rid France of her invaders, just as clearly as the ducal tombs and
imagery at Dijon relate the pageantry of the XV-century Burgundian life.
The stones of Pontigny tell of Becket the martyr, whose cause impassioned
all Christendom, as many a sculptured group and storied window in France
relate, and of another great Englishman, Stephen Langton, who passed from
this cloistral peace—dividing the Bible into chapters for us—to the Magna
Charta struggle in England. By architecture we remember.
Until we have seen Albi’s aggressive fortress-church what do we really
know of the Albigensian heresy, of the disease un-European, antichristian,
antisocial, that bred in the precocious civilization of Languedoc? What do
we know of that terrible struggle called a crusade, when the greedy barons
of the north descended on the Midi (ever brutal and refined), thinking to
cure its soul by the sword and with the same blows to carve out for
themselves rich principalities? Forever is the story told in the Jacobins’
church at Toulouse, in the red cathedral fortress above the Tarn.
All the isolating pride of feudalism is resumed in the ramparts of
Carcassonne and Aigues-Mortes, all the frustrated destiny of Narbonne in
its vast fragment of a cathedral, all the unbroken links with the Latin are in
the sculpture at Arles and St. Gilles, all the immemorial story of la grande
bleu in Maguelonne’s solitary church. By architecture we remember.
The Celtic remnant, that in the volcanic-torn uplands of middle France
inflicted on Cæsar his sole defeat, lives always in the churches of Auvergne,
so stubbornly indigenous, planted so sturdily, contriving decorative beauty
from the regional varicolored lava stones. In the granite churches of
Brittany endures all the aloof individuality, the sensitive independence, the
tenacious traditionalism of the dwellers by the sea in the far-north outpost
of France. We have our souls to keep, say the lowly Breton shrines, we have
always been too busy doing that to find time to erect great churches. But
once our neighbors, the Normans, taught us tower-building, our Celtic
imagination leaped au delà by their spires, so we raised our royal Kreisker
which far out to sea welcomes home our Breton sailors.

Architecture is history. Architecture is what the old Greeks said of
history, “philosophy teaching by examples.” The cathedrals of France prove
that there is no supreme architecture where there is not liberty or the will to
attain it. In 1109 the bishop-baron of Noyon granted his city a charter, the
first communal written laws on record. In 1145 Noyon began to build the
first Gothic cathedral of France. In the Ile-de-France, where from the
nation’s birth were lived its intensest hours, sprang up the churches which
are the most national, the most racially French in character, Noyon, Senlis,
Soissons, Laon, Paris.
The history of architecture proves that without a right-minded national
pride, ready to make sacrifices in order that it may transmit its high deeds to
the future, no mighty monuments rise. In 1214 Bouvines’ victory was won
and French unity demonstrated. In 1220, not far away, was laid the
foundation stone of Amiens Cathedral, the crowning achievement of the
national art. A hazard, such juxtaposition? Ah, no. Nothing happens by
chance in this science of the builder whose basic forces are long at work in
silence. Architecture is the truthteller of history.
The history of France, which in the XII and XIII centuries meant
universal history, is written on the walls of the cathedrals built under
Philippe-Auguste and his grandson St. Louis, during the full flowering of
the new national art. And in the days when France was neither happy nor
good nor great, when faith flagged, when a minority’s blind greed of gold
ended the international fairs, drove out the Jews, overtaxed the clerical
church builders, when the crusading enthusiasm ended in a Templars’
process, then the structural logic of Gothic architecture turned to pitiless
geometry. So proclaim the cold, uninspired XIV-century churches, and few
of them ever were built. It seemed almost as if the Gothic cycle had run its
course. The XII century had seen its rise; the XIII century its apotheosis; the
XIV century its decline. Was the last word said? Churches are not built by
generations that live in ceaseless war, in misrule, or under a foreign yoke.
There was to be another chapter for the Gothic tale. Aspiration was born
again, national pride lifted its head and art flowered. Not from beyond the
mountains or the sea came the needed missionary this time, nor from a
Carolingian palace, nor out of Norman and Burgundian cloister. No saint-
king was to lead now, but only a young girl from a peasant hamlet.

When Jeanne d’Arc broke the spell of foreign invasion, when she gave
France a new soul, then all over the land rose that pæan of rejoicing which
we call Flamboyant Gothic art, for verily it flamed up with joy. Never will
you see an arch of double curvature, accoladed, soaring to its triumphal
finial, never will you gaze at radiant belfries rising richer and richer with
each story, never will you pray beneath a late-Gothic pageantry picture
window with its mullions swaying in exaltation, but the thought of the Maid
of Orleans and her mission will come to you. This Flamboyant art may run
riot in details like any modern, but it remains true in its essentials to the
Middle Ages. Forever will it tell of the freeing of France from foreign rule,
even as the academic Rayonnant phase sets forth the lowered ideals of
Philippe le Bel, or the ampleness of XIII-century Gothic, the creative age of
Louis IX and his augmenting grandfather. No regional schools were there in
the last manifestations of the national art; they built the same at Albi as at
Rouen, at Bordeaux as at Lyons, for an entire people shared the same
feeling of recovered self-respect.
You can learn to read it by yourself, learn to remember, if only you are
not repelled by that stiff word “archæology.” Just what generation made
Dijon’s crypt and Morienval’s ambulatory, put the masonry roofs on the
Caen abbatials, chiseled the column statues at the doors of Angers, Le
Mans, and Chartres, made of Bourges’ procession path a heavenly way of
ruby, sapphire, emerald, and topaz, raised the tower at Senlis, paid tribute to
St. Cecilia’s gentleness in the white imagery of Albi’s grim fortress—that is
archæology. Archæology tells how Cluny lifted up a prostrate Christendom,
how the Normans conquered England, how Abbot Suger reformed himself,
how Bernard of Clairvaux exhorted Europe, how the Lion-hearted went
crusading as had his fascinating mother before him, how Simon de
Montfort won the Midi, how the wily Philippe-Auguste enlarged his
domain, province by province—and all the while most of the Gothic
cathedrals of France laid their foundations—and how the bon-saint-homme-
roy, truest lover of the builders’ art, sat under an oak tree, dispensing justice
at first hand, with his loyal Joinville seated close beside him. That is
archæology. It is written down clearly on great stone pages of perennial
beauty for us to read—if only we will. A little knowledge of construction’s
laws is needed to show us how to see. A little more of history to guide us
when to feel. If to love we must know, to know we must set ourselves to
learn. Even in these days of easy motor travel one cannot go about book-

laden. But there are open libraries in French cities where an inquirer is
courteously lent the monographs on the town’s monuments, or the big folios
that picture the storied windows. It has, therefore, appeared advisable to
give, with each cathedral, a list of its biographies, for they may be of use
some rainy afternoon in France.
It seems almost unnecessary to remind ourselves that in the XII and XIII
centuries the Church of Europe—barring the Greek schism—was one and
united, save for the quarrels inseparable from all manifestations of
mankind’s history, and that the Protestant of to-day descends from the same
mediæval forefathers as does the Catholic, from the same builders of
cathedrals, crusaders, feudal proprietors, and commune winners. To refuse
sympathy to the two best centuries of the Middle Ages because, three
hundred years later, occurred a break in western Christendom is as illogical
as the attitude of those historians who would liken the religious movement
of the XVI century to the antisocial outcrop of Oriental dualism called the
Albigensian heresy.
Let us then, with open minds, turn to this art of the builder, “the
strongest, proudest, most orderly, most enduring of the arts of men that if
once well done will stand more strongly than the unbalanced rocks, more
prevalently than the crumbling hills; the art which is associated with all
civic pride and sacred principle; with which men record their power, satisfy
their enthusiasm, make sure their defense, define and make dear their
habitation.”[2]

CHAPTER I

What Is Gothic Architecture?[3]

Le temps
Où tous nos monuments, et toutes nos croyances
Portaient le manteau blanc de leur virginité
Où sous la main de Christ, tout venait de renaître.
—Alfred de Musset.

BOUT the year 1000 a new spirit animated the art of the builder
in France. That rebirth, to which has been given the name
Romanesque, held sway for a hundred and fifty years, and had
reached its apogee when, in mid-XII century, it was superseded
by the architecture we call Gothic. Gothic architecture did not spring up like
a mushroom. Like all manifestations of art, it was the logical fulfillment of
its predecessor. Romanesque and Gothic were phases of the same art. The
dethronement of Romanesque was a voluntary abdication in favor of
younger, more efficient leadership: “What is called the birth of Gothic is but
the coming of age of Romanesque.”
The XI-century monks who built monastic churches cleared the path for
the laymen builders of the Gothic cathedrals. With persistency, with
courage, the monk architects went forward, seeking a way. And the way
sought, the problem on which they concentrated their energies, was how to
protect their churches by masonry vaulting without sacrificing amplitude or
lighting.[4]
Out of their trials to solve that problem there emerged a new principle of
construction, and Gothic architecture was then born. Thrust and
counterthrust was the law of its being. Instead of the Romanesque idea of
equilibrium by dead load, by sheer mass, which may be called a continuous
counterbutting of the vault’s thrust, there now was substituted equilibrium
by intermittent abutment. By means of diagonal-crossing ribs the vertical
and lateral thrusts of the stone roof were collected at fixed points, which
points alone had to be counterbutted. Thick walls were a necessity in a

Romanesque edifice, if it were to be stable, but in a Gothic building the
walls could be made a mere shell, since all the work was done by an active
skeleton, a bone structure of stone, consisting of piers, arches, and
buttresses.
To define shortly, Gothic architecture is the art of erecting buildings with
vaults whose ribs intersect (concentration of load) and whose thrusts are
stopped by buttresses (the grounding of the thrusts). The never-ceasing
downward and outward thrust of the vaulting is met by an equivalent
resistance in pier and buttress and solid earth. Equilibrium results from that
well-adjusted opposition of forces.
Since the starting point in the development of Gothic was the vaulting,
and how to substitute a stone vault for a wooden roof was the germinal idea
of the Romanesque builder, it is no digression to turn to the earlier school,
the chrysalis of Gothic. The name “Romanesque” is an affair of yesterday,
employed by a French archæologist about 1825. Various local designations
had hitherto been used, such as Lombard, or Norman, or Romano-
Byzantine, but the term Romanesque for this architecture is as suitable as
the name Romance is for the popular languages which, in that same period,
were forming out of the corruption of Latin. A definition given by M.
Camille Enlart is excellent: “Romanesque art was a product of Rome,
animated by a new spirit, and combined with a certain number of elements
of barbarian or Oriental origin.”
Rome gave the basilica plan to western Europe, which for centuries
continued to build its churches as oblong halls with a small apse at one end.
The hall, or nave, consisted of a central vessel with side aisles that were
divided from it by piers. In the treatment of vaulting and the method of
stone laying Romanesque architecture also derived from Rome. Byzantine
influences certainly were important, but they affected the decoration more
than the plan or the structure; the use of the Byzantine cupola was merely
occasional. The Romanesque masters copied the ivories and miniatures of
the Eastern Greeks till, in time, they turned to nature for their models, and
then their work took on new life and evolved into the glory which is Gothic
sculpture.
While some have laid stress on the Oriental influences, rather than those
of Rome, in the formation of Romanesque art, others have overemphasized
the personality and fantasy introduced into French architecture by the

Barbarian invasions. No doubt the influx of new blood added new elements,
but since knowledge of the invaders’ art is fragmentary, there can be no
scientific base for the theory. Composite, certainly, were the causes for the
new spirit which animated architecture after the Carolingian day, but it is
safe to say that the influence of Rome predominated.
In the course of the centuries the Roman basilica was modified by the
Catholic liturgy. For catechumens, or penitents, was made the porch, or
narthex, before the western end. Tribunes were built over the side aisles.[5]
Increased church ceremonial brought about a development of the choir. The
custom of burying the dead in crypts under the main altar originated the
raised chancel. Between the choir and the nave the builders began to insert
a transverse nave called a transept.[6] Such an enlargement enabled the
congregation to approach closer to the altar ceremonies; only the bigger
churches built transepts in the XI century. Then the liturgical writers saw in
a transept the extended arms of the Cross, and it was in that spirit the XIII-
century transepts were made—their symbolism was posterior. The first
ambulatories were no doubt built in churches which possessed some
revered relic, to facilitate the passage of the pilgrim crowd. (The term
ambulatory will be used to designate the continuation of the choir aisle
round the apse.) Before long that curving processional path, with radiating
apsidal chapels opening from it, was taken to represent the crown of thorns
about the Sacred Head. “All things as pertain to offices and matters
ecclesiastical be full of divine signification and mysteries, and overflow
with a celestial sweetness: if so be that a man be diligent in his study of
them, and know how to draw honey from the rock and oil from the hardest
stone.” So wrote William Durandus, the XIII-century French bishop whose
Rationale, or treatise on church symbolism, was an inspiration for centuries
and, next to the Bible, the most frequently printed book of the older times.
[7]

Despite a host of additions to the basilica of Rome—transept,
ambulatory, a long choir, apse chapels, towers—despite the discarding of
the classic orders and of antiquity’s use of a veneer of finer stone (the
Romanesque builder used the unadorned stone of his own region) the
church of western Europe remained, in general plan, a Roman basilica. Like
Rome, they covered their main vessel by a flat wooden roof, although they
knew how to build barrel and groin vaulting.[8]

Now a wooden roof is an easy prey for fire. Such roofs, a succession of
long-continued invasions, and the faulty construction of Merovingian and
Carolingian churches are accountable for the fact that in France to-day is no
church that predates the year 1000. Some portions of ancient wall are
embedded in later work, and some few early crypts are intact. But to speak
with certainty of Merovingian and Carolingian architecture is impossible,
though they formed the incubating phase of Romanesque art.
In France the IX and X centuries were periods of overwhelming disaster.
In the Midi were Saracen incursions. In northern and central France
Norman pirates wiped out Charlemagne’s revival of art. As far as Poitiers
and Clermont the Northmen’s path of destruction extended. “Look where
you will,” wrote Flodoard, the chronicler, “the sky is red with fires.” To the
litany was added a new invocation—A furore Normannorum, libera nos,
Domine.
The falling to pieces of Charlemagne’s civilization and the general return
of social disorders have led to an overdramatic contrasting of the year 1000,
when mankind, in terror, anticipated the ending of the world, with the
rebirth of hope and of building energy, when the dread day had passed.
Whenever the gaunt horses—famine, pest, war, and death—are afoot,
humanity is prone to look for the fulfillment of the apocalyptic prophecy.
Previous to the X century the final day had been awaited, and the same
superstition was to seize on the world’s imagination in following centuries.
The X century was certainly a desperate age. Fifty years of it were
famine, and on the highroads people were killed for food. But the evils did
not cease precisely with the year 1000; also it should be noted that a certain
number of churches were begun before the XI century opened. However, to
mark the start of a new art life the year 1000 is a convenient date if we bear
in mind that it was not a sharp division between Carolingian and
Romanesque architecture, since a gradual evolution took place. All through
the XI century the vital renewal of architecture went on, and churches were
built which, to this day, are unrivaled for their profound religious spirit.
They exist to tell us that in the harsh life whence they emerged there were
enlightened cases. They vindicate, by their grand simplicity and detachment
of soul, the men who built them. Never was an art less one of routine than
this of the so-called hidebound monks, an art of a people reborn, full of
youth’s daring, an art that was never to have an old age, eager, untiring,

experimental, an art that fitly generated the most scientifically sound of
architectures—Gothic.
The heterogeneous races, Celtic and Gallo-Roman, Germanic, and
Norse, whose conflicts long had held France in anarchy, were at last
welding into one people. The advent of a vigorous third dynasty, under
whose leadership social conditions improved, was another cause of art’s
rebirth. Not long after 1000 the bishops formulated the Trève de Dieu, by
which peace was enforced on the turbulent lords from Wednesday night to
Monday morning. With interval of peace came commerce and wealth and
the security necessary for works of the imagination. The rebuilding of
churches was inevitable.
Invasions and wholesale conflagrations had impressed on the mediæval
mind the necessity of a church roof more durable than wood, but a masonry
vault over a wide space was a constructive feat too difficult to be achieved
immediately. In fact, up to the very end of the XI century, though the
builders had succeeded in vaulting with stone the crypt, the apse, and the
side aisles, they continued generally to cover the wide central vessel in
wood. However, the fecund idea was at work. From the time that it took
possession of their imagination, to the day when Gothic, its fulfillment, was
clearly enunciated, there was over a century of continuous effort—roughly
speaking, from the year 1000 to the memorable day in 1144 when was
dedicated the first truly Gothic monument of considerable size—the abbey
church of St. Denis. Within that energetic span of years is embraced the
Romanesque architecture of France.[9]
The monk, Raoul Glaber, wrote an account of the rebirth of architecture
after the year 1000. It has been quoted to weariness, but is none the less a
valuable contemporary record. The whole earth, he says, as of one accord
seemed to throw off its tatters of old age and to reclothe itself in a white
mantle of churches. The monastery in which lived monk Raoul, St.
Bénigne, at Dijon, was one of the first to inaugurate the new century, and its
present crypt dates from the year 1001. Soon after 1017 the monks of Mont-
Saint-Michel, in the far corner of Normandy, began a new church, to which
belonged part of the present nave. At Chartres, Bishop Fulbert undertook to
rebuild his cathedral after the fire of 1020, and the vast crypt which to-day
astonishes every beholder was his work.

The chronicler, Raoul Glaber, lived under the rule of the most powerful
monastic brotherhood ever organized, Benedictine Cluny, embracing
several thousand houses scattered over Europe. Founded in 910, during the
darkest years of the Middle Ages, Cluny kept alive the light of learning and
art, “the solitary torchbearer that passed on the flame from the spent glow
of Charlemagne to the Gothic rekindling.” Her monks were the pioneers of
civilization. Cluny beat back barbarism with a pertinacity that should make
hers an honored name in history. So established was her reputation as a
civilizer that William the Conqueror wrote to the great Abbot Hugues, to
beg from him Cluny monks for England, saying that he would pay their
weight in bullion.
Cluny formed the savants who made the XII century memorable. Her
fertile seed provided Europe with doctors, ambassadors, bishops, and popes.
Gregory VII had passed through her discipline, and in his giant task of
reform, it was from Abbot Hugues that he solicited monks of Cluny. Urban
II, who set in motion the First Crusade, had been a monk in the great
Burgundian house. It is interesting to note that a generation of reforming
pontiffs accompanied the expansion of the Romanesque movement. This
would seem to contradict the notion, which many hold, that the clergy
profits by keeping the people in superstitious ignorance. It is when religion
is purified of its dross that man’s respiritualized faith out-flows in generous
donations to the Church.
St. Benedict had taught his sons that work as well as prayer was a part of
salvation. The monks of Cluny fostered agriculture, thus taking away its
stigma as serf’s work. Thierry speaks of the mediæval monastery as a
model farm. In Cluny craftsmen of every kind were trained; its school of
music was noted, and along the roads, as they traveled, the monks from
Burgundy sang canticles. But the art of arts for Cluny was that of the
builder, the supreme art that takes into its service all the others, to lead them
to the glorification of God’s house. When, in bands of twelve, the monks of
Cluny set out to colonize in Spain, in Germany, in Italy, in Poland,
everywhere they carried with them the tool as well as the Book. As a rule
they conformed in each province to the local building traditions. There was
never a distinct Cluny school of Romanesque architecture.
By the end of the XI century the main provincial centers of France had
each evolved its own special building characteristics. French Romanesque
architecture has been divided into some six or seven regional schools—

those of Normandy, Burgundy, Auvergne, Poitou, Languedoc, Provence,
and a minor school, the Franco-Picard.[10]
In their efforts to protect their churches by masonry roofs, these various
regional schools made use of the barrel vault or the groin vault. The latter
was found too insecure to span a wide space. Now, the thrust of a barrel
vault was exerted along the whole length of the wall, which necessitated a
continuous abutment—in other words, an enormously thick wall. Only
small windows could be opened. Since the Romanesque architect had the
ambition to light his church well, and not to encumber his floor surface by
clumsy piers, a barrel vaulting could be but a temporary solution of the
main problem.
The struggle for a satisfactory stone roof was pursued tenaciously. Many
a clearstory wall was thrust apart by the vaulting’s pressure. Thus the abbey
church of Bec, finished in the ’forties of the XI century, was reconstructed
in the ’fifties, and three times, again, had to be rebuilt. No failure could
daunt the courage of those old monastic builders. Already inherent in the
newly amalgamated race was the creative genius of France. Perseverance
and courage were to have their reward.
The theory long taught in the École des Chartes was that in the first part
of the XI century, among a number of rural churches in the royal domain,
there gradually came into use the member which was to revolutionize the
science of building. The idea did not spring from one brain; it was a
collective, not an individual, triumph. When, under some groin vault, no
doubt at first to reinforce it, some obscure mason constructed the earliest
intersecting stone ribs, the first step in Gothic architecture had been taken.
[11]

From that essential organ, the other characteristics of Gothic art were
deduced: flying buttress, slender piers, expanse of windows. In a Gothic
vault the infilling, or web, rested elastically on the diagonal ribs. As the
load of the stone roof was thus concentrated at fixed junctures, it was
necessary to reinforce only those given points. Buttresses became
intermittent. All the disintegrating force of the heavy vaulting was gathered
on the diagonally crossing arches. An arch never sleeps, said the old Arab
proverb. Let us then, said the mediæval architect, set a guard on it that also
never sleeps; and from that idea he proceeded to develop the greatest
architecture of all times. The force of expansion was counteracted by a

proportionate force of compression. By means of a framework made up of
vault ribs, of piers, of buttresses, and flying buttresses, the edifice became a
living skeleton. The walls between the active members, when relieved of
their load, served merely as screen inclosures and could be carved into
fragile beauty and hung with transparent tapestries of colored glass.
Because the flying buttress transmitted a large part of the vault’s pressure to
the exterior buttress piles, the piers within the church could be lessened in
diameter, and greater capacity be given to the interior.
Each new trial was a lesson learned. It was only with time that they
adjusted precisely the sufficient counterpoise to the thrust of the vaults; it
was only by degrees that the pier’s diameter was lessened, only with
practice that was learned the placing of flying buttresses neither too high
nor too low. At first many a flying buttress was made needlessly heavy. The
solid wall in between the buttresses was not discarded all at once. In the
first Gothic churches windows continued to be single lights, then two or
three lancets were placed side by side, subsequently each light was
subdivided by mullions, and gradually an elaborate fenestration developed.
For a time, too, the round arch continued in use, and the earliest vault ribs
were semicircular. With the fusion of the equilateral arch and the
counterbutted intersecting ribs, the essence of Gothic architecture was
achieved.
Lesser consequences of the new form of vaulting followed in logical
succession. Obeying the law that it is the thing borne which commands the
form of the thing that bears, the ribs may be said to have drawn out of the
sturdy pier of Romanesque art the clustered columns of Gothic
gracefulness.
Not a single beauty in a Gothic church but has a structural explanation.
The soaring pinnacles that crown the buttresses are apparently mere
ornaments, but in reality those gallant little bits of decoration are of sound
engineering usefulness. By weighting the buttresses, they hasten to channel
the transmitted lateral thrust of the vaulting into a vertical pressure, and
they increase, too, the counterthrust of the flying buttress against the side
walls.
A clear comprehension of Gothic is impossible unless the fact be grasped
that architecture is nothing if not structural, and that no decoration can veil
a faulty skeleton. Ornamentation is the spontaneous blossoming of the

structure, else it is meaningless—a principle many a modern architect might
well digest. Too long has the most scientifically exact of architectures been
judged by its embellishments, which often enough, in the hands of the
copyist, do become a florid veneer without reason.
The Gothic master-of-works was right when he said that nothing which
was inherently needed could be ugly. No longer were flying buttresses
hidden under the cover of wooden roofs. Proudly ranged about the church,
those essential practical members became one of the distinctive beauties of
the new science of building. Renan, with his treacherous half praise, has
called the flying buttress a crutch needed by an architecture which, from its
start, nourished the seeds of decay, since it was based on no sound
constructive formula. Its success was a prestidigitator’s trick, he said. Such
criticism misunderstands the A B C of Gothic lore. Can a living limb be
called a crutch? it has been aptly asked. The Gothic cathedral is not only the
most complicated, but is also the most complete, organism ever conceived
by man.
Where the first diagonal-crossing ribs are to be found will probably
never be known. Various have been the claimants. The Rhenish claim is no
longer taken seriously. Gothic made its first appearance in Germany as a
fully developed French art, and its XIII-century name, there, was opus
francigenum. In his Gothic work the Teuton showed a fondness for the tour-
de-force and his manual dexterity surprises more than it satisfies. The best
German works in architecture are the sober Romanesque churches.
Germany’s school was developed a century before the Romanesque of
France; across the Rhine occurred no Norman invasion to sever art
traditions from Charlemagne’s renaissance. The pre-Gothic art suited her
ethnical temperament, and was long adhered to. While France was building
Gothic, Germany was still erecting Romanesque cathedrals. Not till the end
of the XII century were churches along that “rue des moines,” the Rhine,
vaulted in the new manner.
The claim of Italy to be the first to use the diagonal ribs is denied by
most French archæologists, but is put forward by the Italian scholar Rivoira
and by Mr. Arthur Kingsley Porter.[12] The latter cites the church of
Sannazzaro Sesia as showing proofs that its high nave was Gothic vaulted
by 1040. For a century, he says, the Lombard churches used diagonals,
especially in Milan, where wood was scarce and it was easier to build
permanent brick ribs under the groin vault than to mold the groin on a

temporary substructure. Diagonal ribs were invented, he thinks, as a device
to economize wood. That may be true of the Lombard churches, of which
he has made an elaborate study. And it may be true that the use of such
diagonals filtered into Provence and Languedoc, where appeared some
early Gothic vaults sporadically before 1150, at Fréjus, Marseilles,
Maguelonne, and Moissac, all with the rectangular profile of the Lombard
type. The theory he advocates does not prove why the Ile-de-France masons
could not themselves, without hint from Lombardy, have stumbled on the
new feature which was to revolutionize the builder’s art. Why should we
prefer his explanation for the first use of diagonals—the desire to
economize wood—to that advanced by the French scholars—the effort to
brace a falling groin vault?
Mr. Porter acknowledges that not a single Lombard church was rib-
vaulted throughout, that the Lombard architects never counterbutted their
diagonals properly, that their vaults proved unsatisfactory, so that after 1120
they returned to their groin and barrel vaulting, or used timber roofs, in
those regions where wood abounded. The destruction of Milan through the
German invasion, in 1162, was a fatal blow to Lombard architecture. We
can only conjecture how northern Italy might have worked out the problem
of stone roofs. The best definition of Gothic, thinks Mr. Porter, is Professor
Moore’s, which concludes thus: “Wherever is wanting a framework
maintained on the principle of thrust and counterthrust, there we have not
Gothic.” The Lombard churches never met the vault thrust with
counterthrust of buttress. Surely not in Lombardy was conceived the new
system of construction?
S. Ambrogio at Milan was cited as l’œuvre initiale, till it was proved that
it was built not in the IX century, but after 1067; and as later disasters
necessitated reconstructions, none of the present diagonals was extant
before 1198. S. Abondio at Como, consecrated by Urban II, in 1095, has
some very early intersecting ribs, but they are more a step toward the new
system than a true Gothic vault, since the ribs merely reinforce and do not
carry the cells.
M. Camille Enlart contends that the systematic use of Gothic in Italy was
not earlier than the second quarter of the XIII century, and was brought
across the Alps by French Cistercian monks. Though for centuries Italy
used it, she apprehended its constructive principle imperfectly. Because she
possessed a Niccola Pisano, a Giotto, a family of Cosmati to veil the

poverty of her Gothic skeleton with details of consummate beauty, criticism
is silenced. Her best Gothic monument, the cathedral of Siena, was insecure
because of technical errors. Always was Italy adverse to showing the
mechanism by which an edifice stood; few flying buttresses were ever built
south of the Alps. She preferred the classic wide spacing of piers, an
unencumbered interior, and small windows against her hot sun. Who
remembers that he is in a Gothic church when in the somber cathedral of
Florence? Its long nave is divided into four bays where a northern church
would have used eight. For Italy the Renaissance was a whole-hearted
return to a national art which she could fully understand.
No people outside of France better understood and developed Gothic art
than the English. Their claim to priority is based on the date of the cathedral
of Durham, whose choir-aisle diagonals Mr. John Bilson says are as early as
1093. Since those diagonals show no hesitation, they must have been
preceded by others. Where in England are there to be found the earlier
trials? The English claim is practically a Norman one, and Normandy’s
experimental work in Gothic vaultings remains to be traced. Rivoira claims
that Lombard influences predominated in the formation of Normandy’s
Romanesque school. Can the Norman be said to have discerned in
diagonals their immense possibilities any clearer than had the Lombard?
Those among the French archæologists who have disputed the Norman
claim to priority say that the principal span of Norman and English
churches was covered with timber roofs far into the XII century. We know
that the Gothic vaulting of the two abbey churches of Caen were XII-
century additions, and M. de Lasteyrie thought the same was true of
Durham, though Mr. Bilson has convinced MM. Enlart and Lefèvre-
Pontalis that Durham’s choir-aisle vaults are an original part of the
cathedral begun in 1093. Not till 1174, when Guillaume de Sens began
Canterbury Cathedral, did French Gothic architecture, in its plenitude,
appear in England.
The question of priority remains an open one. It might almost be said
that vaulting with intersecting ribs began to appear here and there
simultaneously, that if it had not cropped out in the Ile-de-France, it would
have appeared in Normandy, or vice versa. And not long after them, the
builders in Burgundy and Anjou began to use it. Before 1150, isolated
samples of the Gothic rib vault appeared at Vézelay, Poitiers, Bordeaux,
Quimperlé, Moissac, St. Gilles, Marseilles. The hour was ripe for the

solution. Gothic architecture was the spontaneous invention of French
builders at the dawn of the XII century, at a time when the poetry of France
was imposing itself on the whole of Europe.
L’œuvre initiale will never be known. However, there was a region
where the early use of the ogival vault was not accidental, but systematic,
one spot in the heart of France where it immediately made a school, since
there it found no strong earlier traditions to overcome, where it became a
living organism and went through a succession of logical developments
until it had taken on the main characteristics of the new art. There is one
center from which Gothic architecture spread out with slow, sure march into
the neighboring regions. In the Ile-de-France, all the trials were summed up
and developed by Abbot Suger at St. Denis. From 1140 to 1144 he wedded
definitely the pointed arch with the diagonal rib.
The French masters, who have contended that the Ile-de-France is the
cradle of Gothic architecture, have had lesser controversies among
themselves as to which special portion of the royal domain led in the
evolution. M. Woillez, a pioneer, considered the environs of Beauvais the
favored spot; M. Saint-Paul looked to the districts between Normandy and
Paris; M. Enlart sought the nucleus in Amiens diocese in Picardy; and M.
Lefèvre-Pontalis chose the classic diocese of Soissons. The two latter
masters have modified their views since studying Durham’s vaults, and they
may modify them further in regard to Lombardy’s early use of diagonals.
The controversy is not closed.
The France of that day was more a feudal confederation than a united
kingdom, and some of the king’s vassals ruled territories larger than his
own. If the feeling of nationality is created as much by great achievements
in common, as by political boundaries and the ties of blood, if, as all now
agree, the enthusiasm of the Crusades, those holy wars against a common
foe, helped to weld the rival sections of France into one nation, surely that
other enthusiasm of the day, those other Gesta Dei per Francos, the building
of the Gothic cathedrals, played an important part in forming the national
soul. From end to end of France they were building when at the battle of
Bouvines a French king united with the jealous barons, with clergy and with
burgess and with villein in a common defense of their native land. King,
clergy, lords, and people fought at Bouvines, and king, clergy, lords, and
people built the big national churches. All the energies of the times went to
their making, all the primitive strong purposes, all the newly stirred intellect

of the schools. Science was as needed for them as inspiration, for without
the long manual training of the guilds, the mystic glow had not sufficed.
There has crept into various architectural manuals, since first M. Viollet-
le-Duc voiced it, a theory which scarcely needs refuting, so disproved is it
by modern research.[13] Gothic art is considered as the layman’s expression
of revolt against the Romanesque art of the monks, an idea that denies the
structural sequence of the two phases of the same art, and would present
Gothic as a reaction against its predecessor, instead of its supreme
development.
We read that a cathedral was built as a sort of assembly hall for the rising
communes, and not pour loger le bon Dieu. Now in every known case it
was the bishop who started the rebuilding of each cathedral, and the works
usually began with the choir, the part of a church suitable only for the cult.
Even when a bishop, in his character of proprietor of a city (as in the case of
Rheims and Laon), opposed the communal claims, he and the people went
on building their cathedral together. We have precious documents to assure
us in what spirit of piety the work was done. All classes and all ages,
women as well as men, gave their voluntary labor to the new works, after
having confessed and communicated in pious confraternities; sometimes it
was for an abbot that they dragged in the stones from the quarry, as at St.
Denis and St. Pierre-sur-Dives; sometimes it was to aid a bishop, as at
Chartres and Rouen. To offset such irrefutable evidence there is not one
contemporary reference to a laic, or communal purpose.
Also, when it is asserted that the bishop helped the cathedrals because
they were jealous of the monastic orders, there is not one historical record
to confront a host of documents which disprove the idea. Large numbers of
the bishop-builders issued from monasteries, founded monasteries, and
returned to monasteries to die. While Maurice de Sully was erecting Notre
Dame, at Paris, he built four monasteries, in one of which he requested to
be buried. The bishop who began Auxerre Cathedral chose Cistercian
Pontigny for his tomb. The bishop-builders of Noyon, Laon, Senlis,
Soissons, Rheims, Bourges, and Rouen were buried among the monks. That
there should occasionally be friction between a bishop and an abbot over
legal privileges is only characteristic of human nature in all times. As a
class the bishops were not opposed to the monks, nor the Orders to the
secular clergy. The monks of St. Remi honored the archbishop of Rheims in
their choir windows.

The cloister welcomed the new architecture. Transition Gothic churches
were built by the monks of St. Germain-des-Prés and St. Martin-des-
Champs at Paris, and one could prolong the list into pages. Where in
Burgundy is found the earliest Gothic? In the Cistercian church of Pontigny,
and in Benedictine Vézelay. Where in Champagne?—the abbatials of Notre
Dame at Châlons-sur-Marne and St. Remi at Rheims. In Normandy? In the
Midi?—again the answer is, in abbey churches. Indeed, monastic building
energy seemed inexhaustible, for where the prime of Gothic arrived, it was
still the monks who produced that masterpiece of the new art, the Merveille
of Mont-Saint-Michel.
In the XII century the spread of monastic life took on a phenomenal
aspect. Benedictine houses and those of the newly founded Orders of
Cîteaux and Prémontré increased, not by hundreds, but by thousands. The
monks were in absolute accord with the spirit of their time. Sons of the
cloister had inspired the entire XI century: Gregory VII, Abbot William of
Dijon, St. Anselm, Lanfranc, St. Hugues of Cluny. A bevy of remarkable
men of the cloister led the XII century, the chief being Suger of St. Denis,
protector of the serfs, the man of genius who stimulated the bishops of
France to remake their cathedrals in emulation of his Gothic abbey church,
and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, on whose words all Europe hung.
Architecture passed to laic control when the protection of monastic life
was no longer needed for artists, and when the science of building required
the specialist, the man occupied with it alone. The schools of Cluny had
trained the first guildsmen, and many of the names of Gothic architects—
Orbais, Honnecourt, Corbic—indicate that they were born in places where
monastic building industries flourished. It was in the natural course of
events that the art should pass out of the possession of the few into the
general national life.
Another natural happening has been distorted by partisans. The burning
of monastery archives during the XVI-century religious wars and by the
Revolution is accountable for the few names of architects that have come
down to us. The scarcity of such names has been cited as an instance of the
jealous suppression of the laymen by the clergy forced to employ them.
Now precisely the contrary is the truth. What modern architect was ever
accorded such prominence as was allowed by the bishops of Amiens and
Rheims to their masters-of-works when they inscribe those laymen names
in the labyrinth designs of the cathedral pavements? The monks of

Marmoutier and of St. Germain-des-Prés were proud to bury in their abbey-
churches their architects Étienne de Mortagne and Pierre de Montereau. In
Rheims, the architects Hugues Libergier and Robert de Coucy were
likewise honored.
By digging in old archives, the modern student is ever adding new
names to the nation’s honor roll. Many a gap still remains, but the very
anonymousness of such masters of the living stone is stuff for the
imagination. One likes to picture the old-time craftsman-artist rejoicing in
his insignificance as he chiseled his leaf and vine just as he saw them by the
roadside. He served a Master who gave like wages to all who worked in
spirit and in truth, to him who, in the hidden corners where no human eye
could penetrate, carved his leaf and flower with the same love as did the
greater artist working on the stately imaged portals.
The “heretical Gothic-sculpture bogey” has led certain imaginations
astray. There are those who find latent heresy in the old carvers’ work; they
point, with suggestive smile, to the bishop and monk placed among the
damned in the Last Judgments at the cathedral doors. Let them turn to the
sermons of the day and they will find precisely the same Christian doctrine
of the equality of all men before sin and punishment, preached from the
pulpit within the church. Not in all the myriad scenes from Old and New
Testaments is a single doctrinal error to be found, says M. Émile Mâle, who
is master of the iconography of French churches. The sculptor layman
merely carried out the scheme of the trained theologian.
Many a sharp word does M. Viollet-le-Duc give as critic to those who
enjoy in a cathedral the superficial beauties of decoration, but are blind to
the efficient structure, to the scientific upholding skeleton. Surely it is a still
more radical ignorance which perceives in a Gothic church its mechanical
perfection, but denies the aspiration to immortality which was its inceptive
spirit. To ascribe the origin of cathedrals to the need by the nascent
commune of a town hall is to make of those soaring monuments veritable
follies of human pride. Restore to them their religious soul, have eyes to see
what may be called their spiritual framework, and as up-leaps toward the
infinite they are sublimities. Can churches be the creation of rebellion and
hate when into their very stones passed the clamorous vibrant faith of those
crusading generations? Like hovering prayers their vaults seem to shut one
in. The heart, weary of modern sophistry, draws strength from their eternal
affirmation. He must have little music in his soul who is deaf to such a

Credo. When men built Gothic cathedrals they knelt on both knees to pray,
and never have they soared more supremely above themselves. “Deeds of
God through the French” are these temples.
A word in regard to the term “Gothic.” It is as unreasonable a misnomer
as could have been chosen, but since usage has sanctioned it, it must pass.
Primarily put into currency by the Italians of the Renaissance, in the
injurious sense of barbarous, the term was adopted by the French neo-
classics of the XVII century. Molière’s scathing line on Gothic sculpture is
well known—“Ces monstres odieux des siècles ignorants.” He complained
that Gothic art “fit à la politesse une mortelle guerre.” When Racine spoke
of Chartres Cathedral he made use of the term barbare; even to the
churchman Fénelon the cathedrals of the Middle Ages appeared unreasoned
and faulty.
The opprobrious term was fixed by the Encyclopædists of the next
century, when prejudice against the Middle Ages became militant and
organized. With exclusive pedantism they dismissed the most national and
civilized of arts as worthy of those rough invaders, the Goths. Voltaire, who,
says Guizot, garnered only what was mean and criminal in the Middle
Ages, saw in the study of Gothic architecture “a coarse curiosity, lacking
good taste.” As late as 1800, a project was abroad to disencumber the soil of
France of “these overcharged façades with their multitude of indecent and
ridiculous figures.” And still later, the students in the national school of
architecture were taught to despise the most reasoned, the most robust, the
most logical of arts as a style of confusion and caprice.
The rehabilitation of Gothic architecture in France, if tardy, has been
ample. No branch of modern science presents a more able corps of workers.
While true to the Latin genius, which unites clarity of style with an exact
erudition, they have obeyed a yet deeper race instinct which knows that
matter must be vivified by spirit, else learning sinks to a dry-as-dust
recording, incapable of its highest flight. The telling of the monumental
story of France has been touched by the sacred flame of patriotism. Like
paladins, these modern knights are abroad on all the by-paths eager to
rescue some hidden treasure of the national art. Future scholarship will look
back at the brilliant achievements of the French archæologists of to-day
with the same pride that is felt for the Benedictine savants of the XVII
century.

The aim of archæology is to date a monument correctly. How to do this
by scientific method has been taught the last two generations at the École
des Chartes, the national school par excellence, so M. de Vögué called it.
Archives are pored over to trace each link with history, and those
monuments which have no authenticated pedigree are compared with those
of certain date. Each manuscript date is verified by the analysis of the
edifice itself, whose successive campaigns of building are deciphered, since
few and far between are the homogeneous churches. Each restoration also is
verified. One of the solid bases for archæological exactness is the
knowledge of profiles, which are called by the English textbook rib molds,
arch molds, pier molds, or base molds. By a comparative analysis of
profiles, a monument can now be accurately dated. As keystones were of
different types in the various earlier decades of Gothic, they too help to
substantiate an edifice.[14]
Churches of one region are contrasted with those of another. The
material employed is considered, since the stone of a province causes
richness or poverty of sculpture: thus, Brittany’s granite and Auvergne’s
lava mean an undeveloped sculpture compared with the fine white
limestone districts of the Oise, or in Normandy and Poitou. When
practicable, excavations under an edifice can give data concerning previous
churches on the site.
M. Jules Quicherat was the first to teach that the history of the Middle
Ages architecture was the history of the architect’s fight against the weight
and push of the vaulting.[15] Once the right path was blazed, many an able
pioneer helped clear the new road—such students as Viollet-le-Duc, de
Caumont, Woillez, Prosper Merimée, de Dion, Coutan, de Beaurepaire,
Grandmaison, Révoil, Rupricht-Robert, Félix de Verneilh, Anthyme Saint-
Paul, Louis Courajod, Buhot de Kersers. At the École des Chartes, Robert
de Lasteyrie occupied with distinction the chair held by Quicherat for thirty
years, and his pupils, Camille Enlart and Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis, in their
turn, are passing on the high tradition to a younger school. M. Enlart, the
director of the museum of comparative sculpture at the Trocadéro, is an
authority on Romanesque architecture, and has initiated the study of the
spread of Gothic architecture in mediæval Italy, Spain, the North, and the
Levant.[16] M. Lefèvre-Pontalis has written a host of erudite monographs;
one learns to accept his decisions as final, in so far as the ever-expanding
realm of knowledge can be final. He directs the invaluable publications

called the Congrès Archéologique de France and the Bulletin Monumental,
and he edits those excellent short studies known as the Petites
Monographies des grands édifices de la France, which are convenient
pocket guides for the serious tourist.[17]
Each year is producing final monographs on the chief churches of
France. M. Georges Durand has rendered fitting tribute to Amiens. M. de
Farcy has identified himself with Angers, René Merlet with Chartres,
Lucien Broche with Laon, and Lucien Bégule with Lyons. MM. Brutails
has specialized on Gascony, the Thollier and H. du Ranquet on Auvergne,
Labande on Provence, Berthelé on Plantagenet Gothic, André Rhein on
Poitou and Anjou, Émile Bonnet on Hérault, Charles Porée on Burgundy,
and Louis Demaison on Champagne. Other able students are MM. Bouet,
Louis Serbat, Marcel Aubert, Ernest Rupin, Jules de Lahondès, René Fage,
Amédée Boinet, Jean Virey, Robert Triger, and Louis Régnier.
Precious texts have been unearthed from the archives by Victor Mortet,
Henri Stein, and Eugène Müntz. The sculpture of France has been studied
by MM. Robert de Lasteyrie, Émile Lambin, Léon Palustre, Eugène Müntz,
Gabriel Fleury, Raymond Koechlin, J. M. de Vasselot, Paul Vitry, Gaston
Brière, André Michel, Louis Gonse, and Émile Mâle. The latter three have
brought out monumental general works. L’art gothique of Gonse gives the
most exact and extended account of the beginning of Gothic, says Anthyme
Saint-Paul, who is himself one of the most inspiring masters of mediæval
archæology. M. Michel, who is conservator of the national museums, has
edited the superb Histoire de l’art, to which leading French scholars have
contributed.[18] And the iconography of French cathedrals has received no
more magistral treatment than from M. Mâle, to whom is due the credit of
establishing the scholastic character of Gothic imagery.[19] His path was
cleared by pioneers such as Didron, Crosnier, Martin, and Duchesne.
Happily for the local schools, a bevy of intelligent churchmen have
devoted themselves to their regional monuments. I hope I may be pardoned
if I do not name each with his ecclesiastical designation, but cite them here
simply as savants: the Abbés Eugène Müller (Senlis); Bourassé and
Bosseboeuf (Touraine); Ledru (Le Mans); Auber, De la Croix, and Mgr.
Barbier de Montault (Poitiers); Chomton (Dijon); Bulteau (Chartres);
Abgrall (Brittany); Maurin (Aix-en-Provence); Bouvier (Sens); Cerf
(Rheims); Bouxin (Laon); and for the Norman churches, the Abbés Fossey,
Porée, Loisel, and Pigéon.

The list might be greatly extended. One can cite only a few. From the
pages of such students have been written these chapters, by one who has
felt that there must be many travelers who love the old cathedrals of Europe
and have wandered among them puzzled by half-understood things, longing
to know with exactitude how and when they were built. So it has not
seemed a useless task to gather into these ten chapters what the French
scholars are relating of their churches. So swiftly do archæological
discoveries follow one another to-day, that statements accepted now may be
obsolete to-morrow. The makers of history and art books can hope to serve
only their hour.
The new school of Christian archæology is redeeming the
misrepresented centuries after the year 1000. It is undoing the systematic
falsification of history, and is teaching us to read the past other than by the
printed page. Not hate, but love, opens new windows in the soul. The study
of the churches of France adds flesh and blood to many a mere name in
history. One gains a very special liking for little Abbot Suger, most
dependable of men, whose life was a succession of big undertakings. One
feels reverent affection for that sentinel of the Church and its guide,
Bernard of Clairvaux, who said some harsh things of fine churches, all the
while that he was feeding the mystic life that made them inevitable. And
very real become the bishop builders when one knows their cathedrals. One
pores over the old volumes of the Histoire Littéraire de la France, begun by
XVII-century Benedictines, and still being continued by the Institute of
France, to gather details of good Bishop Fulbert and doughty St. Ives, who
built at Chartres; of that distinguished literary man, Bishop Hildebert de
Lavardin, who worked at Le Mans; of the well-poised Bishop Maurice de
Sully, who raised Notre Dame at Paris; of crusading prelates such as Albéric
de Humbert, who began Rheims; and of Nivelon de Chérisy, who built
Soissons, and who, on the Fourth Crusade, played a foremost role. One
grows to love, above all, the saint-king, Louis, truest hero of la douce
France, who illuminated his kingdom with fair churches. And no one can
admire St. Louis and not keep a warm corner in his heart for Joinville, his
comrade-in-arms, the irresistible seneschal of Champagne.
Crusades and chivalry and all the multicolored aspects of the XII and
XIII centuries become clearer to the imagination as one traces the story of
the cathedrals of France; scholasticism and the early days of the schools,
when Abélard sparred with Guillaume de Champeaux. Very real they all

become: Peter the Venerable, good Stephen Harding, St. Thomas Becket,
John of Salisbury, St. Edmund Rich, Stephen Langton, St. Dominic, St.
Malachy O’Morgair, Innocent III, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas
Aquinas. France welcomed them all during the two vital centuries when she
imposed her literature as well as her architecture on western Europe, when
the Paris schools were the intellectual center of the world.
To paint a rose-colored picture of the two best centuries of the Middle
Ages would be absurd. They were full of very evil things. There were
horrifying episodes in them. “Barbarism tempered by religion; religion
disfigured by barbarism,” is the definition of Balmes, the theologian. The
inconsistencies were gigantic. The same men who sacked Constantinople in
1204, dealing art a staggering blow, were the very men who in western
Europe were building cathedrals. Then, as now, there were many for whom
religion served as a convenient cloak for the lower instincts; then, as now,
there were many who never lost sight of the higher ideals. Side by side with
the evil and the self-seeking should be set the sublime impulses which
checked those untutored generations. Do not hide the merciless laying
waste of Languedoc by the north, but do not forget that, in the same hour,
men had reached an abnegation of self that led them to the African coast as
voluntary substitutes for their brother Christians in bondage there.
In the midst of its human infirmities it was an age that aspired: its poets
sang of the Holy Grail, its kings and its serfs were saints, there were saint
scholars and barons and merchants, there was even a saint lawyer.
It is precisely the restored balance between good and evil which the
study of Gothic art is bringing about. The partisan may go on compiling a
police gazette and call it history.[20] While the towers of Gothic churches
point upward, he is refuted. The modern mind has once for all grasped that
it is psychologically impossible for an age to have been sunk in blind
superstition when it could build, not merely one or two, but hundreds of
churches whose every line is an aspiration toward sanctity. The cathedrals
are the true apologetics of the Middle Ages. Archæology is again proving its
claim to be the soul of history.

CHAPTER II

Abbot Suger and St. Denis-en-France
Under the impulse of this monk, truly great in all things, Gothic
architecture was born.—Félix de Verneilh (of Abbot Suger).
HE churches built during the evolution from Romanesque to
Gothic have been called transitional, a classification which
would be most convenient for the amateur, had not archæologists
decided it was an equivocal term. They say that, during the short
period when “Romanesque and Gothic inhabited under the same
roof,” the Romanesque parts of the edifice were placed side by side with the
simultaneously built Gothic parts, that there was juxtaposition, but no
fusion. Vaults were either barrel, groin, or of the diagonal-rib type; there
was no such thing as a transition form of vault. Arches were either round or
pointed; there was no such thing as a transition or intermediary form of
arch. And since the radical distinction between Romanesque and Gothic is
caused by the vaulting, it is correct to call that part of a church where was
groin or barrel vault Romanesque, and that part where were used the
intersecting ribs Gothic.
The sequence of the passing from Romanesque to Gothic is obscure,
because there is a lack of definite dates. From 1110 to 1140, while the
intersecting ribs were coming into use in northern France, such a vault was
practically the only sign in an edifice of the new movement. The walls still
were massive, the windows still were small and round-arched, the sculpture
still was coarse and heavy. Then, as the transition advanced, the supports
grew lighter, the profiles (those cross-section outlines of ribs, arches,
capitals, and bases) grew purer, and the sculpture discarded Byzantine
traditions and took nature as its model.
French archæologists have thought that the use of diagonals came about
first through the desire to hold up some groin vault, on the point of
collapsing, which would seem a very sensible explanation, since the
creative genius of the Ile-de-France seems dimly to have apprehended even
in the first hour the stupendous possibility to be drawn from a member

whose purpose was to concentrate force in order that other parts of the
edifice might be relieved. From the initial hour began the evolution of the
cardinal organ in the Ile-de-France. Whereas the Lombard architects looked
on the diagonals as a mere contrivance, stubbornly keeping their eyes shut
to the structural possibilities latent therein. The masons of the Ile-de-France
at once began to profile their diagonals graciously, and even before the
genius of Suger had coordinated, at St. Denis, all the foregoing progress of
the nascent art, craftsmen had occasionally symbolized, as it were, the
importance of the intersecting ribs by carving little caryatids for them to
rest upon above the capitals; such figurines are to be seen in the Oise region
at Bury and at Cambronne.[21]
Mr. Arthur Kingsley Porter’s idea is that the transitional period resolves
itself into a series of experiments on the part of the builders to erect a vault
with a minimum of centering, and he cites the hollow spires at Loches as an
experiment to put up a stone roof without the use of any temporary
substructure of wood, which apparently was costly.[22] He thinks that the
earlier Gothic vaults were bombé because that form facilitated construction
without centering, and that the Lombards dropped their precocious
diagonals after 1120, as soon as they had learned how to build domed groin
vaults which required no temporary wooden substructures. What is of value
in Mr. Porter’s thesis is sure, in time, to pass into French currency; until a
majority of French archæologists find his explanation better than their own
it is permissible for us to agree with those who are telling the tale of their
own national art.
Probably the earliest extant Gothic vaults in the Ile-de-France are those
at Acy-en-Multien (Oise) and at Crouy-sur-Ourcq (Seine-et-Marne). Their
outline is rectangular. Some intersecting ribs at Rhuis (Oise) are cited by M.
Lefèvre-Pontalis as the oldest in the Soissonnais. Diagonals were put up,
about 1115, at St. Vaast-de-Longmont (Oise), Orgeval (Seine-et-Oise),
Viffort (Aisne), Airaines (Somme), and in other rural churches. The famous
ambulatory vaults at Morienval were probably built about 1122. A year or
two earlier, perhaps, are the side-aisle vaults of St. Étienne at Beauvais.
Bury (Oise) shows the first extant half dome with ribs. Of the same time,
about 1125, are the diagonals at Marolles, St. Vaast-les-Mello, Béthisy-St.-
Pierre, Bonneuil-en-Valois, and Bellefontaine, all in the Oise department.
Bellefontaine, whose date of 1125 is certain, has helped to place other
churches of the transition by comparing their diagonals with its pointed

intersecting ribs. Bruyères (Aisne) is about 1130, Poissy (Seine-et-Oise)
and Villetertre (Oise) are about 1135, and so are the ribs of St. Martin-des-
Champs at Paris. In the Aisne region are Berzy-le-Sec and Laffaux (c. 1140)
and in the Oise region is Chelles, building at the hour when Suger
undertook St. Denis (Seine), 1140 to 1144. Cambronne (Oise) and Foy-St.-
Quentin (Somme) are about 1145. Such churches as Glennes (Aisne), St.
Leu d’Esserent (Oise), and, close to the latter, Creuil’s church of St.
Évremont were building in 1150; so were Chars (Seine-et-Oise) and, near it,
Pontoise,[23] whose ambulatory vaults some claim are prior to those of the
procession path of St. Denis, and therefore a link between Morienval and
Suger’s abbatial. The big church at St. Germer (Oise) was begun about
1150, though certain of its features are more archaic than St. Denis, built
before it. Some of these churches, called transitional, used wall ribs for their
diagonals, others omitted them; in some the intersecting ribs were pointed,
in others, semicircular.
Mr. John Bilson, who contends that diagonals were used in Normandy
some twenty-five years earlier than in the Ile-de-France, considers the early
dates for these rural churches improbable, that scarcely any were anterior to
St. Denis, that it was a case of little churches following the great churches,
not vice versa. The earliest, he thinks, was St. Étienne at Beauvais (c. 1120),
significantly close to Normandy. But Normandy did not suspect the value
and fecundity of diagonals. That feat of creative genius none can deny to
the Ile-de-France.
The traveler can do nothing more enlightening and delightful as a
prelude to his journey among French cathedrals than to spend some early
spring days exploring the rural churches of the privileged land of the
national art which the old geographers chose to picture as an island inclosed
by the Seine, the Marne, the Aisne, and the Oise. Numerous churches of the
transition lie between Soissons, Senlis, and Beauvais, and once, around
Amiens was another such center, but few of the monuments there have
survived.[24] Go to Creuil and see, in the ruins of St. Évremont, a
rudimentary flying buttress—a quarter arch once hidden under the lean-to
roof. No doubt the architect built it with the intention of bracing the upper
walls, but since he omitted to brace the flying buttress itself it failed of its
purpose. Four miles away, at St. Leu d’Esserent, is an awkward early trial
of a Gothic vault in the tribune above the porch, but as the ribs are
embedded in the cells, no proper elasticity is achieved. Go to Morienval and

study its remarkable essay in spanning a curving section with diagonals.
Trace these early steps of the national art, and the meaning of the Gothic
bone structure grows plainer.

MORIENVAL[25]
I approve the life of those for whom the city is a prison, who find
paradise in solitude, who live by the works of their hands, or who seek to
remake their spirit by the sweetness of their contemplative life, who drink
of the fountain of life by the lips of their heart, and forget what is behind
them to regard only what lies ahead. But neither the most hidden forest nor
the highest mountains will give happiness to man, if he has not in himself
solitude of the spirit, peace of conscience, upliftings of the heart to God.—
Letter of St. Ives, Bishop of Chartres, 1091-1115.
Of the experimental steps which led to Gothic art, the most appealing is
the nunnery church of Morienval, a humble forerunner of Amiens Cathedral
that has made as much stir in archæological controversy as Périgueux’s
cathedral of St. Front itself. Morienval may not be the passionately sought
œuvre-initiale, since its vaults, while they betray inexperience, certainly
were preceded by still cruder attempts, but it can boast that it is the first
Gothic ambulatory extant, and as the curving aisle around the chancel is the
most exquisite feature of the great cathedrals, Morienval’s humble first
essay of it merits a pilgrimage.
As one approaches the abbey church it does not appear till one is directly
over it, so snugly hidden away is the village in a fold of the rolling country
that skirts the forest of Compiègne. Perhaps the IX-century nuns who chose
the site may have hoped that the marauders of that troublous time might
ride by, unconscious of booty so close at hand. With gratitude one learns
that the invasion of 1914 has left Morienval unscathed, as well as those
other memorials of tentative Gothic, Acy-en-Multien and Crouy-sur-Ourcq.
Because of excellent proportions, the church appears larger than in
reality. The exterior is Romanesque. Two time-stained towers of the XI
century mark the angles between transept and choir, an arrangement derived
from Rhenish churches. At the west façade is a beautiful XII-century tower.
It was building while the nuns were proceeding to tear down a decrepit apse
in order to erect the present east end of the church. In that new apse
appeared the much-discussed early ribs.
A record tells that relics were installed in the church in 1122, and it was
probably then that the new works were finished. Ambulatories had come
into favor during the first third of the XII century, when need was felt for a

suitable corridor for pilgrims to encircle the altar whereon relics were
exposed. Now to vault a curving aisle was no easy task, owing to the
trapeze shape of each section. Morienval’s ambulatory must have been
designed to hold extra altars, since entrance to the aisle is blocked at both
ends by the towers, and the passage is so narrow that only one at a time can
walk in it. There are no apse chapels. The sculpture is archaic. Some of the
capitals show interlacings, and some are of the pleated type popular in
Normandy. The diminutive corridor has four small bays whose clumsy
intersecting vault ribs are of the size of the average stovepipe. They curve
strangely, and two of the keystones are not in the axis of the passageway,
nor has elasticity yet been wholly achieved, since the ends of the ribs
plunge into the web of the vault.
Over the choir, consisting of one large bay, are intersecting ribs that
appear to be posterior to those of the ambulatory. They, too, are rude and
large, but are wholly detached from the cells. M. Lefèvre-Pontalis thinks
that the ambulatory diagonals are contemporary, and owe their more archaic
character to the difficulty of vaulting a curved passage. So swiftly did the
early architects acquire skill in the new system of building, that when a
chapel was erected on the northern arm of Morienval’s transept, at the end
of the XII century, each diagonal had become a single slender torus, virile
and graceful.
Of less architectural importance is the Romanesque nave of Morienval,
whose meager vault ribs are of the XVII century. The western tower was the
prototype of the Romanesque belfries of the region and should be
preserved. It is in a deplorable state, propped by beams, which are gayly
scaled by the lads who ring the Angelus. Little Morienval has the human
touch which the traveler craves. Set in the wall above the XIII-century lord
of Viri’s tomb are tablets that commemorate two pastors of this isolated
Valois village who were heroes as valiant as any crusader. Their combined
ministry covered a hundred and one years. The first died in 1840, after fifty-
seven years of service here, “faithful to his duty in times most difficult,”
and difficult indeed was a priest’s life during the Revolution. “Pray for his
soul,” begs his grateful commune, to which he had bequeathed the
presbytery and all his savings.
His successor came to Morienval in his ’twenties, fresh from Paris, his
birthplace, and on this dwindling village he expended his energies for forty-
five years. Abbé Riaux loved his parishioners like a father, and was, says

the memorial tablet, “physician for body as well as soul.” During the
cholera of 1849 his self-denial elicited a gold medal from Morienval and
the village of Bonneuil, where is another primitive essay of a Gothic vault.
“The state of decay of his beautiful church made him suffer,” runs the
inscription, so he willed his modest fortune toward its restoration. Happily,
he lived long enough to see the church he loved become a savant’s shrine. It
was in 1880 that M. Robert de Lasteyrie first drew attention to Morienval as
an early step in the tardily understood national art, and MM. Anthyme
Saint-Paul, Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis, and Camille Enlart joined in the
debate. The archæologists’ war horse they have called our little Morienval.
Such widespread discussion and the good priest’s bequest fortunately
brought about a thorough restoration of the choir.

ST. ÉTIENNE AT BEAUVAIS, AND ST. GERMER[26]
Sous le porche de l’église, chacun laisse le fardeau que la vie lui impose.
Ici le plus pauvre homme s’élève au rang des grands intellectuels, des
poètes, que dis-je? au rang des esprits: il s’installe dans le domaine de la
pensée pure et du rêve. Le gémissement d’une vieille femme agenouillée
dans l’église de son village est du même accent, traduit la même ignorance,
le même pressentiment que la méditation du savant.... De ces parties
profondes de l’être, de ce domaine obscur surgissent toutes les puissances
créatrices de l’homme.
—Maurice Barrès.[27]
Close in date to Morienval are the aisle vaults of St. Étienne’s nave at
Beauvais, the old city that lies on a tributary of the Oise. The intersecting
ribs are not quite so stout as those of Morienval, but their ends still plunge
into the massive, and they, too, are round-arched; their date is
approximately 1120. That they planned at the same time to throw similar
diagonals over the principal span is proved by the existent lower structures,
but the actual vaults there were not erected till after a fire in 1180. The
transverse arches of the aisles are noticeably stilted. This device was to lead
to a solution of the problem how to raise the arches framing each vault
section to the level of the diagonals’ crown, and thus avoid the excessive
doming which is found in the earlier Gothic vaults.
In the XII-century north façade of the transept is an oculus big enough to
be called the first rose window; a wheel of fortune it is called, because the

images around its circle are an allegory of the fleet passing of man’s
greatness. This is one of the very early approaches to pure sculpture. The
nave’s two westernmost bays and its façade are of the XI century. Had the
original choir of St. Étienne survived, it is thought that its ambulatory
would be one of the missing steps connecting the cramped corridor of
Morienval with the double procession path of St. Denis. The present choir, a
Flamboyant Gothic structure, is famous for its gloriously colored windows,
some of which were made by that notable family of local artists who
designed the big rose windows of Beauvais Cathedral, Engrand Le Prince
and his sons Jean and Nicolas, and his son-in-law Nicolas Le Pot. The latter
carved the cathedral’s wooden doors, for versatility was characteristic of the
artisan-artists of those days.
Ten miles from Beauvais, a crawling train sets one down in a field
whence a two-mile walk leads to the sleepy bourg of St. Germer-en-Flay.
The abbey was founded in 655 by Germer, a noble of Dagobert’s court,
nephew of St. Ouen the great bishop of Normandy’s capital. To St.
Germer’s abbey came William the Conqueror to beg the French king to join
him in his proposed descent on England. But Philip I gathered his
counselors, and it was decided not to support the Norman duke, since, if he
gained England, he would be richer than his own suzerain, the king of
France, and if he failed, France would have antagonized the English.
The large abbatial church of St. Germer, if not beautiful, is of
archæological interest. Formerly it was thought to be a monument of 1130,
but closer study has shown that it was erected during one bout of work from
1150 to 1180. Hard though it was to believe it the contemporary of the
cathedrals at Senlis and Noyon, its sculpture is too excellent to have been
done earlier. The crocketed capitals of its westernmost bays were never
made earlier than 1175. That the church was continued without pause from
apse to façade is proved by the unity of profiles and details. Its
anachronisms are to be explained because it derived from a side current of
Gothic art, out of touch with the swift-moving main stream, which was
channeled by Abbot Suger.
The architect of St. Germer showed in the main parts of his church a
thorough understanding of the new Gothic vaulting, and at the same time he
covered his tribune gallery with Romanesque groins. He made heavy
Romanesque piers, and simultaneously he essayed to disencumber the
pavement by employing the corbel, or side bracket. The Norman zigzag or

chevron design decorates the heavy molding of the pier arches. Over the
sanctuary he attempted the inartistic experiment of having his ribs
converge, not on a keystone, but directly on a transverse rib. The ribs of the
upper vaulting are heavy and ornamented. The pointed arches of the pier
arcade are surmounted by round arches, in the tribunes. And between
tribune and clearstory are square apertures neither Romanesque nor Gothic.
To meet the thrust of the upper vaulting, some rudimentary flying
buttresses were built under the lean-to roof of the tribune galleries, but as
they themselves were not braced, they remained ineffectual. The collapse of
some of the high vaults caused the addition, later, of the present flying
buttresses. The exterior of the church is gaunt, with windows that are small
and round-arched. The west façade was wrecked during the Hundred Years’
War, and never restored. Walled-up arches mar the spacious interior. Thick
coats of whitewash cover it, and when dust gathers on that make-shift of
cleanliness the effect is tawdry. Directly behind the apse of the big abbatial
stands a masterpiece of Rayonnant Gothic, a diminutive church whose west
façade faces, with awkward closeness, the back of the larger church. As it is
connected with the latter’s ambulatory by a glazed passage, it may be
regarded as a sort of Lady chapel. Many such imitations of the Sainte-
Chapelle of Paris arose, after St. Louis had made his shrine for the crown of
thorns. The abbot who put up St. Germer’s glass reliquary was Pierre
Wesencourt, who ruled from 1254 to 1272, and it is thought that the king’s
own architect designed it. That Louis IX contributed toward it is shown by
the fleur-de-lis and the donjons of Castile in the storied windows. Over the
altar once stood the alabaster retablo, depicting St. Germain’s life, now in
the Musée Cluny, at Paris.

POISSY[28]
Christianity is still for 400,000,000 of human beings the great pair of
wings that are indispensable if man is to rise above himself, above
humdrum living and shut-in horizons, it is still the spiritual guide to lead
him by patience, resignation, and hope to serenity, to lift him by purity,
temperance, and goodness to the heights of devotion and self-sacrifice.
Always and everywhere for nineteen hundred years as soon as these wings
flag or break, public and private manners degenerate. Neither philosophy,
reason, nor artistic and literary culture, nor even feudal honor, military and

chivalrous, no code, no administration, no government can serve as
substitute for it.—H. Taine (1892).
The church of St. Louis, at Poissy, is a link in the normal development of
Gothic, and not like St. Germain, a disconcerting anachronism. About 1135
both systems of vaults were here built at one and the same time.
Poissy lies on the Seine slightly above its junction with the classic Oise.
A pleasant way to approach it is to walk from St. Germain-en-Laye through
the forest, when it is carpeted with anemones. St. Germain’s palace chapel
is thought to be the work of Pierre de Montereau. One goes to Poissy in a
spirit of pilgrimage, for at its font, in 1215, St. Louis of France was
baptized.[29] He held the gift of Christian citizenship he here received above
all that the world could bestow. To his intimates he often signed himself
Louis of Poissy. His grandfather, Philippe-Auguste, had given the manor of
Poissy to his son, on his marriage to Blanche of Castile. Living then in
retirement at Poissy was the gentle Agnes of Méran, that aunt of St.
Elizabeth of Hungary whom Philippe-Auguste had been forced by Rome’s
decree to set aside. When St. Louis was born, on St. Mark’s Day of 1215, in
order to spare the young mother, the church bells were silent. The Spanish
princess asked the cause, and ordered—gallant woman that she was—that
every bell in the town should ring out a joyous carillon because God had
given her un beau fils. Shakespeare would inevitably admire Blanche; she
was a Shakespearian character:

That daughter there of Spain, the hardy Blanche,
Is near to England; look upon the years
Of Louis the Dauphin and that lovely maid.
If lusty love should go in search of beauty,
Where shall he find it fairer than in Blanche?
If jealous love should go in search of virtue,
Where shall he find it purer than in Blanche?
If love ambitious sought a match of birth,
Whose veins bound richer blood than Lady Blanche?[30]

The wide ambulatory of Poissy is groin-vaulted, but diagonals cover the
two oriented apsidioles that open on a false transept, which arrangement of
pseudo-transept with chapels was copied soon after at Sens. The three
easternmost bays of the nave have retained their primitive intersecting ribs,

which are round-arched, decorated, and very broad, as are the transverse
arches that separate the vault into sections. Poissy’s sculpture is of an
advanced type. Owing to later changes, there is much patchwork in the
church.

ST. DENIS-EN-FRANCE[31]

Give all thou canst: high Heaven rejects the lore
Of nicely calculated less or more:
So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense
These lofty pillars, spread this branching roof
Self-poised.
—Wordsworth.

Poissy. An Early Example of Gothic Vaulting (c. 1135)

Finally came the hour of the new architecture’s clear achievement. After
all the trial efforts, there now was built, midway in the XII century, a
monument which was to wield momentous influence. With the erection of
St. Denis, the center of Gothic art may be said to have shifted slightly south,
to Paris. From the capital the new movement spread out in systematic
progression—each church comprehending better than had its predecessor
the principle of thrust and counterthrust, each drawing from it further
consequences.
St. Denis did not put a stop abruptly to the coexistence in the same
edifice of both systems of vaulting any more than it began immediately the

usage of all the consequences of diagonals. Yet none the less the Royal
Abbey is rightly called the first Gothic monument, since here first was
demonstrated stout-heartedly the advantages of the new system. Abbot
Suger was the first to employ the generating member with the full
intelligence of its results. “From the moment of St. Denis’ conception,
Amiens had become inevitable.”
It was Suger who wedded definitely the pointed arch and the intersecting
ribs. He dared to make piers so slender that the beholders were astonished
they could carry the weight of a stone roof; he dared to open his walls by
windows so large that his choir was called by the people the lantern of St.
Denis. The mastery by Suger’s craftsmen of the art of stained glass was to
have profound consequences in Gothic structure, since it hastened the
suppression of the wall screen between the active members: “Behold I will
lay thy stones with fair colors, and thy foundations with sapphires; and I
will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy
borders of pleasant stones.”
Suger has himself told us how the house of God, many-colored as the
radiance of precious stones, lifted his soul from the cares of this world to
divine meditation, for this Gothic art, whose spiritual appeal he had
apprehended as profoundly as he had its structural laws, was most aptly
fashioned to be a foretaste of the Beyond, neither touching the baseness of
earth nor wholly the serenity of heaven.
Doubtless Suger understood the importance of the dedication day in
1144. He made of it a national ceremony. He started the Gothic movement
intrepidly. Before a historic gathering of bishops and barons he
demonstrated that a Gothic vault was lighter, more easily built, more
economical, and more enduring than any other, and the important men of
France went back to their own cities to spread far and wide the lesson they
had learned.
In the course of the story of French architecture, fate has most graciously
allied certain monuments of prime archæological interest with people or
events of historic importance.
Gothic art made its debut in a unique setting. St. Denis was the patron of
France, the missionary who first preached Christianity by the Seine, and
who there had been martyred in the III century. On Montmartre is the crypt
said to have been the burial place of the first Christian martyrs of Paris. In

time there rose on the road outside the city a monastery dedicated to St.
Denis, and thither were his relics transferred. Each of the three royal lines
that have ruled France, Merovingian, Carolingian, and Capetian, chose the
abbey of St. Denis as their final resting place and loaded it with favors. The
first milestone on the highroad of Gothic art was the famous center of the
nation’s life, and the initiator of the new system of building was the maker
of the nation’s unity, Abbot Suger.
To Suger may be applied the mediæval term for an architect, Master of
Works, maître de l’œuvre. He wrote an account of how he reconstructed his
abbey, building it, he says, with the aid of his companions in the community
and his brothers in the cloister. The people gave voluntarily of their labor.
When a quarry with suitable stone was discovered at Pontoise, the whole
countryside—men, women, and children being harnessed to the carts—
dragged the blocks in pious enthusiasm to St. Denis.
The tomb of the martyred patron of Paris was a pilgrim shrine from
earliest days. The same trait in human nature that, in 1915, sent Americans
to gaze reverently at a relic of their national history, the Liberty Bell, when
on a two weeks’ journey from the San Francisco Fair to Philadelphia, it was
exhibited in different cities, made the early Christians of Gaul flock to
revere the relics of the holy man who had brought them the light and liberty
of the gospel. Religion then and all through the Middle Ages was fraught
with patriotism.
For St. Denis’ abbey a Merovingian church had been built by Dagobert.
Pépin and Charlemagne replaced it by a Carolingian church. By the XII
century the abbatial had become inadequate for the pilgrim crowds; people
were crushed to death on festival days, and Abbot Suger decided to rebuild.
He began by demolishing a heavy vestibule which Charlemagne had put up
as a kind of tomb over his father’s grave, for Pépin had begged to be buried
face downward in penance, before the abbey church. Suger replaced that
encumbering porch by what is to-day a narthex, or forechurch, formed by
the two westernmost bays of the edifice. In the thirties of the XI century he
started the new works. Romanesque feeling lingered in the sculpture, and
the stout vault ribs crossed each other in round arches. By 1140 the west
façade was finished and ceremoniously consecrated.
A month later, a still greater gathering met at St. Denis for the laying of
the corner stone of the choir. To the sound of trumpets, Louis VII descended

into the trench prepared for the foundation, and placed the first stone, and as
the choir chanted of the jeweled walls of the heavenly city, Lapides pretiosi
omnes muri tui, the king, profoundly moved, took from his finger a costly
ring and threw it into the mortar, which had been mixed with holy water.
Each baron and bishop, as he laid down a stone, did the same. Their
vehement faith would turn to literal meaning the Psalmist’s dream of the
celestial city.
In his choir, Suger united definitely the pointed arch with the intersecting
ribs, and the ribs, now, were not the heavy ones used in his forechurch. All
the arches at their crown were brought to the same height by a combination
of stilting, pointing, or depressing them. In the outer aisle of his ambulatory,
Suger introduced a fifth rib in each vault section, which welded the apse
chapels with the procession path. For his inner aisle he employed what is
called the broken-rib vault. First, the keystone was planted in the center and
from it branched the four ribs, each regardless of making a straight
diagonal. This became the generally accepted method for vaulting an
ambulatory. Every part of his edifice Suger supervised with untiring energy.
Owing to the waste of forest trees for machines of war, none of sufficient
girth could be found for the outer roof covering. Suger lay brooding over
this one night, then started up impetuously before dawn, took the
measurements of the beams needed, and himself went into the dense forest.
Before nine that morning he had found a giant tree; by noon ten others, and
the timber was hauled in triumph to the abbey.
All France was talking of the new works at St. Denis. Never before had
been such a gathering of skilled masons and sculptors, of goldsmiths and
glassmakers. St. Denis’ school was to direct the glassmakers’ art through
the second half of the XII century. Little is known of the origin of that art;
the early basilicas of Christian Gaul had made use of pieces of colored glass
framed together, and in the X century figures were represented. No work,
however, previous to the XII century has survived. For the earlier
fenestration the term “painted glass” is a misnomer, since each piece was
colored in the mass, and only a few black lines were applied to denote the
features, or the folds of the draperies. The artists of St. Denis obtained their
relief effects by a skilled juxtaposition of tones; intensity of hue was
increased by the employment of thick rough leaves of glass. Scarcely any
white was used; in the ancient windows no spots spring out unpleasantly.

To St. Denis’ school succeeded that of Chartres, which predominated
during the first part of the XIII century, while its second half was ruled by
the school of Paris, when windows of the Sainte-Chapelle type were the
rule. Gradually the craftsmen gave up their sound tradition that a window
should be a transparent mosaic, subordinate to its architectural setting. They
began to treat a window as an isolated picture and the art declined.
Abbot Suger’s school of glassmakers carried their art to its zenith. Not
all the wonders of XIII-century fenestration equaled the unfathomable
vibrant blue in the background of XII-century windows—a fugitive mystery
whose secret has been entirely lost. The popular fancy was that Suger
ground down sapphires to obtain his magic color.
All over the land the church builders desired windows like those of St.
Denis. Suger’s own craftsmen went to Chartres to make the three big
lancets in that cathedral’s western front. The St. Denis school influenced the
superb Crucifixion window in Poitiers Cathedral, and others in the
cathedrals of Angers and Le Mans and in the Trinité at Vendôme, also the
Tree of Jesse window in York Cathedral. And, had the choir glass of Notre
Dame at Paris survived, it would have been of the school of St. Denis.
Suger wrote inscriptions for his abbey windows to make their symbolism
clearer. Owing to the vicissitudes of seven hundred years, few of the St.
Denis lights have survived. Four are now reset in the central apse chapel
and in that to its north. In a medallion at the base of one of these windows
Suger himself is represented holding a scroll bearing his name. The
medallion figures are of the hieratic Byzantine type. Every window has a
closely woven pattern; each losenge has its own border, and a rich jeweled
border surrounds the whole lancet. Bracing bars of iron run straight across
the pictured story. Slowly, with infinite patience, worked those old XII-
century artists, and never has their handicraft been surpassed as sheer
splendor of ornamentation.
After three years and three months of passionate work, the choir of St.
Denis was finished, and on June 11, 1144, the dedication day, the relics
were installed. That date, forever memorable in the annals of architecture,
may be called the consecration of the national art. At the ceremony assisted
Louis VII with his queen, Aliénor of Aquitaine, whose strange destiny was
to make her patroness of that entirely different phase of Gothic called the
Plantagenet school. The chief barons were present at the dedication, as well

as five archbishops and some fourteen bishops. They looked and wondered,
and not a few of them returned home to imitate. The bishops of Noyon and
Senlis hastened to rebuild their cathedrals in the new way, and some of
Suger’s masons passed into the service of the former prelate. Bishop
Geoffrey de Lèves went back to Chartres to build the most beautiful tower
in the world, and the sculptors who had made Suger’s western portals (now
no longer extant) worked on the three west doors of Chartres.
On the day of St. Denis’ dedication, Abbot Suger, small and frail in
person, but towering in personality, was honored on every side. When the
abbot of great Cluny, Peter the Venerable, passed from the marvels of the
new church to Suger’s narrow cell, he cried out in honest distress: “This
man condemns us all. He builds, not for himself, but for God alone!”
Though the last half of Suger’s life was an example of monastic
simplicity, not always had he been content with a monk’s cell. Perhaps
because of his conversion midway in life, he appeals to us in a more human
way. Not that he was converted from evil doings; his purpose always was
high. But in his position as St. Denis’ abbot, as a powerful feudal lord, he
lived sumptuously, according to the accepted standards of the time. He
mixed freely in the world; he directed state affairs for the king to whom he
was devoted; he went on embassies; he even led armies. In 1124, when an
irate German emperor was marching on Rheims, which he had vowed to
destroy, Suger in person led against him some ten thousand of his abbey’s
retainers. That was the first time the oriflamme of St. Denis was carried as
the national emblem.[32] Suger had grown up in the secular atmosphere of
the Royal Abbey, and took its worldliness as a matter of course.
Of peasant parentage himself, he had been brought, a child of ten, to live
with the monks, because he already showed exceptional qualities. Among
his fellow students in the abbey school was the king’s son, the future Louis
VI, and an intimacy began between the two lads destined to continue till
death. When Suger became a monk he was sent on notable missions, for he
was gifted with tact and good manners, vivacity and charm. Sweetness of
disposition, mental energy, courage, and absolute integrity won for him
general esteem. Early and often this born lover of things beautiful made the
journey into Italy. It was while returning from one of his missions there, in
1122, that he learned of his election as abbot by his fellow monks in St.
Denis. Louis VI had come to the throne; henceforth Suger was to lead in all
state affairs.

The genius of this son of field workers had pierced to the vital need of
the age—unity of government. Only a strong, central administration could
cope with the disintegration which was feudalism. For its very existence the
feudal system depended on the absence of well-enforced general laws. It
was Suger’s strong hand that guided the early steps toward national unity,
and king and people worked for it together. Under the king whom Suger
served France began her great role of redresser of wrongs. Louis VI was the
first to use the title, king of France, not king of the Franks. The ideal of this
XII-century statesman was a strong central monarchy, coexistent with a
national assembly. His high conception of solidarity was to fructify, within
a hundred years, under Philippe-Auguste, the grandson of Suger’s master.
Suger was one of the first in Europe to understand political economy. He
laid the base of a sound financial administration. His confirmation of a
charter for the townsmen of St. Denis gave security to trade; he relieved the
abbey serfs of mainmorte, built a Villeneuve for homeless nomads, and
found time to study agriculture scientifically. In his writings we feel the first
breath of a national patriotism. A new note in that age of unfettered personal
impulse when might meant right, was Suger’s constant reference to “the
poor weighed down with taxations,” to “that which has been too long
neglected, the care of the surety of laborers, of artisans, and of the poor.”
Many a modern politician could well ponder Suger’s censure of the spoils
system. “The officers dismissed carry off what they can lay their hands on,”
he said, “and those who replace them, fearing to be likewise treated, hasten
to steal, to secure their fortune.”
Suger’s pre-eminence in public affairs continued during two reigns.
Louis VII, after stumbling some years without guidance, turned to his
father’s counselor and, during his absence on the Second Crusade,
appointed him regent of France. So masterly was the abbot’s rule that king
and people publicly proclaimed him Père de la Patrie. Suger studied the
causes of the crusade’s lamentable failure; he felt that forethought and
prudence might win success, and, though he was seventy years of age, he
began preparations to carry out a crusade at his own expense. Time was not
given him again to prove his genius for leadership. When news of his death
(1151) reached the court, the king and the Grand Master of the Templars,
who was with him, burst into tears. On his grave in the abbey church which
he had built they cut the simple inscription, “Here lies Abbot Suger.” No
need of panegyric. “The single names are the noblest epitaphs.”

The commanding place held by this monk in the estimation of Europe is
vouched for by letters from pope, kings, and many a dignitary. The king of
Sicily wrote to beg a line from him; the king of Scotland sent gifts; the
bishop of Salisbury made the journey to France expressly to know Suger.
By one clear stroke after another—and above all by his own writings—
every line of which is of historical value—the picture is filled in of this
admirable churchman who was as soundly honest and forceful as the
architecture he fostered, and whose delicate, ardent soul accomplished
remarkable things with the reasoned orderliness of the art he loved.
Suger’s sudden but thorough conversion is attributed to St. Bernard. Up
to middle life he had been a type of those who soar as high as human
abilities can reach without super natural aid. Entangled in the mesh of
various employments, his soul could not rise to heavenly things. Then the
trumpet of Bernard’s reform sounded in Europe. Men’s hearts were set on
fire with repentance and aspiration toward the highest. Bernard’s clear eyes
read beneath the outer circumstance of Abbot Suger’s life. He saw that here
was a good man, capable of becoming a holy one. He wrote fearless words
of disapproval. “One would think it was a governor of a province, not of
souls,” he wrote, when he saw the abbot of St. Denis ride by with sixty
horsemen.
Suger began to scrutinize his manner of life. Grace touched his soul,
pomp was laid aside, and he set about his conversion with the same
thoroughness that he displayed in all his acts. Before reforming his
monastery, he completely reformed himself. With St. Bernard, who was ten
years his junior, he was linked in ennobling friendship to the end. “I know
profoundly this man,” Bernard wrote of Suger to the pope, “and I know that
he is faithful and prudent in temporal things, that he is fervent and humble
in things spiritual. If there is any precious vase adorning the palace of the
King of Kings, it is the soul of the venerable Suger.” When Suger lay dying,
he wrote to St. Bernard: “Could I but see your angelic face before I die, I
should go with more confidence.” And Bernard, who was to follow in a
year, begged that when Suger reached Paradise he would “think of him
before God.”
Yet, if the overwhelming saint could change the whole tenor of Suger’s
life, the cultivated little abbot of St. Denis offered a gentle, stubborn
opposition to the puritanic ideas of Bernard in the domain of art. “Vanity of
vanities,” cried the ascetic, in the well-known open letter in which he

denounced the new luxury in church building. Churches were made too
long, he complained, too high, and needlessly wide; the capitals were
carved with monsters more apt to distract than to lead to pious recollection.
The art lover in St. Denis’ abbey smiled at such iconoclastic vehemence.
Suger thought that nothing was too precious for the house of God. He
proceeded to erect an abbey church as imposing as a cathedral, and to
enrich its treasury with goldsmith work. Over the three gilt-bronze entrance
doors of his church he inscribed, “The soul on its earthly pilgrimage rises
by material things to contemplate the Divine.” To this day both men have
vigorous partisans, and those who set out on a cathedral tour in France are
more likely to be on Suger’s side in the controversy.
Suger’s subtle mind reached beyond the ascetic’s maxim. Well he knew
that both saint and art patron were needed, well he knew that Bernard of
Clairvaux was as instrumental as himself in the formation of the cathedral
builders. A living example of Christian perfection, Bernard fortified the
faith of all Europe. He might advocate church simplicity, but it was not
without cause that his apostolate preceded the most fecund creative period
of mankind’s art. His impassioned love of God warmed the imaginations of
the men who began the big Gothic churches.
What remains to-day of the XII-century abbatial built by Suger of St.
Denis? Comparatively little. The lower parts of the west façade and the two
first bays of the nave which form a narthex, or vestibule, are his work. In
the choir, his beautiful ambulatory begins at the third bay of the double
aisles. There are nine bays of Suger’s processional path, and from them
radiate seven apse chapels. The pillars that divide the lovely curving double
passage are the very ones which the generous enthusiasm of the people
dragged from Pontoise, and, in memory of the little abbot, some will touch
those slender columns with reverential gesture. It was Suger who created
the disposition of the rond point found in its perfection at St. Denis and
copied in the great cathedrals. The crypt also is his work, though its nucleus
belonged to an underground shrine built by Abbot Hilduin in the XI century.
When Abbot Suger had finished his choir, he proceeded to make a new
Gothic transept and nave; but of them scarcely a vestige remains. Some
sculpture at the north door of the transept is of the XII century. Whether the
construction was faulty, or whether the monks desired a more ample church,
there was a total reconstruction of St. Denis’ abbatial, a hundred years after
Suger’s day.

THE ST. DENIS OF ST. LOUIS

Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense,
With ill-matched aims, the architect who planned
(Albeit laboring for a scanty band
Of white-robbed scholars only) this immense
And glorious work of fine intelligence.
—Wordsworth.

From 1231 to 1280, at St. Louis’ own expense, the present nave and
transept of St. Denis were built, and the first bay of the choir as well as the
upper parts of the chevet were reconstructed. Inasmuch as the new nave was
wider than the choir, a canted bay of the latter joined it to the transept.
St. Denis, as it now appears, presents the noble elegance of Gothic art in
its golden hour. The new transept was made of exceptional width; its aisles
and stately piers compose picturesque vistas. The triforium of the
reconstructed church was glazed, one of the first essays of a feature which
was to be in general use in the XIV century. To unite triforium and
clearstory in a brilliant sparkle of color added to the magnificence of a
church, but it marked a decline in the sound structural laws of Gothic. The
purpose of a triforium arcade was to beautify the plain wall surface
necessitated by the lean-to roof over the side aisles. When that blind arcade
was opened, the lean-to roof of the aisles had to be changed to a conical
one, which signified an inner channel for rain water and the ultimate
deterioration of the masonry. Suger’s St. Denis had started the delight in
stained glass, and the St. Denis of St. Louis merely carried out its
consequences—the suppression of wall inclosures. The present upper
windows of the abbatial are poor examples of Louis-Philippe’s day.
The architect of Louis IX, Pierre de Montereau, designed St. Denis as we
have it to-day, so says a record recently unearthed by M. Henri Stein.[33] He
was an innovator who here first accentuated the upward sweep of Gothic
lines. To that XIII-century master they attributed for a time the Sainte-
Chapelle of the king’s palace in the Cité, but now that it is certain that he
planned St. Denis, it is doubted if he made the Sainte-Chapelle, as there is
little kinship between the two. There is a decided likeness between St.
Denis and the chapel of the palace at St. Germain-en-Laye, and also with
the Lady chapel of St. Germer-en-Flay. Pierre de Montereau was buried in

1267 in a now-destroyed Sainte-Chapelle which he had erected within the
monastery inclosure of St. Germain-des-Prés, at Paris.
Both Montereau and Montreuil claim this distinguished master. Probably
he was born in the former town on the border of Champagne, as his church
at St. Denis shows a trait of that region, the gallery of circulation under the
windows of the side aisles. Moreover, two of his abbot patrons came from
Montereau. The architect Eudes de Montreuil, whom St. Louis took with
him on his first crusade, and who worked on the fortresses of Aigues-
Mortes and Jaffa, was a son of Pierre de Montereau, it is supposed, and his
name should be spelled in the same way.
No tomb in St. Denis’ abbey church predates the XIII century. To honor
King Dagobert, founder of the abbey, St. Louis put up an elaborate
monument and ordered the effigies that distinguish his royal predecessors’
graves. With the tombstone of St. Louis’ son, Philip the Bold, began portrait
work. An exact likeness of Charles V, the good Valois king, was made by
his Flemish sculptor, André Beauneveu, and of almost too great realism is
that of his general Bertran Duguesclin, whom King Charles ordered buried
with royal honors in the national necropolis.
It was the XVI century that added to St. Denis’ the three tombs of most
architectural pretensions, those of Louis XII, Francis I, and Henry II. The
monument of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany was undertaken (1516-32) by
Jean Juste, who with his brothers had come north from Florence, being
among the first to bring into France the ideals of the Renaissance.[34] It has
been suggested that the king’s and queen’s kneeling images are from the
studio at Tours of Guillaume Regnault, who for forty years was co-worker
with Michel Colombe, last of the great Gothic artists. The priants are still
quite French in treatment. Jean Juste made the gisants and his brother and
nephew aided with the lesser sculpture. It was Louis XII who ordered artists
at Genoa to make, in 1502, the Carrara marble tomb of his father, the poet-
duke, Charles d’Orléans, and of his grandfather, the murdered duke of
Orléans, builder of Pierrefonds Castle, and son of the art-loving Valois king,
Charles V.
The tomb of Francis I (1549-59) was designed by Philibert de Lorme.
Pierre Bontemps fashioned the bas-reliefs that celebrate the wars in Italy; he
and other masters made the priants and gisants. The tomb of Henry II and
Catherine de Medici (1570) of less artistic value, has a complicated history.

The Italian, Primatici, directed the works; Domenico Florentino made the
king’s kneeling figure, and Germain Pilon his gisant; Jerome della Robbia
chiseled the queen’s death image.
To sum up: there are in St. Denis’ abbatial three totally different parts,
built in different periods. There is Suger’s forechurch, in which linger
Romanesque echoes; there is the ambulatory of purest Primary Gothic built
a little later by the same great abbot; and finally there are nave, transept,
and the main parts of the choir erected during the reign of St. Louis in the
zenith of Gothic art.
As one stands in the center of the church, gazing along its vaulting, it is
easy to perceive that the axis is broken three times, and each divergence
from the straight line conforms to one of the different stages of work. The
deviation of the axis line once was called poetically inclinato capite (et
inclinato capite, emisit spiritum—St. John xix:30). It was thought to
symbolize the inclining of Christ’s head on the Cross. When M. Robert de
Lasteyrie proved that a constructive miscalculation was the cause of the
irregular line, the beautiful idea had to be renounced.[35] In each successive
addition to a church it was difficult for the architect to start the new part
exactly on the same axis as the old, since usually a temporary wall shut off
the portion of the church already finished and in use. The slightest
miscalculation at the start led to a very apparent deflection of alignment.
Those churches which show irregular alignment are known to have been
built in successive stages. A number of church choirs slant to the south,
whereas were the figure on the crucifix taken as model they would deviate
to the north. In churches without a transept, or, in other words, churches that
lack the extended arms of the cross, is sometimes found a decided slant to
the north. Moreover, the crucifix of that epoch represented a triumphant
Christ with erect head, for the art of the XIII century was serene; the
pathetic in religious iconography was a later development. No writer of the
period mentions a symbolic interpretation of the deviated axis, not even
Bishop Guillaume Durandus, in his noted Rationale, or Signification of the
Divine Offices. There is, instead, a text of the XIV century which says that a
certain architect was so chagrined at having built a tortuous axial line that
he never returned to be paid by the cathedral chapter. Mr. Arthur Kingsley
Porter thinks that the deviation of the axis was intentionally done, in order
to overcome that tendency of perspective which lessens the apparent length
of a church by foreshortening its far bays. By slanting the east end, the

distant bays could be brought into view, and thus the edifice would seem
longer.

St. Denis-en-France and Its Royal Mausoleums

The Royal Abbey of St. Denis suffered during the Hundred Years’ War,
from which period dates the crenelated wall at the birth of the towers. In
those checkered times the silver tombs of St. Louis, of his father Louis VIII,
and of his grandfather Philippe-Auguste, disappeared. In the XVI-century
religious wars the abbey was pillaged, and its library, a national treasure,
was burned. The Calvinists carried off Suger’s altar vessels of silver and
gold, on which the learned little abbot had inscribed Latin verses. The
Revolution completed the havoc; of the monks’ quarters nothing remains to-
day. The Committee of Public Safety voted to destroy the tombs of “our
ancient tyrants” on the first anniversary of the August 10th that had

unseated the monarchy. So the mob sallied forth to St. Denis and scattered
the dust of the patriot Suger, whose life work had been the public weal, and
the dust of St. Louis, the most conscientious man who ever ruled a nation
and the first to give France her written laws. The gruesome account of the
wrecking of the royal tombs was written by an eyewitness.[36]
In the opening years of the XVIII century, the abbey church was
described by Chateaubriand as in a ruinous state, with the rain falling
through its roof and grass growing on the broken altars: “The birds use its
nave as a passageway; little children play with the bones of mighty
monarchs. St. Denis is a desert.” Napoleon began its restoration, and many
of the scattered tombs were brought back. During the first half of the XIX
century some deplorably bad work was carried on, and the robust primitive
profiles were chiseled away. No sooner was the spire on the north tower
finished than cracks showed, and the tower was dismantled to the level of
the roof. Later changes have repaired some of the stupidity of those
tasteless renovators.
The very history which had been enacted within the walls of the great
abbatial would suffice to make it a national relic. To the Primary-Gothic
church which Suger was building came Louis VII for the oriflamme, the
banner carried before the army in momentous wars. He shared bed and
board with the monks the night before he set forth on the Second Crusade.
To the same early-Gothic church, in 1190, came his son Philippe-Auguste,
to receive the oriflamme for the Third Crusade. The flame-colored abbey
gonfalon on its gold lance flouted the German emperor when Bouvines’
great victory was won in 1214. At the funeral of Philippe-Auguste, in 1223,
a little lad of eight marched to St. Denis’ behind his grandfather’s bier. It
was the first time that the populace had beheld their future saint-king, and
an old record tells how his noble bearing gladdened their hearts. At his side
walked Jean de Brienne, king of Jerusalem, leader of the recent Fifth
Crusade. When St. Louis came to St. Denis for the oriflamme in 1247, it
was to find a totally reconstructed church, for Pierre de Montereau had been
many years at work. Joinville in his memoirs described the landing in Egypt
of the Royal Abbey’s banner, how for miles the sea was dotted with the
gleaming ships of the crusaders, how the king, standing head and shoulders
above the rest, on perceiving that the leading vessel which bore the
oriflamme had touched shore, leaped into the sea, sword in hand, with the
cry, “Montjoye St. Denis!” And uttering the same battle cry of France,

princes and knights followed. Five years later, tested by defeat and
imprisonment, as fine gold is by fire, Louis IX brought back the oriflamme
to St. Denis. Again he returned for it in 1270 for his last crusade. Within a
year, the whole nation, in mourning, came out to the abbey. In a reliquary,
the king’s bones, embalmed with fragrant spices, had been brought from
Tunis, and the new king bore the châsse solemnly, and wherever he paused,
on the way from Notre Dame to St. Denis, a memorial cross was erected.
But, to give the annals of the abbey church would be to tell the history of
the French monarchy.
The first time that the gonfalon of St. Denis was carried against
Frenchmen was in 1413, two years before the defeat at Agincourt, in the
black days of the Hundred Years’ War, days as fatal to the builders’ art as to
the civic life of France. What those dire times were that rent France to
shreds, and how la fille de Lorraine à nulle autre pareille came to the
rescue, have been sung by a poet whose high destiny it was to fall in recent
battle. Charles Péguy, in his poem, linked the momentous epochs of the
capital: St. Denis, who brought the Light; Ste. Geneviève, the sentinel
patroness of Paris, who guarded it, and Jeanne d’Arc, who lifted up the
torch from the mire—the torch which the fallen heroes of the World War
have passed on refulgent.
In the V century it was at Geneviève’s instigation that a basilica was
raised to honor St. Denis. In the XV century Jeanne d’Arc paid tribute to the
first martyr of Paris. Her troops lodged in the town of St. Denis, then moved
in closer to Paris, and in a shrine dedicated to St. Denis, in the village of La
Chapelle, Jeanne heard Mass, the morning that she led the assault on the
walls of Paris, September 8, 1429. When wounded she was carried back to
La Chapelle (to-day a dense industrial faubourg of the city), and on St.
Denis’ altar she offered tribute. During her trial at Rouen they asked her
what arms she had offered to St. Denis.[37]
“A complete knight’s outfit in white, with a sword that I had won before
Paris,” was Jeanne’s reply. “And why did you make that offering?” asked
the judge, bent on twisting her every act to sorcery. Jeanne answered
hardily: “For devotion, and because it is the custom for all men-of-arms
when they are merely wounded thus to give thanks. Having been wounded
before Paris, I offered my arms to St. Denis because his is the cry of
France.”

But let Charles Péguy speak, he who fell between Belgium and Paris in
August, 1914:[38]

Comme Dieu ne fait rien que par miséricordes,
Il fallut qu’elle [Ste. Geneviève] vît le royaume en
lambeaux,
Et sa filleule ville embrasée aux flambeaux,
Et ravagée aux mains des plus sinistres hordes;

Et les cœurs dévorés des plus basses discordes,
Et les morts poursuivis jusque dans les tombeaux,
Et cent mille innocents exposés aux corbeaux,
Et les pendus tiront la langue au bout des cordes;

Pour qu’elle vît fleurir la plus grande merveille
Que jamais Dieu le père en sa simplicité
Aux jardins de sa grâce et de sa volonté
Ait fait jaillir par force et par necessité;

Après neuf cent vingt ans de prière et de veille,
Quand elle vit venir vers l’antique cité ...
La fille de Lorraine à nulle autre pareille ...
Gardant son cœur intact en pleine adversité,
Masquant sous sa visière une efficacité,
Tenant tout un royaume en sa ténacité,
Vivant en pleine mystère avec sagacité,
Mourant en plein martyre avec vivacité ...
Jetânt toute une armée aux pieds de la prière.[39]

CHAPTER III

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

C’est vers le Moyen Âge énorme et délicat,
Qu’il faudrait que mon cœur en panne naviguât.
... Roi, politicien, moine, artisan, chimiste,
Architecte, soldat, médecin, avocat,
Quel temps! Oui, que mon cœur naufragé rembarquât.
Pour toute cette force ardente, souple, artiste!...
Guidé par la folie unique de la Croix
Sur tes ailes de pierre, ô folle Cathédrale!
—Paul Verlaine, Sagesse,
IV.[40]

T. 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 Châlons-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 assured 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 clustered 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 passing 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 æsthetically
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 passed 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 mediæval 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 shells 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 Compiègne,[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
Où les peuples entiers se mordent aux entrailles,
Un combat formidable aux cris désespérés,
Dont parleront longtemps les hommes effarés;
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 passed 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 noble 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 associations 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 Étienne de

Nemours (1188-1222), who had three brothers, also bishops and builders, at
Paris, at Meaux, and at Châlons, the sons, all four of them, of a lord
chancellor of France. In Noyon, Bishop Étienne was a sound administrator;
he was favorable to the municipality, 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 sexpartite system, which
embraces two bays, and has six branches from the keystone of each vault
section, was now substituted the barlong plan, where diagonals cover one
bay. The early-Gothic architects took up with enthusiasm the Normans’
sexpartite plan, but after using it for half a century they most sensibly
returned to the quadripartite system as better suited to their needs. The
sexpartite 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 sexpartite 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 clustered 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 clustered 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 façade towers and the middle section of the first bay.
The nave of Noyon is a noble vessel, with an interior four-story
elevation of happier proportions than was achieved in the transept. No
longer do annulets bind the clustered 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 Péronne—pitiful Péronne 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 Hôtel de Ville had been built in the dawn of the classic
Renaissance, and its fine façades 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.

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
shells 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 analysis has seized on all things, and it is leading us to death.
Man, we must not forget, lives intellectually by synthesis.... If archæology
is to make known the monuments of the past, it ought, before all else, to try

to make them loved, for, given the uncertitude of the future, it is in that love
that they will find their only chance of safety.
—Émile 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 bombé 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 mediæval sculpture. On the
lintel is related the Death of the Virgin and her Assumption, 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. Émile Mâle 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 mediæval 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 passed 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 assistance from the Mother of God with such
humility that the beholders wept. She founded a chapel in the cathedral.
A few years later, in 1191, the cathedral of Senlis was consecrated by
that archbishop of Sens who was Philippe-Auguste’s uncle, Guillaume of
Champagne, William of the White Hands, the prelate who had completed
the cathedral at Sens. And there came to the dedication Bishop Nivelon de
Chérisy, just starting Soissons’ Cathedral; Bishop Étienne de Nemours, at
work on Noyon’s; the prelate of Meaux, who was raising that cathedral; and
many another expert in the new art. Sometime later, Bishop Geoffrey
resigned his see, and in his place was elected Pierre Guérin, chancellor of
France under three kings, a figure worthy to stand beside those Gallo-
Roman bishops who remained as bulwarks of society when the Roman
Empire fell in pieces around them.
Bishop Guérin was a man possessed by a passion for the public weal.
His prudence and firmness caused Philippe-Auguste and Louis VIII to name
him executor of their testaments. One of his enterprises was the organizing
of the royal archives. It was he who came to Blanche of Castile to break the
news of her husband’s death as she rode out from Paris to meet Louis VIII
returning from the southern war. For Louis IX during his minority he
showed a father’s affection. “He governed marvelously well the kingdom’s
needs,” says the old chronicler, and when he died, on his grave they
inscribed, “Here lies Guérin, whose life was an untiring work.”

In early life Guérin had, in Palestine, become a Knight Hospitalier of St.
John of Jerusalem, and, as bishop, continued to wear the white habit of that
military order. At the battle of Bouvines, though not an actual combatant, he
exhorted the troops and directed maneuvers, for he was skilled in the
strategy of war. A survey of the enemy’s position made him urge Philippe-
Auguste to attack at once, and the king, who knew Guérin to be sages homs
et de parfont conseil, obeyed, thus winning the greatest victory of the
century. “On that day French unity received its baptism.”
The king had vowed, were his arms successful, to endow an abbey.
Bishop Guérin laid for him the first stone of the Abbaye de la Victoire, near
his episcopal city.[52] Before this greatest of the bishops of Senlis died, his
cathedral had begun to crown its southwest tower by the octagon and spire
which are the boast of all the Valois country. St. Louis must have
contributed to Senlis’ famous tower, which places in foremost rank, this, the
smallest cathedral in France. The unknown architect gathered features from
many a beacon to unite them here in a masterpiece. He may be said to have
created a new type, since his belfry at Senlis made a school in the region.[53]
The graduation of the upright shaft into the inclined plane, which in
every tower is the crucial point, has here been accomplished with such
address, such rhythm, that precisely at what instant the fusion takes place is
not to be determined. It has been said that the shaft of the tower is too high
in proportion to its spire; at a distance perhaps the criticism may seem
justified, but not on closer view. Some have thought that Senlis’ belfry was
a trifle too conscious of its charms, that it had not the calm poise of
Chartres’ tower. So it may be; there is more of the woman than the
archangel in it. Its personal graciousness has become so wedded with the
lives of Senlis’ townspeople that they wish it good morning as they pass.
The voyager will not find himself many hours in Senlis without pausing at
every coign of vantage to gain some new silhouette effect of the slender
beacon. It is charming when viewed in the same group as the Gallo-Roman
ramparts. And from the open door of the church of St. Frambourg,[54] it can
be studied at leisure.
In the original plan of Senlis’ Cathedral there was only an indication of a
transept—two small lateral chapels that open, to-day, from the choir aisle.
When, about 1240, the radiant tower was finished they undertook to make a
real transept. To insert one they had to do away with four bays of the nave;
some ancient columns in the west piers of the transept witness to this

change. In its present form the transept of Senlis belongs to the XIII century
only in its lower walls.
In 1504 a conflagration lasting several days destroyed the cathedral’s
upper vaulting and necessitated the total reconstruction of the clearstory. In
consequence, the exterior appearance of this very early Gothic church is
most decidedly Flamboyant. Only the apse and the west façade have
retained their Primary Gothic aspect. Chapels with complicated pendant
vaults were built, aisles were added, and balustrades put before the tribune
opening. Thick coats of whitewash coarsened the lines; in fact, restorations
have been so radical, and many of them so over-ornate, that this cathedral
has been called the Gothic of bad taste. An extreme criticism, for if some of
the changes are distressing, Senlis’ transept façades, which also are later
additions, are to be reckoned among the best work of the final phase of the
national art.
After the fire of 1504 the cathedral chapter sought assistance from the
king: “Plaise au Roy d’avoir pitié et compassion de la paoure église de
Senlis ... laquelle, par fortune et inconvénient de feu a été bruslée, les
cloches fondues, et le clocher qui est grant, magnifique et l’un des
singuliers du royaume, au moyen du dit feu tellement endommagé qu’il est
en danger de tomber.” Royalty responded generously as the sculpture
shows; at the transept’s portals are to be seen the porcupine of Louis XII,
the ermine of Anne of Brittany, and the salamander of Francis I.
Under the learned Bishop Guillaume Parvi, confessor to Francis I, was
laid the first stone of the transept’s elaborate south façade in 1521. On it
worked Pierre de Chambiges, son of the noted maker of late-Gothic
frontispieces, and Jean Dixieult. And when it was nearing completion in
1560 the north façade was begun, and finished by the latter master.
Effective, vivid, alertly handsome are Senlis’ transept fronts. The wise
traveler, even if he infinitely prefers the purer lines of early Gothic, will
learn to value this florid final expansion of the national art. The renewal of
builders’ energy in the XV and XVI centuries was a sumptuous phase
worthy of admiration. Those who are partial to English Gothic do not need
to be warned against depreciating French Flamboyant work. The advice to
be eclectic in travel, so as not to lose any source of artistic pleasure, is for
those whose ideal of the builders’ art is that of the Ile-de-France, comprised
between 1150 and 1250. For such the chief interest of Senlis will be the

cathedral’s apse, its main façade, and the splendid tower. Let them widen
their sympathies and take in the effective transept-fronts of the Flamboyant
rebirth.
Senlis of the towers, of the silent squares, of the quaint names—rue des
Fromages, rue du Puits-Tiphane, rue des Pigeons Blancs—a charming
aristocratic little city, set in an undulating Corot-like landscape, dotted with
country houses, was the very epitome of well-conditioned provincial life.
Before the summer of 1914 no spot on earth seemed farther removed from
violence and crime. Then came the invading hordes over the Valois land.
On September 2, 1914, the Germans surrounded Senlis, which, ville ouverte
though it was, they proceeded to bombard. One third of the obus that fell hit
the cathedral. That the guns, three miles away, were pointed on the famous
tower would seem to be proved by the fact that only those houses were
damaged which lay in the direct line between the German battery and Notre
Dame.
When the enemy entered the city the mayor (shot later in reprisal) met
them at the Hôtel de Ville. He had scarcely assured them that no troops
remained in Senlis when shots rang out: by ill luck some colonial colored
troops, on retiring, fired a salute. Thereupon followed the usual accusation
that civilians were the combatants, and the usual tragic scenes of reprisal.
Down the main street of the little city passed the trained wreckers of
peaceful homes, prying open the doors to throw in incendiary bombs.
Before night a whole section of Senlis lay an unsightly blackened ruin....
Then came the victory of the Marne and the invaders retreated. The havoc
done to the cathedral can be repaired, though, in the process, must be lost
the exquisite golden lichen stain which long ages had achieved. The
preservation of Senlis’ tower was due to a curé of the cathedral who
fearlessly pleaded for his church before the German commandant.

THE CATHEDRAL OF SENS[55]
What were Rheims and Soissons before their martyrdom but the
transfiguring of stone and metal and wood; dead matter delved from the
ground or hewn out of the forest, through the labor of man exalted into
forms of absolute beauty, and, because of this loving labor, transformed ...
into a mysterious creation that, in the words of Suger of St. Denis, was

neither wholly of earth nor wholly of Heaven, but a mysterious blending of
both.
—Ralph Adams Cram.[56]

Senlis’ Tower (c. 1230-1250)

Sens was a chief Celtic city at the intersecting of the Roman roads from
Lyons to Paris, from Orléans to Troyes. Long did it dispute the title of
primate of Gaul with Lyons and Rheims; even down to the XVI century
Paris was within its jurisdiction. To-day as the express trains rush by from
Paris to Marseilles, many a traveler looks out on a cathedral that seems to
over-tower and overpower a flat, sleepy little town whose name he scarcely
knows. When the cathedral was building in the XII century Sens was a
center of the nation’s life, and under a succession of noteworthy
archbishops reached its zenith.

Here at the Council of Sens, in 1140, was scheduled to take place a final
contest between St. Bernard and Abélard, and in that hour of enthusiasm
over abstract controversy, the king with his court and people of every
degree flocked to Sens for the schoolmen’s debate on the Trinity. At the last
moment Abélard, the inexhaustible arguer who had himself called for the
test, quitted the combat. Some twenty years later Pope Alexander III spent a
year and a half in Sens, and hither came Thomas Becket to seek papal
indorsement for his opposition to Henry II’s interference in church affairs.
Between these two events, 1140 to 1164, lies the building of Sens
Cathedral. At the time of Abélard’s and St. Bernard’s visit the present
edifice had been started. During the residence here of Alexander III and the
archbishop of Canterbury it was nearing completion. The pope is recorded
as dedicating an altar.
For a time Sens usurped the claim to be the oldest of the Gothic
cathedrals. Its choir was started as Romanesque, but the walls rose slowly,
and before a stone roof crowned the ambulatory the new system of building
had conquered public opinion. The choir-aisle walls, intended to carry a
groin vault, were rearranged to bear one with diagonals. On the outer wall
the diagonals were caught on corbels placed above the capitals, and though
such an arrangement shows maladroitness, the ribs themselves were made
by no novice hand. Sens was a pioneer in the use of the broken rib to avoid
the curving of diagonals: from each keystone, set precisely in the center of
each section, branched the four ribs.
The walls of the procession path and an apsidal chapel opening on the
transept’s north arm, are the oldest parts of Sens Cathedral. It is true that
they antedate the dedication of St. Denis, but not by a few Romanesque
vestiges can Sens substantiate its claim to be the first built of Gothic
cathedrals. In its main parts it belongs to the third quarter of the XII
century. It was a distinct advance on Noyon and Senlis, because it
eliminated the deep tribunes over the side aisles. One of the striking
characteristics of Sens is the way that light floods it from the aisle windows,
which are on a noble scale. Because the church was built during a tentative
hour its deficiency lies in the height of the central nave. For right
proportion, when flanked by such lofty aisles, the nave should have been
made considerably higher.
Sens Cathedral was begun by Archbishop Henri-le-Sanglier (1122-43) to
replace a church dedicated at the end of the X century. Such strides has

mediæval archaeology taken in France during the last generations, it is hard
to believe that serious students, during the Congrès Archéologique held at
Sens in 1840, could have considered the present edifice to be the one
dedicated before 1000.
Henri-le-Sanglier had been appointed by Louis VI to the see of Sens
before he had received holy orders, and in the lax spiritual standards of the
day, he saw no harm in living like the feudal lord he was by birth. He had
not Thomas of Canterbury’s unbending consistency. When his worldliness
was censured by St. Bernard he changed his way of life, and ultimately
proved himself a loyal and humane pastor.
Of the six archbishops who were to follow him as builders of Sens’
metropolitan church, all of them were national figures. Under the long rule
of Hugues de Toucy (1143-68) the church was mainly erected. He was the
friend of Abbot Suger the pioneer, the friend, too, of Bernard the
regenerator, who came as his guest to Sens, after preaching the Second
Crusade at Vézelay. The same hospitable bishop welcomed on two
occasions the exiled archbishop of Canterbury. The second visit of St.
Thomas Becket was when he had been forced to quit the abbey of Pontigny,
situated close by over the Burgundian border, because Henry Plantagenet
swore to close every Cistercian house in his English and French domains if
further refuge were offered the prelate. Moved by the welcome given him in
his distress by the archbishop of Sens, the famous Englishman cried out—
so his secretary, Herbert of Bosham, records: “Ah, we have proved the truth
of the old saying—‘douce France! ô douce encore, ô très douce France!
Oui, elle est douce, vraiment douce, la France!’”
By a series of logical inferences the name of the architect of this Primary
Gothic cathedral has been added to the roll call of honor. It is known that
Guillaume de Sens, a French master, was chosen in 1174 by the chapter of
Canterbury to rebuild their cathedral, destroyed by fire. He drew the plan of
Canterbury and had put up its apse, its Lady chapel, and two bays of the
choir, when one day he fell fifty feet from a scaffold, and returned, in 1180,
to his native land to die. An English architect, also named William,
continued the works at Canterbury, always on the plan of French William.
Now the chevet of Canterbury has strong analogies with that of Sens.
There is the same single chapel in its axis; at Sens other apse chapels were
added in the XVI and XVIII centuries. The profiles were alike in both

cathedrals, and so were the sexpartite vaulting and the embryo transept. In
both Canterbury and Sens is an exceptional feature, of Champagne origin,
which could hardly have been used accidentally by two men in the same
generation. Each alternate pier, at Sens, consists of twin columns, placed
side by side according to the width, not the length, of the church. At
Canterbury, despite subsequent rebuildings, the same arrangement is still to
be found in the bay before the sanctuary.
Guillaume de Sens was too prominent to have copied another man’s
work, and since it is certain that the plan of Canterbury is his, it is now
accepted that he built the cathedral of his native town before he proceeded
to England. The homogeneous choir and nave of Sens show that they are
the work of the years preceding 1175. And Guillaume’s claim to be Sens’
architect is further strengthened by a historic link. Not only did Thomas
Becket spend three weeks with Archbishop Hugues de Toucy on his first
arrival in the city during the pope’s stay there, but, after quitting Pontigny,
he passed some years in St. Colombe monastery by the town. Without a
doubt he knew the master-of-works who was erecting the cathedral, and it
may have been he who, on his return to his own see, made the French
architect’s skill known to his cathedral chapter. Guillaume was not called to
Canterbury, however, till after the martyrdom of its great archbishop.
Sens Cathedral was completed by a prince of the reigning house of
Champagne, a son of Thibaut the Great, Archbishop Guillaume-of-the-
White-Hands (1168-76). He, too, was Becket’s stanch supporter, and
denounced his murder to the pope, though by blood he was Henry II’s
cousin. In 1178 he crossed to England to pray by the tomb of the newly
canonized saint—one of the first of the Canterbury Pilgrims who for over
three hundred years were to wend their way to the shrine in Kent. Through
his influence, Becket’s friend and adviser, John of Salisbury, the ablest
scholar of his generation, was raised to the see of Chartres. Both William of
Champagne and John of Salisbury received episcopal consecration from the
hands of good Maurice de Sully, the builder of Paris Cathedral. In his later
life Archbishop Guillaume was transferred to the see of Rheims, and in that
cathedral he anointed as king his own nephew, Philippe-Auguste, whose
prime minister he was; when Philippe II went on the Third Crusade he left
as regents his uncle and his mother, Alix of Champagne. The archbishop’s
affection for his nephew led him to sanction the king’s divorce from
Ingeborg of Denmark and his marriage to Agnes of Méran, which drew on

France the papal interdict, and on William of Champagne the censures of
Innocent III.
The house occupied by Thomas Becket, in the cloister of Sens Cathedral,
was decorated by a statue of him, which disappeared during the Revolution.
During excavations in the cloister, in 1899, they came upon an image
representing a bishop, and marked with the seal of Archbishop Guillaume-
of-the-White-Hands. The statue is now set up in the choir aisle on the site
where once stood an altar dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury.
The tutelary of Sens Cathedral is St. Stephen, the first martyr. A XII-
century statue at the trumeau, or central shaft, of the west door presents him
as the beautiful youthful servant of the Lord. Gazing at it one thinks of St.
Augustine’s words: “The Church would never have had St. Paul but for St.
Stephen’s prayer.” Paul, holding the robes of those who stoned Stephen,
heard the martyr pray for his executioners. The trumeau statue of St.
Etienne with its parallel feet marks the transition from the column image,
such as those at Chartres’ western portal, to the XIII-century type of saintly
personages at the doors of Rheims and Amiens. It escaped mutilation during
the Revolution because some one had the wit to write on the stone tablet in
the saint’s hand, The Book of the Law. The foliage relief on the shaft is
exquisite.
As the XII century closed the archbishop of Sens was Michel de Corbeil
(1194-99), a well-known scholastic writer. Under him and Pierre de Corbeil
(d. 1222), his successor and also a learned teacher from the Paris schools,
the axis chapel at Sens was rebuilt, and the upper vaulting of choir and nave
reconstructed in order to enlarge the windows. As the longitudinal or wall
arches were now raised to the level of the keystone, the bombé shape of the
vault disappeared; in the chevet the wall ribs show as many as three sets of
capitals. The vault sections of the side aisles, however, remained domical,
as originally built.
Two other distinguished brothers, men of great lineage and intellectual
attainment, ruled the see of Sens during many years, Gautier de Cornut
from 1222 to 1241 and Gilles de Cornut, who died in 1254; and they had a
brother who busied himself with the new cathedral at Beauvais. Gautier de
Cornut, who while doctor of law in Paris University served as chaplain to
Philippe-Auguste and Louis VIII, was the envoy sent in 1234 to fetch
Marguerite of Provence to be married to Louis IX in Sens Cathedral, the

king then being in his twentieth year. The young princess of the art-loving
Midi came north accompanied by a troop of minstrels. Again in 1239 St.
Louis returned to Sens for the Crown of Thorns, on its transit from Venice
to Paris, and he walked out some miles from the city to meet it. Barefooted,
he and his brother, Robert of Artois, bore back the previous relics to the
cathedral, through streets hung with tapestries and lighted by candles. The
relic rested in St. Étienne’s church all night and then in a solemn, eight-day
procession was carried to Paris. The king had the archbishop write the
formal account of it all. Gautier de Cornut erected the synodal hall which
touches the cathedral’s façade, and his own statue and that of the young
king decorated its buttresses. The best civic monument of St. Louis’ reign
many think it to be, and as perfect in its own way as the hospital hall at
Ourscamp, its contemporary.
In 1267 the cathedral’s southwest tower fell; it may have been one built
in Carolingian times from the proceeds of a gold retable, or it may have
been a XII-century tower of Archbishop Hugues de Toucy’s time, as are the
two lower stories of the present northwest tower. Its fall necessitated the
remaking of the last two bays of the nave and of the damaged western doors
during the early XIV century. The side chapels were built then, too, but they
have been rehandled in the present day, and are now dissimulated behind an
arcaded wall. A record of 1319 speaks of the able Nicholas de Chaumes as
architect here before he proceeded to Meaux Cathedral. He demolished the
ancient chapel on the transept’s southern arm, but its corresponding chapel,
on the transept’s northern arm, still exists and is, with the ambulatory walls,
the oldest part of the church. Not till after the Hundred Years’ War,
however, was the plan to erect a new transept carried through.
Sens then possessed as its archbishop, during forty years, the energetic
Tristan de Salazar (d. 1519) who had fought, sword in hand, with Louis XII
in the Italian wars. Like Bishop Jacques d’Amboise, who was then finishing
at Paris the present Musée Cluny as town house for his abbey of Cluny,
Archbishop de Salazar built the Hôtel Sens in Paris for his diocesan house.
To his own cathedral he added the southwest tower’s upper story (to which
later a Renaissance lantern was attached) and he connected the synodal hall
with the episcopal palace by a rich gallery. Some sculptured panels now
attached to a pier in the nave of Sens Cathedral originally formed part of a
tomb he had made for his parents. It was this munificent art patron who
began the late-Gothic transept. In 1490 the most notable architect of the

day, Martin Chambiges, was invited to direct the work, and for four years
he gave it his personal supervision until called to Troyes to make the
Flamboyant Gothic façade of that cathedral.
Sens Cathedral contains some ancient windows, four of which are
among the best in France and allied with Suger’s school, though probably
executed as the XIII century opened, since the saddle bars follow the
outline of the medallion pictures. Those four exceptional windows of the
choir aisle sparkle with the jeweled intensity of the golden age of the vitrine
art. In one of them is told the story of St. Eustace, often to be met with in
French iconography, since he figured in the Golden Legend. Another
describes the return to England of Thomas Becket and his immediate
martyrdom. Originally next to it hung a companion lancet, giving Becket’s
early life, but this was done away with to make room for a chapel. The
other two lancets are of the Biblia Pauperum type. In one, the parable of the
Prodigal Son is given. In the other is the story of the Good Samaritan, and
the half medallions on either side of each central scene interpret it
symbolically. Such correlation of the Old and the New Testament was most
popular in the Middle Ages. Beside a medallion which shows the traveler
fallen among thieves stands the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the
Garden of Eden; and the scene of the charitable Samaritan is accompanied
by pictures of the Saviour’s death and resurrection. They might not be able
to write and read, the ordinary men and women of that day, they had no
daily journal to crowd their minds with half-digested facts, but their souls
were fed by sound ethical truths set forth clearly in their one great book, the
cathedral. The artisan donors of such windows we may be sure knew the
symbolic meaning of every panel.
In the clearstory windows at the curve of Sens’ choir is more XIII-
century glass, but it is later work, lacking the marvelous glow of the choir-
aisle lancets. The two big roses of the transept are splendid. A celestial
concert was then a favorite theme. The south rose (1500) was made by the
same Champagne artists, Lyénin, Varin, Verrat, and Godon who filled the
nave of Troyes Cathedral with its high-colored translucent woodcuts. The
north rose of the transept finished in 1504, was the work of native masters,
influenced by the noted school of Troyes. The side windows in Sens’
Flamboyant transept are equally good.[57]
Jean Cousin, born in Sens, 1501, made two of the cathedral’s windows,
the rich one of St. Eutropius, in the nave, and the Tiburtine sibyl of amplest

design, in the shrine to the south of the axis chapel. Nothing could be more
resplendent as picture windows, but Gothic-Renaissance work, whose
tendency was to treat each light as an isolated picture, is not equal to the
close-woven patterns of XII-and XIII-century mosaic glass, which kept
itself in subordination to its architectural setting. The immense superiority
of the earlier windows is demonstrated in Sens Cathedral, which offers us
both types at their best.

The Interior of Laon Cathedral (XII Century). View from the Tribune Gallery

THE CATHEDRAL OF LAON[58]

And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven
from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.—Apoc. xxi:2, used
in the office for the dedication of a church.
While Sens, Noyon, and Senlis were building, the splendid cathedral of
Laon was begun, about 1160. The usual transition features of Primary
Gothic showed in its retention of tribunes over the side aisles, in the
simultaneous use of round and pointed arches, the beringed colonnettes, and
the salient transept arms. The chapel, in two stories, that opened on each
arm of the transept, was another Romanesque tradition.
The interior of Laon, “the cathedral of Purity, Silence, and Power,” is
indeed most impressive. One bay follows another with a regularity that is
accentuated by the interior elevation being in four stories—pier arcade,
tribune arches, triforium wall arcade, and clearstory. It is not a lofty church,
but, like English cathedrals, what it lacks in height is compensated for in
length. There are eleven bays in the nave, and ten in the choir. Moreover,
because it was comparatively low it could build a square transept-crossing
tower, and the average French cathedral was too high for such a tower to be
artistic. Laon and Braine were exceptions among Ile-de-France churches in
having central lanterns; they were derived from Normandy, since the
Rhenish lantern usually was octagonal. Strange as it may seem to say of the
most prominent, most open, and best-lighted part of a church, there is a
blessed seclusion beneath the wide white tower of Laon that “shuts the
heart up in tranquillity.”
Down the long church, the stout monolithic piers make two virile lines.
Only during a short period were such sturdy cylinders used, here and in
Notre Dame at Paris are the chief examples, and both cathedrals were
artistically right in preferring their uniform columns, even though both of
them used the sexpartite vaulting that called for alternating ground supports.
The coming cathedrals were to adopt once for all the barlong system of
vaulting, where the concentration of loads fell equally on every bay, and to
evolve a classic type of pier, consisting of a central cylinder flanked by four
semi-attached columns. At Laon a few piers in the nave experimented with
free-standing colonnettes, three of which were placed in front of the pillar
to enlarge, there, the abacus of the capital on which stood the shafts that
mounted to the vault-springing. The elliptical piers of Beauvais, longer

from north to south, were to be the most perfect solution of the problem of
ground supports.
There is no denying that Laon’s interior is to-day too white, but we must
remember that originally color was used on the stones, so that any effect of
a hall would have been impossible in the olden times. Viollet-le-Duc called
Laon the laic cathedral par excellence. He considered it a great civic hall
wherein the populace “could unite and enjoy spectacles more or less
profane.” And even in the flat eastern wall he found something occultly
heretical. The towers, he said, were more those of a château than a church.
He shut his mind to the fact that Laon was erected largely by its bishops,
that it was begun by the choir end, which is suitable only for divine service,
and that if its seven towers had been crowned with the sky-pointing spires
of the architect’s plan, and if its sky-dreaming windows were still intact,
there would be little of the aspect of a town hall about this stately church.
Critics like Huysmans have exaggerated its present iciness: no one can pray
in Laon, he exclaimed; its soul is fled forever. But what would be Chartres,
his spot of election for prayer, were it unsoftened by its “storied windows
richly dight”?
Only a slight amount of ancient glass has survived in Laon. The north
rose of the transept shows pictures of the sciences. Beneath the rose
window in the flat eastern wall are three handsome lancets made by the
school of Chartres early in the XIII century. They show the passing away of
the hieratic Byzantine gesture: in the Annunciation and Visitation
medallions the robes float naturally; in the Nativity scene the natural
gesture of a woman who tests the warmth of the water before bathing the
Holy Child has been well rendered.
If a lack of accessories makes the interior of Laon Cathedral seem to-day
more philosophic than religious, there are certain lovable individual touches
in it that warm both heart and imagination. In the first place it is a church
fairly garlanded with springtime foliage. The wonder of eternal youth is in
its half-curled leaves which the sculptors conventionalized just enough to
make them architectural. Not one sprig, not one leaf is like another. Never
was nature more profoundly loved or more convincingly interpreted.
Then there are the stone bulls of Laon. They stand high on the western
towers, those sixteen massive oxen, stretching their necks, as if watching
the people climb the steep hill below. Each stands under a columned

canopy. The popular fancy is that they commemorate the patient beasts who
dragged the stones for the cathedral up Laon’s precipitous crags, and there
is nothing improbable in the idea. It was a day when St. Francis was telling
man to love his dumb fellow creatures. The towers of Laon Cathedral are
worthy of the magistral setting of the church on the edge of the abrupt hill
where had grown the ancient city. For miles Laon’s towers command the
plain, “an assembly without rival among Gothic monuments.” Incomplete
though they are, Laon’s five towers come nearer to the ideal plan of seven
spires than does any other cathedral. The corner tourelles pass from one
form to another, as they rise, converting themselves into octagons. “Ponder
it well,” wrote the XIII-century architect, Villard de Honnecourt, in his
famous sketchbook. “I have been in many lands, as you can see by this
book, but never in any place is to be found a tower equal to Laon.”
Four of the towers are alike, each with the same long lancet openings,
the same free-standing pillars at the corners. Rows of crockets mark the
main lines, for the old-time masters were adepts in every device whereby to
fix the eye on the essential. There are aspects when the fretwork designs
made by Laon’s towers against the sky are superb.
The date of the cathedral long gave rise to discussion in the days when
mediæval archaeology was still hazy. No one now contends that the present
Notre Dame is the church which was patched up hastily by Bishop
Bartholomew de Vir after the fire of 1112. That conflagration was a semi-
lawless act. Laon’s bishop was also its feudal proprietor, hence a greedy
baronage contended to hold the see. One Gaudry, a knight adventurer who
had served under William the Conqueror in England and there grown rich,
obtained the bishopric of Laon by simony. All his talk was of hawks,
hounds, and hunting. During one of his absences in England the
townspeople set up a commune, and Gaudry bent his energies to frustrate it.
In an uprising in 1112 the infuriated populace murdered him. The fire,
started during the riots, spread to the cathedral, which was practically
consumed. The burghers, being unskilled in arms, were forced to call to
their aid a fierce robber-baron of the house of Coucy, Thomas of Marle,
who, according as he found it profitable, fought, now against, now for, the
communes.[59] It took the king of France half a lifetime to destroy that
“raging wolf,” as Abbot Suger called him.
Guizot has brought out that the XII-century uprisings against feudal
exactions on the part of the burgesses were often favored by king and

clergy. Such was the unformed state of society that no liberal general views
could be adhered to; the king is to be found granting charters to some towns
and marching against the rebellious citizens in others. The bishops of
Noyon, Beauvais, and Soissons favored the people’s claims. The prelates of
Rheims and Laon opposed them. Such feudalism as that of Thomas of
Marle meant permanent anarchy; for the royal power to centralize authority
then meant law and order.
It is sad to relate that no sooner did the burgess gain his civic rights than
he began to oppress the peasantry. Before the XIII century closed there
were outbreaks of the peasants against the prosperous townspeople. In our
own day has the cry of the underman, voiced by the old Norman poet, been
silenced? “We are men as they. The same in stature, the same in limb, and
the same in strength—for suffering. Are we not men even as they?”
At Laon the antagonism between bishop and citizens continued for a
century; several times the charter was won, only to be abrogated later. There
is food for thought that all through the embittered struggle the building of
the cathedral was carried forward, and it was an enterprise that required the
collaboration of bishop and people. The people might fight their baron
bishop to wrench from him certain civic rights, but they were aware of the
difference between his temporal claims and his spiritual authority. Their
robust faith was not disconcerted by a discrepancy between “Peter’s key”
and “Peter’s sword.” To the end of time Peter will show his weak human
side. Had he not denied thrice? Had not another of the selected twelve
betrayed for paltry lucre? Had not everyone of them run away in the hour of
need?
While Bishop Gaudri’s ill-gotten gains were buying him a bishopric
there was in Laon’s cathedral chapter a famous scholar who had stoutly
opposed his election. Anselm of Laon, son of a laborer, “the grave, the
sweet, the prudent,” was a pupil of St. Anselm of Bec and Canterbury. For
over forty years he taught in Paris and in Laon, and from the nucleus of his
pupils, among whom were Guillaume de Champeaux and Abélard, was to
emerge Paris University, which was not, however, to appear by name in
history till 1215. Anselm of Laon (d. 1117), like his greater namesake, was
a pioneer in scholasticism, which brought to the study of Christian doctrine
not only the aid of tradition, the Old and New Testaments and the Church
Fathers, but also the use of metaphysics and dialectics. The school of this

master at Laon became a veritable university to which flocked students
from Italy, Spain, Germany, and England.
Laon Cathedral is justly entitled to carve the Liberal Arts on its façade. A
score of the coming notable men of the XII century were Anselm’s pupils;
one of them was that bishop who began the Primary Gothic tower of the
cathedral at Rouen. Anselm and his brother trained the youths who, having
heard St. Norbert of Cologne preach in Laon Cathedral, in 1120, followed
him to Prémontré, in the forest of Coucy, which estate gave its name to the
new order Norbert there founded. Like the Cistercians, so swift an increase
had the white canons of Prémontré that they soon counted a thousand
houses over Europe and were an evangelizing force for their century even
as Cluny had been earlier and as the Franciscans and Dominicans were to
be in the XIII century. The citizens of Laon clamored for Anselm as their
bishop when the miserable Gaudri was killed in 1112, but he declined the
honor and directed the choice to the worthy Bartholomew de Vir, who
restored temporarily the cathedral.
It is not known exactly when was laid the foundation stone of Laon’s
Gothic cathedral. By its sculpture, the profiles, and the noticeable
keystones, the archæologists say that it belongs to the last third of the XII
century and that it kept to its original plans, though its building continued
into the first third of the XIII century. The bishop-founder was a pupil of
Anselm’s and himself had taught rhetoric in Paris. Gautier de Mortagne
(1155-71) gave generously of his own revenues to the new works. The choir
he built ended in a semicircle and consisted of the present three bays next
the transept. There, and in the west wall of the transept, the profiles are
different from those elsewhere in the church.
In a second spell of work they finished the transept, the nave, the towers,
and the west façade just before 1200. Laon’s façade ranks among the great
western frontispieces of Gothic architecture, a model for that of Rheims.
What chiefly characterizes it are the profound shadows made by cavernous
porches, projecting gables, and other varied surfaces. It has been called a
supreme composition in light and shade. In accentuating the upward surge
of lines it was a pioneer. When the façade was finished the choir was
lengthened by seven bays, and now was terminated by a flat wall whose
prototype is to be found in Laon town in the church of St. Martin, an early-
Gothic edifice, building about 1165. Various regional churches used the
square chevet. As the custom died out in France, it struck root in England,

where the Cistercians made it popular. Those accustomed to the rectagonal
chevet of the English cathedral may prefer that type, but to a lover of the
apse of the French cathedral, of the curving procession path with its
radiating chapels that mystically suggests the thorn crown around the
Sacred Head, it will ever seem a dull way to end a sanctuary precisely like a
transept arm.
The cathedral of Laon was consecrated in 1237. That same century built
the treasure hall and the large chapel beside the west façade. The XIV
century added side chapels between the buttresses, and in those chapels at
Laon appears the academic precision of that skilled but dry period. About
the same time was made a new southern portal for the transept, and the
wheel window over it was replaced by a big Rayonnant Gothic light.
The hill citadel called by Charlemagne in the Chanson de Roland “my
good town of Laon” was held by the invader from August, 1914, to
October, 1918. Though the city was shelled by the French, not a piece of
glass in the cathedral was broken. St. Martin’s abbatial, too, is intact, and
the XII-century Templar’s church, the only well-preserved monument in
France built by the great military Order. The Prussians’ horses were stabled
at first in the cathedral till a general public protest stopped such a
desecration. When the Allies, under General Foch, drove back the German
lines in the final weeks of the war, the retreat was too swift for much havoc
to be wrought. On October 13, 1918, General Mangin made his triumphal
entry into Laon, whose much-enduring citizens flocked around him in the
cathedral to chant a solemn Te Deum.

THE CATHEDRAL OF SOISSONS[60]
The other evening before the ruins of a Cistercian abbey, that once
harbored St. Louis and his mother, Blanche of Castile, a group of Alpine
chasseurs and Zouaves fell to recounting their daily feats of heroism just as
in the times of chivalry the strong, swift strophes of the chanson de geste
celebrated knightly prowess. To the north, the cannon thundered.... And the
next morning, a Sunday, I assisted at Mass in a Gothic-vaulted hall that had
served as promenoir for the monks of Cîteaux. Soldiers filled all the
wooden seats, others thronged the threshold, bareheaded in the shadow of
the ruins.... Then when the sacrifice of the body and blood of our Lord was
celebrated, a song rose in the dawn: “Kyrie Eleison! God be praised!” And

the soldiers within the chapel and without sang before returning to battle as
in the ancient Chanson de Saucourt: “Kyrie Eleison!” Even those
harnessing the great cart horses, those saddling their own restive mounts,
those extinguishing the fires of the night’s bivouac, and those charging the
six-wheeled camions, all took up the canticle: “God be praised! Kyrie
Eleison!”.... And the implacable cannonading to the north echoed in the
deep quarries, whence had come the stones builded here for God’s glory.
—A war picture of Longpont abbey,[61] by Gabriele d’Annunzio, who visited
the battle-front in 1914.

The Oxen on Laon’s Towers

To-day the fair white city of Soissons lies a scene of desolation, only to
be likened to a wrecked town of old-time barbarism. They say that Soissons
Cathedral is more damaged than if a geological convulsion had wrecked it.
Deliberately was it taken as a target, though, as French troops held the
highlands round the flat town, there can be no excuse that the towers were
used as posts of observation. The westernmost bays are ruined; the north
side of the big church has been riddled with projectiles; flying buttresses
have been cut off; great rents show in roof and sides; the vaulting hangs in
air; a pier lies prone, its stones scattered like a pack of cards; the aisles are
dismantled, and the windows, some of which Blanche of Castile gave in
1225, have been reduced to powdered dust. In one week of January, 1916,
over three hundred projectiles fell on the church, said the old priest, who
lived in the midst of the wreckage, to a visitor to whom he spoke gently of
God’s mercy. In the once “sweet and tranquil provincial city, whose soul
was the daughter of honorable simplicity, grass grows in the street. Soissons
is a dead city. Its casementless windows fix you like the eye of the blind.”
Always has it lain in the path of war, this ancient capital of Clovis that has
ever been part of the very heart of France, but never war such as this!
Here, in 486, Clovis won the battle of Soissons that annihilated the last
remnant of Rome’s empire in Gaul, and conquered the land to the Loire. In
the evil days of the Hundred Years’ War, Soissons suffered. So depopulated
was it by the XVI-century religious wars that it took over a century to
recover. Nor did the Revolution spare the seat of the ancient monarchies of
France. In 1814 occurred an explosion of gunpowder that wrecked precious
windows in the cathedral, some of them the gifts of Philippe-Auguste. In
1870 the Prussian bombardment of Soissons devastated what remained of
the abbey church of St. Jean-des-Vignes, whose Flamboyant Gothic spires
have been mutilated again in the World War.[62]
Under the southern flank of the shattered cathedral nestles the diamond
of Primary Gothic art in France, the transept arm built by the crusading
bishop, Nivelon de Chérisy. As by a miracle it has escaped. The most
exquisite thing in France, many of us hold it to be. It has drawn its devotees
back to Soissons time and time again, this perfect thing so little heralded.
They would test a second and a third time the overpowering first impression
it had made. Perhaps it had been some happy mood, some subtle lingering
shadows of the late afternoon, that had touched it momentarily to an
ethereal grace. And then standing face to face again with its small and

stately beauty, those who love this early-Gothic monument of France know
that its power is not a chance or borrowed comeliness.
Sit before it for hours; study the mystery and play of its lights and
shadows; try to seize in what lies its young poesy of grace, its maturity of
dignity, “its invincible impression of virginity.” In vain to analyze it. Can
that intangible quality which is sheer inevitable beauty be dissected? Those
who fall under the spell of its supernal loveliness lose all false shame that
would prune adjectives, lest their praise be excessive. No glow of words
can convey the something celestial here. The nave and the choir of Soissons
Cathedral are XIII-century Gothic at its prime, and yet they seem merely to
be the setting for a jewel, for the small apse preceded by one bay, which is
the transept’s southern arm. That apse and bay are the culmination of the
Romanesque ideals, and at the same time, indissolubly part of the new and
richer art, they crown the Primary Gothic hour.
Soissons’ chief church is better documented than Laon’s. Bishop Nivelon
I de Chérisy (a Chérisy fell on the field of honor in 1914) occupied the see
from 1176 to 1207. The Romanesque cathedral which he inherited had
become inadequate, so the bishop gave land from his episcopal garden, and
about 1180 the foundation of the south arm of the transept was laid. Like
Noyon’s transept, it terminated in a hemicycle, and its interior elevation was
also in four stories, but here was attained a consummate symmetry not
achieved at Noyon. Soissons’ curving transept arm is exceptional in having
an ambulatory. The apsidal chapel which opens in its eastern wall has over
it a similar chapel that gives on the tribune gallery. Slender columns with
stilted arches are planted at the entrance of each of these chapels in the
gracious fashion originated by the Champagne school of Gothic. It was
born of a necessity, in order that a more regular vaulting might be built over
the curving aisle. St. Remi at Rheims had used the same arrangement. So
many are the points of resemblance between Soissons’ transept arm and the
choir of St. Remi’s abbey church that it is thought the architect of the
Champagne abbatial proceeded to Soissons later; there are the same
profiles, the same plan, the same encircling frieze of sculpture. At Soissons,
the architect had grown bolder and dared to diminish his supports. To have
made Soissons’ curving wall of arches and colonnettes proves him to have
been, not only well practiced in mason-craft, but a man of genius who had
visions. He here created a thing apart. The exterior of the transept’s arm is

unimpressive and plain; the lower windows are round-arched. Inside, the
pointed arch reigns, however. “The king’s daughter is all glorious within.”
The prelate who built Soissons Cathedral was a remarkable personage
and played a foremost part on the Fourth Crusade. Villehardouin tells us
that it was Bishop Nivelon de Chérisy who was sent as an envoy to
Innocent III, when against papal commands the Crusaders had turned aside
to capture the Christian city of Zara on the Dalmatian coast. The bishop-
ambassador found the pope at Viterbo and obtained from him the raising of
the excommunication on condition that the knights should proceed direct to
Palestine. We all know how, a second time, they went filibustering. Among
the first to scale the walls of Constantinople was Nivelon de Chérisy; with
him was the bishop of Troyes. When the chief barons met to elect the first
Latin emperor of Constantinople, it was Bishop Nivelon who passed out to
the waiting crowd to announce that Baldwin of Flanders had been chosen—
Baldwin who began the Cloth Hall at Ypres—and it was he who crowned
Baldwin in St. Sophia. When that new emperor was captured by the Bulgars
the bishop of Soissons returned to Europe for aid.
All the time that he was absent in the Holy Land Nivelon had devoted
the revenues of his see toward the renewal of the cathedral. Strangely
enough, it was this same prelate who also built Soissons’ choir, which in
scale and plan differs so radically from the transept arm. The fleeting hour
of Primary Gothic was over. The new art was moving forward swiftly;
irresistible the development of its principles and impossible at such a time
that the work of one decade could be similar to the decade preceding it
unless, as at Laon, the primitive plan was insistently adhered to. Whoever
the master that designed Soissons’ choir and nave, he incorporated the
perfect transept into his bigger church with reverence. Not to dwarf it was
his main care, for he bowed before the touch of perfection in his
predecessor’s work, and sought to give to his own monument, different
though it was, a like clarity and noble simplicity. Examine the skill with
which choir and nave are joined to the small transept arm. It is lower than
they, it has four vertical stories to their three, and yet no discrepancy is felt.
It was as if the new builder said: “Here is a miracle of force and grace, done
in a fugitive hour never to be recaptured. Let us enshrine it fittingly.”
In 1212 services were held in the finished choir. The nave proceeded
without interruption and was in use in the first years of St. Louis’ reign.
Probably the final touches were given to it by that bishop of Soissons of

whom Joinville tells, Mgr. Jacques de Castel, fort et vaillant homme, who
started with the king on the crusade of 1248. After Mansourah’s battle and
the disastrous retreat toward Damietta good Bishop Jacques felt such a
desire “to go to God” that he rushed alone to attack the infidels, whose
swords soon “dispatched him to God’s company with the martyrs.”
Singular good taste has at all times guided the builders of Soissons. The
XIV century decided to make a northern arm to the transept; and as if to
avoid all hint of rivalry with its peerless neighbor, the new structure was
finished by a flat end wall without a portal.
The cylinder piers of Soissons choir and nave are a distinguishing trait of
the church interior, neither too high nor too short. Before each is engaged a
slender shaft which rises to the level of the springing and causes the edifice
to appear more lofty than its reality. Everywhere, in the church, the fitting
of the stones was done with peculiar nicety, though the picking out of the
mortar lines in black, a recent innovation, was a sad mistake. In the choir
and nave the clearstory windows were an advance on those of Chartres,
their model, for the lights were made longer, and the oculus, above the twin
lancets, smaller, which gave greater compactness to the whole composition.
St. Gereon at Cologne copied these windows. Marburg’s church also was
aided by Soissons.
The talc of this desolate city during the World War is heartrending. The
Germans first entered Soissons on September 1, 1914. The mayor had fled.
But an admirable woman, Madame Macherez, the widow of a senator, went
to the état-major of the Prussians and assumed the responsibility to keep
order among the civilians: “Le maire c’est moi.” Already the poets of
France have enshrined the memory of this heroine of sixty winters who
saved her city from pillage:

Le regard bleu comme strié de lave
De Jeanne Macherez qui nous sauva Soissons.
Ah! la vieille brave!

For ten days the Germans occupied the town. The first battle of the
Marne caused their departure on September 12th. Then a French reverse in
January, 1915, let them draw near enough to the city to bring it within the
range of fire, and such was its tragic fate till the Germans’ strategic retreat
in the spring of 1917. The enemy had intrenched himself solidly in the vast
quarries on the left bank of the Aisne, and month after month poured his fire
on desolated Soissons. Then came the final grand act of the war. Rolling
forward in overwhelming numbers in March, 1918, the invaders drove the
French troops from Soissons after a desperate resistance in the streets.
There they encamped until the first days of the following August, when the
French army re-entered the smoking ruins of a dead city over which stood a
phantom cathedral.
Noyon, Senlis, Sens, Laon, and Soisson, are with Notre Dame of Paris
the first cathedrals of the national art. They are far from being the complete
list of Primary Gothic monuments, which includes such churches as the
Trinité at Vendôme, two churches at Étampes,[63] the collegiate of Notre
Dame at Mantes, the Trinité at Fécamp, and Lisieux Cathedral. There are
the two towers built in an hour of religious enthusiasm: the clocher vieux at
Chartres and the belfry of St. Romain at Rouen. The nave of Angers
Cathedral is the Primary Gothic of the Plantagenet school.
The Attica of Gothic art is the Ile-de-France, and where Picardy touches
it on the north, and Champagne on the south. In that land filled with never-
to-be-forgotten churches speaks the clarity of French genius in its classic
simplicity. The beauty of such churches comes from their rightness of
proportion, that quality which gives the most enduring joy in architecture,
beyond all richness of detail or startling effect. From such churches one
learns the difference between the architect born and the architect made. The
supreme quality of proportion must be innate; it is never acquired. The artist
blessed with it may only produce a small masterpiece, such a church as that
of St. Yved of Braine or a St. Leu-d’Esserent, but one is sure that he would
not exchange the glow which his work gave him for the fame of building
even a Strasbourg.

It is in the early-Gothic churches of the Ile-de-France that the taste is
best purified and trained. There the sense of beauty is spiritualized. In them
art gives an entity to what is ethereal, art seems to make tangible what is
impalpable. In them the heart feels the loveliness of the space inclosed as
the eye rejoices in the inclosing walls. There is something of poignancy in
such churches. Standing in all the promise of their youth, of the youth of the
greatest architecture the world ever produced, they gravely admonish us
that beauty even as theirs is but a momentary lifting of the veil. To such
churches the memory returns with nostalgic regret amid the magnificence
of the Gothic expansion, when the leaves opened wide to show the golden
pollen. But the sadness which the early-Gothic churches of France rouse in
the soul, is it not the stumbling name we give to an eternal Hope? “There
are no hours in this cathedral,” wrote Rodin of Soissons; “there is
Eternity.”[64]

THE ABBATIALS OF ST. REMI AT RHEIMS, AND NOTRE DAME
AT CHÂLONS-SUR-MARNE[65]
There are two things for which all the Faithful ought to resist unto blood,
Justice and Liberty.—Pierre de Celle, Abbot of St. Remi (1162-81).
Before closing our crowded chapter on Primary Gothic cathedrals, let us
add a few notes on a few early-Gothic churches. Those of chief interest, in
the story of the national art, are the big abbey churches at Rheims and at
Châlons, sister monuments, equal in size to cathedrals. So closely do they
resemble each other in plan and ornamentation that it is thought one
architect planned both. They are the earliest Gothic edifices in Champagne.
Notre Dame at Châlons-sur-Marne was reconstructed soon after 1157.
Three periods of work appear in it. The transept and the four towers—
which give an imposing air to the church—belong to the Romanesque
rebuilding of 1130. The towers which stand between choir and transept are
not set symmetrically, since, in that to the south, use was made of the
foundations of an earlier tower, a boundary mark between the lands of the
big abbey and those of the bishop of Châlons.
In 1157, the Romanesque choir of Notre Dame collapsed, and when
rebuilt the citizens of the ancient city on the Marne displayed the same
pious enthusiasm as had the men and the women of Chartres in 1145. In
1165, Guy de Bazoches, then a canon of Châlons Cathedral, wrote to his

sister to describe how all ages and conditions brought material to the new
church of Notre Dame-en-Vaux, and how the people, harnessed to carts,
sang canticles as they labored. When the new Gothic choir was under way
the nave of 1130 was remodeled. The pier arches and the tribune arches
were made pointed, and the upper walls were raised in order that a Gothic
vaulting might be added.
Notre Dame’s choir is very beautiful. Its three apse chapels open on the
ambulatory, by columns and stilted arches, perhaps the first time this
disposition of Champagne Gothic was used. Soon it was repeated in St.
Remi at Rheims. Auxerre and St. Quentin also used it, and it reached its
apotheosis in the ethereal charm of Soissons’ transept. Notre Dame at
Châlons was in other ways a precursor; here first were set in each bay of the
clearstory three windows side by side, a triplet of lancets that started the
complex fenestration of the new art. In its first plan were no flying
buttresses, but they were soon added when it was found that the thrust of
the upper vaulting was not sufficiently counterbutted. In the XV century the
Flamboyant south porch was built. Of the XVI century are some rich
windows of the school of Troyes, now set in the nave’s aisles. One of them
represents the victory of Spain’s crusaders over Islam at Las Navas de
Tolosa in 1212, and is the best battle scene depicted in colored glass. With
its beautiful Gothic cathedral, its immense abbatial, and all of its churches
rich with storied windows, one is profoundly grateful that Châlons-sur-
Marne only for a short hour early in the World War formed part of that
“ligne doulereuse et triomphale, ce ruban de pourpre et de lumière qui
s’étend de Belfort au rivage des Flandres, la Voie Sacrée.”
Tragic the fate of its sister abbatial, St. Remi, in martyred Rheims. That
grand ancestral church lies well-nigh mortally wounded on the field of
honor. It stood up above the city as prominently as the cathedral itself, and
has been mercilessly wrecked. The vaulting has fallen, and great rents have
been torn in the walls of the precious Primary Gothic choir. A recent
traveler found that its devastated nave recalled gaunt Jumièges.
Some ten years after the reconstruction of Notre Dame at Châlons, the
monks of St. Remi began to make over their abbey church under the
inspiration of Abbot Pierre de Celle, of the same lineage as the heiress of
Braine who, with her husband, a brother of Louis VII, built the church of St.
Yved. While John of Salisbury was a young student in France, Pierre de
Celle entered into a friendship with him which continued to deepen till their

death, both of them being men of the highest culture, strong literary
abilities, and solid character. Pierre de Celle succeeded the English scholar
as bishop of Chartres in 1181; summi et incomparabilis viri, so his epitaph
sums him up.
It was this distinguished churchman who built, about 1170, the superb
choir of St. Remi, and who remodeled as Gothic the ancient Romanesque
nave. The choir had five radiating chapels, each of which opened on the
ambulatory in the beautiful Champagne way, by slender columns bearing
stilted arches. As tribunes were built over the aisles, the wall elevation was
in four stories, and below two of them ran friezes of sculptured foliage. As
if the architect felt that he had thus over-accentuated the horizontal line, he
bound his triforium and clearstory into one composition by continuous
moldings, a precocious first step toward the glazed triforia of Rayonnant
Gothic. Originally no flying buttresses braced this early-Gothic choir; those
that were added, about 1180, are probably the first ever made. Nothing
could better show the swift development of Gothic structure than to
compare the plain old flying buttresses of St. Remi with the luxuriant
counterbutting members of Rheims Cathedral built fifty years later.
Between St. Remi’s choir and the hemicycle transept of Soissons
Cathedral there is such similitude of profile, detail, and plan that it is
thought the same architect designed both. The able Pierre de Celle built the
two westernmost bays of St. Remi’s nave, and opened the tribune on the
middle vessel with Gothic arches. He also built the west façade, which to-
day is ancient only in its lower stories, as it was reconstructed in 1840. The
north tower was re-done in the XII century; the south one is of the XI
century, Abbot Herimar’s time.
With book in hand should be read the complicated story of St. Remi’s
nave and transept, the ancient Romanesque edifice re-dressed as Gothic in
1170. Nothing remains of the church built in the IX century under Bishop
Hincmar of Rheims. The oldest parts extant are the piers of the nave, which
belonged to the reconstruction of the abbatial by Abbot Airard (1005-33).
His successor, Thierry (d. 1041), decided that the works then under way
were on too elaborate a scale to be within his means, so he simplified the
plan. The outer side aisles were suppressed, the archivolts were doubled, the
bays widened, and the old columns replaced by compound piers. In the
transept his work still exists in the west wall (north arm) where are two

stories of arcades supported by thick, short, cylinder piers whose capitals
are coarsely carved acanthus leaves.
The rest of the transept (save what was added in 1170 to connect it with
the Gothic choir and the re-dressed nave) is the work of Abbot Herimar who
raised the west towers. Under him occurred the notable dedication of St.
Remi’s new Romanesque church, in 1049, by Leo IX, the reformer, with
whom the Benedictine Order took possession of the papacy for some vital
years of needed regeneration.
St. Bruno of Cologne, the future founder of the Carthusian Order, was a
student in the episcopal school of Rheims while Romanesque St. Remi was
building. And later he returned from Germany to direct the school from
1057 to 1075 with great prestige. His most notable pupil, Eudes de
Châtillon, became the pope of the First Crusade, Urban II. Feeling the call
for a life of prayer and retirement, Bruno thought of joining the group of
earnest men about to commence the Cistercian Order, but his destiny led
him to Grenoble, near which in the mountains he began the Grande
Chartreuse (1084) where they say reform never was needed.[66]
In St. Remi’s abbatial the last phase of Gothic art was to be represented.
The transept’s south façade is Flamboyant, and over its sculptured portal is
a highly colored XV-century window. The façade was finished by Abbot
Robert de Lenoncourt (d. 1531), who later became archbishop of Rheims.
To his abbey church he presented ten rich tapestries relating the life of the
first bishop of the city, St. Remigius, who baptized Clovis in 496, and
whose rule of seventy years is the longest spiritual reign on record. Clovis
and Clotilda founded the abbey. At its church altar St. Louis was knighted.
On the day of Charles VII’s coronation the barons rode their steeds into the
basilica, dismounting at the sanctuary to ask for the sacred ampulla needed
for the king’s anointing in the cathedral.
In the clearstory windows of St. Remi’s choir were thirty-three lancets in
which were portrayed the archbishops of Rheims from holy Remigius to
Robert of France, brother of Louis VII, who was ruling here from 1162 to
1175, while Abbot Pierre was building his choir. The windows were
probably set up in the time of Archbishop Robert’s successor, Archbishop
Guillaume of Champagne, who had finished the cathedral at Sens. They
were memorable for their lovely browns and greens, and were allied,
undoubtedly, with St. Denis’ glass, though executed by local workers. Deep

borders surrounded each lancet. Similar ornate borders and a magnificent
deep blue color distinguished still older XII-century windows in the tribune
gallery. The central lancet was an extraordinary Crucifixion, somewhat like
that at Poitiers. An irreparable loss to art is the destruction of St. Remi’s
windows, though it is said that some of them were dismounted in time and
carried to a place of safety.

ST. QUIRIACE CHURCH[67] AT PROVINS
Provins, une des plus charmantes villes de France, rivalise avec la vallée
de Cachemire.... Des croisés rapportèrent les roses de Jéricho dans cette
délicieuse vallée, où, par hasard, elles prirent des qualités nouvelles, sans
rien perdre de leur couleurs.—Balzac, Pierrette (whose scene is Provins).
Another Primary Gothic church in Champagne is St. Quiriace at Provins,
which one goes out of one’s way to see because Provins is one of the most
individual little towns in France, still in part surrounded by massive XII-and
XIII-century ramparts. Thibaut IV the Singer added to the great walls of the
lower town about 1230. They say that when crusaders drew near to
Jerusalem on its hill encircled by its walls and towers they often cried out,
“Provins!” Once the population of this shrunken little city rivaled that of
Paris. Here were held annual fairs to which flocked the merchants of
Europe, and the sensible counts of Champagne encouraged their visitors by
wise regulations and strictest justice. The money of Provins was accepted in
Florence and Rome.
The valley of roses was the favorite residence of the reigning counts.
Here Thibaut IV, the most celebrated lyric poet of the Middle Ages, wrote
his songs that wedded the art of the Midi troubadour with the salt of the
northern trouvère. His son, Thibaut V, married the daughter of St. Louis and
brought her in state to Provins, “où ils firent leur entrée accompagnés d’une
grande foison de barons,” wrote Joinville, who had helped to arrange the
match. Thibaut V’s heart is contained in a XIII-century monument now in
the chapel of the Hôtel Dieu, which hospital was originally the ancient
palace of the countesses of Champagne. Thibaut V and his wife died
returning from the tragic last crusade of Louis IX. Their niece Jeanne
married the king of France, and the prosperous days of Champagne ended
when it merged its independence in the royal domain, for new regulations

soon impaired the popularity of its famous fairs. It was Countess Jeanne of
Navarre who persuaded her seneschal, Joinville, to write his reminiscences.
In the days when Provins was a world center St. Quiriace church was
begun about 1160 by Henry the Liberal, the reigning count who was
warmest patron of John of Salisbury when the latter, forced to quit England,
lived in Provins. Little more than the choir of St. Quiriace now remains. In
the tympanum of a late-Gothic portal is a XIII-century image of Christ. The
semicircular chevet is boxed in a square ambulatory on which open square
eastern chapels. The shafts are banded with annulets. There is Romanesque
feeling in the zigzag ornamentation on the heavy ribs; the round arch reigns
in the triforium, although the pier arcades below are pointed. The choir
shows a curious experiment in vaulting hardly to be called successful: three
bays are embraced by the vault section of eight branches.
St. Quiriace crowns the hilltop; in the lower town is St. Ayoul, whose
portal sculpture (c. 1160) is of the same type as the three western doors at
Chartres, as is the portal of St. Loup-de-Naud (Seine-et-Marne), close by.
[68] Those who have fallen under the spell of Chartres’ fascinating column
statues will always study their sister images with interest.
Epitaphs on the walls of St. Quiriace recall two true shepherds of this
church, one, who went daily into the hills to teach children and to tend on
the sick poor in their homes, and the other, who opened up the forgotten
crypt and left a school and presbytery to his parish. There is a quaintly
worded tablet of the XVI century telling of the haute et puissante dame, the
Marquise de Chenoise, who had “for God a tender solid piety; for her
husband a submissive, respectful love; for her children a Christian and
reasonable tenderness; for her friends a sincere and generous affection; for
the poor charity without limit; and for the rest of the world une bonté, une
douceur, une honestété charmante.” One would not mind being the rest of
the world for this gracious person. Both her sons were killed in one week,
fighting under Turenne, so she passed the last years of her life in a
retirement, which “she sanctified by prayer, and her prayer she nourished
and sustained by good works.” The robust piety of Bossuet’s preaching
breathes in such records. In St. Remi’s abbatial at Rheims is the eulogy of
another good lady of Champagne who was “Rachel in beauty, Rebecca in
fidelity, Suzanna in purity, Tabitha in piety of heart, Ruth in sentiment, and
Anna by good works.” Paragons those old-time ladies seemed to be!

ST. YVED AT BRAINE[69]
I am just back from the battle line in that Royal Domain of Soissons,
where the soul of ancient France seems more itself than in any other region,
country of martyrs, and of kings, of Merovingian crypts, of the donjon of
Coucy, of the five apses of St. Yved—realm of the first race of rulers
bearing vestiges of the greatest history of France.—Gabriele d’Annunzio, 1914.
Strictly speaking, St. Yved at Braine is not so much a Primary Gothic
monument as it is a link between that first tentative hour and the fuller
development of the national art represented by Rheims and Amiens. In the
same group as Braine, between Primary Gothic and the Era of the Great
Cathedrals, are St. Leu d’Esserent, Montréal, Vézelay’s choir, and the
church of St. Laumer at Blois.
Braine, on the ancient Roman highroad between Rheims and Soissons,
had been a farm of the Frankish kings. In the VII century it belonged to the
father of St. Ouen, and it was here that the future bishop of Rouen, as a
child, was blessed by a passing guest, the Irish missionary St. Columbanus,
whose Celtic rule of Luxeuil dominated, in Gaul, the century called of
saints.
Lady Agnes of Braine espoused a son of Louis VI, the turbulent Count of
Dreux (d. 1188), and, from them came the funds for St. Yved, the second
foundation of the new Order of Prémontré. The recorded date of the
enterprise is from 1180 to 1216, but as the church is perfectly
homogeneous, it must have been built in one campaign, probably in main
part before the dedication of 1216.
As a composition, the plan of the collegiate is original. The apse chapels
on each side of the choir chapel are placed on the bias so that the sanctuary
opens out like a fan, with five altars visible at the same time. The
arrangement was copied in far-off Hungary in St. Martin’s church at
Kassovie, built for the king by the wandering Picard artist Villard de
Honnecourt. In Cologne the church of St. Gereon, and in Marburg that of
St. Elizabeth, show the influence of Braine. St. Léger’s abbatial at Soissons
copied it. St. Yved has a square transept-crossing tower that opens still
farther the central part of the edifice. Carved about the interior is a cordon
of free springtime foliage. There is youth in every line of this beautiful
white church. The superb monocylindrical columns and their capitals are

robust virility itself. Everywhere is firmness of touch, and never has the
unity been marred by patchwork reconstructions. Like its neighbor,
Soissons, the same nicety of stonework is shown.
Before the Revolution the collegiate at Braine harbored an unparalleled
collection of tombs, since here for centuries were laid to rest the barons and
bishops of the proud family of Dreux, warriors at Bouvines, crusaders, and
donors of storied windows at Chartres and Rheims. The four west bays of
the church of Braine were stupidly demolished after the Revolution,
because funds for repairs were at that time lacking. From the destroyed
portal were saved the two statues now set in the choir’s wall. They represent
the Coronation of Our Lady; the robes flow easily and there is scarcely a
touch of Byzantine rigidity left in them.
Twice during the late World War was Braine’s collegiate in the direct
path of invasion. The first battle of the Marne freed it, but in May, 1918, the
Germans again entered the little town. Then swept forward the second battle
of the Marne, and Braine was liberated in September. One can only pray
that, in such hasty retreats, St. Yved escaped mutilation.

ST. LEU D’ESSERENT[70]
I think that that style which is called Gothic is endowed with a profound
and a commanding beauty, such as no other style possesses ... and which
probably the Church will not see surpassed till it attain to the Celestial
City.... The Gothic style is as harmonious and as intellectual as it is
graceful.—Cardinal Newman.
St. Leu d’Esserent is one of the small but perfect churches of the classic
Ile-de-France that satisfy both eye and soul by the exquisite justness of their
proportions. Its serene white charm is unobtrusive. Only a master of the
inmost heart of France could have produced the assured rightness of its
proportions. Unforgettable are the moments spent in this Benedictine
abbatial on the Oise; sometimes up and down its lovely white avenue flits
some happy lost bird, rejoicing in the paradise of quietude he has found.
The quarries round St. Leu d’Esserent were noted, and many a church of
France has been made of their firm white stones. The origin of Gothic art is
comprised, thinks M. Lefèvre-Pontalis, in this region where good quarries
abounded, with Senlis taken as a center. A line from Senlis to Laon, if
carried round, would pass through Rheims, Provins, Montereau, Étampes,

Vernon, Amiens, Péronne, St. Quentin. Well within that circumference lies
St. Leu d’Esserent.
The Benedictine church stands on prominent foundations overlooking
the river loved of Corot and Daubigny. The priory was founded and
presented to great Cluny by a knight of Esserent as thank-offering for his
ransom from the Saracens by monks of St. Benedict. Of the church built in
that XI century, there remain only the two stout columns, with archaic
capitals, which now are embedded in the westernmost bay of the nave.
About 1150 the present church was begun, and for a century continued
building, in three distinct bouts of work. First was made the west façade,
only one of whose Romanesque towers was ever finished with a spire, the
octagonal faces of which were relieved by curious lancelike ridges not
repeated elsewhere. In the narthex, or porch between the towers, was tried
an experiment to eliminate the so-called domical shape of the first Gothic
vaults. The transverse arches were loaded with masonry to raise them to the
vault’s apex. Experimental also are the ungainly diagonals, in part
ornamented with Norman chevrons, that span the tribune over the
forechurch (c. 1150). The ribs are not free of the vault web, so elasticity is
missing.
During the last quarter of the XII century, the chevet was built, as were
the two towers placed beside the apse, an arrangement derived from
Rhenish churches. Of that time, too (c. 1180), is the double bay, surmounted
by a sexpartite vault which precedes the apse. There is no transept. The
recently finished choir of Senlis Cathedral influenced the ambulatory and
apse chapels of St. Leu. At Senlis and here occur the earliest examples of
double flying buttresses. The six bays of the nave were added about 1220,
after a pause in the works. Previously, each bay of the church had been
lighted by a single lancet; now two lancets surmounted by an oculus were
used, which added much dignity to the exterior aspect of the edifice. Over
the axis chapel was built a second story. The unvaulted tribunes, above the
side aisles, were transformed into a sort of triforium by building a wall
slightly behind their arcaded openings. As that wall was pierced by some
odd little square windows, this may be regarded as one of the first essays of
a glazed triforium, the feature which was soon to develop into the
decorative richness of St. Denis, Troyes, Le Mans, Tours, and Beauvais.

CHAPTER IV

Notre Dame of Paris and Other Churches of the Capital[71]
It is important to meditate often and with ardor and respect on the
documents which the ancestors have left us.—St. Thomas Aquinas.
HE Era of the Great Cathedrals was inaugurated by Notre Dame
of Paris, the most imposing Gothic church hitherto attempted.
The popular voice has chosen to group it among the chief four,
with Chartres, Rheims, and Amiens—all four of them dedicated
to Our Lady, though in a special way Notre Dame of the capital seems to
have appropriated the name.
Of the four, the cathedral of Paris was the first built, and traits of the
Romanesque epoch lingered in it, such as the tribune galleries over the side
aisles, the division of its interior wall into four vertical stories, and the
Byzantine feeling of its earlier sculpture. The piers were massive single
columns of true majesty. In the sixth pier of the nave, counting from the
east, an experiment was tried when an engaged shaft was added to its front.
The seventh pier (c. 1192) marks a date in the development of Gothic
structure since with it was made the type of ground support which was to
predominate in the XIII century—four engaged shafts around a central
pillar. When the middle core was made elliptical, as at Beauvais, the type
pier was achieved.

Notre Dame of Paris. View from the South

Notre Dame of Paris used the sexpartite system which calls for
alternating ground supports. Either the uniform piers here were laid before a
sexpartite vault was thought of, or else the architect preferred them for
æsthetic reasons, and in this case he certainly was right. Double aisles about
both nave and choir differentiate the interior of Notre Dame of Paris from
that of the average cathedral. The far-stretching aisles of this church
compose vistas of unsurpassed picturesqueness and variety of perspective.
Some have said that the central nave is not sufficiently wide for such a
stretch of lateral aisles, and have found a certain monotony in the clearstory,
tribune, and pier arcade being of equal height. Originally, beneath the
clearstory were small circular unglassed apertures giving on the rafters over
the tribune. Those oculi were done away with during the XIII century, when
the clearstory windows were lengthened for the better lighting of the
church. During his able restoration of Notre Dame, M. Viollet-le-Duc found
hidden under the pavement some of the discarded window frames, and he
took the liberty (which many regret) of replacing a few in the bays near the
transept, thus marring the uniformity of the interior.
Despite the enlargement of the upper windows and the changes made to
give more light to the tribunes, none can deny that, in gloomy weather,
Notre Dame can be somber and even cavernous. Yet who, of its devotees,
would have it different? Supreme cathedral it is for that supremest of
hymns, the Dies Iræ—sound and sense and vision welded. To exchange its
severe majesty for an expanse of brilliant glass—save Suger’s glass—is

unthinkable. In Notre Dame you comprehend the spectacular repentances of
the Middle Ages. Here, when pestilence stalked the city or the enemy was at
the gate, have echoed the Miserere and the Libera nos, Domine.[72]
There is an individuality in the cathedral of Paris that overrides every
criticism. Perpetually does the worshiper find in it new aspects, in the dim,
low aisles full of mystery, in the gleam of transept windows as seen through
the tribune arches while one listens, perhaps, to a lenten friar preacher
discoursing of sin, justice, and the judgment to come; here on the very spot
where Dominic himself taught the same sobering lessons; here where, six
hundred years later, his son, Lacordaire, held the manhood of Paris
spellbound. Or, again, one gazes down the length of the church, with its
incomparable perspective, while around one rise the voices of strong men
fresh from the battle of Verdun, fresh from their firm “They shall not pass,”
and their Magnificat of thanksgiving to Notre Dame swells in a volume of
sound like the eternal sea. The crusaders of St. Louis’ time prayed, too, for
strength in Notre Dame of Paris.[73]
The curve of the sanctuary as seen from the west end of the nave is one
of the splendors of the monument, and no chevet ever built surpassed it.
The cause of the magic is practical—a structural problem solved, as is the
case with the best aspects of Gothic art. At that eastern curve extra piers
were inserted between the double aisles in order to obviate the difficulty of
vaulting such irregular trapeze-shaped sections.
The enthusiast maintains that the exterior of Notre Dame surpasses that
of all other cathedrals. Certainly better transept façades were never made
nor was apse more romantic than that of the chief church of Paris, as it rises
in three grandiose steps, with flying buttresses of wide span leaping with an
audacity that fairly catches the breath; and again the success is a case of
sound science solving a problem.
The west façade is an accepted classic, “an architectural glory of
France,” irreproachable. Once the intelligence has grasped its pre-eminence,
allegiance to it will never waver. The frontispieces of Rheims and of Rouen
are richer and may appeal more to the imagination. It is possible that the
severe dignity of Paris may even chill at first. But what clarity of plan! Four
strong buttresses accentuate the big square parallelogram. Excess of
ornamentation has been avoided in order that the whole may stand forth.

Lest the two towers might appear to rise abruptly from the massive, some
master hand made there the graceful open colonnade.[74]
The façade of Notre Dame is true to its epoch in its appeal to the intellect
rather than to the emotions. It was built in the golden age of scholasticism,
when religion and philosophy went hand in hand, when the teachers in the
schools of Paris, the cité lettré, the œil du monde, thought that Faith and
Reason could give mutual aid one to the other, that the truths of Revelations
could coincide with the natural judgment.
Scholasticism has been belittled by the modern sophists from the time of
the XVIII-century Encyclopædist to the XIX-century superman. Yet
scholasticism was an important factor in the formation of the French
intellect, which, in its virile youth, it put through a course of useful mental
gymnastics. Precisely the race, whose ancestors sharpened their wits in the
Sic-et-Non debates of the mediæval schools of Paris, is to-day pre-eminent
in precision of language and freedom from fogginess of thought. Easy
enough for the modern mind to ridicule the quarrel of generations over
nominalism and realism, pursued with the personal heat of a modern
political campaign.[75] Certainly the abuse of the scholastic system led to
hair-splitting disputes, for the deductive method, when carried to excess,
ends in thin subtlety. But why judge a system by its extremes? Because
XIV-century architecture grew rigid with set formulas and the abuse of its
own laws, does that discredit the virile period to which it succeeded?
The bishops who built Notre Dame were notable scholastics. The
generations who built cathedrals were impregnated with the certainty that
what was Christian was rational. Scholasticism produced St. Thomas
Aquinas, whose philosophy has outlived a dozen systems, whose Summa
was placed on the assembly table of the Council of Trent, the sole
companion of the Scriptures, Aquinas, whose sanity of ethics and doctrine
was held up by Leo XIII as the best guide amid current errors.
With Aquinas, who taught the inextricable union of Faith and Reason,
Christian philosophy reached its zenith.[76] Too long has it been the fashion
to look on orthodoxy as a sign of mental inferiority. Professors still dismiss
the Summa with a scathing line. They have never opened its pages, perhaps,
but second-hand knowledge to vast regions of human thought is no
impediment to a chair in the modern university. “Abstractions as repulsive
as they are frivolous,” is the dictum of a group of present-day French

scholars who seem to think that to belittle things mediæval is proof of
patriotism.
We have looked on at the rehabilitation of certain mediæval saints. It
was not so long ago that the poor man of Assisi was patronized as an
ignorant fanatic. The appeal of St. Francis is to the emotions, while that of
St. Thomas Aquinas is to the intellect, so, perhaps, it is expecting too much
to hope that some day the average man may appreciate this thinker who set
sane boundaries round the human mind. Too long have the prime sanities of
reason been flouted by hazy abstract thinking in the void; too long has man
shut his eyes to the fact that a crime of the intellect is of more consequence
to mankind than a crime against the civil law; too long has applause been
given to philosophers who obliterated the distinctions between right and
wrong—like Hegel, teaching the identity of Being and non-Being—so that
the very soul of the peoples grew perverted and appalling cataclysms
threatened civilization.
What the older centuries thought of Aquinas, the painter as well as the
poet tells us. In the Louvre hangs Benozzo Gozzoli’s picture of the doctor
angelicus sitting in luminous repose amid pope, doctors, saints, and the
sages of antiquity, and the inscription runs: “Vere hic est lumen ecclesiæ.”
And in Milan hangs Piero della Francesca’s profound study of the saint. “I
place Plato high,” wrote a sound French thinker, “but as I see Aquinas he is
as superior to Plato, and even more, than is our knowledge of the physical
world to that of the Greeks.... He embraces St. Augustine, Aristotle, and
Plato.”
Often has it been said that a Gothic cathedral is the Summa translated
into stone, logical, ordered, interlinked, leaving nothing to chance, a sound
skeleton on a sound base, so securely balanced that great windows could be
opened on the sky, like flashes of intuitive genius lifting the soul to the
infinite. Many were the points by which St. Thomas touched Gothic art in
its heyday. He was a student in Cologne when its mighty cathedral was
begun. He was in Paris during the years when the transept of Notre Dame
was building, and the Sainte-Chapelle and St. Denis’ abbatial. By blood he
was related to St. Louis, and often was his guest at table, where talk must
have turned on that keen interest of the hour—the making of Gothic
churches.[77] He was to die (1274) in Cistercian Fossanuova, the first
Gothic monument of Italy. And his great work, like many a cathedral, was
left unfinished.

Never was aspiration toward the infinite more passionate than in that
scholastic disputing, commune-winning, cathedral-building, crusading age.
The absorbing interest for old and young, for bishop and layman, for king
and poor student, was to know God, to know their own souls, to learn how
to make life more worthy of God. “In the entire length of France,” wrote the
archbishop of Sens to the pope, in 1140, “in towns and even in villages, in
the schools and outside them, all, even simple people and children, are
disputing on the Holy Trinity.” Paris became the center of the seething new
interest in theology and philosophy. In 1109 Guillaume de Champeaux
opened a school of logic on the slopes of St. Geneviève’s hill (where to this
day reigns Paris University), and soon all Christendom frequented it.[78] His
pupil, and later his opponent, was Abélard, brilliant, restless knight-errant
of dialectics, whom the modern orthodox student finds to be a forerunner of
the new method of biblical criticism rather than a rationalist.
In the abbey of St. Victor, whose free classes were founded by
Guillaume de Champeaux when harried by Abélard, there gathered a group
of mystic scholars and poets: Hugues de St. Victor, the Augustine of his day
(d. 1141), whose work on the sacraments was an interlinked system of
theology. Lucid in intellect, tender in sentiment, was this friend of St.
Bernard, whom Dante places in Paradise with St. Anselm and St.
Bonaventure (Par., xii: 30); and Hugues’ disciple, Richard de St. Victor (d.
1173), ranked in Paradise as the companion of the Venerable Bede and St.
Isidore of Seville, “Richard, who in contemplation was more than man”
(Par., x: 132); and Adam de St. Victor, one of the best poets of the XII
century, whose sequences and rimed proses fill the liturgy. Another pupil of
the learned Hugues was Pierre Lombard, who died bishop of Paris in 1160;
his Book of Sentences became a textbook in European universities for
centuries to come.
From the cathedral school and the mount of St. Geneviève and St.
Victor’s cloister[79] evolved the University of Paris, “elder daughter of
France,” whose title first appears in 1215, the oldest university in Europe
with that of Bologna—one the high priestess of theology, the other the
leader in canon and civil law. In the XII-century schools of Paris, John of
Salisbury met Thomas Becket and Nicholas Breakspear (the English pope,
Adrian IV), and there the future Innocent III became the friend of Stephen
Langton.

By the XIII century over thirty thousand students thronged the colleges
in Paris. Aquinas taught in the Dominicans’ branch of the university, in
which same convent, called the Jacobins, lived the reader of Louis IX,
Vincent de Beauvais, whose four Mirrors were depicted in the imagery of
the great cathedrals. No age was ever more enamored of encyclopædias. To
overclassify was a characteristic of the times which even the great Aquinas
could not escape. They say that over five hundred monks, under the
guidance of the Dominican cardinal, Hugues de Saint-Cher, were busy in
the rue St. Jacques preparing the first concordance of Scriptures. The entire
Bible was translated into French in the XIII century. In the Franciscans’
branch of the University St. Bonaventure taught. The king’s chaplain,
Robert de Sorbon, founded a house where poor students could live in
common. Canterbury’s archbishop, St. Edmund Rich, was a pupil in Paris,
then a teacher. Roger Bacon, first to grasp the importance of experimental
science, studied there, and so did Robert Grosseteste, builder of Lincoln
Cathedral, whom Bacon said excelled all other masters in his range of
useful knowledge.
The smelting pot of modern society those fecund formative years of the
XII and XIII centuries have been called. A life-time’s study it would be to
draw adequately the picture of the one city of Paris then, when Philippe-
Auguste and his grandson, St. Louis, were busy raising their Louvre and
their Cité palaces, their Notre Dame, and their Sainte-Chapelle, busy
cleaning the city streets and the city laws; when one scholarly bishop
succeeded another as slowly rose the capital’s cathedral, when lovely Latin
hymns poured from St. Victor’s abbey, while in the street the students sang
the new lays of trouvère and troubadour, telling of “love that is a thing so
high,” of Roland and the gestes of paladins, of the Celtic heroes, Tristan,
Lancelot, and Percival; when all the newly awakened intellectual and art
life was astir welding old blood and new, making Frenchmen, at last, of
Celt and Latin and Frank, making a kind of commonwealth of the nations
that met in universities whose common speech still was Latin.[80]
That there were black shadows in the picture, none deny. There were
pillages and massacres. It was an agitated day full of tumults and heresies
and terrible reprisals. One has only to read the censures of St. Bernard and
of Innocent III to learn of the cupidity and the lust. Joinville has told of a
sink of corruption lying within a stone’s throw of the saint-king’s crusading
camp. But, above all the lawlessness, the men of those ages of faith aspired.

Their acts might fall short; their principles remained sound. “No easy-going
doctrines, then, to legitimize vice,” says Ozanam. Man knew how to beat
his breast in humble repentance. He lifted his eyes toward an ideal so far
above himself that it was given his human weakness to build cathedrals
such as Notre Dame of the capital. Not so does he build when as superman
he sits on a self-raised altar.
The virtuous bishop, who had most to do with the erection of the
cathedral of Paris, had been a student and later a teacher of scholasticism.
Maurice de Sully was born of simple parentage in the village of Sully-sur-
Loire, and he came as a poor scholar to the great city. His abilities and the
integrity of his conduct won him recognition, and after teaching belles-
lettres, he was elected to the see of Paris as the seventy-second successor of
St. Denis. From 1160 to 1196 he directed his diocese, a true shepherd whose
special care was the training of young priests. Crowds flocked to his
sermons, wrote a contemporary. He took an active part on the side of
Thomas Becket during the English archbishop’s struggle with Henry II, and
it was he who consecrated as bishop of Chartres Becket’s friend, the
intellectual John of Salisbury. To Bishop Maurice, who had baptized him,
Philippe-Auguste left the care of the Royal Treasury when he went on the
Third Crusade. So wisely did this churchman administer his revenues that
he was able to build hospitals and abbeys, as well as erect, in larger part by
his personal donations, his own cathedral.
The first stone of Notre Dame was laid in 1163, and tradition says that
Alexander III officiated in the same month that he dedicated for the
Benedictines the new choir of St. Germain-des-Prés; the exiled pontiff
resided in France for four years. Though the name of the architect of Notre
Dame has not survived, his design was adhered to during a century and a
half. A transept was not in his plan; however, a short one was inserted
before the nave was laid down. That nave was nearly finished when Bishop
Maurice de Sully died, in 1196, leaving large sums, in his testament, for the
completion of his beloved church. The two westernmost bays of the nave
are not of the bishop-founder’s time.
Notre Dame, because of interruptions in its construction, presents an
irregular alignment, and it is easy to perceive, as one gazes along its
vaulting, that its choir slopes toward the north. Archæologists have given up
the poetic explanation that the slanting choir was symbolic of the droop of
Christ’s head on the cross. Nor can the symbol seeker now call the Porte

Rouge (an extra door in the north wall of the choir) a souvenir of the spear
wound of the Saviour, since if made with such intention it would have been
placed below the extended arms of the transept.
Three campaigns of work built Notre Dame, and each time that the work
was resumed the axis deviated slightly. First rose the choir and a short
transept. Then was done the nave, save its westernmost bays. And finally, at
the beginning of the XIII century, they undertook the west façade and the
two bays behind it. The carving on the pier’s capitals shows the gradual
advance in sculpture: in the choir they cut the large leaves of water plants
which were the first nature models copied when the conventional Byzantine
models were discarded. Then, in the nave, the foliage grew richer, and oak
and vine and curled-up ferns appeared. Capital by capital should be studied,
for their sculpture is masterly. The capitals of the nave’s triforium are said
to mark the culmination of Gothic art in foliate design. While unity was
kept throughout the entire arcade, there was unceasing variation in details.
When Bishop Maurice de Sully, the peasant, died, he was succeeded by
Bishop Eudes de Sully, the feudal baron, descended from the reigning
counts of Champagne, from Louis VII and Aliénor of Aquitaine, and in
whose veins ran the blood of William the Conqueror through his daughter
Adela. The ability to build was his by inheritance. He began the west
façade, and probably at his death all three of the portals were in place. To
him we owe that fairest of sculptured entrances, the Virgin’s door, under the
northwest tower, called “the most beautiful page of stone that the Middle
Ages have left us.” Visibile palare are Dante’s words for such art as this. In
the carved tympanum, “Gothic art reached the simple perfection of
Phidias.” The draperies flow easily; only in the abrupt turning up of the
edges of the robes lingers an archaic touch. Below are represented kings
and prophets, the ancestors of Mary. Above them is a moving version of the
Assumption; and in the upper triangle is the Coronation of the Queen of
Heaven by her Divine Son—she, the mortal, turned toward Him, the
divinity, with a gesture of adoration. The Christ is the Nazarene, a noble
Oriental.
No haziness then in their knowledge that the patroness in whose care
they placed their cathedrals was a fellow creature. To the common sense of
the Middle Ages, it would have seemed a muddle-headed way of thinking to
have called Jesus, God, and at the same time to have refused homage to His
Mother, the one whom God chose to honor above all mortals, “she who

didst so ennoble human nature that its own Maker scorned not to become its
making.”[81] It was only logical, they thought, that the best advocate with
the son should be the mother. “All of us who fear the wrath of the Judge, fly
to the Judge’s mother,” wrote Abélard. “Que Dieu nous l’octroie par la
prière de sa douce mère,” wrote the crusader Joinville. So, without
worrying over future carpers who might murmur “Mariolatry,” the Middle
Ages chanted “Laus Deo et Beatæ Mariæ laudum.” And the cathedral of
Paris dared to dedicate four of its six doors to the Queen of Heaven.
The door under the southwest tower commemorates St. Anne, the
Blessed Virgin’s mother. It is a composite work, carved in Bishop Maurice’s
time, between 1160 and 1170, but not set up here till Bishop Eudes de Sully
had undertaken the façade; in its tympanum are representations both of
Louis VII and of Maurice de Sully. St. Anne’s door was a link between the
still archaic western doors of Chartres and the clearly enunciated Gothic
portal under the northwest tower of Paris Cathedral. In the multitudinous
folds of the draperies is Byzantine feeling, and sacerdotal is the Madonna
who gravely presents her son to be adored. By the middle of the XIII
century, the Madonna had become a natural mother, and so she is sculptured
at the north entrance to Notre Dame’s transept.
Bishop Eudes de Sully, like his predecessor, had many a link with
scholasticism and with other bishop-builders. He had been fellow student in
Paris with the future Innocent III, and that expert in men when pope called
on his aid to find capable occupants for the French sees. Eudes’ own brother
Henry was the archbishop of Bourges who initiated the new cathedral there;
and when his brother died, Eudes assisted in placing in his see the saintly
Guillaume, who built the chevet of Bourges. Through Eudes de Sully, the
bishop-builder of Rheims Cathedral, Albéric de Humbert, was elected, and
he also helped to elect Bishop Hervé, who began the cathedral of Troyes.
Able men ever found a protector in the capable bishop of Paris, whose strict
sense of duty was incorruptible. When Philippe-Auguste, his near kinsman,
broke the marriage law, Bishop Eudes went into exile rather than sanction
the scandal. To him Innocent III sent St. Jean de Matha, that the prelate
might draw up a Rule for the new Order of Trinitarians, established to
redeem captives from Islam. It was Eudes de Sully who founded, in 1204,
the abbey of Port Royal, a name to become of note in French letters.
The bishop of Paris from 1208 to 1219 was Pierre de Nemours, one of
four brothers who were bishop-builders, at Paris, at Noyon, at Châlons, and

at Meaux. He died a crusader under the walls of Damietta. Scarcely a
cathedral but has its crusade memory. The façade of Notre Dame had
almost reached the crowning open arcade when the scholarly Guillaume de
Seignelay was transferred to the see of Paris from Auxerre where he had
begun the Gothic cathedral. The galerie des rois, whose date is about 1223,
was no doubt his work. Such galleries are found only in cathedrals in the
royal domain, and it is just as likely that they honor the kings of France as
the kings of Judea as some maintain. The majority of the larger statues of
Paris Cathedral are restitutions. Viollet-le-Duc had an English sculptor,
George Frampton, make the gargoyles and grotesques of Notre Dame, since
the Revolution wrecked most of the exterior sculpture.
Still another noted scholastic, Guillaume d’Auvergne (1228-29), was to
rule the see of Paris while its chief church was building. He finished the
northwest tower, which differed slightly in size and details from that to the
south; across the face of the former are ten statues, whereas nine only are
set before its companion tower. Perhaps a change of architects caused the
disparity, or it may be that when the houses were cleared away for the
erection of the north tower, more space was available. Bishop Guillaume
d’Auvergne’s writings show him to have been one of the most original
thinkers in the XIII century, a theologian, a philosopher, a mathematician,
and one versed in Arab and in Greek literature. He became for St. Louis a
kind of prime minister in ecclesiastical business, and, like the king, he
founded hospitals and houses of charity. There is a charming page in
Joinville’s reminiscences concerning this able man. A priest expressed his
doubts to him on the Eucharist. Bishop Guillaume asked if he tried to resist
the temptations, and he replied that he did so with all his force. “Now I,”
said the good bishop, “have not a single doubt about the Real Presence. I
am like the fortress of Montleheri, safe in the heart of France, far from the
danger line; but you, who fight unceasingly, are like the king’s fortress of
Rochelle in Poitou, on the frontier. Now, of us two, whom will the king
most honor for guarding his fortresses?”
Peasant and prince, crusader and scholar, humanist and mathematician,
men of exemplary lives, born rulers and guides, such were the builders of
Notre Dame of Paris, and their ability and sincerity live eternally in their
work.[82] They gave free wing to the soul in raising their great church, while
they cheerfully accepted the human law of working within limits. No
cathedral in France shows more clearly the relation between builders and

building, more clearly vindicates the ideals of its age. The partisan historian
may cite his instances to prove that the religion of that age was
superstitious. While Notre Dame stands, such charges are refuted. It is a
historical document as potent for the vindication of the truth as the Divina
Commedia itself.
When Bishop Guillaume d’Auvergne had finished the towers of Notre
Dame he caused to be made the open arcade from which they emerge, as
from a royal peristyle. About the same time side chapels were inserted
between the buttresses, and the line of small rose windows, which had
hitherto marked the triforium story, was done away with, in order that the
clearstory windows might be lengthened. Only step by step were the
builders learning that they might open the entire space between the active
members of a Gothic structure; the upper windows of Chartres had passed
on the lesson to Paris.
The plan of the first architect was adhered to throughout, and since the
later masters-of-works were likewise natives of the Ile-de-France and innate
in them a classic restraint and a hardy daring (the hall-mark of the best
Parisian art to this day), the cathedral of Paris was homogeneous. Midway
in the XIII century Jean de Chelles, a precursor of Rayonnant Gothic,
lengthened the transept arms by a bay and finished them with admirable
façades. His name, and the date 1257, are cut on the foundation stone of the
south façade. The sculpture of that southern entrance honors St. Stephen,
since on the site had once stood a church dedicated to the first martyr; the
tympanum of the door is another chef-d’œuvre of Notre Dame. Jean de
Chelles was the first to use perforated gables. It is thought that on the north
façade worked Pierre de Montereau, the architect of St. Denis. As the XIII
century merged in the XIV Pierre de Chelles, probably a son of Jean,
directed the making of the apse chapels and the superb flying buttresses
which leap unhesitatingly over chapels and aisle and tribune gallery. He
added the big tribune windows with gables.
The classic restraint which is the leading quality of Notre Dame was
never poverty. Sculpture was lavish where it should be. At the portals the
Scriptures were set forth in detail and saints were held up for the edification
of the people. The signs of the zodiac were carved, as well as the
personification of the seasons and the months. Pinnacle and parapet were
weighted with winged beast or demon, and the useful water spouts, or
gargoyles, were chiseled as crabbed images. However, one should always

remember, in climbing the towers of Notre Dame, that most of the present
stone monsters are modern, and it is one of the weaknesses of the restorer to
overemphasize the grotesque in the art of the Middle Ages.
A strange world of fabulous creatures dwell on the roof of Our Lady’s
church—conceptions that are half terrible and half fantastic, imaginations
that are survivals of the old pagan superstitions which Christianity could not
wholly extirpate. The XII and XIII centuries were not so far removed in
time from the invasions of the northern Barbarians, and the Church made
concessions to primitive inheritances. Artists were allowed to carve on roof
or pinnacle the chimeras and vampires which through long centuries had
haunted the imagination of their ancestors, provided that they expounded
the truths of Christian doctrine in such principal places as portals, façades,
and choir screens. Might not a mocking grotesque beside an angel be taken
as emblem of the external antagonism of the animal and the spirit in man?
The choir screen of Notre Dame of Paris is sculptured with the apparitions
of the risen Lord, from Easter Day to the Ascension. “If Christ be not risen
again, then is our preaching vain.”[83]
The cathedral of Paris during the first centuries of its existence was the
setting of many national scenes. Here the kings of France deposited their
crown and renewed their vow to be just fathers of their people. Before its
altar their newborn heir was blessed. In 1182 the main altar of Notre Dame
was consecrated, and three years later the patriarch of Jerusalem preached
from it the Third Crusade. On the eve of both his crusades St. Louis prayed
here, and in 1270, when his remains were brought back from Tunis, they
rested in Notre Dame for a solemn night of chanted mourning.
In Notre Dame the Duke of Bedford had his nephew, Henry VI of
England, crowned as king of France. Factional hate and a foreign enemy in
control caused a Te Deum of rejoicing to be sung in this, the most national
of French cathedrals, when the news came that Jeanne the Maid had been
taken prisoner before Compiègne, in 1429, but solemn reparation was made
in 1456, when, in the presence of Jeanne’s mother and brothers, the bishop
of Paris (a Norman, and brother of the poet Alain Chartier) opened in Notre
Dame the inquest that was to lead to the Rehabilitation of the heroine of
Orleans.
To the hidden places over the vaults of Notre Dame fled the illustrious
chancellor of Paris University, Gerson, to whom during two centuries was

attributed the Imitation of Christ. In 1407 he had reprobated the murder of
the Duke of Orléans (builder of Pierrefonds) by the Duke of Burgundy (of
the regal Dijon tomb), and the mob rose and sacked his house. It is said that
for months Gerson lay concealed in Notre Dame, alone with his books, and
given over to prayer and meditation.
The present stained glass in Notre Dame is modern, save for the north,
south, and west rose windows, the trilogy of light usually found in big
cathedrals. The roses of the transept belong to the Paris school which led in
the art of glassmaking during the second half of the XIII century. So large
were the spaces then to be filled that the scrupulous patience of the St.
Denis craftsmen was no longer possible. Backgrounds had to be made
quickly by bold, simple trellis designs, and as the most frequent background
was a red trellis on a blue field, and the juxtaposition of red and blue makes
violet, in too many of the windows of that period prevails a melancholy
purplish hue. Originally the choir of Notre Dame boasted some glass given
by Abbot Suger himself to the preceding Romanesque cathedral. In the
XVIII century, those over-confident gens de goût, the cathedral canons,
whose taste admitted only the neo-classic, substituted uncolored glass for
the ancient windows. They say that when the workmen were removing
Suger’s priceless glass, they were dumfounded by its deep, ineffable blue.
[84]

Many a treasure of Notre Dame was destroyed by the Revolution, and
the church itself was put up for sale and escaped demolition by merest
chance. It served as Temple of Reason, as warehouse, as fête hall. Again,
during the Commune, in 1871, for the purpose of destroying it, chairs were
piled high in the choir and set on fire, but brave men broke in the doors and
extinguished the flames. Early in the World War, in 1914, a German airship
dropped a bomb on Notre Dame which pierced the roof of the transept’s
northern arm.

THE SAINTE-CHAPELLE[85]

Li cuers doit estre semblans à l’encensier,
Tous clos envers la terre et overs vers le ciel.
—(Old song of the Middle
Ages).

On the same isle in the Seine with Notre Dame stands the Sainte-
Chapelle, the reliquary of stone and jeweled glass which the saint-king had
made to enshrine the Crown of Thorns redeemed from Constantinople. To-
day it is a body without a soul, as the revered crown is kept in the treasury
of Notre Dame, and until a memorial service during the World War, Mass
had not been said in the reliquaire de souvenirs for fifteen years.
The chapel, which was connected with the king’s palace, was begun in
1246 and dedicated in 1248. “It was,” said one who knew St. Louis well,
“the king’s citadel against the adverses of the world.” He would rise at
midnight to pass into the chapel for the singing of matins. “Into this shrine
Louis IX put all the memories of his crusading ancestors, all the hues of the
Orient. It was his vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem.” The walls were rich
with gold and color. The present polychromatic decorations of the walls are
a deplorable modern experiment. Fifteen splendid windows told the Bible
story in a thousand small medallions; ninety-one scenes related Genesis;
one hundred and twenty-one gave Exodus. A window on the south side told
the True Cross story, and the three central windows were devoted to the
lives of the Saviour and John the Baptist. The western rose was added
during the Flamboyant Gothic revival following the expulsion of the
English invaders.
The making of the vast windows of the Sainte-Chapelle raised Paris to
the leadership of the vitrine industry during the second half of the XIII
century. Of that school are windows in the cathedrals of Angers and
Clermont, and Soissons’ western rose. Though of splendid effect, such
windows do not equal those of the preceding hundred years, when Chartres
and St. Denis led. The borders round each medallion had now become mere
zigzags, since expedition was required for the glazing of enormous spaces.
The Sainte-Chapelle, as Gothic science, could be carried no farther
without violating its own laws and becoming what an English critic said of
the late-Gothic of France, “all muscle and glass.” Everywhere was the
ascending line accentuated; over the windows are some of the earliest
gables extant. They break the horizontal band of the balustrade above, and
serve structurally as weights on the longitudinal wall arches.
Perhaps it was because the architect felt he was overemphasizing the
ascending line that he interrupted the soar of the columns marking the
chapel walls, by placing against each shaft the amply draped statue of an

apostle—the twelve pillars of the Church. To-day only the forth and fifth
statues on the north side are originals; there are merely ancient fragments in
the other images. For some time it was thought that the Sainte-Chapelle was
the work of Pierre de Montereau, the king’s own architect. A newly
discovered record proves that he designed St. Denis’ abbatial, which shows,
however, no family likeness with the chapel of the Cité palace. Now, that
chapel does display a certain likeness to the façades of Notre Dame’s
transept, and it has been suggested that Jean de Chelles, who designed the
transept, was the architect of the Sainte-Chapelle.

ST. JULIEN-LE-PAUVRE[86]

La France est l’homme,
Paris est le cœur.
—Henry IV.

Close to the Seine, under the hill of St. Geneviève, stands a small
contemporary of the choir of Notre Dame, St. Julien-le-Pauvre, built by the
Cistercians of Longpont, about 1180, and claiming as its patrons three
saints of the same name, St. Julian, martyr, St. Julian, bishop of Le Mans,
and a humble St. Julian who had founded a hospice for pilgrims by the
Seine and used to help the poor across the river. It is said that a leper whom
he was piloting over vanished in midstream, whereupon the people said it
had been the Lord himself come to test the holy man’s charity.
The western bays of St. Julien-le-Pauvre have been demolished and all
that remains intact of the Primary Gothic church are the choir, with three
apsidal chapels, the side aisles’ vaulting, and the columns against the side
walls. The same sculptor who worked at Notre Dame made the virile
capitals of this little church.
St. Julien to-day is used by the Greek-Melchite rite of Roman Catholics.
It long was the patron church of letters and science, and every year from its
altar started the procession of the University of Paris to the fair at St. Denis
called Lendit, for the solemn purchase of a twelve months’ supply of
parchment. The rector of the university led the throng, and so vast was the
concourse of students that the head of the procession was in St. Denis’
abbatial before the rear ranks had quitted St. Julien-le-Pauvre. For four
hundred years Paris University elected its rector in this little church, and

tradition says that Dante prayed here when he crossed the Alps in 1304. In
his imagination was then surging his mighty poem, and the men of France
have pictured him pausing to muse over the images of Hell at their own
cathedral doors. The great exile of Florence was himself the purest product
of scholasticism, as impassioned as were the cathedral builders for theology
and philosophy, for symmetry and rhythm and the mysterious beauty of
numbers. The Divina Commedia was a poetic Summa.

ST. GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS, ST. MARTIN-DES-CHAMPS, AND ST.
PIERRE-DE-MONTMARTRE[87]
Ces vénérables bénédictines dont la science n’était égalée que par leur
modestie—F. Brunetière.
There are in Paris three abbey churches that show steps in the transition
to Gothic art: St. Germain of the meadows, St. Martin in the fields, and St.
Peter’s church on the martyr’s hill, names that keep alive early Christian
traditions—the first bishop and martyr of Paris, St. Peter whom always “the
eldest daughter of the Church” was glad to honor; St. Martin, first beloved
of the apostles of Gaul, and Bishop Germain (d. 576) who founded outside
the city walls the abbey called later by his name, and who helped to
Christianize the new Frankish conquerors. So disinterested was he that, to
feed the poor, he sold a horse given him by the king; whether riding or
walking, the saint-bishop ever went in prayer.
The present church of St. Germain-des-Prés has a tower that in part
predates the year 1000; it was erected by an abbot who ruled from 990 to
1014, and shows the small stones used at that period. The nave and transept,
finished before the XI century closed, under a bishop of Paris who was
uncle of Godfrey de Bouillon, comprise the only remaining Romanesque
work in the capital. Twice in the XII century the choir was reconstructed by
the monks, first about 1125, and at the same time the ancient tower’s upper
story was built; and again, after Suger, in 1144, had demonstrated the
superiority of Gothic vaulting. St. Germain’s abbot wrote, in 1163, that he
had repaired his church in a new fashion. In the ambulatory the round and
the pointed arch appeared side by side, and the groin vault was used
simultaneously with the diagonals. The capitals were altogether
Romanesque, since sculpture changed less swiftly than construction in
those transitional years. Perhaps the new choir of St. Germain was not

wholly finished when Pope Alexander III dedicated it in 1163, the year that
the foundation stone of Notre Dame was laid. The choir’s triforium arches
were cut off, later, to lengthen the clearstory windows, and the nave has
been revaulted.
In the abbey inclosure a Sainte-Chapelle, a cloister, and a refectory were
built by Pierre de Montereau; he and his wife, Agnes, were buried in the
chapel. Fragments of his work have been collected in the small garden
beneath the Carolingian tower of the abbatial, as well as in the gardens of
the Musée Cluny.[88] The Revolution entirely wrecked the monk’s quarters.
St. Germain-des-Prés, in popular speech, was The Abbey. Here gathered
the learned men of Paris for mental stimulus. In its priceless library,
destroyed by the Revolution, worked those famous scholars Dom Luc
d’Achery (d. 1685), Dom Mabillon (d. 1707), and Dom Rivet (d. 1749),
whose tireless patience and scrupulous respect for historical truth made the
name Benedictine a synonym for “savant.” Three monumental works were
begun by the XVII-century reformers who renewed the love of letters in the
leading monastic houses of France: the Acta Sanctorum; the annals of the
Benedictine Order; and that pride of French letters, the Histoire Littéraire
de la France, which to-day the Institute of France is continuing. “Gros
livres inutiles,” Voltaire glibly called the invaluable books which for the
modern school of mediæval archæology have made flesh-and-blood men of
the old prelate-builders of cathedrals.
The parts which have survived of that other notable Benedictine
establishment in Paris, St. Martin-des-Champs, are now comprised in the
Arts et Métiers establishment. Affiliated with great Cluny, St. Martin’s
priory was as like it, said Peter the Venerable, as seal is like signet. To-day
in the ancient church is installed an exhibit of machinery. The beautiful hall,
once the monks’ refectory, and now a technical library, is thought to be the
work of Pierre de Montereau. The slender pillars dividing it into two aisles,
the well-carved capitals, the elaborate keystones, and the portal’s foliage all
belong to the golden hour of the national art.
For the student it is the choir of the church (c. 1135), built by the prior
who surrounded the monastery lands with walls (1130-40), which is of chief
interest, for in it were taken marked strides in the advance of Gothic
structure. Here first was attempted a double ambulatory, an idea which
Suger within a few years was to carry out in its fulfillment at St. Denis. The

Lady chapel, a lobed half dome—the sacred trefoil—developed further the
ribbed apse first found at Bury (c. 1125); here the ribs are structural, not
merely decorative. Like other monuments of the transitional hour, St.
Martin used simultaneously intersecting ribs and groins, round and pointed
arches. Its XIII-century nave was never vaulted.
The third monument of the capital which shows other stumbling first
steps of the national art is the little church of St. Pierre under the towering
new basilica of the Sacred Heart on Montmartre.[89] Till the XII century
there stood on the site of St. Pierre a church dedicated to St. Denis, for
tradition said that the first martyr of Paris had here been interred until his
relics were removed to the new abbey of St. Denis on the Roman road
outside Paris. In the crypt, by St. Peter’s, on Montmartre, it is said that the
earliest Christians of the region held their rites. And to that hallowed spot
has come many a soul to beseech enlightenment on the eve of some
projected good work. Here, in 1534, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis Xavier,
and the first Jesuits passed a night in prayer and vowed themselves to God’s
service. Here came St. Francis de Sales before founding the Visitation
Order, St. Vincent de Paul before founding the Lazarists, and M. Olier
before he organized St. Sulpice. Ursulines and Carmelites also have
memories with St. Pierre-de-Montmartre.
A Benedictine priory was installed here by Louis VI and his queen,
Adelaide, niece of Pope Calixtus II of the Capetian house of Burgundy.
They began the present church as Romanesque, but soon the new system of
vaulting was employed. Slowly but consecutively throughout the XII
century St. Peter’s church was built. Its oldest Gothic vault is the one over
the section of the choir preceding the apse; the stout ribs have profiles like
those which Abbot Suger was making about that same time in the
forechurch of his abbatial.
The solemn dedication of St. Pierre-de-Montmartre took place in 1147
with Pope Eugene III officiating and St. Bernard and Peter the Venerable
acting as deacon and subdeacon. Since the rebuilding of the apse, at the end
of the XII century, numerous reconstructions have gone on in order to
preserve the revered church.[90]

ST. LOUIS AND JOINVILLE[91]

Je dis que droit est mort et loyauté éteinte

Quand le bon roi est mort, la créature sainte,
A qui se pourront désormais les pauvres gens clamer
Quand le bon roy est mort qui tant les sut aimer?
—Regres du roy Loeys.
The greatest glory of the Middle Ages was the saint-king himself. He
was essentially of his epoch both in his love of theology and his enthusiasm
for building. Under his grandfather, Philippe-Auguste, most of the Gothic
cathedrals of France were begun. The majority of them continued building
under Louis IX. In his reign Beauvais Cathedral was started, that of Meaux
rebuilt, as was also St. Denis’ cathedral-like abbatial. There rose now a host
of lesser Gothic edifices, such as the Sainte-Chapelle at Paris, the synodal
hall at Sens, and the hospital hall at Ourscamp. “And as a writer who has
made his book, illuminating it with gold and azure, so our king illuminated
his kingdom with the beautiful abbeys he built,” wrote his friend Joinville.
All too many of his abbatials have been swept away—Royaumont,[92]
built with the proceeds from his father’s jewels, where Louis IX had
worked side by side with the masons, where he had passed his saddest
hours, for in its church was laid to rest his promising eldest son, whose
beautiful tomb now is harbored at St. Denis. Gone, too, is Maubuisson
Abbey, where was buried his mother, Blanche of Castile. Her bronze tomb
was melted up and made into cannon during the Revolution, but one knows
that the something high and Spanish in Blanche (whom her contemporaries
compared to stag and eagle) would have preferred a cannon to the copper
pennies into which were transmuted all too many of the ancient tombs. The
mother of St. Louis was a woman cast in a heroic mold, daughter of that
Spanish king who at Las Navas de Toloso saved Europe from an avalanche
of 400,000 Mussulmans and granddaughter of art-loving Aliénor of
Aquitaine and Henry II, Plantagenet.
The prudence of Blanche of Castile saved the kingdom for her son
against the insurgent barons of France. She hastened to have him crowned
at Rheims, in 1226, in the same year that St. Francis died, in Italy. It is said
that the lad of twelve held up firmly the sword of the Emperor
Charlemagne, whose blood ran in his veins. The barons tried to kidnap the
young king from his mother, and when he escaped the snare and rode back
to Paris all the countryside poured out to bless him. Years later he told
Joinville it was from that hour he dedicated himself to the welfare of his
people.

In 1234, at twenty, he was married in Sens Cathedral to a princess of the
cultivated house of Provence; Dante has a line for the daughters of
Raymond Berenger IV, patron of the troubadours: “Four daughters had he
and each a queen.”[93] Marguerite of Provence was somewhat overridden by
the stronger personality of Blanche, her mother-in-law. For his valiant
mother, Louis IX retained always a passionate admiration. On his first
crusade he left his kingdom in her charge, which, however, he did not do for
his queen, when he last went crusading. He had seen her sister, on the
throne of England, tamper with that country’s interests for the advancement
of her own family, and he recognized in his Marguerite a strain of the same
intriguing. She could rise to her lord’s level, however, and was his faithful
lifelong companion. A sublime word of hers has come down to us: they
were sailing back to France after four years’ sojourn in Palestine; off
Cyprus the ship was well-nigh wrecked, and an attendant rushed to ask if he
should awaken the royal children. “No,” cried the queen, “let them go to
God in their sleep.”
That a king whose forebears had fought in all the crusades should, in his
turn, strike a blow for Christendom, was inevitable. Jerusalem had fallen in
1244, and the instinct of Europe felt the menace of the Mongol advance
from the East. Was not the fate of Spain close at hand to prove the
possibility of Oriental invasion? So St. Louis took the crusader’s vow, and
with him went the turbulent lords whose departure gave France some
needed years of peace. He had in vain tried to negotiate peace between
Papacy and Empire, in whose protracted duel he remained neutral.
In Cyprus, in 1248, the crusaders paused before descending on Egypt,
and there St. Louis and Joinville drew together. The hereditary seneschal of
Champagne was a very great lord, his mother being of Burgundy’s Capetian
line, and his Joinville forebears notable crusaders.[94] The contingent which
he provided for the holy wars consisted of nine knights and seven hundred
men, but because of the long winter’s halt in Cyprus he found himself in
straits to meet their expenses. Louis IX, ten years his senior, came to his
aid, although the ruler of Champagne and not the king of France was
Joinville’s suzerain. Side by side the two friends went through the
disastrous campaign in Egypt—the delayed march on Cairo, which ended in
Mansourah’s defeat. Together they shared imprisonment, and the king’s
elevation of soul won the Mussulmans’ respect. Then, their ransom paid,
they sailed together for Palestine, and there, in the daily intimacy of years,

the affection of these two loyal knights struck deep root. To Joinville the
king intrusted his wife and children in the perilous overland journey in
Syria, before they embarked for France.
When, in 1254, Louis IX came back from the East, he gave himself up
for fifteen years to his country’s welfare, “the most conscientious man who
ever sat on a throne,” touched to the core by that divine unrest which is
man’s highest faculty and does lasting work for God, revered by the “little
people of the Lord” as their champion for justice and social progress. “Il est
en doulce France un bon roy Loeys,” sang the minstrels then. Never did
king love more la doulce France and prove it more conclusively. Justice
was inherent in him. A most sensitive feeling of duty ruled his every act. Yet
he knew how to mete out deserved punishment unflinchingly. From his
shrewd and capable grandfather, so little of a saint, he had learned that no
one could govern well who could not refuse as well as grant.
That Louis IX understood his age is shown in his dealings with the
feudal system. He made no attempt to destroy it, which would then have
been impossible, and, moreover, his respect for the rights of others always
kept him from extreme measures; but he regulated its excesses, knowing
that organized anarchy could be broken only by organized laws. One of the
best laws he passed was that of the quarantaine-le-roy, which forbade any
baron to wage war on his fellows without a notice of forty days. The king
favored the written law to offset the law of custom, on which feudal abuses
were based. During a generation he had his agents all over France collect
old laws and customs—Roman law, canon law, feudal privileges, and from
their composite mass was created the great code called the Établissements
de St. Louis. He substituted jurisprudence by inquest, and witnesses for that
by force, and he made a supreme court by instituting the right of appeal.
Admirable were some of his treaties such as that which made the Pyrenees
the natural boundary between Spain and France. His reform of the coinage
was another link of unity for France.
In Paris he organized a police, protected commerce by regulations, put
an end to the selling of magistratures, and he began, there, the library which
to-day is the richest in Europe. In the garden of the Cité and under the oaks
of Vincennes, the king held open courts of justice, and when his youngest
brother, Charles d’Anjou,[95] tried to browbeat one of lesser rank, the king
gave a legal councilor to the poor knight who won the case against the

prince. Louis IX’s very enemies chose him as arbiter. Little wonder that the
people of France have sung of him:

Ha! le bon Roy!
Simples, ignorans supportait
Pauvres, mendians confortait,
Observant de Jhusys la foi,
Redoutant Dieu—
Ha! le bon Roy!

Joinville has drawn for all time the picture of the years between the
saint-king’s two crusades, a golden age, if ever there was one. The
friendship begun during their years of Syrian comradeship continued, and
the seneschal often came up to Paris. It was he who arranged the marriage
of the king’s daughter with his own suzerain, the son of Thibaut IV, the
song maker, in whose court of Champagne Joinville had acquired his
delightful mode of speech.
Then, again, came the call of the East. Jaffa and Antioch had fallen to
Islam, and the condition of the Oriental Christians was heartrending. Louis
IX could not resist their cry for aid. In 1270, twenty-two years after his first
departure from Aigues-Mortes, the king sailed again from that half-finished
fort by the dead waters. Joinville was not with him, for he was needed by
his “little people,” an excuse which his friend acknowledged.
The crusaders had scarcely landed on the coast of Africa when plague
struck them down. First died Tristan, the son born to St. Louis in the
sorrowful, earlier days in Egypt. Then the saint-king himself passed away;
and on his lips was the prayer that his race might learn to despise the
prosperity of this world and not to fear adversity, and that France might
never deny the name of Christ. The night before he died they heard him
singing, “Nous irons en Jerusalem,” the holy city he had never seen, the
aspiration, the magic name that stirred those strong generations.[96] Before
the century closed the Church canonized him. “House of France,”
announced the pope, “rejoice to have given the world so great a prince, and
to heaven so great a saint. People of France, rejoice to have had so great a
king.”
“If ever the golden age of the good old times existed,” wrote Sainte-
Beuve, “it certainly was under St. Louis, and it is by the pen of Joinville

that it exists for us. They believed then in their king, they believed above all
in their God, as if God were present in the smallest occurrences of daily
life.” In the Histoire de St. Louis by Jean, sire de Joinville, there is not a
mawkish note, and considering what happens to too many saints in their
biographies, it must be acknowledged that the seneschal accomplished a
feat. As depicted by his contemporaries, Louis IX is so convincingly
himself that later efforts to stereotype him as the sacristan’s ideal of piety
have failed. His “pleasant manner of speech seasoned with wit” had nothing
of the prig in it. From his childhood to his deathbed of ashes in ancient
Carthage (birthplace of his favorite Augustine), St. Louis possessed a direct
personal touch with God. “Beau Sire Dieu, garde-moi mes gens!” he rose at
night to petition with insistent outstretched arms when, in Egypt, the “Greek
fire” was hurled into the Christian camp. And Joinville, who had a
wholesome dread of the Saracens’ projectiles, turned to rest, feeling secure
while such prayers were beseeching Heaven.
Louis IX was a tireless student of the Bible and works of the Church
Fathers. He had a passion for the liturgy. The number of hours which he
spent in prayer has roused the sarcasm of our indifferent generation. His
hours before the Tabernacle bore fruit in deeds. His temper was naturally
quick, and he had a keen sense of irony, but his friend, the seneschal, was
able to bear witness, at his canonization process, that in an intimacy of over
twenty years never had he heard a word of disparagement of others fall
from the king’s lips. “There was something in the mere sight of him that
found a way to the heart and affections,” wrote one who knew him; “the
eyes of a dove,” said another. “He seemed pierced to the heart with pity for
the unfortunate,” wrote Queen Marguerite’s chaplain who had daily
intercourse with him. An observant Italian who saw the king on his way to
his first crusade described the something of rare refinement and grace in his
bearing.
Not a touch of self-consciousness was in Louis; barefooted, in a white
tunic, he carried the Crown of Thorns through the streets of Paris. In his
sublime other-worldliness, he bathed the feet of beggars, dressed the sores
of lepers, and when he felt that his soul needed it he scourged himself. And
at the same time he was a model of knightly prowess, who many a time had
fought

For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field,

Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross
Against black pagans, Turks, and Saracens.[97]
At the battle of Mansourah, Joinville saw the king, “the most beautiful of
men,” to his eyes, fair, gallant, in stature head and shoulders above those
around him, defend himself alone with great slashing sword cuts from the
onslaught of six paynims. He was a true prud’homme, a name for which he
had a weakness, for to be a prud’homme meant to be a knight, not only
bodily, but in one’s soul.
Side by side with his other-worldliness went a sound practical sense.
When his son-in-law, Thibaut V of Champagne, gave overgenerously to a
monastery in Provins, all the while that he was in debt, St. Louis asked him
was it fair to bestow alms with other people’s money. His personal tastes
were unostentatious, but he held court sumptuously when the occasion
required, and he advised his lords to dress well so that their wives would
love them better. He was ever human; when word came to him in Palestine
that the mother he adored had died in France, he shut himself away from
sympathy for two days, then sent for the friend he loved best. As Joinville
approached, the king opened his arms to him with the cry, “Ah, seneschal, I
have lost my mother!”
Joinville has recounted a scene which took place between him and his
friend, that is one of the fairest things in literature, slight episode though it
is. In council, in Palestine, the barons urged the king to return to France.
Almost alone, Joinville held out against such a course while their retainers
were still unredeemed from captivity. For he remembered how a knight of
his family had admonished him: “You are going beyond the seas. Be careful
how you come back. For no knight, rich or poor, can return an honored man
if he leaves in Saracen hands the humble folk of Our Lord with whom he
started forth.”
The king listened in silence at the council, and in silence sat through the
banquet that followed, paying no heed to Joinville, who was placed by his
side. The seneschal, saddened by what he thought to be his friend’s
displeasure, was standing alone, leaning against a casement, thinking that
when the others returned to France, he would join the Prince of Antioch, his
cousin, till another crusade came to deliver the “little people of the Lord”
unransomed still in Egypt. As he leaned against the window bars he felt
friendly arms laid about his shoulders: “Have done, Monseigneur,” he cried,

thinking it was one of the barons come to mock him, “leave me in peace.”
Then the loving hands slipped over his face and he recognized the emerald
ring worn by the king. The dear words of mock reproach: “What you, the
youngest, dare advise me against all the great and the wise men of France?
Tell me, you think I would do wrong in leaving?” Then sturdy Joinville,
who paints his friend, too, by the confession, “Never did I lie to him,” made
answer, “Yes, Sire, as God is my aid.” “And if I stay, will you stay?” asked
the king.
The bloom of the exquisite moment has come to us across the dividing
centuries because Joinville was not thinking of making a book when he
wrote his reminiscences. His object was to have others understand the
gracious distinction, the tender familiarity with him of this king-crusader
whom he loved and who loved him. Written artlessly, and in entire good
faith, his book is full of that indefinable quality called charm. The
seneschal’s honest heart is in its infinitely precious pages.
In that other early monument of French prose, the grave Villehardouin
rises to the historian’s plane in depicting the Fourth Crusade. Joinville
cannot be said to have taken in the Sixth Crusade as a whole; he muddles
the battle scenes; he digresses to right and to left in idle details, then catches
himself up with happy ease, as if saying, “Dear me! I forgot to mention,”
imparting to his chronicle an inimitable quality all its own. No one would
have Joinville different. Amiable, jocund, unaffected, the soul of honor,
candor itself, he does not fear to acknowledge that he could tremble with
fright in battle despite his stalwart six feet and over. He beguiled his
captivity by trying to convert a Mohammedan by highly colored
descriptions of hell. He whiled away the long hours in Syria in composing a
treatise of theology, a Credo, wherein he warns every prud’homme to hold
on to God with both arms lest that felon, the devil, come between. And the
two arms by which a man was to hold on to God were Faith and Good
Works. “You must have both, if you wish to keep God: one without the
other is worthless,” warns the young seneschal. No quibbling then!
Joinville had also that quality which the French term enjouement, hard to
translate, a playful, most lovable frankness, a mocking vivacity which was
for St. Louis a source of relaxation. The king loved conversation; he
thought there was no book so good as quolibet, or say what you please.
Some Armenian pilgrims besought of the seneschal a glimpse of the saint-
king. Joinville came merrily to tell his friend, warning him that he, the

seneschal, was not yet prepared to kiss his bones. And the king laughed,
too, but because he knew it would give the devout Armenians pleasure, he
accorded them an interview. Stroke by stroke, Joinville filled in the picture
of Louis IX, and all the while he unconsciously paints himself as well. He is
so eager to make you love his hero that you learn to love himself. A tear is
always close to the eye in reading Joinville, not that what he relates is sad,
but because this story of a high soul, written by his loyal friend, touches
things that lie deep in all true hearts.
Joinville was to survive his friend for half a century. He died in 1317.
With a character ripened by six years of intimacy with the bon saint-homme
roy, he came back from the East and set himself to work for his people’s
welfare, the “little people of the Lord” by whom he had stood in their hour
of need. He was then but thirty. In his old age he was the accepted arbiter of
good taste, admired as the last of a generation of courtesy. When over
ninety, this vigorous old crusader rode into Flanders on a military
expedition for the crown. He had seen the reigns of six French kings and the
passing away of the crusader’s spirit. He had seen his own Champagne
become a part of the royal domain, when the heiress Jeanne was married to
the grandson of St. Louis. And it was at the bidding of that queen of
Philippe-le-Bel that Joinville wrote down his memories of Louis IX.
France has high advocates to plead for her before the Throne in hours of
national peril. Jeanne d’Arc said that she saw St. Louis petitioning God in
the dire hour of foreign invasion. “May they never deny Thy name,” prayed
the saint-king at Tunis, as he rendered “his pure soul unto his captain,
Christ, under whose colors he had fought so long.” And in the men of 1914-
18, true prud’hommes after the heart of St. Louis and his dear friend
Joinville, stirred the crusader blood of their ancestors.

THE COLLEGIATE OF MANTES[98]
The king was very well built, of easy bearing and smiling countenance,
bald, high-colored, a great eater and drinker. Toward his friends he was
most generous; toward those who displeased him he was very firm; in his
designs he was foresighted and tenacious, very catholic in his beliefs, and
he judged rapidly and with great perspicacity. Easy to arouse, he was also
easy to appease. Upon the great who disobeyed him he was hard, and he

enjoyed sowing discord among them, and to make use of the little people in
his purposes.—Portrait of Philippe-Auguste by a canon of St. Martin, Tours.

Notre Dame of Mantes (1160-1200). The Contemporary of Paris Cathedral

From Paris can best be visited the cathedral-like collegiate at Mantes on
the Seine to the east, and the cathedral of Meaux on the Marne to the west.
Mantes-la-Jolie, the “well-beloved” city of Philippe-Auguste, and where he
died in 1223, is set picturesquely above the Seine, in whose widened course
are wooded islands. From the bridge crossing the river[99] may be had the
best view of the town. The collegiate church of Notre Dame stands above

the houses of the pleasant little city, in the high-shouldered way of many a
French church. Happily, it has never been reconstructed. It has various traits
in common with Notre Dame of Paris, and some think that the same
architect planned both.
Mantes’ Primary Gothic church was begun about 1160, at the same time
as the cathedral in the capital, but, being on a lesser scale, it was finished
sooner, and thus appears more archaic. Normandy’s Romanesque zigzag
ornamentation was still retained, and the cells of certain vault sections show
the hesitating rough work of masons as yet unpracticed. While the
transverse arches are pointed, those of the diagonal-crossing ribs are round.
Too wide an expanse of plain wall space was left between tribune and
clearstory, for it was to take half a century longer before architects dared fill
their entire upper wall with windows. Like Notre Dame of Paris, the
tribunes open on the middle church by wide, graceful arches. And this
smaller Notre Dame also has western towers that are connected by an open
colonnade. The collegiate has no transept, and one recalls that neither had
Paris Cathedral in its first plan. The flying buttresses here are among the
first ever made. A striking feature of the exterior of the church is the row of
litt ble oculi that light the tribunes over the aisles, some of which have been
changed to windows of Rayonnant tracery. The deep galleries once were
entirely vaulted by transverse half cradles borne on low lintels, an
experiment in masonry roofing first tried at Tournus, but which never
became popular; at Caen the tribunes of the Abbaye-aux-Hommes had been
vaulted by similar half cylinders whose axial lines were at right angles to
that of the nave.
The first Gothic rose window of big dimensions adorns the west façade
of Mantes collegiate. It is what they call plate tracery—that is, the pattern is
formed of voids, the window being a group of variously shaped openings,
and not, as in bar tracery, a single opening with the pattern made by solids,
or stone mullions. The western rose at Laon stands halfway between plate
and bar tracery. Mantes’ rose was the prototype for that at Chartres.
Like most of the larger XII-century churches, the sexpartite system of
vaulting was used. Mantes also followed Noyon and Senlis in having
alternating piers and, like Noyon, it showed the Rhenish trait of a western
transept, formed by the two lower stories of the towers and the westernmost
bay of the middle vessel. Two of the portals are of the XII century, but the
largest—the one under the south tower—was made by Raymond du

Temple. And probably that same XIV-century architect of Charles V added
the gracious chapel of Navarre which is among the best works of
Rayonnant Gothic. In it are four charming statuettes of the donors, the
princesses of Navarre, portrait work showing personal mannerisms. When
the sister of the art-loving Valois king, Charles V, married Charles the
Wicked (a scion of Capetian stock who was count in Évreux and king in
Navarre) she brought the town of Mantes in her dowry, and it was probably
her daughters who are sculptured in this chapel of Navarre—their gift to
Mantes collegiate.
On the site of the present church once stood a Romanesque edifice built
by funds donated by William the Conqueror on his deathbed, to atone for
his having set fire to the ancient church (1087). Angered by a coarse joke of
the French king’s, he had sworn his usual oath, “by the splendor and
resurrection of God,” that he would light a hundred thousand candles when
he went to his churching Mass; so he marched against his tormentor and set
fire to Mantes that lay in his path. For, as Mr. Henry Adams has
picturesquely expressed it, “Mantes barred the path of Norman conquest in
arms, as in architecture.” As the corpulent Conqueror rode around the place,
his horse stumbled, and from the injury then received he died in Rouen in a
few weeks. That burning of Mantes by the Duke of Normandy and King of
England has been called the prelude to the Hundred Years’ War between
France and England, whose actual span was from 1337 to 1453. And in a
way Waterloo was its epilogue. The shoulder-to-shoulder fight of the
ancient rivals, from 1914 to 1918, let us hope, has put the seal on their pact
of peace.

THE CATHEDRAL OF MEAUX[100]

Ah, see the fair chivalry come, the companions of
Christ!
White Horsemen who ride on white horses, the
Knights of God!
They, for their Lord and their Lover have sacrificed
All, save the sweetness of treading where He first
trod!
These through the darkness of death, the dominion of
night,

Swept, and they wake in white places at
morningtide....
Now, whithersoever He goeth, with Him they go;
White Horsemen who ride on white horses, oh, fair
to see!
They ride, where the Rivers of Paradise flash and flow,
White Horsemen, with Christ their Captain: forever
He!
—Lionel Johnson, Te
Martyrum
Candidatus.[101]
To decipher Meaux Cathedral has been a student’s tour-de-force, so early
and unceasing have been its rebuildings. With Troyes and Séez, it was the
only Gothic cathedral that had a flaw in its structure. Begun with the choir,
in the last decades of the XII century, it still retained the Romanesque idea
of deep galleries over the side aisles. Whether poor foundations were laid or
whether the tribune vaults were made too cumbersome, the edifice gave
signals of insecurity from the start.
As the XIII century opened, the transept and that part of the nave near it
were building with the tribunes still, although by that time such galleries
had fallen into disuse. Repeated restorations delayed the works. Cracks
continued to show until, about 1270, when the collapse of the whole church
was threatened, a complete reconstruction was undertaken by Bishop Jean
de Poincy.
Already, in 1220, the choir had been redone and two more chapels
added, making five apsidioles in all. In 1270 they demolished throughout
the church the tribunes over the side aisles, and thus the aisles became twice
their intended height. In the first three bays of the choir were retained the
arches of the tribune, so that now certain bays of the choir aisles open on
the central vessel by pier arcades surmounted by false-tribune arches.
Striking effect is made in the nave by some giant cylinder piers whose
height is double what was originally planned and whose capitals are gems
of interpretative sculpture, vine leaf and fern. Much mechanical dexterity
was shown in the recutting of piers and the elimination of the tribunes, but
even now a few of the shorter columns are to be found embedded in the
newer parts, and a few sections of the triforium show their primitive plan.

By the time Meaux Cathedral was completed it was practically an edifice
of the end of the XIII century. Its chief patroness was the queen of Philippe-
le-Bel (St. Louis’ grandson), the Jeanne of Champagne who brought that
rich province to the Crown, as well as the kingdom of Navarre, the same
princess who encouraged Joinville to write his reminiscences. The city of
Meaux was in her dowry, and they say that her portrait was carved on a
keystone of the choir. When she died, in 1305, she named the bishop of
Meaux as her executor and donated a legacy to his church.
A well-known XIV-century architect, Nicolas de Chaumes, worked on
the west façade, two of whose portals are of that period, and one of the XV
century. Unfortunately, use was made of a soft stone which time has sadly
eroded. Flamboyant Gothic sculpture, with foliage in gracious disorder,
appears in the western bays: the undulating flora of the XIV century, and
the nervous, deeply indented, pointed leaves of the XV century when such
complicated forms as the curly cabbage were taken as models. Wiser were
the earlier sculptors who had interpreted and arranged their leaves with
architectural fitness. The south portal of Meaux’s transept must have had in
mind St. Stephen’s door of the cathedral at Paris. At Meaux the sculptured
figures show certain mannerisms, such as the throwing out of one hip, a
trait soon to be exaggerated. The carvings throughout the church were
mutilated by the Huguenots in 1562, and from that date no further work was
done on the edifice. One tower of the façade remains painfully stunted.
The church of Meaux would stand well in the front rank of Gothic
cathedrals were it not for certain flaws of proportion. Such exceptionally
high side aisles call for a nave twice as long, and the clearstory appears
dwarfed by the lofty pier arcades of the chevet. Yet though made piecemeal,
and without uniformity of style in its main parts, Meaux possesses a unity
of its own, and its effect as a whole is one of elegance and even radiance.
The tomb of its greatest bishop is an immense slab of marble in the
pavement of the choir. Bossuet devoted himself to his diocese for over
twenty years (1681-1704). Frequently he preached in the cathedral built by
the generosity of Jeanne of Champagne, the founder of the College of
Navarre, where he had studied in his youth. There is something akin in
Meaux Cathedral to the high soul and courtliness of Bossuet. The two most
religious and national epochs in French history were the XIII and XVII
centuries.

Few churches in France present a better setting for a festival of solemn
joy than the cathedral of Meaux. It is the church for Noël, for the white
radiance of First Communion gatherings, for the Te Deum of victory. Fitting
is it that the victory of the Marne should here have become a personal
heritage. At the very gates of Meaux came the turning of the tide on
September 5, 1914, when the thunderous advance on Paris was suddenly
arrested. The password for that day of miracle was “Jeanne d’Arc.” Near
by, on the Oureq, Jeanne’s troubadour, Péguy,[102] fell on that same
September 5th, he who had chanted prophetically:

Heureux ceux qui sont mort pour une juste guerre ...
Heureux les épis murs et les blés moissonnés,
Heureux ceux qui sont mort dans les grandes batailles,
Couchés dessus le sol à la face de Dieu.

Close to Meaux the battle raged outside, and the wounded, in bewildering
numbers, were carried into the desolated town which lacked a civic head.
The bishop of Meaux, Monseigneur Marbeau, stepped forth as the accepted
leader, as in the time of those earlier invasions when the bishops of Gaul
saved Latin civilization.
Again, in 1918, the invader drew perilously near, and a second victory of
the Marne swept back the avalanche. From the fields around the city forever
will an invisible white army of martyrs swell this cathedral’s Te Deum. In
Meaux on the Marne, God will always be the omnipotent Lord God of
Battles, the Dominus Deus Sabaoth of the great hymn of thanksgiving.[103]

The Cathedral of Meaux, Viewed from the Nave’s Aisle

CHAPTER V

Era of the Great Cathedrals, Chartres, Rheims, Amiens

I stood before the triple northern porch
Where dedicated shapes of saints and kings,
Stern faces bleared with immemorial watch,
Looked down benignly grave, and seemed to say:
“Ye come and go incessant, we remain
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past.
Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot
Of faith so nobly realized as this.”
—James Russell Lowell, The
Cathedral.

F the four master cathedrals of France, that of Paris was begun
first. Thirty years later, in 1194, the cornerstone of Chartres was
laid, that of Rheims in 1211, and that of Amiens in 1220. In the
case of Chartres, Rheims, and Amiens, rebuilding was
undertaken when fire had destroyed their Romanesque cathedrals. All four
of these great churches have the same patroness, Our Lady, “the glorious
mother of God, our advocate against our enemy of hell”—thus those
generations spoke of her of whom Dante chanted: “Lady, thou art so great,
and hast such worth that if there be who would have grace, yet betaketh not
himself to thee, his longing seeketh to fly without wings.”[104]
It is difficult for many a modern mind to understand the passion of
spiritual chivalry felt by the generations that built cathedrals for her whom
they called their sovereign lady, but unless some comprehension of that
mystic ideal is grasped no complete sympathy for mediæval art is possible.
Mr. George Santayana, who would renew our sense of the moral identity of
all the ages, may see in the mediæval devotion to Our Lady a development
of Platonic love, which he calls the transformation of the love of beauty into
the worship of an ideal beauty, the transformation of the love of a creature
into the love of God. All love is to lead to God. All true beauty leads to the

idea of perfection, said Michael Angelo, who practiced Platonism, even as
had Dante, who was of the very essence of the great scholastic century that
built Chartres, Rheims, and Amiens.

THE CATHEDRAL OF CHARTRES[105]
Discipline is indispensable to art.—George Santayana.[106]
Chartres was Our Lady’s shrine in a peculiar way, her “special chamber.”
A local tradition, so old that it reached back to the dimmest past, told of a
prophecy concerning a virgin mother, pronounced by the Druids, a hundred
years before the Christian era on the site where Chartres now stands, and in
the cathedral first built on the revered spot the bishop retained a pagan well
which from time immemorial had been honored by the populace. That Puits
des Saints-Forts has been included in the crypt of each succeeding cathedral
of Chartres. Finally some priggish XVII-century prelates looked with
disfavor on the policy, advocated by the apostle of the gentiles, to make use
of the ancient superstition for the spread of the true faith. So the pagan well
was filled in, and trace of it was lost till M. René Merlet discovered it in
1900 and had it excavated.
That Chartres was a meeting place of the Druids, we know from Cæsar,
and the XIII-century sons of the Gauls, as if in souvenir, carved the
druidical oak leaf freely upon the present cathedral. Is it fanciful to feel that
in the grave forest stillness of Chartres’ interior lingers much of the
theocratic nostalgia that forever haunts the Celt? In druidic times priest,
teacher, and lawmaker were honored above brute force of arms. The present
crypt of Chartres includes part of the Gallo-Roman walls. The V-century
Merovingian cathedral abutted on the city ramparts. Then came wars which
in part demolished the town walls, so that the reconstructed church was able
to extend itself beyond the ramparts. It was doubtless after the Norman
inroads that was built, in the IX century, the chapel of St. Lupus which
forms the core of the present crypt. The Carolingian cathedral of Chartres
was destroyed by a terrible fire in 1020.
Now, in 1020, the see of Chartres was occupied by one of the notable
bishops of French history, Fulbert (1007-29), revered of the people, a
scholar enamored of the life of study, though the events of that agitated age
forced him to play an active part in the national life. Like Abbot Suger, he
was of lowly extraction. He had studied in the cathedral school of Rheims,

made notable by Archbishop Gerbert, who later became Sylvester II, the
pope of the year 1000. Fulbert, too, like his master, was a versatile genius—
doctor in medicine as well as theologian, and one of the first to take up the
new musical system of the Benedictine Guy d’Arezzo. He made the
cathedral school of Chartres a center of learning, and men who were to be
the leaders of the age were his pupils. Like Socrates, he taught his disciples
as they paced up and down the cathedral precincts. In his exhortations there
was an appealing tenderness that had a singular power in moving men’s
hearts, and letters from his pupils still exist, complaining of the exile they
felt when separated from him.[107]
To rebuild his cathedral, Bishop Fulbert gave up his own revenues. Gifts
poured in from the kings of England and Denmark, from the bishop’s
schoolmate of Rheims, the good and cultivated King Robert of France, from
the Duke of Aquitaine, who donated the treasure accumulated in St. Hilary’s
abbatial at Poitiers. The work was pushed forward with such energy that
after four years Bishop Fulbert was able to write that, by winter, his lower
church would be vaulted.
The present magnificent crypt under Chartres Cathedral is the very one
built by St. Fulbert. It is the most extensive crypt in France. Its soundly
constructed groin vaults stood firm when, two hundred years later, the upper
church was destroyed by fire. In times of public calamity the people have
fled to Fulbert’s subterranean passages, and the devotion of generations has
hallowed his shrine. If you would know the soul of this mystic cathedral,
gather at dawn with the silent worshipers who choose that hour to kneel
daily in the secluded intimacy of Notre-Dame-sous-Terre. The true hour for
Chartres is not at noontime, when the tourists flock to the empty church, but
in the morning with the dawn.[108]
Fulbert’s Romanesque cathedral was finished in the same XI century by
St. Ives of Chartres, another born leader of the nation, who righted many
abuses. He dared stand up against Philip I himself, because of the king’s
adulterous marriage with the beautiful Bertrada de Montfort, stolen from
the Count of Anjou. The bishop wrote thus to the king, refusing to attend his
wedding, “out of respect for my own conscience, which I wish to keep pure
before God, and because I would retain the good repute by which a priest of
Christ should honor himself before the faithful. I would rather be flung into
the bottom of the sea, with a millstone round my neck, than be a stumbling
block to the weak. Nor do I fail in the fidelity I owe you, in speaking thus to

you, but rather I give you proof of it, for I believe that you are risking your
immortal soul and are putting your crown in jeopardy.” The king’s answer
was to throw him into prison and to pillage his church.
Bishop Ives, in 1095, attended the preaching of the First Crusade at
Clermont, after which he accompanied Urban II to the Council of Tours.
Scarcely a big event of his day or a leading personage that he was
unassociated with, and the three hundred of his letters which are extant
form a valuable contribution to history. Twice was the exiled St. Anselm of
Canterbury his guest, and in 1107 Paschal II—the pope who built the upper
church of S. Clemente at Rome—stopped with him in Chartres. Bishop Ives
had been a pupil at Bec, of the celebrated Lanfranc, so he was fully
competent to keep up the prestige of his cathedral school.
The Romanesque basilica, begun by Fulbert and finished by Bishop Ives,
lasted for over two hundred years. The present northwest tower was started
probably in 1134, when the nave’s western bays had been damaged by fire.
Following a pre-Romanesque tradition, the tower was placed a little
distance before the church, apart from it, and so it remained for some ten
years. Then, one day in June, 1144, the eloquent Bishop Geoffrey de Lèves,
successor of St. Ives, was the guest of the abbot of St. Denis during the
dedication of Suger’s abbatial, and what he there saw of the new system of
building made him determined to reconstruct his own church of Chartres.
Being an excellent administrator, he was able to start the new works
immediately.
Within a year was begun the southwest tower of Chartres (1145), which
many hold to be the most beautiful in the world. While it was building, the
side aisles of Fulbert’s basilica were lengthened to meet both western
towers. That the one to the south never was intended to stand isolated is
shown by the absence of windows on the two sides where it joins the
church, whereas the tower to the north had windows on all four sides. While
these works were in progress St. Bernard came to Chartres to preach the
Second Crusade. He and Bishop Geoffrey had recently traveled together
through Aquitaine, combating the Cartharist heresy.
It was Geoffrey de Lèves who accompanied the future Louis VII to
Bordeaux for his marriage with Aliénor of Aquitaine, and when the death of
the king suddenly called Louis away, he left his bride in the care of the
bishop of Chartres. Geoffrey was long the sincere defender of Abélard,

though finally he disapproved of what was overhardy in his doctrine; with
Peter of Cluny he held that the errors of the brilliant schoolman were of the
head rather than the heart.
Two often-quoted ancient records described the surge of religious fervor
which raised the western end of Chartres Cathedral. In 1145 the archbishop
of Rouen wrote to the bishop of Amiens to relate how the people of his
diocese, knights and ladies, townspeople and peasants, went in a spirit of
penitence to Chartres, there to help in the new work of Notre Dame. No one
could join the pilgrimage who had not confessed, and renounced all
enmities and revenges. As the quarries were some miles from the city, it
was a heavy task to drag in the big stones. In that same 1145 Abbot Haimon
of St. Pierre-sur-Dives in Normandy, wrote to some monks in England to
picture the scenes at Chartres: “Whoever heard tell in times past of
powerful princes brought up in honors and wealth, of noble men and
women bending their proud necks to the harness of carts, and like beasts of
burden dragging stones, cement, wood, to build the abode of Christ? And
while men of all ranks drag these heavy loads—so great the weight that
sometimes a thousand are attached to one wagon—they march in such
silence that not a murmur is heard. When they halt by the roadside, only the
confessing of sins, and prayer, humbly suppliant, ascend to God. If anyone
is so hardened as to refuse to pardon his enemies, he is detached from the
cart and refused companionship in that holy company. When they have
reached the church they arrange the wagons about it like a spiritual camp,
and during the whole night they celebrate the watch by hymns and
canticles.”
It was not long after this wave of enthusiasm that the Portal Royal was
begun, probably about 1155, though some have placed those three western
doors earlier and some later. As they resembled the doors of St. Denis (now
destroyed), they were made, doubtlessly, within ten or fifteen years of
Suger’s work. By 1175 cracks appeared in the new west foundations, and
the three doors were moved forward, stone by stone, and placed on a line
with the towers. In their first position, set back between the advancing
towers, they had shown to better advantage, but it is to the advance of
Chartres’ western façade that we owe the preservation of its priceless glass
and sculpture.
At the time of these changes the bishop of Chartres was John of
Salisbury (1176-80), perhaps the most learned man of his century, and

certainly one of the wisest, sincerest, and most likable men who ever lived.
In his works this humanist advocated a proper use of dialectics, as opposed
to the sterile subtlety then increasing among scholars. His stand on the
problem which agitated the thinkers then—how our ideas correspond to
things existing outside our intellect—was one of moderate realism. Abélard
had led up to such an outlook, and the scholastics of the XIII century,
notably Aquinas, also classed themselves as moderate realists. John of
Salisbury possessed what the French call esprit, and he poked some fun at
the hair-splitting in the schools. Hebrew and Greek he knew, and his Latin
was of good literary quality, which was rather an exception among
scholastic writers.
When Thomas Becket was raised to the see of Canterbury, his friend,
John of Salisbury, became his chief adviser, and though the latter held
principles equally firm, he endeavored to curb the primate’s excess of zeal.
Through the years of Becket’s exile, John lived in France, returned with his
archbishop to England, and witnessed his martyrdom in Canterbury
Cathedral. At Sens he, too, must have watched with interest that cathedral
building, being himself an artist and modeler in clay. Sens’ archbishop,
Guillaume de Champagne, admired the balanced character and solid
scholarship of the Englishman, and after the Canterbury tragedy proposed
him for the see of Chartres. No one could have appreciated better than John
of Salisbury the strange charm and beauty of the column statues which one
by one were moved to a new position at his cathedral’s west doors while he
governed this see.
And no one was more fitted to comprehend the glory of the three XII-
century windows, also dismounted and reset in those years, than John of
Salisbury’s successor at Chartres, his intimate of many years past, Pierre de
Celle, who, while abbot of St. Remi at Rheims, had adorned the lovely
Primary Gothic choir he built there with admirable colored lights. The south
tower was crowned with its mighty spire in his day, and he paved the streets
of Chartres and raised the town walls. Both these best types of scholastic
authors were interested in maintaining the high repute of their cathedral
school. As Pierre de Celle died in 1183, he was spared the sight of his
cathedral’s destruction.
On the night of June 10, 1194, a terrible conflagration wiped out
Fulbert’s Romanesque basilica. To its cavernous crypt the clerks bore the
treasured relics, and after three days emerged, when the fire was spent.

Only the crypt and the more recent west façade, with its two towers,
escaped destruction; the north tower at the time still lacked its upper stories.
On the smoking ruins the pope’s legate made an appeal to the people’s
generosity, and once again Chartres presented the devotional scenes of
1145. Bishop and canons gave up three years of their revenue, and pious
confraternities dragged in the big stones. Those passionate rivals, Richard
Cœur-de-Lion and Philippe-Auguste, were donors. Thus every part of
Chartres Cathedral has been raised by the hands and hearts of faith, and
surely the personality which builders impart to their work breathes here in a
piety of the soul that not all the science of later times has ever been able to
simulate. Non est hic aliud nisi Domus Dei et porta coeli.
The new cathedral went forward apace; early in the XIII century the big
west rose was added to the much-transformed façade. By 1224 the upper
vaulting was entirely closed in. The formal dedication was postponed till
1260, to allow for the completion of the two elaborate porches before the
transept’s doors. To that delayed consecration came St. Louis and his court.
The name of the architect of Chartres is unknown, but its unity of plan is
proof that it emanated from the brain of one man. The choir had double
aisles, the nave a single one. It is believed that to the absence of side
chapels in the nave is due the exceptionally good acoustic properties of this
church in which the preacher’s voice carries to every part. Unknown, too, is
the architect of the tower built in the dawn of Gothic art, two generations
before the present cathedral. The veriest amateur as he gazes at it is
conscious that he has before him one of the supreme things of France.
The more closely the clocher vieux is analyzed, the more it becomes a
touchstone by which will be judged other towers. A miracle of just
gradation, it sprang in one jet from the brain of a man of genius. With a
pleasurable sense of harmony the eye travels from the base to the tip of the
spire. Proportion, not ornament, is the secret of its transcendent influence.
The width is right—and so many towers fail there—the division of the
stories is right, and radiantly right is that crucial point, the transition from
the vertical square shaft to the inclined octagonal spire, accomplished here
by means of dormers and turrets. An innovator was the architect of
Chartres’ belfry when he placed open windows in the gables. To obviate any
monotonous optical effect, he made a ridge down each inclined plane of the
spire, which spire is a massive pyramid forming almost half of the tower’s

height. Its bare nobility surpasses the richer open stonework of the spire to
the north.

The Cathedral of Chartres (1194-1240). The Southern Aspect

It is confusing that the north tower at Chartres façade should be called
the clocher neuf because of its Flamboyant Gothic upper stories, for its
lower Romanesque parts were built before the clocher vieux. When towers
were rising in every part of France as the XVI century opened, the chapter
of Chartres Cathedral invited a local architect, Jean de Texier, called Jean de
Beauce,[109] to complete their truncated northern tower, whose temporary
top had just been consumed by fire. Jean de Beauce saw that the XIII-
century rose window had crowded the south belfry. While the rose was
making, a new story had been added to the north tower. To that tower he
decided to add still another story before he topped it with an elaborate
lacework spire. In consequence the clocher neuf is out of all proportion to
its mate. Nor does it carry the eye smoothly from soil to tip; its renewals are
abrupt. However, if it lacks subtlety, its crown is none the less a strikingly
effective monument of the final phase of Gothic architecture. The spire is
adjusted to the shaft by means of little flying buttresses which spring from
the angle and face turrets, and help to unify the design.
Some human vanity the north tower of Chartres displays, but no arrogant
pride, no Renaissance pretentiousness. And in the inscription

commemorating its renewal still breathes the reverential, loving, personal
note of the Middle Ages:
“I was once built of lead, till after the fire on the feast of St. Anne, six
o’clock in the evening, 1506, Messires the Chapter ordered me rebuilt in
stone. In my necessity good people helped me. May God be gracious to
them.”
Under his belfry tower, Jehan de Beauce built a pretty pavilion to
regulate its chimes. Sculptor as well as architect, he designed the sumptuous
screen about the choir, on whose exterior wall is portrayed the life of Our
Lord in groups made during seven generations. The oldest and best scenes
are those in the south aisle nearest the transept.
The mystery plays gave to the iconography of the late XV century its
realistic character. In these sculpture panels at Chartres, not only were the
costumes of the religious theater copied, but the stage settings. A group was
represented in a room, whereas in earlier work the sacred personages “stood
with a sort of spiritualized detachment, clad in the long tunic of no country,
of no time, the very vestment itself for the life eternal.”[110]
One of the earlier scenes of Chartres’ choir screen presents Our Lady
seated in the cosiest of interiors, like a XVI-century housewife, a reticule by
her side and a chaplet, which last touch was a charming anachronism. She
sews serenely while poor distracted St. Joseph dreams. A complete contrast
to this human Virgin Mother is a XIII-century lancet across the aisle from it
—the much-venerated Notre-Dame-de-la-belle-verrière, a mother of God,
the austere symbolic Throne of Solomon, almost uncanny in her solemn
passiveness. In some of the later groups sculptured on the outer walls of the
choir screen appears the icy hand of the Renaissance, though the setting
remained Gothic throughout.
The two decorative glories of Chartres Cathedral are its sculptured
portals and its wealth of stained glass, “an assemblage unique in Europe,
the thought of the Middle Ages made visible.” Though over ten thousand
personages are represented, decoration is kept subordinate to structure with
an instinct for discipline inherent in the best Gothic art.
For the archæologist, the three western doors are of prime importance,
last of the Romanesque, first of the Gothic portals, call them whichever you
wish. To speak of a transition is to be metaphysical, employing words for
what has no existence in reality, since there was no break in the sequence of

sculpture from the first imaged portals of French Romanesque art, at
Beaulieu, Moissac, Autun and Vézelay to those at Le Mans and Chartres,
and to that masterpiece of Gothic sculpture, the portal of Our Lady under
the northwest tower of Paris Cathedral.
For the making of his three western doors at Chartres, Bishop Geoffrey
de Lèves must have obtained workers from his friend, Abbot Suger of St.
Denis. Archaic enough seem these kings and queens with their strange,
haunting faces, their slim, parallel feet, with their slender figures more
architectural than sculptural as they stand against the pillars to which they
conform, yet none the less they show freedom from the stereotyped
Byzantine traditions. The attitudes are less rigid than in previous column
statues, and personality is dawning in the faces. The Madonna is own sister
of the Eastern empress of St. Anne’s door at Paris, made about fifteen years
later under Bishop Maurice de Sully.
The “celestial portal” of Chartres portrayed the life of Christ from his
birth to his ascension. At the northern doors of the transept was set forth the
Creation, to the coming of the Messiah, and Our Lady was especially
honored. And the southern portal commemorated from the coming of the
Lord to his second advent at the Last Judgment. It was the custom to
represent this last scene at the west façade, where it might be illumined by
the setting sun of the world’s final day, the dies iræ long dreaded. But since
the west portal of Chartres had followed a Romanesque tradition by carving
in its place of honor a Christ in the elliptical aureole of eternity,
accompanied by the symbols of the four evangelists, the Last Judgment was
relegated to the transept’s south entrance.
Between the two lateral portals of Chartres there is little choice. In them
Gothic sculpture appears in full bloom. Each is a national heritage. In the
first plan of the transept the entrances lacked their magnificent porches
begun as afterthoughts (about 1240), but so well adjusted to the doors that
they appear to be of the same date. Among the seven hundred statues at the
northern entrance, some show that they were portrait studies, but it is mere
hypothesis to give names to them. Not a statue was placed haphazard. A
prearranged dogmatic scheme was consistently followed, since to the
mediæval mind art was before all else a teacher. Our Lady stands at the
central door, accompanied by ten big figures representing Melchisedek,
Abraham, Moses, Samuel, and David on her right, and Isaac, Jeremiah,
Simeon, John the Baptist, and St. Peter on her left. They are the patriarchs

who prefigured her Son and the prophets who foretold Him, and the two
who witnessed His coming, one as foreteller, the other to be His symbol in
the future. Each personified a period of history: “Fathers of the people,
pillars of humanity, contemporaries of the first days of the world, they seem
to belong to another humanity than ours. They are to be counted among the
most extraordinary images of the Middle Ages.” It is inevitable that M.
Mâle be quoted on all points of mediæval iconography.
Usually under each large statue was carved a pedestal scene having some
connection with it. Thus beneath the Queen of Sheba is a negro; beneath
Balaam, his ass. At the south porch, under St. Jerome, translator of the
Bible, is the Synagogue with bandaged eyes, and under St. Gregory the
Great is a crouching scribe, who cranes his neck to see the saint, for the
legend was that one day as the pope dictated to his secretary, a long pause
came, and the scribe peeped through the curtain that hung between them
and saw a dove perched on the saint’s shoulder, symbolic of the Holy Spirit
directing him. St. George and St. Theodore garbed as crusaders are the only
youthful images at the south porch, and must have been studied from some
of St. Louis’ knights.
At her entranceways Chartres set forth the calendar of months in small
medallioned allegories, and here and at Amiens, Paris, and Rheims was
given a complete system of moral philosophy through the contrast of virtues
with vices. On the north façade of Chartres is carved “Libertas” under the
image of a virtue. Bishop John of Salisbury would have approved this: “For
there is nothing more glorious than freedom,” he wrote, “save virtue, if
indeed freedom may be rightly severed from virtue, for all who know
anything know that true freedom has no other source.”
In structural technique the fenestration of Chartres was a stride forward,
and both the cathedrals of Paris and Soissons learned immediately from its
clearstory arrangement—the first attempt to fill with colored glass the entire
space between the active wall shafts. “In certain parts of the cathedral of
Chartres,” says M. Mâle, “is a magnificent amplitude, a superabundance of
power. Each of the nave’s windows is surmounted by an immense rose as
wide as the bay, a conception as proud as ever an architect realized. It is one
of those flashes of genius such as came to Michael Angelo. Those great orbs
of light, those wheels of fire that dart sparkling rays are one of the beauties
of the cathedral.”[111]

Notre Dame has preserved over two hundred of the ancient, imaged
windows. The oldest and the best are three large lancets under the western
rose which, like the Royal Portal beneath them, are the work of Suger’s
craftsmen who came here from St. Denis. One of these noted windows
relates the childhood of Christ, another His Passion and Resurrection, and
the third is a tree of Jesse, similar to one in St. Denis.[112] The iron bars
supporting the sheet of glass do not conform to the outline of the
medallions, hence it is somewhat more difficult to decipher the scenes than
in XIII-century work. None the less, these, the oldest windows of the
cathedral, are the peer of any colored glass ever made, because of their
inherent genius for decorative effect and their conscientious workmanship.
Many a pen has tried—in vain—to describe the marvelous deep blue which
blends together the other colors—the streaky ruby, the emerald green, the
sea-green white, the brownish purple and pink, the yellow pot metal.
Even after the opening of the XIII century the St. Denis school exerted
influence, as is shown by the Charlemagne-Roland windows in Chartres’
ambulatory, whose outline was taken from a crusader window of Suger’s
abbey. The majority of Chartres’ windows belong to the early XIII century,
when the city was mistress of the vitrine art and supplied the cathedrals of
Bourges, Rouen, Sens, Laon, Auxerre, Tours, Le Mans, Poitiers, and even
Canterbury. In the nave’s north aisle, the St. Eustace window (the third) is
held to be of faultless artistry. The large lancets which light the aisles
scintillate as with precious jewels. Only some five or six have floral scrolls
filling the spaces between the medallions and the deep border that
surrounds each window; in France a geometric pattern for such interstices
was more frequent.
At the base of each window is what is called its signature—a medallion
which usually represents the avocation of the donors, whether kings,
knights, priests, butchers, shoemakers, furriers, or water carriers. Thus
below the Charlemagne-Roland windows tradesmen display rich fur
mantles, and we know that the pelletiers were the donors. Splendid were the
gifts of the old artisan guilds. The tanners presented an apse-chapel window
in honor of St. Thomas Becket, the vintners one that related the story of
Noe, planter of vines. An overpowering sensation it must have been for
those mediæval workmen to worship beneath the vaults they themselves
had helped to build, under the windows they had contributed. Kings and
knights were their fellow donors, but in the cathedrals of France the gifts of

the lowly were the most plentiful, a Christian quality which endured till the
XVI-century disunion.
To Chartres St. Louis gave a window in honor of St. Denis, patron of his
kingdom. The splendid red northern rose, “The Rose of France,” is a
glorification of Our Lady. The donjons of Castile adorn it in honor of the
queen regent. Directly opposite is the big south rose presented by Blanche’s
enemy, Pierre Mauclerc, who tried to kidnap Louis IX from his mother, but
who was to die fighting the infidels under his cousin the king, as did Pierre
de Courtenay, another donor of a window at Chartres. Pierre de Dreux, it is
said, began the porch before the southern entrance to commemorate his
marriage with the heiress of Brittany, a granddaughter of Henry II,
Plantagenet. Like every door of this church of the resplendent
entranceways, it is a mass of sculpture. Mauclerc was grandson of the
builder of St. Yved at Braine, and brother of Archbishop Henri de Dreux,
who donated windows to his cathedral at Rheims. Below the Dreux rose at
Chartres, four of the Prophets are borne on the shoulders of the four
Evangelists, for never could those generations, enamored of symmetry,
resist the opportunity to weave together the Old and New Testaments.
A first cousin of St. Louis, Ferdinand III, the saint-conqueror of Seville
and Cordova, donated to Chartres a window commemorating the patron of
Spain. Three times was St. James honored here, so popular was the
Santiago Compostela pilgrimage. St. Martin and St. Nicolas of Bari are also
commemorated, the former some seven times, for it pleased the voyagers to
noted shrines to record their travels. By pilgrimages French art and song
spread in Italy and Spain.
Single monumental figures of prophet or saint were used in the
clearstory windows instead of small medallions, which would be indistinct
when viewed at such a height. Although most of the windows in the
cathedral belong to the XIII century, the XV century is represented in the
Vendôme chapel, begun in 1417 by Louis de Bourbon, an ancestor of Henry
IV. Much white was then employed for the better lighting of the church, and
the straight saddle-bars of Suger’s time were again made use of.
No attempt was made for perspective in the earlier glass, which was
treated like a translucent mosaic: relief was obtained by the skilled
juxtaposition of tones. The old workers had taught themselves many of the
secrets of optics. They knew that designs on a background of blue—an

expansive color—should be larger than those on red—an absorbent. They
knew that blue was a sedative, that red excited the vision, and that yellow
stopped contours, hence it was to be employed in borders.
It is not of technique that one thinks when standing face to face with the
windows of Chartres. “Create in me a new heart, O God!” one murmurs
when gazing at them. When at noon the sun renders the colors dazzling and
bewildering, the cathedral seems to be chanting “Sanctus! Sanctus!
Sanctus!” with the seraphim proclaiming that the whole earth is full of the
glory of the Lord. Live coals from heaven’s high altar are the windows of
Chartres, then, cleansing us of our iniquities; and seeing with our eyes we
see, and hearing with our ears we hear, and understanding with our heart we
comprehend the vision and are converted and healed.
When evening blots out the rest of the church, and in luminous obscurity
the windows hang ethereally in space, they are psalms of intercession and
penitence. To gaze at such windows is to pray, think the Levites who serve
in this temple. At sunset it is no unusual sight to see a young student of
theology seated with his back to the choir, his forgotten breviary open on
his knee, gazing spellbound at the western lancets, in his face a rapt
reverence, indicating that his soul is in prayer. Each evening the windows of
Abbot Suger’s craftsmen hymn the suave and lovely Te Lucis ante which
ushers in night’s purity. A mediæval cathedral was designed for the Real
Presence, and without that soul of all ritual it stands bereft. Windows such
as Chartres’ proclaim the miracle of the Tabernacle as symbolically as do
those pillars of humanity sculptured by the northern doors, Melchisedek and
Peter, types of the Christ, each holding a chalice, or as do the transept’s
outspread arms that recall the sacrifice on Calvary, renewed daily in the
sacrifice of the Mass.
That Chartres Cathedral has preserved its wealth of colored glass is
proof that it came gently through the ages; moreover, it was constructed
solidly, being a pioneer in the use of flying buttresses with double arches
united by an arcature. Its lower walls never were weakened by the insertion
of side chapels, those customary XIV-century additions. That academic
period built at Chartres merely the semi-detached chapel of St. Piat, to
which a stair ascends from the ambulatory. In the XVIII century some well-
intentioned but misguided canons of the cathedral lined their sanctuary with
neo-classic marbles and stucco, and cluttered the plain wall spaces over the
pier arches with needless ornament.

In the time of the Revolution, the entire demolition of the big church was
proposed, but happily the embarrassment of how to dispose of such a
mountain of stone prevented the vandalism. Lead was stripped from the
roof to make bullets and pennies. In the XIX century the vast timber
covering of the masonry vaults, called la forêt, was burned, but the new
steep-pitched roof covered with lead has taken on a greenish hue that blends
well with the ancient gray stones.
The easy hill of the town serves as pedestal for Chartres Cathedral. Walk
through the little city, whose air of cold propriety is very typical of French
provincial life, pass through the Porte Guillaume, and from the boulevard
beside the stream study the chief edifice of this Beauce which is “the
granary of France.” Observe how salient are the transept arms. Another
Romanesque trait is the placing of two towers—unfinished here—between
choir and transept. What Huysmans called the maigreur distinguée of youth
is a characteristic of this church. In Rheims, the next begun of the big
Gothic cathedrals, is no trace of youth’s structural plainness.
As you sit by the stream watching Notre Dame of Chartres, its
Flamboyant Gothic tower, perfect of its kind, seems to ride imperiously
over the nave; none the less it will be the weather-beaten southwest tower
on which the eye will linger longest. Though it was designed to accompany
a church of lesser proportions, though it labors under the disadvantage of
being overtopped by its sister beacon, nothing can diminish its unparalleled
unity. Virile, virginal, aërial, majestic, venerable in youth and youthful in its
venerable age, the clocher vieux of Chartres is one of the supreme things of
the national art, “full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing.”

THE CATHEDRAL OF RHEIMS[113]

The nation that made a compact with God at the baptismal font of
Rheims will be converted and will return to her first vocation. Her errors
may not go unpunished, but the child of such virtues, of so many sighs, of
so many tears, will not perish. A day will come, and we hope it may not
long tarry, when France, like Saul on the road to Damascus, will be
enveloped in a supernal light whence will proceed a voice, asking: “Why
persecutest thou me? Rise up and wash the stains that disfigure thee. Go,
first-born of the Church, predestined nation, race of election, go carry as in
the past my name before all the peoples and before all the kings of the
earth.”—Address of Pope Pius X, in 1912, to the visiting French cardinals.
The other two of the four great cathedrals have no setting equal to the
hill pedestal of Chartres or to the river island of Notre Dame of Paris.
Seldom is a French cathedral surrounded by the pleasant precincts and
cloisters preserved by the English minsters, and Rheims Cathedral is no
exception in its abrupt rise from flat city streets. Its druidical massiveness
can easily dispense with a pedestal. Rheims imposes itself. Even in the
night its prodigy of magnificence endures. “The huge bas-relief is always
there in the darkness,” wrote Rodin. “I cannot distinguish it, but I feel it. Its
beauty persists. It triumphs over shadows and forces me to admire its
powerful black harmony. It fills my window, it almost hides the sky. How
explain why, even when enveloped in night, this cathedral loses nothing of
its beauty? Does the power of that beauty transcend the senses, that the eye
sees what it sees not?... O Nuit! tu es plus grande ici que partout
ailleurs!”[114]
The “masters of the living stone” who built Rheims Cathedral are known
to us to-day. Their names were commemorated in a labyrinth that once
formed part of the nave’s pavement, a drawing of which has been unearthed
by M. Louis Demaison. The obliterated figure in the middle of the labyrinth
no doubt represented the bishop who laid the foundation stone. He was
Albéric de Humbert, formerly archdeacon of Notre Dame at Paris while the
bishops Maurice and Eudes de Sully were raising that cathedral. Builder
and crusader, Albéric was a true product of his age. He marched into
Languedoc, in 1208, to chastise the Albigensian heretics; he attended
Innocent III’s great Council of the Lateran in 1214, and when he ventured
again to the East to take part in the crusade of Jean de Brienne, he was

captured by Saracens and ransomed by the Spanish knights of Calatrava. He
died on the return journey, 1218.
For a man of such energy, it could have been with slight regret that he
witnessed, in May, 1210, the destruction by fire of the decrepit church he
had inherited, one of whose builders had been Archbishop Hincmar in the
IX century. That early cathedral of Rheims had been redressed with a
façade by Archbishop Sampson, a friend of Abbot Suger’s, and among the
prelates who attended the memorable dedication of St. Denis. His Primary
Gothic work, wiped out in the conflagration of 1210, was a loss indeed for
art.
Bishop Albéric de Humbert set vigorously to work, and within a year of
the fire had laid the corner stone of the present cathedral (1211). By 1241
services were held in the finished choir. An archbishop of the Dreux line
(1227-40) gave windows to the upper apse, and although he and the
townsfolk were at bitter odds, the building of the great church by both
prelate and people went on unabated. The imperious Henri de Dreux, like
Pierre Mauclerc, the donor of Chartres’ south rose, was a grandson of that
brother of King Louis VII who built the beautiful church of St. Yved at
Braine on the highway between Rheims and Soissons. While the cathedral
of Rheims was building, another of its archbishops was a Joinville, and in
1270 its sixtieth ruler died on St. Louis’ last crusade.
The plan of the cathedral was made by Jean d’Orbais, who had watched
the erection of the abbatial (1180) in his native town of Orbais,[115] a church
modeled on the choir of St. Remi which the celebrated schoolman Pierre de
Celle had built from 1170 to 1180. Thus Orbais is the intermediary between
the big abbey church of Rheims and Rheims Cathedral.
For twenty years Jean d’Orbais directed the works at Rheims, so stated
the inscription in the labyrinth; and on his death Jean de Loup became
directing architect for sixteen years (1231-47), during which the transept
and its portals were constructed. The third architect, Gaucher de Rheims
(1250-59), began the west portals and worked on the nave. In his precious
notebook, Villard de Honnecourt sketched a bay of the nave before 1250.
The fourth master-of-works at Rheims, whose name was inscribed in the
labyrinth, was Bernard de Soissons. He worked here for thirty-five years;
the inscription states that he made five bays of the nave—no doubt the
westernmost ones—and that he opened the big O, the rose window of

twelve mammoth petals that flowers in the west façade, and is one of the
most beautiful designs of the age. By the end of the XIII century, therefore,
Rheims Cathedral was completed in its main parts. Carried on with scarcely
a pause, and always after the original plan of Jean d’Orbais, the great
church kept its unity throughout. The first four architects who during a
century had directed the works were succeeded by Robert de Coucy, to
whom for a time was erroneously attributed the original plan, but who
really continued to build the elaborate west façade.
That frontispiece of Rheims Cathedral, with its cloud of witnesses, is a
culmination of Gothic art. Some have called it a work of the XIV century,
but the labyrinth, set in the pavement before Robert de Coucy’s day,
distinctly attributed the placing of the big rose window to Bernard de
Soissons, who was in the city till 1298. Also a text of 1299 refers to one of
the west towers, and the armor worn in the David-Goliath group of the
gable is of the 1280 type. All critics acknowledge that the big statues of the
portals belong in main part to the golden period of Gothic sculpture, and
were done between 1250 and 1260.[116] The images under the southwest
tower had been prepared about thirty years earlier, in the time of Jean
d’Orbais. The façade of Rheims inspired many a later Gothic frontispiece—
Meaux, Tours, Rouen, Troyes, and Abbeville.
The cathedral went on perfecting itself in detail, and was nearing a
complete finish when, four months after the raising of the siege of Orléans,
Jeanne d’Arc brought her king to be crowned in the city where two hundred
years earlier St. Louis had been anointed. Three gentlemen of Anjou wrote a
letter to the queen of Charles VII, Marie of Anjou, and to her mother,
Jolande of Aragon, to describe the ceremonies at Rheims on that fifth day of
August, 1429. As the crown was set on the king’s head trumpets rang out,
till it seemed that the vaults would crack, and every man cried “Noël!” and
drew his sword. A fair sight it was to see the gallant bearing of Jeanne the
Maid as she stood by the king, holding the banner she cherished more than
the sword.
At her trial in Rouen even her standard was used against her. “Why,”
asked her judges, “was your banner carried into the church of Rheims to the
consecration rather than those of the other captains?” And Jeanne made one
of her ringing answers: “It had been in the fray, surely there was good
reason it should be at the victory”—à la peine ... à l’honneur—her phrase
was to become a proverb of France.[117] Jeanne liked fair play. In her army

she would tolerate no pillage, nor eat of food which she thought had been so
obtained. But then Jeanne had no Kultur. She was merely an unlettered
peasant girl of the Middle Ages, who called it plain thieving to carry off
household goods in an invaded country. For her good friends of Rheims la
bonne Lorraine kept a warm place in her memory, as her letter to them
showed: “Mes chiers et bons amis les bons et loyaulx Franxois de la cité de
Rains, Jehanne la Pucelle vous faict à savoir de ses nouvelles ... je vous
promect et certiffy que je ne vous abandonneray poinct.”
Not many years after that national hour of rejoicing the cathedral of
Rheims suffered a disaster which put a stop to further construction;
henceforth only restorations went on. In 1481 some careless plumbers set
on fire the timber overroof and the molten lead ran like a river into the
streets. Many a citizen perished in the effort to check the flames. The stone
roof of the cathedral stood firm, justifying those generations whose life
struggle had been the problem how to cover their churches enduringly.
Though all France contributed, the huge edifice was never to be crowned by
the six spires of Jean d’Orbais’ plan; yet even as it is, Rheims presents the
ideal exterior of a Gothic cathedral.
The main façade was made most appropriately a thing of pomp and
circumstance, regal and gorgeous for the royal coronations. No need to
hang such walls with tapestries for the feast. The three deep portals were
united as one by means of an unbroken line of thirty or more large images,
deriving from similar arrays at Chartres and Amiens, but possessing a
pronounced indigenous genius. In the groups of the Annunciation and the
Presentation the Blessed Virgin is a figure of spotless purity, meek and
infinitely touching in her little mantle that falls in straight simplicity from
her slender shoulders. “By humility the holy Virgin merited to become the
mother of God,” was the answer given by St. Isabelle of France, the only
sister of St. Louis, when asked why she named her convent at Longchamp,
L’Humilité-Notre-Dame. A very different Virgin is that in the Visitation
group. She and St. Elizabeth are draped voluminously like stately Roman
matrons. Those two statues (imitated by Bamburg Cathedral in 1280) must
have been inspired by some work of antiquity, of which Rheims possessed a
number. Classic influences in the imagery of northern France during the
Middle Ages was transitory, however. First and last mediæval sculpture was
a building-stone sculpture.

In the eyes and on the lips of a few of the entranceway statues hovered a
half-smile, a fleeting, rare expression which, long centuries before, the
Greek sculptors preceding Phidias had achieved. Again, at the Renaissance,
Da Vinci was obsessed by the same expression, “born of a miracle, meant to
gladden men’s souls forever.” To-day, the angel image La Sourire stands
headless at the portal under the north tower.
Not only was the west frontispiece of Rheims unique, but its transept
façades would have distinguished any cathedral. One of the three doors of
the north façade is composed of fragments from a monument which had
been in the Romanesque metropolitan burned in 1210. The middle door
commemorates local saints, for cathedrals were historians and linked the
generations with that continuance of tradition which makes the strength of a
race. To honor their spiritual forefathers was held to be patriotism by those
believing generations. At both west and north façades was an image of St.
Nicaise, the eleventh bishop of Rheims, who had been martyred as he knelt
by his cathedral door. Tradition relates that he was reciting the Psalmist’s
words, “My soul is bowed to earth,” when the Vandals struck off his head,
and that the severed head finished the verse: “Verify me, O Lord, according
to thy word.”[118]
The fifteenth bishop (459-533), St. Remigius, apostle of the Franks, is
honored by a statue. In the cathedral of his day he baptized Clovis, and thus
made France the first orthodox Christian kingdom of the West, since Gaul’s
other conquerors had fallen into the Arian heresy. Many an archbishop of
Rheims played a foremost part in the life of the nation. The military
prowess of Turpin, the twenty-seventh prelate here, is related in the
Chanson de Roland.[119] The forty-first archbishop was the learned Gerbert,
who died Pope Sylvester II (1003). He made the cathedral school famous,
among his pupils being the king’s son and Bishop Fulbert of Chartres.
One of the students in Rheims in that age was St. Bruno of Cologne,
founder of the Carthusian Order. For long years he directed the cathedral
school, guiding the people during the misrule of a scandalous archbishop. A
pupil of his at Rheims became Urban II, who instigated the First Crusade.
And a century later one of his ablest and holiest sons, St. Hugh of Avalon,
built the cathedral choir of Lincoln, as well as its small transept, and part of
the big transept—the oldest examples of Early-English Gothic. In 1180, the
archbishop of Rheims, Guillaume de Champagne, crowned as king his

nephew, Philippe-Auguste. Only those shepherds of the flock who attained
to canonized sainthood were honored by statues at the church entrances.
The Beau Dieu of Rheims of most benign majesty is the central image of
the transept’s northern façade. Surmounting it is a Last Judgment that
speaks well for the honesty of the clerics whose pupils were the sculptors.
Here at the king’s own basilica, whither he came for the most brilliant hour
of his life, was sculptured a crowned monarch, as the front figure, marching
to hell, and behind him walked a bishop. No pharisees were the men of the
XIII century. Sin was sin, and all men were equal before sin’s punishment.
There are statues on the towers of that same north frontispiece to which
names have been given. One has been called Philippe-Auguste, and it
certainly was a portrait study, whether or not it represented the most able
monarch of the feudal ages, the victor of Bouvines, who tripled the area of
France and under whom was begun almost every Gothic cathedral in the
land. The name of his grandson, St. Louis, has been given to another image.
In a niche of the façade stands a charming Eve holding a very mediæval
serpent.
One can merely indicate, in passing, the astounding wealth of Rheims—
five thousand images whose verve and fecundity are marvelous. “If your
heart is right, all creatures will be for you a book of holy doctrine,” so they
dared to carve clown, dog, cat, or sheep on pinnacle, or in hidden nook, and
their flora was as generous as their fauna. A local botanist has found that
every leaf growing to-day by the roadsides was reproduced in the cathedral.
It was only natural that in Champagne the vine leaf should be popular; on
one of the capitals of the nave a pleasant vintage scene is represented.
If the gorgeous west approaches of the Cathedral-Royal were suited for
earthly pageantry, its eastern end paid homage, in holier simplicity, to the
Spiritual King. Around the exterior wall of the apse was set a guard of
angels, each carrying an emblem of the Passion, or of its symbol, the Mass
—chalice, censer, missal, spear—and the procession met at the Christ image
placed in the center of the curving wall. The ordinance was derived from
Byzantine art. Many an artist has said of the apse sculpture of Rheims that
the Greeks can show no lovelier work. A few years later, more angelic
thrones, dominations, and powers were set around this, the Cathedral of the
Angels. A seraphic sentry adorned each buttress and at the same time

increased its counterbutting force, and were agents toward the swifter
grounding of the load.
And now, having touched superficially on the exterior of this
inexhaustible church, let us step inside its imaged doors. On the inner wall
of the three western portals is an elaborate decoration found nowhere else.
Tier upon tier of statues shrined in foliage-covered niches rise to the level
of the triforium. Never has a wall been more glorified both within and
without. Lavish leaf ornamentation forms the capitals of the piers. Each pier
consists of a circular shaft cantoned by four lesser columns; the capitals of
the latter are divided into two stories because their diameter is less—a
skillful contrivance that solves the difficulty of grouping pillars of different
sizes.
The nave of Rheims was never weakened by the
addition of side chapels, which always diminishes
the integrity of an edifice. In fact, the lower
walls[120] as well as the piers were made oversolid
for what they bear, since it had not yet been
learned how to apply exactly the right counterforce
to the pressure of the vaulting. Amiens was to be
the first to achieve that perfect equilibrium.
The interior proportions of Rheims are
The Angel Apse of Rheims harmonious; the side aisles are relatively right with
(c. 1220) the central vessel, and the nave leads up well to the
sanctuary, which, inside and out, is beyond
criticism. As a whole, however, the interior of this cathedral has not the
slender upwardness of Amiens nor the ascetic holiness of Chartres. It stands
more than it soars. It praises the deity in another fashion than does the
mystic cathedral. The keynote here is a right-minded human splendor.
Robust and majestic, this is the church for state pageants, the regal temple
for national festivals.
Alas! poor battle-worn Rheims! Alas for the bons et loyaulx Franxois de
la cité de Rains! Has Jehanne la Purcelle forgotten her promise never to
abandon you?

Mourant en plein martyre avec vivacité ...
Masquant sous sa visière une efficacité ...

Jetant toute une armée aux pieds de la prière....
So wrote the poet who fell on the field of honor, in September, 1914, of
St. Jeanne, whose martyrdom was a victory; so he might have written of
Rheims Cathedral. Again a sublime holocaust was needed for the saving of
the soul of France.

RHEIMS SINCE 1914
How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people. How is she become
a widow, she that was great among the nations.—Jerimiah: Lamentations.

Designer infinite!
Ah! must Thou char the wood e’er Thou canst limn with
it?
—Francis Thompson, The Hound of
Heaven.

In the first days of September, 1914, after the battle of the Marne, the
Germans evacuated Rheims, which they had occupied for little over a week.
Before they quitted the city, some cans of inflammable liquids, with bundles
of straw, were set on the roof of the cathedral, and there they were found
and made note of officially by Frenchmen who ascended the towers to hang
out the Red Cross flag. The destruction of Rheims Cathedral was planned
deliberately and in cold blood it was carried out. No military excuse for the
crime is possible, since General Joffre made a formal statement that at no
time were the church towers used as posts of observation.
From the heights a few miles away the enemy opened fire on the city. It
is said that Baron von Plattenburg ordered the bombardment. General von
Haeringen is also cited as an executioner of Rheims Cathedral. On
September 17th and 18th the church was riddled with projectiles. Between
dawn and sunset, on September 19th, over five hundred of them struck the
mammoth church. About four o’clock on that fateful day, Saturday,
September 19, 1914, the timber roof caught fire from an inflammable
bomb. In less than an hour flames were devouring the wooden scaffolding
which, by ill luck, because of repairs in progress, framed part of the edifice.
Fire lapped and calcined the outer walls, obliterating the kings and the
angels and the saints, wiping out all the loving handicraft of the old
stonecutters. Once again molten lead ran in the streets of Rheims. Fire

lapped the sculptured screen inside the western doors, and the lovely lavish
chiseling has become a blurred, amorphous mass. Projectiles tore through
the gaping windows and crashed against the opposite walls. Some of the
burning timber from the overroof fell through the apertures of the vault’s
keystones and ignited the straw spread on the pavement for the wounded
German soldiers who had been left behind when the invaders evacuated the
city.
Let an eyewitness relate the burning of Rheims Cathedral: “It stood
enveloped in flames, one towering flame itself. Before the outrage
something surged unchained at the root of our being. Our cathedral! Our
hearts broke as we watched its desecration. An aged woman of the city
intoned solemnly: ‘This will bode them no good!’ (‘Ca ne leur portera pas
bonheur!’) We stood in groups watching with fierce anger the conflagration.
We walked, we spoke, but like automatons, for our souls were groaning
with anguish. Our cathedral! Première page de France! Geste des aïeux!
Legs des siècles devenant aujourd’hui, en ce poignant martyre, l’hostie
nationale!” Suddenly word came that the German wounded inside the
church must be saved. The archpriest of the cathedral, Canon Landrieux (to-
day a bishop), called for aid from the onlookers. He was answered by angry
murmurs: “What! must we then risk our lives to save these bombarders of
hospitals, these incendiaries of cathedrals?” Then a young girl’s voice rose,
trembling with tears: “On est de France, nous autres!” And instantly men
stepped forward to aid the heroic priest save their enemies from the flaming
furnace.
Poor martyred Rheims! Its once illuminated western front is battered and
corroded past restoral, and is falling flake by flake. With a touch of the
finger the stone crumbles into dust. The towers are mutilated. One after
another the rapt and fearless angels on the buttresses have been toppled
down. As the incessant rain of fire and iron came from the northeast, the
transept’s northern entranceway is wrecked—its historic statues mere
unsightly stumps. Never again will the hardy lesson of the Last Judgment
be preached at the ruined portal.
No more will the triple-winged seraphim chant hosannas in the great
western rose. No coming generations of travelers will carry away an
undying memory of the sunset hour in the great church, when the western
inclosure became a resplendent sheet of flame, and those who paced up and
down the basilica gazed with awe at that majestic spectacle of Art and

Faith. The XIII-century windows of the clearstory are pulverized; scarcely a
fragment is left of the forty lancets of the nave where, in superimposed
rows, the kings of France stood, with the archbishops who had crowned
them, big-eyed barbaric images, so intense of hue that one remembers them
as blood-red rubies. The loss of the windows of Rheims has been expressed
poignantly by Pierre Loti, who spent a Sunday in October, 1915, in the
cathedral. He found the silence of death within its ravaged walls that for
centuries had echoed the music of the liturgy. Only a cold wind now and
then made fitful psalmody. When it blew strongly he could hear a patter as
of delicate light pearls. It was the falling to oblivion of what still remained
of the ancient windows.
The hammer of Odin and of Thor has gone on beating down relentlessly
the national church, and a Berlin poet has sung, exultantly: “The bells
sound no more in the two-towered Dom. We have closed with lead, O
Rheims, thy house of idolatry.” Rheims was hated of old. In its cathedral of
1119 Calixtus II, of the blood of the Capetians, had excommunicated the
would-be autocrat of Europe, the German emperor, who had proved himself
an unnatural son, a treacherous neighbor, and one who laid sacrilegious
hands on holy things. As the pope pronounced the sentence the four
hundred prelates gathered in the cathedral dashed down their candles. Yes,
Rheims was hated.
Every check to the invader’s troops in the trenches was immediately
revenged on the defenseless church. Rheims Cathedral bombarded became
a tragically recurrent line in the war’s official bulletin. On October 14,
1914, a hole, meters wide, was torn in the most beautiful of Gothic apses.
On February 21 and 22, 1915, the bombardment surpassed in savagery the
horrors of the fateful September 19th. On March 29, 1915, a German
airship dropped inflammable bombs on the choir, and before many months
of this rain of iron and fire the masonry roof began to give way. During the
half year preceding the armistice a veritable avalanche of shells fell on the
stricken city, where remained only a few hundred of its hundred and thirty
thousand inhabitants. From June 15 to June 28, 1918, over sixteen thousand
shells fell on Rheims, and, strange to tell, amid it all Dubois’ statue of
Jeanne d’Arc mounted on her charger on the cathedral parvis stood
unscathed.[121] On July 5th eight shells crashed into the western entrances;
and so on runs the sinister record.

“We wait for a chastisement equal to the crime,” is the word of Enlart,
the archæologist. And the world’s heart echoes the verdict. When on that
fatal September day of 1914, the staggering almost unbelievable report first
spread over France, “Rheims Cathedral is in flames”—many a strong man
wept on the streets of French cities, and throughout the tragic night of the
conflagration the French soldiers, camped over the plains for miles,
watched in anguish the destruction of their patrimony, of their ancestress
cathedral, l’holocauste de la patrie. In Jeanne’s century it had taken a long
and cruel war and the sacrifice of her who was the incarnation of France to
remake the stricken soul of the nation, and again an overwhelming
martyrdom was needed to set right the grievous pitié there was in the
country of France.
The city of Rheims is to-day a shapeless mass, resembling a place
wrecked by ancient barbarism. The archiepiscopal palace, whose two-
storied chapel was built by the same hands that laid the choir stones of
Notre Dame, is entirely demolished. The cathedral, though ravaged
irreparably, still towers above the ruined city. Had Amiens been subjected to
the same bombardment as Rheims, it would have collapsed long ago. It is
the surplus strength of Rheims’ foundations, somewhat criticized by
architects, that has saved the church from utter destruction. Notre Dame of
Rheims was built for eternity.
The mystic wonder of the severed head of St. Nicaise has been repeated.
Immolated Rheims has stirred anew the latent crusading blood. “Honor”
and “sacrifice” and all the brave words of the days of chivalry are again on
the lips of Frenchmen, and many a scoffer has been beaten to his knees by
the same spirit which actuated the generations who built the cathedrals and,
building them, welded a nation’s unity. Those who committed the sacrilege
of Rheims forgot that when mankind is robbed of a heritage it sets the
criminal in the pillory of history. To-day Rheims Cathedral lies wounded on
the field of honor; Rheims Cathedral is forever the symbol of a people’s
resurrection. À la peine!... À l’honneur!

AMIENS CATHEDRAL[122]
There have been, in humanity’s story, only two great schools of art—that
of Greece, and that of the Gothic era. For only then was expressed the ideas
and the religious spirit of the peoples that gave birth to them. The Greeks

rendered the Pagan spirit, the Pagan emotion; they left us the Parthenon.
The Gothic School rendered the Christian idea, the Christian spirit. It has
left us Notre Dame of Amiens.—Émile Lambin.[123]
The terrors and the thunder of the World War menaced Amiens through
the long four years, but the grand doctrinal temple, almost superhuman in
its majesty, was spared the fate of Rheims, Soissons, and the noble church
of St. Martin at Ipres, begun in the same twelvemonth as itself. The statues
at the portals of Amiens have seen pass the great personages of the
mediæval centuries. The kings of this world felt honored to visit the church
of Our Lady and St. Firman. Its reconciliation Mass put the seal on a treaty
of goodwill between France and England, and united the English ruler with
his rebellious people; St. Louis, the peace maker, prayed in its sanctuary.
On its very enemies it imposed veneration. When Charles le Téméraire
attacked the city in 1471 he ordered his troops to respect the cathedral.
While the upper vaulting of Chartres was being finished and the choir of
Rheims was building, there was laid the first stone of Notre Dame of
Amiens in 1220. Amiens is the Gothic cathedral par excellence, recognized
from the first as a masterpiece—the Parthenon of Gothic—and immediately
taken as a model. The cathedrals of Tours and of Troyes, already begun,
were now continued like the big church of Picardy. The Sainte-Chapelle in
Paris was modeled on the Lady chapel of Amiens. The cathedrals of
Clermont, Narbonne, Rodez, and Limoges are “daughters of Amiens.” Its
influence extended to the church of St. Sauveur at Bruges, to the cathedral
of Prague, and to the choir of Cologne, the latter being almost a replica.[124]
Amiens carried the Gothic principle of equilibrium farther than Rheims.
The aisles were made higher, the bays wider, the points of ground support
fewer, and the piers less heavy. No energy was wasted. Each part was made
just strong enough. To go beyond this culminating point of constructive
boldness was inevitably to decline.
No one has better summed up the amplitude of this inspired church than
M. Georges Durand, its latest historian, whose monograph is a model: “A
vast space inundated with air and light has here been covered by stone
vaults, as light and solid as possible; those vaults have been raised to a
height never before attained; no longer any walls; the solidity of the edifice
is assured by a play of pushes and resistances; flying buttresses exactly
meeting the necessary spot to counterbut the great vault; the system of

equilibrium perfectly known, and applied with a rigor and audacity
unbelievable; the least possible sharpness given to transverse arches; the
collaterals raised to a great height—all contribute to give this interior its
expression of immensity.”
Amiens is a “triumphal chant.” The “vast space inclosed” produces an
impression that is confounding. When first you step inside the western
doors of Amiens, you pause in awe. The emotion felt has the efficacy of a
prayer.
The edifice is prodigious and appears so; only St. Sophia, Cologne
Cathedral, and St. Peter’s at Rome cover larger areas. Now in St. Peter’s
each detail was enlarged in proportion to the giant scale chosen; thus, a
cherub would have a thigh the size of an elephant’s. The result is that the
great church appears less than its real size. The method of the mediæval
architect was precisely opposite. He saw no advantage in making his edifice
appear smaller than it really was. He observed that no matter how big a tree
might grow, its leaves were no larger than those on smaller trees. The
mediæval architect took for his scale of measurement the height of man. His
doorways were made for man to walk under. In the bases of his piers, in the
triforium arches, in the normal size of his sculpted flora and fauna, he
recalled to the eye the scale of a man, his chosen échelle: “And he measured
the wall thereof ... the measure of a man, which is of an angel.”[125] No
matter how large a Gothic church might be, the statues decorating it did not
increase in scale. To those who prefer a cathedral of the north there will
always seem to be a touch of the artificial, of the tour de force in St. Peter’s.
The name of the master mind who designed the cathedral of Picardy was
Robert de Lusarches, recorded in a labyrinth formerly in the nave’s
pavement, as were his two successors, Thomas de Cormont and his son
Renaud. The occasion for a new structure was the fire of 1218 which partly
destroyed the Romanesque cathedral. As its old choir was preserved
sufficiently to serve for a while longer, the new cathedral was begun by the
nave, not the usual procedure. The nave rose in one supreme effort; from
start to finish its plan never deviated. It has been taken as the typical
masterpiece. “The façade of Paris, the tower of Chartres, the sculpture of
Rheims, the nave of Amiens” is a popular summing up.

The Transept of Amiens Cathedral (1220-1280)

By 1236 the nave of Amiens was finished, whereupon the Romanesque
choir was replaced by a Gothic one whose plan had been drawn by Robert
de Lusarches at the same time with that of the nave. His feeling for
proportion was unfaltering; the relation between every part of his church is
perfect. The interior elevation in three vertical stories was to become classic
—a pier arcade—which is one-third of the entire height, and of the
remaining upper wall a clearstory which occupies two-thirds and a triforium
one-third. The church is three times as wide as the side aisle is high, and
height and span correlate with length. Subtlety of calculation is seen
everywhere. The perspective view became a kind of classic type. As you
gaze down the church toward the curving east wall which closes the vista,

you see beneath the pier arcades of the sanctum sanctorum the windows of
the apse chapels behind; they appear to fill the apertures symmetrically,
whereas at Beauvais, where the side aisle is exceedingly high, the windows
of the chapels rise to merely half the height of the pier arches. The
cathedrals of Tours and Clermont followed the more satisfactory
arrangement of Amiens.
In the last days of Gothic architecture the dislike of the horizontal line
was to be carried to such an extent that even the capitals, which the custom
of all nations had approved for three thousand years, were eliminated. At
Amiens a sane balance was kept. Under its triforium runs a deeply carved
band of foliage broken only at the triumphal arches of the transept-crossing.
Only there does the ascending line rise unobstructed from pavement to
vault. And yet no church ever soared more confidently. The very hall-mark
of genius is Amiens’ strong horizontal leaf garland—just the needed touch
to give variety to regularity as grandiose as this. In the nave the frieze was
cut before the posing of the stones, but in the choir the sculpture was done
in situ.
The fenestration of this cathedral of St. Louis’ reign shows the national
art in its prime. The glazed triforium is a kind of pedestal for the clearstory,
with which it is bound in a single composition by means of continuous
mullions. The original glass was of the Sainte-Chapelle type, made by the
Paris school which led in the second half of the XIII century, and were it
still in existence the interior of Amiens would be a gorgeous sight. Only
vestiges have survived; in some of the choir chapels are patchwork panels
of ancient fragments. No one denies that the light enters this cathedral too
profusely for the mystic seclusion beloved of the soul.
The prelate who laid the foundation stone of Amiens in 1220 was Evrard
de Fouilloy, cousin of that archbishop of the great house of Joinville who
was a builder at Rheims. Intimate with Innocent III, connoisseur in notable
men, the bishop of Amiens was one of the many building prelates who
attended the Lateran Council whose séances must often have appeared like
an Amis des Cathédrales reunion. Bishop Evrard’s splendid bronze tomb,
cast at one flow, escaped the smelting pot of the Revolution, and with that
of his successor, Geoffrey d’Eu, who chanted the first Mass in his cathedral
in 1236, the year of his death, is now placed under the pier arcades of the
nave. “Here lies Evrard,” runs the inscription, “a man compassionate to the
afflicted, the widows’ protector, the orphans’ guardian, who fed the people,

who laid the foundations of this structure, to whose care the city was
given.” The hand of the bishop is raised in a grave gesture of power. The
image of Geoffrey d’Eu is less personal. “Bright-shining man of Eu,” runs
his epitaph, “by whom the throne of Amiens rose into immensity.” The
saintly bishop used to encourage even the beggars to give their penny
toward raising the new house of God.
By 1245 bells were placed in the western towers; then came a lull in the
work, from 1247 to 1257, for the bishop had accompanied St. Louis to the
holy wars. Louis IX was in Amiens on several occasions and his Sainte-
Chapelle at Paris proved his admiration for the classic church. As the XIII
century closed, a chapel was added to Amiens by her bishop, the learned
Guillaume de Mâcon, a personal friend of St. Louis, and present at his death
in Tunis, 1270. The son and successor of Louis IX sent Guillaume to Rome
to solicit his father’s canonization. During the XIV century other side
chapels were added, and in the one erected by Bishop La Grange, from
1373 to 1375, appeared for the first time in France some of the
characteristics of Flamboyant Gothic—the flame tracery and ramified
vaulting. As early as 1270, however, Amiens had made a sporadic use of
supplementary ribs, in the square over the transept-crossing, employing
them there, no doubt, in order to break up the immense expanses of
infilling.
Though the cathedral of Amiens has lost its stained glass, it has retained
that other glory of decorative art—its sculpture. The three western entrance
arches, in nine orders, are sovereign compositions. Probably as a scheme of
dogmatic theology Amiens is even more complete than Chartres or Rheims.
The main façade, with its strong buttress lines unbroken from ground to
tower, would be the grandest of all the Gothic frontispieces had it been
completed as first planned. But only in its lower stories is it of the XIII
century, and the towers scarcely rise above the enormous parallelogram.
At the trumeau of the central door stands le Beau Dieu of Amiens, of
stronger personality than that of Rheims, a Christ of the West more than the
East. “He is the master, wise, steadfast, fraternal, with the patience and the
human sympathy that comprehend man’s eternal weaknesses.”[126] He
treads on monsters that symbolize Satan and Sin: “Thou shalt walk upon the
asp and the basilisk; the lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under
foot.”[127] About him stand the best loved of all the saints, the apostles—
plain, primitive men in whose upturned foreheads shines the serenity of

certitude. We are His witnesses, they seem to be saying, and our testimony
we sealed usque ad sanguinem: “That which we have seen and have heard
we declare unto you....” “We were eyewitnesses of His greatness....” “This
Voice we heard brought from heaven....” “These things we write to you that
you may rejoice and your joy be full.” The prophets and patriarchs at
Amiens’ portals lack the assurance of joy which shines in the faces of the
humble men chosen for the hierarchy of the New Law; the earlier ones had
not themselves seen and heard and touched.
Never was the meaning of the Messiah’s coming set forth more
sublimely than in this archetype cathedral. The soul of the Middle Ages had
brooded over the Gospels till it had pierced to their spiritual sense. “The
house of the Lord built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets,
Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone in whom all the building
being framed together, growing up into an holy temple in the Lord.”[128]
When the apostles were placed at the cathedral doors, the tradition was
to have St. Peter stand to the right of his Master, and St. Paul to the left; the
latter was substituted for Matthias, elected to Judas’ place. St. Peter,
tonsured, carried the key and a cross; his beard was short and curly. St. Paul
bore a sword, since his Roman citizenship had saved him from death by
crucifixion; he was represented with a bald forehead and a long beard. St.
Andrew carried the peculiar-shaped cross on which he died; St.
Bartholomew a knife, emblem of his martyrdom.
At the western doors of Amiens is an Annunciation group in which the
Virgin is the prototype of the gentle Ancilla Domini at Rheims. The St.
Elizabeth of the Visitation group is a noble aged woman; the St. Simeon of
the Presentation has been called the Nunc dimittis in person. Local saints
are in a position of honor at the right-hand door, the chief here being St.
Firman, the first bishop of Amiens, and the pioneer who preached the Word
in Picardy, where he was martyred in 289. On his tomb rose the first
cathedral of the city. His statue at the trumeau is a masterpiece of its period.
In his Bible of Amiens,[129] Ruskin gives enlightening interpretations of
the quatrefoils adorning the wall under the big images at the western
entrance. Little genre studies of agricultural life typify the seasons, and the
vices and virtues are rendered with movement and subtlety. There is a
connection between certain of the small bas-reliefs and the large statues
standing above them.

About 1288 they carved the images at the transept’s southern portal.
Fifty years had elapsed since the making of the western entrance, and
already the early reverential awe had passed away. Our Lady is now shown
as a radiant young matron whose smile is somewhat mannered, but to call
the charming vierge dorée “the soubrette of Picardy,” as did Ruskin, is an
absurd exaggeration. The apostles are no longer of the ideal type. They are
mediæval schoolmen, debating some point of dialectics.
Each century was to add to the sculpture of Amiens. André Beauneveu,
an illustrious French-Flemish master, made buttress statues of Charles V
and his sons, realistic portrait work. The king was one of the four Valois
brothers who were, with the Avignon popes, the chief art patrons of the XIV
century. As Amiens Cathedral suffered comparatively little during the two
cataclysms which emptied the churches of France, it is still a museum of
treasures. When, in 1562, the Huguenots, sword in hand, rushed into the
church to shatter the altars, the town’s tocsin sounded and the citizens
assembled in such numbers that they saved their church. Again, during the
Revolution, when brutal soldiery began to mutilate the choir screen’s
groups, the women of Amiens who lived about the cathedral lustily beat the
vandals with chairs. Of course the Revolution set up here the usual altar
with its living Goddess of Reason, Marat’s bust was honored, and over the
portal was inscribed the grandiloquent boast: “Fanaticism is destroyed:
Truth triumphs.”
The tombs, bas-reliefs, and paintings were left intact, as well as the
famous carved stalls finished in 1522. In the choir-screen sculpture of XVI-
century Gothic the Renaissance had only just begun to appear. St. Firman’s
mission was related quaintly—no prudery shown in the scene of the
baptism of Amiens’ first Christians. The life of St. John the Baptist was set
forth because crusaders had brought his relics to this church from
Constantinople. The tourist guide enjoys leading his clients behind Amiens’
sanctuary to show them a plump little cupid weeping a marble tear over the
tomb of some good canon who founded a local orphanage. M. Durand
remarks that for one who appreciates the magnificent bronze tombs of the
bishop-builders, or the realistic late-Gothic groups of the choir screen, there
are ten who are moved by that banal little ange pleurant.
In the transept are some marble slabs inscribed with the names of the
presidents of a religious-literary association called Puy-Notre-Dame. Such
Puys (from podium, or platform) were poetic contests that sprang up in the

XIV century, with the disappearance of the wandering minstrels, and they
led in turn to a real literary movement.[130] At Amiens it was the custom
each year for a new picture in honor of Notre Dame to be presented to her
church, and at the festival a poem was read in her praise. Eventually statues
were substituted for pictures, which explains the wealth of XVII-century
sculpture in the side chapels and aisles of Amiens Cathedral. A number of
the ancient paintings have been placed in the Museum of the city, whose
walls have been embellished by Puvis de Chavannes’ Ave Picardia nutrix.

CHAPTER VI

Six of the Lesser Great Cathedrals: Bourges, Beauvais, Troyes, Tours,
Lyons, Le Mans
Every work of art truly beautiful and sublime throws the soul into a
gracious or serious reverie that lifts it toward the Infinite. Art of itself is
essentially moral and religious, since it expresses everywhere in its
manifestation the eternal beauty, or else it is false to its own law, to its own
genius.
—Victor Cousin, Du vrai, du beau, et du bien.
CATTERED over France are a number of cathedrals that would
stand in the first rank in any other land but one in which were
such supreme churches as Chartres, Rheims, and Amiens. It is
convenient to group here six of these lesser Great Cathedrals,
since they will not fall properly within the coming four chapters, which deal
with the regional schools of Normandy, Burgundy, the Midi, and
Plantagenet Gothic.
According to the classification used by M. Lefèvre-Pontalis, there are six
schools of Gothic architecture in France. Their differences lie in secondary
characteristics such as ground-plan, ramifications of ribs, and the form of
piers, window tracery, and ornamentations. Of the Ile-de-France and
Champagne schools we have already gained some idea in tracing the first
steps of the national art, and in following its highest development at Paris,
Rheims, and Amiens. Of the six cathedrals here grouped that of Beauvais
belongs to the Ile-de-France Picard school and that of Troyes to the Gothic
of Champagne. But the four others—Bourges, Tours, Lyons, and Le Mans
—show the influences of two or more schools and therefore fit more
reasonably into this heterogeneous chapter. In speaking of Gothic schools it
is well to recall that in the Flamboyant development there were no distinct
regional groups. A similar Gothic style was used in the Midi as in
Normandy, in Picardy as in Burgundy.

Though not of the greatest, these six churches are splendid monuments.
With hesitation one places such a cathedral as Bourges in a secondary
group. Had Beauvais and Le Mans been completed on the same scale as
their grandiose choirs, they would stand with the foremost. At Troyes are
windows, of the same epochs as the stones framing them, that for splendor
are second only to those of Chartres and Bourges. The cathedral of Tours is
the personification of the equipoise of Touraine’s art, and its storied
windows are notable. The metropolitan church of Lyons possesses a grave
individuality of the most singular interest, and its windows, too, are
masterpieces.
During an astonishing century—roughly speaking from 1170 to 1270—
France built about eighty Gothic cathedrals, and more than three hundred
fine churches. And the miracle is that each had its own distinct personality,
which etches itself clearly on the traveler’s mind. Such was the super-
abounding joy of creation in the golden age of the national art that no two
churches are alike.

THE CATHEDRAL OF BOURGES[131]
One goes before the Lord’s altar, one bends the knee, one stays there in
an attitude of prostrate humility, and perhaps, in it all, one has not rendered
to God a single homage. Why? Because religion does not consist of
inclinations of the body, or of modesty of the eyes, but of humbleness of
spirit, and not for an instant has the spirit been one with those
demonstrations of respect and adoration.
One visits the hospitals and prisons, one consoles the afflicted, one tends
the sick and helps the poor, and perhaps the very one who displays in all
this the most assiduity and zeal is he who possesses the least Christian
mercy. Why? Because he is carried on by a certain natural activity, or an
entirely human pity touches him, or is it any other motive, except God, that
leads him.—On True and False Piety, Bourdaloue (1632-1704; born in
Bourges).
The cathedral of St. Étienne stands on a slight hill in the center of
Bourges, and is a landmark for forty miles over the Berry plains that are the
tranquil heart of France. The best architectural view of it is obtained from
the park once attached to the archbishop’s palace and said to have been laid
out by Le Nôtre, master of this type of cold distinction which is so

eminently French. As the entire south flank of the church is exposed to view
there, the absence of a transept is what first strikes the attention. Bourges is
the only XIII-century cathedral without the extended arms of the cross. Had
it a transept it might appear short, whereas now its four hundred feet of
length make the most imposing effect.
Bourges, Paris, Troyes, and Clermont are the only cathedrals with double
aisles about choir and nave. Bourges is exceptional in that the inner aisle is
twice as high as the outer—so high that it possesses its own triforium and
clearstory; so high that the pier arches around the middle church rise to
more than half the height of the edifice. Indeed, many an English cathedral
could stand under the pier arches of Bourges. Each pillar is encircled by
eight shafts—an arrangement that accentuates its loftiness. It may be
claimed that there is over-emphasis in a procession of such giant columns
about the interior of a church, and that there is something spectacular in a
colonnade of such stupendous arches. Certainly the main clearstory is
dwarfed by comparison, and the contrast in height between inner and outer
aisle is too violent. Bourges must pass as a superb experiment rather than
the restrained achievement from which emanates a school. Subsequent
architects preferred to take as model the more classic division of Amiens’
interior wall elevation.
None the less is this most original basilica magnificently and
romantically beautiful. Upon entering the church for the first time one feels
the gripping sensation of beholding a thing audacious and gigantic. And yet
the impression conveyed is not that of overweening pride. There is
reverence here. Bishop Durandus tells us that the piers of a church are the
bishops and doctors who sustain the temple of God by their doctrines, that
the length of a church representeth fortitude which patiently endureth till it
attain heaven; its breadth, charity; its height, courage that despiseth
prosperity and adversity, hoping to see the gladness of the Lord in the land
of the living. The windows are hospitality with cheerfulness, and tenderness
with charity. They are Holy Scriptures which expel the wind and the rain—
that is, all things hurtful—but transmit the light of the true Sun—that is,
God—into the hearts of the faithful.[132] So wrote the wise old XIII-century
Midi bishop for whom the whole world and everything in it were symbols.
Sound doctrine, fortitude, and warm protecting hospitality—such are
qualities supremely understood of Bourges. There is awe in this church and
there is magic. Of the boundless imagination of dreams are certain sunset

aspects here, when from the wide western window of Jean de Berry gleams
of light strike athwart these vast arches of wonderland, across these sixty
big pillars of stone, and night-time hours—during the May evening services
of Our Lady—when the great church as in fearsome meditation is shrouded
in shadow.

The Apse of Bourges (1200-1225)

Some four or five cathedrals have stood, in turn, on the same site which
was close by the Gallo-Roman city walls. For the early Christians were
despised as pariahs, and allowed to build only on the outskirts of cities,
until the edict of Constantine permitted them to exercise their religion with
honor. All over France churches are to be found abutting on the ancient
ramparts of towns. Of the early cathedrals of Bourges only the core of the
present crypt remains. From the Romanesque edifice immediately
preceding the present cathedral come its XII-century side portals.

There are strong analogies between the ground-plan of St. Étienne of
Bourges and that of Notre Dame of Paris, especially if one recalls that the
cathedral of Paris, as first designed, possessed no transept. Probably the
plans of both were made at the same time, but the work in the capital of the
royal demesne started immediately in 1163; hence it retained the galleries
over the side aisles—a Romanesque tradition—whereas, at Bourges the
actual building began only in the last decade of the XII century, when such
tribunes were passing out of vogue. Bourges thereupon undertook to modify
its first design, and it tried the startling experiment of making an inner aisle
whose height comprised both aisle and tribune.
The crypt of Bourges,[133] one of the most spacious in France, was begun
by Archbishop Henri de Sully (1184-99), brother of Bishop Eudes who
helped build the west façade of Paris Cathedral. When Henri died, the
decision was left to his brother in Paris, as to which of three Cistercian
abbots should be the succeeding archbishop in Bourges. The nomination
fell to St. Guillaume Berruyer (1199-1208) of the house of Nevers, whose
counts had built the admirable Romanesque St. Étienne in that city.
Guillaume had watched both Paris and Soissons’ cathedrals rising; he had
been a monk in Pontigny, whose church was the earliest Gothic venture in
Burgundy, and he was abbot of Châalis, where the church also was Primary
Gothic. This holy Cistercian was loath to leave his cloister, and always
wore his white robe and fasted like a genuine son of St. Bernard. In his face
shone his purity of soul, and it is said that his manner was merry.
Only a saint could have made the ambulatory of Bourges, a place apart
from the world’s fret, fashioned for meditative prayer, its walls hung with
gospel parables of mosaic glass. It is thought that while the new Gothic
choir was building, services were held in the Romanesque cathedral, which
may have been partly open to the elements, since St. Guillaume caught a
chill in it while preaching, from the effects of which he died in 1208. Ten
years later, the first ceremony held in the completed choir was for his
canonization; without the usual process of investigation the pope declared
him a saint.
From 1236 to 1260, a nephew of St. William’s, Blessed Philippe
Berruyer, was archbishop of Bourges and carried forward the nave; and the
saint’s great-niece, the Countess Matilda of Nevers, contributed generously.
Bourges commemorated her saintly bishops in the clearstory of her inner

aisle. The window wherein St. Guillaume is pictured shows his niece as the
donor.
Never was monument set on a more majestic base than the choir end of
Bourges. There the crypt stands above the ground, owing to the slope of the
land. The chevet of St. Étienne is incomparable. In every part of the edifice
good mason work was done, save in the upper vaults, where the necessity of
economy led to skimping. It is apparent that, as the eastern curve of the
cathedral was rising, the architect modified his plan. In his apse walls he
inserted small chapels, each standing on two columns and an engaged shaft
and each roofed by a stone pyramid. Not only does the circlet of little
shrines add to the beauty of the chevet, but each chapel serves the practical
purpose of a buttress. That they were afterthoughts is proved by the
ambulatory windows not being set symmetrically over the crypt windows.
However, the chapels must have been added during the building of the
procession path, because the latter’s vaulting shows no sign of
reconstruction.
The cathedral of Bourges is not well documented. Only by a study of the
stones themselves can it be dated. Its eastern end was building during the
first part of the XIII century; in 1266 the chapter contributed toward the
works, their donations being used probably for the completion of the nave.
At the end of the XIII century porches were added to the side doors retained
from the Romanesque cathedral. Work continued on the west façade during
the early part of the XIV century, but when, in 1324, St. Étienne was
dedicated, it had been completed in its main parts for forty years.
This makes the west front of Bourges about a century younger than its
apse. The five deeply recessed portals correspond to its five aisles, and the
western towers are set clear of the aisles, as at Rouen; that to the southwest
is now braced by a flying buttress and detached buttress pile. In 1506 the
northwest tower collapsed. It was rebuilt by alms, given as thank-offering
for the privilege of eating butter during Lent, hence its name Tour de
Beurre. Such butter towers may be called the XVI century’s method of
charity bazaar to raise money for church repairs. During the heyday of
Gothic, the fervent layman gave voluntarily, asking for no return, and in
that spirit rose the clocher vieux at Chartres. Compare that sublime
monument with the elegant, mundane late-Gothic “butter towers” of France,
and you comprehend how inevitably the spirit of builders reveals itself in
the work of their hands.

Of the five western doors of Bourges, only the central one is wholly of
the XIII century (c. 1260-75). Its representation of the Last Judgment,
adjudged to be the best ever set up at a cathedral door, the Dies Iræ warning
in stone, is derived from Job, St. Paul, St. Matthew, and the Apocalypse. In
the upper zone Christ is enthroned; in the lower is shown the arising of the
dead from their tombs. Between these scenes is the splendid panel of the
Judgment, with the stately archangel as its central figure, holding the scales
of justice. To his left malign demons seize on the damned to plunge them
into the jaws of the Leviathan described in Job. To his right the blessed ones
smile with complacency as they move toward Paradise, here represented by
a hieroglyphic—supposed to be Abraham’s bosom, out of which peep some
little souls smuggled safely away.[134] St. Peter stands at the gates of
Paradise, holding the keys, a doctrinal symbol of his power to bind and to
loose, until in time popular fancy pictured him as the actual gatekeeper of
heaven. Among the elect is represented a king holding the flower of
sanctity, probably meant for St. Louis. Beside the king is a cord-girdled
monk—hence the name “cordeliers” for Franciscans—showing how
popular was the new Order.
The fall of the north tower caused the ruin of the portals near it, and
when rebuilt in the XVI century an iconographic error was made which
would have been impossible with the trained scholastics of an earlier day—
the mother of the Saviour was placed on his left, instead of in the seat of
honor on his right. In the fatal year 1562, when from end to end of France
the churches were mutilated, the Calvinists attacked the portal images of
Bourges and flung the carven stones into the breaches of the town walls.
They went so far as to mine the giant piers in order that the great edifice
might totter to its fall; but happily their control of the city was cut short, or
the tragedy of Orléans might have been enacted.[135]
Bourges is a chosen spot for stained glass, second only to Chartres.
Students have made the study of its windows a lifetime enthusiasm.
Nowhere can the epochs of the vitrine art from the XII to the XVII century
be more easily studied. The school of St. Denis, however, is not
represented. Two small panels, now set in a window beside the south portal,
are earlier in date than Suger’s windows; their flesh tone is purplish;
perhaps they are the oldest colored glass extant in France.
Of the XIII-century school of Chartres are the twenty and more lancets
in the ambulatory, legend-medallion windows ranking with the best ever

made. They repeat some of the themes used by the artists at Chartres, such
as the parables of the Prodigal Son, presented by the tanners, and of the
Good Samaritan, which latter lancet at Bourges is an exception in having its
story begin at the top. Ancient windows are to be read usually from the
bottom upward. The first window in the choir aisle, as you enter it from the
north, shows the beggar Lazarus despised and suffering on earth, then
carried by angels to Abraham’s bosom, wherein (in the topmost medallion)
he sits cozily ensconsed, but Dives, the bad rich man, is snatched by
demons from his earthly scenes of plenty and thrust into hell. The lancet
which, at Bourges, is devoted to the Apocalypse, is held to be a subtle
commentary on the vision of Patmos. To the fifth large window of the
ambulatory, called the New Alliance, the Jesuit fathers, Cahier and Martin,
have devoted over a hundred pages—a veritable treatise on symbolism—in
their monumental study of the earlier stained glass in this church.
“Prophecies in action,” our friend Joinville called the prefiguring of the
New Law by the Old, so popular during the Middle Ages. New Alliance
windows are to be found in various cathedrals—their theme being the
substitution of Gentiles for Jews by the merit of the Cross.[136] The guild of
butchers was the donor of this abstract doctrinal window of Bourges.
The only break in the XIII-century glass of the choir aisle is in the axis
chapel, where the windows—of the XVI-century Renaissance—belonged
originally to the Sainte-Chapelle of the ducal palace that once existed in
Bourges; other windows from the same source have been reset in the
cathedral’s crypt. The small scenes at the base of each lancet—the
signatures as they are called—show that here, as at Chartres, the larger
number of these priceless treasures of art were donated by the little people
of the Lord—carpenters, weavers, coopers, money changers. A window
given by the stonecutters, in the choir aisle of Bourges, is devoted to St.
Thomas, the apostle, patron of builders. Bourges and Chartres afford the
best opportunity for a more intimate study of the legends and symbols then
most popular. Here, as at Chartres, the Golden Legend should be one’s
inseparable companion.
In the high windows of the middle choir the apostles are ranged on one
side of Sancta Maria, and the prophets on the other—another of the many
contrasts of the Old and New Testaments. The nave’s clearstory is chiefly
XIII-century grisaille. The XIV-century artists, in their desire for more light,
gave up the profound colors of their mosaic-like windows for that coldly

elegant phase of the vitrine art, when the use of white was carried to excess
and each figure set in its own panel was pictured like a statue with
architectural niche and dais.
About 1370 Duke Jean of Berry, born connoisseur like his brothers
Charles V, Philippe of Burgundy, and the Duke of Anjou, presented to
Bourges Cathedral its immense western window. Before the Medici, this
Valois prince collected cameos and medals and bric-à-brac. Among the
twenty castles he built were those of Poitiers, Riom, and Bourges, on which
were employed the noted Flamboyant Gothic architects, the Dammartin
brothers. When the Sainte-Chapelle of the palace in Bourges was destroyed
(1759), the duke’s tomb, which his nephew Charles VI had ordered of Jean
de Cambrai (1477-83), was brought to the cathedral. The sarcophagus was
once surrounded by alabaster statuettes, some of which are in the Museum.
The arrangement of mourners came from his brother’s world-famous tomb
in Dijon. In his old age the spendthrift, unstable Jean de Berry married the
very youthful Jeanne de Boulogne, and kneeling images of both duke and
duchess have been placed on either side of the entrance to the axis chapel of
the cathedral. Apparently art-loving John of France was in person the
homeliest of men. The Revolution damaged these images, which were
restored by means of drawings made of them by Holbein in the time when
Bourges was a Mecca for the artists of Europe. Some of Duke Jean’s friends
presented early XV-century windows to the side chapels of Bourges
Cathedral. His physician, Aligret, gave one.
The Hundred Years’ War put a stop to the accumulation of art treasures
in the metropolitan church. When Charles VII, “the little king of Bourges,”
as the English had dubbed him ironically, went with the victorious Maid of
Orleans to be crowned king at Rheims, his gentle queen, Marie of Anjou,
stayed in Bourges with her mother, Yolande of Aragon. Marie’s brother,
then a youth under Jeanne’s command, was to become the good King René
of history. To Bourges Jeanne herself came later. She lodged with an
estimable widow of the town who, years afterward, during the inquest
conducted for the Maid’s rehabilitation, bore testimony to the young girl’s
simple goodness. She told how gallantly Jeanne mounted a horse and how
adroitly she managed a lance so that “everyone was in admiration of her, for
no knight could have done better.”[137]
Then when “Jehanne la bonne Lorraine,” as Villon called her, had given
France a new soul, when the blight of the Great Schism of the West was

over, and France accepted the same spiritual chief as the remainder of
Europe, there came about the energetic, happy, restless manifestation of art
which we call Flamboyant Gothic. Bourges then possessed a Mæcenas in
the person of a merchant (son of a tradesman of the city) whose ships
covered the sea. Jacques Cœur, from 1443 to 1452, built himself, in his
native town, the finest burgher’s house in France, to see which René of
Anjou—great-nephew of Jean of Berry—came especially to Bourges. Its
walls were carved with quaint devices and images,[138] and, like Van
Eyck’s, were the charming little angels painted on its chapel vaults. No
civic monument in the land excels it; it ranks as the best with Rouen’s
Palais de Justice and the Hôtel Cluny at Paris.
The same merchant-prince built in Bourges Cathedral a private chapel
for his family, and beside it a rich Flamboyant Gothic sacristy. The
Annunciation window in the chapel (1450) is held to be the best glass of its
century, uniting the better drawing of the later day with a plain, firm,
general design. The face of the Angel Gabriel has been said to be a portrait
of Jacques Cœur. St. James is represented in pilgrim garb because of the
fame of his shrine at Santiago Compostela. It is thought that Jacques Cœur
donated the row of richly damasked windows in the west façade beneath
Jean of Berry’s big sheet of glass, made fifty years earlier. Colors have
become richer and the figures show a tendency to escape from the rigid
attitude of statues, but not yet has absolute congruity between the hues been
achieved.
Jacques Cœur was not to be buried in the chapel he had prepared. He
served the same master who had let the Maid of Orleans perish at Rouen
without striking a blow to save her. With money provided by the merchant-
banker of Bourges, Charles VII had reconquered Normandy, but he let the
estate of his faithful servant be rapaciously confiscated without a trial, and
left him to languish in prison for two years before being banished from the
kingdom by the mockery of a law process. Jacques Cœur died in exile in
1461, but his good name was exonerated, and his son Jean, archbishop of
Bourges, was buried in the cathedral’s choir. The merchant-prince’s chapel
passed with his mansion into the hands of the Laubespine family, whose
kneeling statues now adorn it.
With the XVI century there opened another golden period of the vitrine
art in Bourges. A local master, Jean Lecuyer, won fame. He made the Tullier
window (1532) in the tenth bay (south) of the cathedral. The donor, Canon

Tullier, and his father, mother, and various ecclesiastic relatives, are being
presented by their patron saints to a distinguished-looking Madonna. The
architectural background shows what headway the foreign Renaissance had
made in France, though the chief figures are still true to French traditions.
The colors are faultlessly balanced and certain exquisite half-tones are
noticeable. In the upper panels, in a fair blue sky, are entrancing little angels
giving a celestial concert, fiddling, beating a drum, singing with all their
hearts, for this is the shrine built by St. William, who knew how to be holy
and merry as well.
The Tullier light has been called the loveliest of XVI-century windows.
And yet no one can deny that enamel painting on glass was a deterioration
of the art. The old masters had followed a sounder tradition when they
subordinated their windows to their architecture, making them an integral
part of it, and not merely isolated painted pictures. Jean Lecuyer also
composed the window (1518) relating the lives of St. Stephen and St.
Laurence in the cathedral’s nave (south side), and several brilliant lights in
St. Bonnat’s church. Even the XVII century produced interesting work at
Bourges; in the Martigny chapel of the cathedral (north side of nave) the
portrait of the donor is as realistic as a miniature.

THE CATHEDRAL OF BEAUVAIS[139]
C’est alors que se constitue cette merveilleuse discipline, vrai fondement
de la culture intellectuelle et de la science, qu’est la discipline
scholastique.... Toute la connaissance est tournée vers la science de l’être,
vers la métaphysique, plus haut encore vers la théologie; plus haut encore,
vers théologie vécue, vers la contemplation.—Jacques Maritain.
The cathedral of Beauvais derived directly from Amiens, and no
expression of the Gothic principle was ever carried farther. It consists of a
mammoth choir and transept. As the height of the edifice is three times its
width, the nave which now is lacking would need to have been of enormous
length. Instead of that much-needed nave, there nestles under the truncated
west end a modest little Carolingian edifice called the Basse-Œuvre, built
by the fortieth bishop of Beauvais, Hervé (987-998). The small cubic stones
and occasional courses of brick tell of the antiquity of this, the best-
preserved monument in France, dating before the year 1000.[140] Most of
the Romanesque churches of the Oise copied it. Scarcely, however, had the

Ile-de-France Picard Romanesque school developed than the privileged
region gave birth to the national art.
In 1227 Beauvais planned a new cathedral, spurred on thereto by the
magnificent nave rising in neighboring Amiens. But the works were not
started till 1247, for the bishop, more a feudal baron than a pastor, was for a
time entirely engrossed in mercenary wars in Italy and in quarreling with
Blanche of Castile, the queen-regent. Finally Bishop Milon began his
cathedral in Beauvais on a scale beyond the resources of the diocese.
Despite his own and the chapter’s generous donations, and the exemption of
workmen and all building material from taxes, the choir was not finished till
1272, two years after the choir of Cologne. Scarcely was it done when, in
1284, its upper vaulting fell; a few years earlier a partial collapse had
occurred. To remedy the disaster new piers had to be inserted between the
old ones, which explains the sharp-pointed arches of the pier arcade. Only
in the ambulatory, which was untouched by the falling masonry, is the
original vaulting to be found. The required addition of flying buttresses was
no improvement to the symmetry of the exterior. Instead of being able to
proceed to the erection of a nave, forty years were wasted in repairs.
Then came the calamities of the Hundred Years’ War when building
activities flagged all over France. Never again were profiles to be virile.
The apogee hour of Gothic was forever past. With English, Burgundian, and
French troops roving the country, Beauvais was kept on the alert. In 1429,
the citizens, roused by Jeanne d’Arc’s success at Orléans, expelled their
bishop, who was in sympathy with the foe, and was none other than the
unworthy Pierre Cauchon, soon to sit as miscreant judge at the Maid’s trial
in Rouen. Two years after Jeanne had been burned, Beauvais was besieged
by English troops, and so gallant was the behavior of the women of the city,
notably Jeanne Hachette, that forever after was accorded to them the right
to march in the place of honor in all processions, directly behind the clergy.
When the Duke of Burgundy, England’s ally, besieged the city in 1472 he
burned the episcopal palace, to which the two sturdy towers near the Basse-
Œuvre originally belonged. Once more the women of Beauvais fought side
by side with the men, while the children and the aged gathered in the
cathedrals to supplicate Heaven for protection.
No city in the land had better cause to rejoice over peace and the
invader’s expulsion than Beauvais. And nowhere did Flamboyant Gothic
take on nobler expression than in the stately transept now added to the

cathedral, a masterpiece worthy to be joined to the giant choir. On its north
front worked Martin Chambiges, who gave to Troyes and Sens their
admirable façades. Over-ornamentation was a pitfall for the late-Gothic
masters, but not for Chambiges, who kept Beauvais’ strong lines of
construction unobliterated by lavish detail.
Flamboyant Gothic was essentially a decorative art. Therein only did it
differ from preceding schools, for it developed no new principles of
construction. Because of the flamelike undulations of its window tracery,
the Norman archæologist, M. de Caumont, who had brought into use the
name Romanesque, invented the equally useful term Flamboyant.[141]
Capricious, overladen, disturbingly restless, this final phase of the national
art may often be (it has been called more terrestrial than celestial), it was
inclined to exhibit its technical dexterity; but none the less it was keenly
alive and a vast improvement on the over-formalized geometric Rayonnant
Gothic to which it succeeded. In both, the profiles were prismatic, fluid, and
weak. Discipline which made for robustness was forever lost.
A century before the characteristics of Flamboyant art developed in
France, they were in use in England, and there called Curvilinear or
Decorated Gothic. Window mullions undulated, arches were crowned with
reversed curves and sculptured finials, secondary, connecting ribs were
added to the vaulting, bases were elongated, there were interpenetrating
molds, hanging keystones, piers without capitals, and such new models for
foliate sculpture as the deeply indented leaves of parsley and curly cabbage.
When capitals were given up, the ribs died away weakly in the piers. The
Gothic of England had changed to its cold Perpendicular phase by the time
that the architects across the Channel adopted the features called
Flamboyant in France.
M. Camille Enlart has developed the idea that the last phase of the
national architecture was a product of the English occupation during the
Hundred Years’ War, that from elements of decoration introduced by
England, the French composed a style which differed somewhat only from
that in vogue across the Channel from 1300 to 1360. In France, flowing
tracery and ogee arches were not used before 1375. France need feel no
diminution of her claim of leadership in Gothic architecture because she
adopted, for her XV-century traits, certain decorative details developed first
by others, since the Gothic of England was originally of French derivation.

The theory of an English origin for French Flamboyancy is contested by
M. Anthyme Saint-Paul, who thought that from the same elements of XIII-
century Gothic one country developed its own Curvilinear style and the
other its own, Flamboyant Gothic.[142] M. de Lasteyrie agreed with the
thesis that there is a French origin for French late-Gothic manifestations.
That Flamboyant art is in part indigenous and partly of foreign derivation is
probably nearest the truth. Certainly sporadic cases of florid features
appeared in French art during the XIII and XIV centuries, but it is clear that
in various places long held by the English there appeared the first or the
fullest expression of late-Gothic art.
Before the Flamboyant Gothic transept of Beauvais was finished, the
foreign Renaissance had arrived in France. And it showed here in the richly
sculptured doors. The sibyls, all ten of whom are represented, are, as
pagans, kept outside the church. With skilled gradation the carving grows
deeper and bolder toward the top of the doors, farthest away from the eye.
Jean Le Pot carved the southern doors in faultless taste. He was a
glassmaker as well, and in St. Étienne’s church are his windows beside
those of his father-in-law, Engrand Le Prince, who, with his sons Jean and
Nicholas, made the north and south rose windows of the cathedral and its
splendid Peter and Paul window. Their tree of Jesse, in St. Étienne’s choir,
is considered a masterpiece of color and design. To-day a Le Prince window
in any French city is a matter of civic pride.
The old saying ran: “The choir of Beauvais, the nave of Amiens, the
portals of Rheims, the towers of Chartres” make the most beautiful
cathedral in the world. One hundred and fifty feet high curve the upper
vaults of Beauvais choir. Beneath them could be set the belfries of Notre
Dame of Paris. As at Bourges, the lofty aisle possesses its own triforium
and clearstory, but here the clearstory of the central choir has not been
dwarfed as a result of the stupendous pier arcades. Beauvais dared to make
its upper windows eighty feet high. Think what its interior would be had it
retained the original stained glass! Its towering choir windows would
scintillate like those of Sainte-Chapelle, since it was the Paris school that
supplied XIII-century Beauvais.
Such a sweep of fragile glass was possible because the play of thrusts
and counterthrusts had been calculated to a certainty. Technically, Beauvais
is the extreme expression of the Gothic theory. It perfected the pier by
making it elliptical, widest where fell the greatest strain, north and south. It

is said that its error lay in certain false bearings, that some of the
intermediate buttresses were balanced half on air without direct ground
supports. That may have been temerarious, since building material of
perfect quality is required when chances are taken. Certainly Beauvais
pushed to its rigid consequences the law of equilibrium, allowing no excess
in the supporting members, but it was not a builder’s folly.
M. de Lasteyrie has called its plan a chef-d’œuvre of lightness. Though
the architect pushed his technique to the extreme limit of the law of thrust
and counterthrust, he did not pass beyond the possible, and had he
employed the hard, resistant stone of Burgundy the history of the cathedral
church he built would not be a tale of disasters. What brought about the
collapse of Beauvais’ vaults was the use of inferior stone.
Sometimes one feels in the hardihood of this cathedral a trace of
everweening pride, as if its certitude of excelling tended to virtuosity. The
stupefying ascending lines, strong-willed and carried out with science, seem
as much to vaunt the enterprise of their builder as pay homage to the
Creator. Some of the lesser churches, that humbly and tentatively reached
out toward perfection, make a deeper appeal than does stupendous
Beauvais. Was man meant for the superlative on earth? And one remembers
that Bishop Milon de Nanteuil was a proud man of the world, very unlike
that true pastor of souls, Maurice de Sully, who with unpretentious
diligence raised Notre Dame of Paris. Such criticisms would be silenced,
perhaps, had Beauvais a nave from which could be viewed its
overwhelming choir. Truncated as it now is, it is necessary to crane the neck
in order to see its clearstory windows. So colossal a thing should be led up
to gradually; it cries out insistently for its missing nave.
Fatality seemed always to pursue Beauvais. After terminating a noble
Flamboyant transept, the ambitious citizens were lured into the scheme of a
central tower, when a church of such height should have at its crossing
merely a slender spire. Instead of proceeding to build a nave, they raised a
lantern that lacked merely a few feet of the enormous height of St. Peter’s
dome in Rome. It was a day of tower building in France, and Beauvais, ever
hopeful beyond its resources, thought to outvie all others. On feast days
lights were hung in its spire’s open stonework for the illumination of the
entire countryside. For five years only the giant beacon stood. On
Ascension Day of 1573, just after the congregation had left the church to
walk in procession, the tower fell with an appalling noise, covering the

whole town with dust. Only one bay of the nave has been built, its piers
have disappearing moldings, amorphous profiles, and no capitals whatever.
Beauvais stands a massive fragment, and there seems little chance that the
truncated church will ever be completed.

THE CATHEDRAL OF TROYES[143]

With travail great, and little cargo fraught,
See how our world is laboring in pain;
So filled we are with love of evil gain
That no one thinks of doing what he ought,
But we all hustle in the Devil’s train,
And only in his service toil and pray;
And God, who suffered for us agony,
We set behind, and treat him with disdain.
Hardy is he whom death doth not dismay.
The feeble mouse, against the winter’s cold
Garners the nuts and grain within his cell,
While man goes groping, without sense to tell
Where to seek refuge against growing old....
The Devil doth in snares our life enfold.
Four hooks he has with torments baited well;
And first with Greed he casts a mighty spell,
And then, to fill his nets has Pride enrolled,
And Luxury steers the boat and fills the sail,
And Perfidy controls and sets the snare.
Thus the poor fish are brought to land.
—Count Thibaut IV of
Champagne.[144]

Beneath the present choir of Troyes Cathedral are Gallo-Roman walls,
and a succession of edifices have stood on the same site. From the cathedral
of the V century started the bishop, St. Loup, “the friend of God,” when he
went forth to check Attila the Hun, “God’s scourge,” and the barbarian was
touched by spiritual fear and retired. That same good bishop of Troyes was
the companion of St. Germain of Auxerre, on the notable journey north,
when they blessed the gentle child Geneviève in a village near Paris,
marking her as a vessel of election.

Probably the cathedral immediately preceding the present one was in
large part early-Gothic. Fire wiped it out, in 1188, and preparations for a
new basilica were started by the energetic Bishop Garnier de Trainel, who
went on the Fourth Crusade, and was among those, says Villehardouin, who
scaled the walls of captured Constantinople along with his friend Nivelon,
the bishop-builder of Soissons.
The first stone of the new cathedral at Troyes was laid in 1206 by Bishop
Hervé (1206-23), an able man who had been advanced by the observant
prelate of Paris, Eudes de Sully. For almost twenty years Bishop Hervé
worked on the choir, considered one of the best chevets in France. During
his episcopate Troyes was a brilliant center of European trade and culture.
Blanche of Castile and young Louis IX passed some time in the city when
Thibaut IV the Singer, related to the royal line, was attacked by the clique
of rebellious barons who plotted against the boy king. There had been
considerable romancing about the volatile, inconstant Thibaut’s admiration
for Queen Blanche, who was a married woman before he was born. His
own mother, Blanche of Navarre, another of the able women rulers of that
day, gave generously to the new cathedral of her capital city.
In 1228 a storm damaged the rising structure, necessitating years of
tiresome repairs. Pope Urban IV, as a native son of Troyes, contributed.
During the last forty years of the XIII century the transept was building. It
showed traces of English feeling derived perhaps from Edmund
Plantagenet, a son of the builder of Westminster Abbey, who had married
the dowager Countess of Champagne. His ward Jeanne, Thibaut the
Singer’s granddaughter, inherited the countship of Champagne, the
kingdom of Navarre, and by marriage became the queen of France.
Slowly during the XIV and XV centuries, one bay of the nave was added
to another; the changes from the precise lines of Rayonnant tracery to the
undulating mullions of the Flamboyant day are easy to follow. The long
delays were caused by lack of funds and the repeated need for consolidating
the parts already built. The soil on which the church stood was unsuitable,
and from the first, security was jeopardized by using the soft, native stone
in those parts of the edifice which were out of sight, in order to economize
on the firm stone imported from Burgundy.
Several times during the difficulties of reconstruction, the cathedral
chapter turned for advice to noted masters—to Raymond du Temple,

Charles V’s architect, and to André de Dammartin, patronized by the king’s
brothers of Berry and Burgundy. Work ceased altogether during the English
occupancy.
Then in 1429 the city opened its gates to Charles VII on his way to be
crowned at Rheims. Jeanne d’Arc, during her trial in Rouen, told of an
incident of their entry into Troyes. Some of the townspeople were fearful
lest the heroine of Orleans came of the devil, so they had a holy preacher
march out to exorcise her. Scattering holy water and making repeated signs
of the Cross, Brother Richard approached the Maid. “Draw near without
uneasiness,” Jeanne assured him, in her pleasant manner. “I won’t fly
away.”
The city by its reception of the king evinced eagerness to wipe out the
infamy of the Treaty of Troyes, signed here in 1420 by Queen Isabeau of
Bavaria, wherein she repudiated her son Charles VII and gave France over
to the foreign invader. The people’s renewed hope and self-respect
expressed itself in some of the most lovely Flamboyant foliage ever
chiseled—the deeply undercut leafage on the gable of the north portal
(1462-68).
Work on the cathedral was taken up with energy after Jeanne, carrying
her standard, had hallowed the streets of Troyes. As the XV century closed,
the nave’s radiant late-Gothic windows were installed. They are of the
Biblia pauperum type, and are surprisingly like big translucent woodcuts.
They tell the story of Daniel, Tobias, Joseph and his brethren, Job—a
window especially to be noticed—some parables, too, and edifying legends.
The scenes are set quite as they appeared in the mystery plays, the costumes
being not of Syria, but of the very stuffs and damasks bought in their own
international fairs. The same masters of Troyes, Verrat, Godon, Lyénin,
Macadré, who signed a rose window of Sens transept, put their signatures
here.
Bible stories such as these suit the layman’s part of a church, for they
serve to hold the attention of the average man. In the choir of Troyes are
thirteen large windows of an earlier day, profounder in color and more
spiritual in suggestion. They are like a jeweled cloistral screen around the
Holy of Holies. In the upper central windows are the Passion scenes, and on
either side rise tier on tier of martyrs who witnessed to the Faith—bishops,
abbots, and a few important personages, such as Pope Innocent III, Bishop

Hervé, the builder, and the archbishop of Sens, the learned Pierre de
Corbeil. On one side of the choir Henry I, emperor of Constantinople, of the
house of Champagne, is pictured, and Philippe-Auguste, suzerain of
Champagne. And opposite in the fourth window are donjons and fleurs-de-
lys showing that the queen-regent, Blanche of Castile, was generous here as
elsewhere.
The upper choir windows of Troyes allowed more light to pass than had
their immediate predecessors, the lancets of Chartres. Their colors were
clear and bright; only such stone mullions were used as were absolutely
required for the support of the glass. The eight lateral windows of the upper
choir belong to the XIII century, the five at the eastern curve to the XIV
century. In the lower choir are various ancient windows, liberally restored,
the Tree of Jesse, of Byzantine character, being the best. Two hundred years
later another Tree of Jesse was made by Lyénin,[145] for the clearstory of the
nave. It gave Christian folk a feeling of pride to record the Lord’s high
ancestry according to Isaias and the Acts. This cathedral of Troyes was one
of the first to glaze its triforium, even before St. Denis’ abbatial. The
present triforium lights are, in most part, modern.
By 1504 the clearstory windows of the nave were all in place. Among
their donors was represented a mayor of Troyes with all his family. The
golden-hued west rose was put up in 1546. And even into the XVII century
the vitrine art of this exceptional city maintained its high traditions of five
hundred years. In 1625 Linard Gontier made the Pressoir window, the
swan-song of good Renaissance glass. There is a translucent picture of Our
Lady in the nave’s south aisle, with stars leaded into holes that were cut out
of an entire plate of glass; any apprentice who could perform that difficult
feat of glazing was promoted to be a master craftsman.[146]
For the building of the cathedral’s west front, the chapter, in 1506, called
on the noted late-Gothic master, Martin Chambiges, who had made his
reputation with transept façades at Beauvais and Sens. Together with other
artists, his son, Pierre (who won fame with Senlis’ transept façade, and who,
in 1539, began the château of St. Germain-en-Laye), carried on Troyes’
frontispiece during fifty years, so that its imagery—badly damaged by the
Revolution—shows the ermine of Anne of Brittany, the porcupine of Louis
XII, and the salamander of Francis I. Troyes, with its record of four hundred
years, was, of all the cathedrals of France, the longest in building.

In spite of its double aisles, its wide transept, its noble, deep choir, and
its astounding wealth of storied windows, it is clear when standing before
the Flamboyant Gothic front of this chief church of Champagne’s capital,
that it is a cathedral of secondary rank. The flaw here is one of proportion.
With such width—and this is the widest cathedral in France—the church
should be thirty feet higher. However, no traveler with harmony in his soul
thinks of technical criticism once he steps across the threshold and walks
beneath the joyous terrestrial windows of the nave and the seraphic lights of
the sanctuary.

ST. URBAIN AND OTHER CHURCHES AT TROYES[147]

Madame, je vous le demande,
Pensez-vous ne soit péché
D’occire son vrai amant?
Oïl voir; bien le sachiez.
S’il vous plaît ne m’occiez;
Car, je vous le dis vraiment,
Quoique l’amour soit tourment,
Si vous m’aimez mieux vivant.
Je n’en serai point fâché.
—Thibaut IV of
Champagne, in
lighter mood.

St. Urbain’s famous collegiate church, a forerunner of XIV-century
Rayonnant Gothic, was founded by a son of Troyes, who sat in Peter’s
chair, Urban IV. He tells us that “in the desire that the memory of this our
name might remain forever in the city of Troyes even after the dissolution
of our body,” he began, in 1262, a church on the site where his father’s shop
had stood, choosing for its tutelary the saint-pope, Urban, who had succored
the early martyrs in Rome. His father was a prosperous shoemaker in the
day when tradesmen gave princely gifts to their parish churches. Urban IV
himself had been a choir boy in Troyes Cathedral.
He died before his church was finished, but his nephew, Cardinal
Pantaleone Ancher, continued the edifice, which was completed in 1276.
Urban’s successor, Clement IV, also a Frenchman, patronized the new

works at Troyes. While the choir and transept were done by one generation,
many a century was to pass before the westernmost bay and façade were
finished.

St. Urbain at Troyes (1264-1276)

In archæological circles St. Urbain is noted, Viollet-le-Duc being the
first to discuss its ingenuity. As construction it is a small masterpiece, a
model of elasticity, perhaps the lightest and most fragile of all Gothic
edifices. To an economy in stone we owe this structural feat. Were the
principle of equilibrium pushed a step farther, metal, not stone, would be
required. Ground supports have been lessened, and flying buttresses
attenuated to the last limit. Despite its science, St. Urbain is not doctrinaire,
but immaterial and seductive. On first entering it Montalembert exclaimed,
“Quelle délicieuse église!”

The architect, Jean Langlois, here created the most elegant form of
Rayonnant window tracery. At his porch appears the first French arch of
double curvature, the earliest interpenetration of archivolts. We know his
name because in 1267 a papal bull summoned him to account for sums
advanced on the edifice, and Jean was not forthcoming, because he had
disappeared in the East, crusading. The chief church at Famagusta, in
Cyprus, begun in 1300—the only completed French-Gothic cathedral of the
XIV century—shows such analogies with St. Urbain at Troyes that
apparently Langlois’ architectural influence had spread in the Orient.
M. Lefèvre-Pontalis has called Troyes’ lantern church inundated with
light one of the most original monuments of the Middle Ages. Ten feet
above the ground its walls change to opalescent glass. No grisaille is more
exquisitely decorated with natural foliage outlines; set in the expanses of
the opal-tinted white glass are colored medallions of extreme beauty. The
lower row of lights around the choir are of this character. Above them, and
almost a part of them, are the choir’s upper windows—big prophets and
patriarchs with the Crucifixion in the center—transition windows between
legend-medallion glass, and the XIV century’s single figures in a vitrine
architectural frame. The arms of France, Champagne, and Navarre appear in
the borders of the choir windows.
The transeptal chapel to the north of the choir shows in its quatrefoils
some interesting heads of men, women, and children. From the windows of
the south transeptal chapel some panels were stolen, but St. Urbain’s curé,
Abbé Jossier, a learned enthusiast, was able, by sending photographs all
over France, to trace his lost panels in a private collection, and it is to be
hoped they may be returned.
In his short pontificate, 1262-64, Urban IV, besides creating this
enduring memorial, instituted the feast of Corpus Christi. He requested a
liturgy for his new feast from St. Thomas Aquinas, who composed the
Pange lingua gloriosi, the last stanzas of which are sung daily throughout
the Christian world, the familiar Tantum ergo. To Aquinas is ascribed the
Verbum supernum prodiens hymn whose ending is the lovely O Salutaris
Hostia. Doubt and heresy have always been instrumental in clarifying
doctrine and in enriching the liturgy and art. So in a later day was made, in
reaction against the XVI-century desecration of the Eucharist, such
windows as the Wine Press of Troyes and that of Conches.

In 1906, soon after St. Urbain’s church had celebrated the completion of
its western portal, it became the scene of a conscientious objection on the
part of its parishioners, who protested against the taking of an inventory,
they deeming it an unlawful interference with their private affairs. They sat
in their church till the police broke in the doors; even then they continued to
sing canticles, and were expelled only by having a hose turned on them. Six
centuries earlier, St. Urbain’s had been the scene, on the completion of its
choir, of a suffragette-like demonstration by a community of nuns, who
claimed part of the land on which the church stood. They smashed various
things on the premises, and, it is whispered, even slapped a high dignitary’s
face. Apparently St. Urbain’s is destined to pass into history under various
aspects.
For four hundred years the ancient capital of Champagne was an active
center of the stained-glass industry. Overpowering is the wealth of storied
windows to be found in its churches, the majority being of the Flamboyant-
Renaissance day. In the suburbs, and farther afield in the hamlets of
Champagne, there is the same prodigal display of colored windows and
interesting statues.[148] From father to son, from generation to generation,
was passed on the art skill of this ancient city on the highway of
international trade.
In Troyes there were so many churches that the old saying ran: “You
arrived from Troyes? And what are they doing there?” “On y sonne.” Next
to St. Urbain’s, for its wealth of art treasures, comes the Madeleine church
built about 1175, and reconstructed during the Flamboyant enthusiasm
when this city readorned almost every shrine it possessed. Contemporary
with its noted jubé, or rood screen (1508-17), is the statue of St. Martha,
one of the gems of French sculpture, entirely of the national school,
unaffected work as ample and robust as the best period of the XIII century.
St. Martha is represented, in this church of Troyes dedicated to her sister,
with the holy water by which she exorcised the legendary Tarasque of
Tarascon. She was the patroness of housekeepers, and it is said that the
servant maids of Troyes presented to their church this memorial of the
plastic genius of Champagne.[149]
Champagne’s special aptitude for sculpture appeared in the XIII-century
gargoyles of St. Urbain’s church, each of which was almost a complete
figure. Later her imagery grew mannered for a few generations, with the
Madonna’s face of a formal type, and an exaggerated throwing out of the

hip. The advent of Flemish realism, through the Franco-Flamand school at
Dijon, renewed the vigor of French idealism, and before the XV century
closed a truly French Renaissance had set in, retaining the equipoise of the
old school and quite free of Italian classicism.
Eventually the imported standards checked that renewed national
movement. It was not the big men of Italy’s revival who came to
Champagne, but secondary artists whose work was often pretentious or
coldly abstract. From 1540, under the leadership of the Italian, Domenico
Rinnuccini, called Florentino, the foreign Renaissance prevailed at Troyes.
In the church of the Madeleine, besides its jubé and St. Martha statue, is
some of the best XVI-century glass. A window of 1506 tells the life of St.
Eloi, the goldsmith-bishop of Noyon; a window dated 1517 is devoted to St.
Louis; Jean Macadré I made a Jesse tree; and there is the celebrated
Creation in which God the Father wears the papal tiara, significant of the
reaction that followed Luther’s attacks on Rome. There are, also, two good
XV-century windows, the Lord’s Passion and the Magdalene’s story.
So vast is the accumulation of treasures in the sanctuaries of Troyes that
one can indicate merely a few of them. In St. Jean’s church—Flamboyant
Gothic mainly, with a XII-century tower and a XIV-century nave—is a
Visitation (1520) by Nicolas Haslin, a meeting of two pleasant dames of
Troyes, wearing robes of Burgundian fullness, a group in which there
appears a first evidence of transalpine influence. The reredos, from the
Juliot studio, that led in the transition from French Gothic art to the neo-
classic standards, has conventional images somewhat overgestured. In the
flat eastern wall of St. Jean is a maîtresse vitre (1630) by the Gontier
brothers, delicate in hue, yet radiant, with half tones such as mauve, salmon
pink, soft grays, pomegranate, celadine green. Eagerly the Renaissance
masters seized on the new invention of verre double, which allowed them a
fuller palate. Their over-use of opaque enamel-painting on glass led to the
deterioration of the vitrine art, for the picture-painter soon swamped the
glazier and draftsman who had worked in subordination to the architect.
In the church of St. Pantaléon, where Lyénin II worked, the windows are
in one or two tones, gray-brown with silver-stain yellow and flesh color, a
style better suited to domestic interiors or to civic halls than to churches.
The church boasts a statue of St. James and a Charité by Domenico
Florentino, and a St. Crespin group by a son of Troyes, François Gentil,
influenced by the Italian. To Gentil is attributed the Christ at the column

and the Christ bearing the Cross in the church of St. Nicolas, where are also
images of St. Anne and St. Joachim from the Juliot studio, a St.
Bonaventure from the same source whence emanated the adorable statue of
St. Martha, and more of the grisaille picture-glass. In St. Martin-ès-Vignes
the window of St. Anne (1623) is attributed to Linard Gontier; in Ste.
Sabine are some painted wood panels, and a carved keystone of great
beauty; in the hall of the library of Troyes are thirty panels by Linard
Gontier, made in commemoration of Henry IV’s visit in 1598.

CHÂLONS CATHEDRAL[150]
It so happens that in most of our communes the church remains the only
witness of the olden times and of departed generations. It thus becomes a
symbol, legible for the humblest, of the duration of our race, of the
persistence, through the dead, of a special group of French families on a
special corner of French soil. The village church gives the lesson of lineage,
of the solidarity of efforts, of the communion of men.—Edmond Blanqueron,
Inspecteur de l’Académie de la Haute-Marne, in the crusade to save the
churches of Champagne, notably Vignory, one of the oldest in France (c.
1050).
The cathedral of Troyes and the church of St. Urbain belong to the
Champagne school of Gothic, to which we have devoted no separate
chapter because some of its monuments, such as St. Remi at Rheims and
Notre Dame at Châlons, we grouped with the Primary Gothic churches, and
the cathedral of Rheims with the Great Cathedrals, classifications used
solely for greater clarity.
From its inception, the Gothic of Champagne kept pace with the Ile-de-
France Picard school, and in certain characteristics even took the lead of its
neighbor. Gerson, Racine, La Fontaine, Gaston Paris, are among the sons of
this province whose Gothic art, formulated centuries before them, displays
qualities which embody aspiration, sublimity, sanity always and just
measure, a singular ease and grace, patience, and science.
From Champagne came the gracious arrangement of planting slender
columns and stilted arches at the entrance to radiating chapels. Champagne
was the first to use the pier composed of twin columns, first to employ a
passageway round the church at the level of the aisle windows, and to place
lancets side by side in each bay for the better lighting of the edifice. The

region was conservative in clinging to certain Romanesque traits, such as
apsidal chapels projecting from the eastern wall of the transept. It
employed, as did Normandy and Burgundy, a circulation passage under the
clearstory windows. Champagne’s influence spread far afield to Sens,
Auxerre, St. Quentin, St. Denis, Metz, Toul, Ipres, Tournai, Avila, León, and
York.[151]
Lest these pages should become overloaded, we can merely touch on the
beautiful Champagne cathedral of Châlons-sur-Marne, an old city which is
another treasure house of colored glass. The most interesting windows are
in the small church of St. Alpin, whose apse celebrates the Eucharist, the
souls in Purgatory, the Corpus Christi procession, lately mocked by the
Calvinists. Its Manna in the Desert window is a symbol of the Eucharist. In
St. Alpin are the most successful examples of that distinguished phase of
vitrine art called camaïeu—of cameo or chiaroscuro effect, using brown-
gray hues, the yellow of silver-stain, a pale blue for the sky, and an
occasional single touch of superb ruby red. One of the windows of
Raphaelesque design represents St. Alpin, bishop of Châlons, meeting Attila
the Hun; another, dated 1539, is a rendering of the Vision of Augustus, a
theme most popular then.
Peter the Venerable called Châlons “great and illustrious.” Guillaume de
Champeaux, one of the most learned men of the age, whose schoolroom
was really the beginning of the University of Paris, was bishop of Châlons
in 1115 when a young Burgundian named Bernard came to be consecrated
abbot of Clairvaux. In the monk of twenty-five, unknown yet to fame, the
great teacher was swift to recognize a supreme spiritual genius. In 1147 St.
Bernard preached at the dedication of the Romanesque cathedral of Châlons
before Pope Eugene III, who had been one of his own Cistercian monks at
Clairvaux. The present tower to the north of the choir belonged to the
church that Bernard knew. The south tower, its mate, is of the XIII century.
The placing of belfries on either side of the choir was a Rhenish trait.
In 1230 Châlons Cathedral was wrecked by lightning. Its reconstruction
began with the choir, under Bishop Pierre de Nemours, whose brothers were
building-prelates at Noyon, Paris, and Meaux. In 1250 work on the nave
was going on, and at the end of the century was built the transept’s excellent
north façade. The XVII century erected the unsuitable neo-classic west
frontispiece, yet at the same time, curiously enough, the two westernmost
bays were constructed in perfect imitation of Apogec Gothic. It remains an

open question whether the same Renaissance century made the apse chapels
after a fire in 1668. Some say they are of the XIV century, that the choir, as
first built, had no ambulatory, but that one was added soon after, with radial
chapels.
There is a noble purity in Châlons Cathedral, due in large part to its
soaring monolithic piers. No church is richer in tombstones, and its stained
glass is plenteous. In the eastern clearstory are three lovely silver and blue
XIII-century windows; the north rose of the transept is early XIV century
and the first window in the nave’s south aisle is another good example of
that period. The same aisle shows a brilliant XV-century light, ruby red in
effect, and a window of 1509, wherein the Blessed Virgin’s life is explained
by quaint inscriptions. Some XII-century glass from Châlons Cathedral is in
the Trocadéro Museum at Paris.
Just as Champagne had proved herself a pioneer in the first days of the
national art, so she distinguished herself in later times when Rayonnant
Gothic turned to Flamboyant art. Among the few churches built during the
transition between those two phases is the cathedral-like Notre-Dame-de-
l’Épine, in the fields a few miles from Châlons-sur-Marne, a link
connecting St. Urbain at Troyes with the goodly array of Flamboyant
buildings that sprang up in the ancient capital of Champagne. The interior
proportions of Notre-Dame-de-l’Épine resemble those of Rheims Cathedral,
and its rood screen recalls the jubé of the Madeleine church at Troyes.
But revenons à nostro matière, as dear Joinville, seneschal of
Champagne, would say. The reason for the wealth of architecture and its
allied arts and crafts in the region of which Troyes is the center was because
the ancient city, so unnoted in to-day’s activities, lay on the mediæval
highway of commerce, and under its enterprising rulers became the scene
bi-yearly of a fair to which all Europe flocked. To this day we use Troy
weight. The counts of Champagne safeguarded the visiting merchants and
fostered commerce by wise laws. Their money passed in Rome and Venice
as freely as in Provins and Troyes. Lavish and art-loving were the
Champagne rulers; one of them founded Clairvaux in lower Champagne;
another rebuilt the Cistercian church of Pontigny, just over the border in
Burgundy. They were indefatigable crusaders, some of them winning
thrones in the East. And their alliances constantly enriched their stock with
new qualities, as when Count Henry the Magnificent wedded, in 1164, the
daughter of Louis VII by Aliénor of Aquitaine. That Countess Marie—the

suer comtessa to whom her half brother, Richard Cœur-de-Lion, addressed
his famous prison song—made of her court of Champagne a school of good
manners with all the ceremonial of the Midi’s cour d’amour. What M.
Gaston Paris calls poet-laureates’ work, poésie courtoise, became the
vogue, and the Countess Marie herself wrote in the troubadour manner. She
encouraged the best of the XII-century poets, Crestien de Troyes (d. 1175),
suggesting to him the romances of the Breton cycle, Lancelot, Tristan, and
Percival.[152] Through Crestien the story of the Holy Grail spread over
Europe. In him the trouvères new ideals of chivalry met the Midi’s refined
gallantry, and the Celtic themes which he versified brought what was
needed of passion and profundity.
All Europe then drew its poetic inspirations from the matière de France,
as France in her turn was enriching herself from the inexhaustible matière
de Bretagne. The XII-century French trouvères were imitated by the
German Minnesingers, by the early songsters of England, Spain, and
Portugal, and in Italy the precursors of Dante preferred the use of the
Romance tongues of France. In the fecund hour wherein our modern
civilization was conceived, France gave to the Western World her
architecture, her sculpture, and her poetry. At the cathedral doors of Verona,
Roland and Oliver were sculpted.
The international city of Troyes saw the creation of the Templars Order
at her Council of 1128, whither had come Hugues de Payns, a knight related
to the reigning counts. Taking part in the First Crusade, he proved himself a
true prud’homme in Palestine by forming a band of volunteer knights to
escort unprotected pilgrims. At the Council of Troyes he won recognition
for his monk-knights. St. Bernard championed them, drew up their rule, and
gave them their white robe and red cross. With the birth of the national art
rose this great military Order and with its decline it was stricken down.
When the lust of gain replaced aspiration, men no longer went crusading or
built cathedrals.
The ancient city of Troyes is not only associated with epic poetry
—“history before there are historians”—but is linked with the earliest two
historians who wrote in the vernacular, Villehardouin and Joinville. “Mes
lengages est buens car en France fui nez,” boasted the Champagne poet,
who tells us that God listened by preference to his speech, since he had
made it lighter and better than any other, of more brevity, of nobler
amplitude. Villehardouin’s record of the Fourth Crusade, the Conquête de

Constantinople, possesses the same powerful simplicity as the greatest of
all chansons-de-geste, Roland. He was born near Troyes, in whose convents
lived two of his daughters and his two sisters, and to whose churches he left
property.
Our good friend Joinville grew up in the cultivated court of the Countess
Marie’s grandson, Thibaut IV le Chansonnier, born in Troyes. Thibaut’s
songs blended the courteous poetry of the troubadour tradition with the attic
salt of his own most civilized Champagne. In his gallant company Joinville
acquired his good manners and inimitable mode of expression.
The last countess of this land of gay singers and soldier-historians was
Thibaut’s granddaughter, Jeanne, who inspired Joinville to write his
memoirs, helped to build Meaux Cathedral, and founded the College of
Navarre where Gerson and Bossuet were to be trained. But, alas! the liberal
young heiress of Champagne married the legist king of France, Phillipe le
Bel, the executioner of the Templars. When he struck a blow at the
international fairs of Champagne by persecuting Lombards and Jews, the
great day for Troyes was over. When Jeanne d’Arc—born on the confines
of Champagne—revived the nation’s pride, the art traditions latent in the
citizens of Troyes flowered once more with magnificence. Only the slow
accumulation of centuries could have produced the unemphatic beauty of
the gracious St. Martha in Troyes’ Flamboyant Gothic church of the
Madeleine.

THE CATHEDRAL OF TOURS.[153]
A religion is the heart of a race; it expresses the emotions of a people and
elevates them by giving them an aim: but, unless a God be visibly honored,
religion does not exist, and human laws are powerless.... Thought, the
fountain of all good and evil, cannot be trained, mastered, and directed
except by religion, and the only possible religion is Christianity, which
created the modern world and will preserve it.... France is being saved and
lost perpetually. If she wants to be saved, indeed, let her go back to the laws
of God.—Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850; born in Tours).
The cathedral of Tours does not startle. One is not carried away by it, at
first. Its charm is that of the tranquil horizons of the Loire, fleuve de
lumière, de vie doucement heureuse, partout de plein effets de lenteur,
d’ordre, so Rodin saw it. The beauty of Touraine increases with familiarity

because it is touched with that measure, that justness of soul inherited from
the classic spirit, that has ever tempered, in the art manifestations of this
nation, the sublime overimpassioned consistencies of the Celt and the lofty
overexaggerated dreams of the Teuton.
The cathedral of Tours does not aspire to the impossible. It is a rather
cold, high-bred church at one with its environment, the gracious garden of
Touraine, a satisfying, discreet church and most intensely French. While
one rejoices that a Robert de Lusarches aspired to the Infinite at Amiens,
one approves the architect of Tours who worked within human possibilities.
The choir of the cathedral possesses both delicacy and force. Toward its
erection Louis IX granted a quarry and some forest lands near Chinon. The
choir must have been nearing its completion when in 1255 the king visited
Tours, whose archbishop, Geoffrey de Martel, had lately died a crusader in
Palestine.
During the fifty years prior to 1270 the cathedral was building. In 1269
the relics of St. Maurice and his companions from Thebes, who were
martyred in Gaul under Diocletian, were transferred to the sanctuary. Those
early Christians were the tutelary saints of Tours Cathedral up to the XIV
century. Then St. Gatien, the first to preach Christianity in this region, was
chosen as patron. La Gatienne the people call their chief church. The cult of
the early missionary had been a favorite devotion of St. Martin, third and
greatest bishop of Tours, who died as the IV century drew to a close.
Like Lyons, Tours has eminent ecclesiastical memories. The shrine of St.
Martin, the most popular saint of Gaul, made the city a frequented
pilgrimage for Europe. Gregory of Tours, who ruled this see from 573 to
595, has described the richness of the Byzantine church that stood over the
tomb of the great thaumaturge. Like most of the prelates who saved Latin
civilization from the Barbarian’s submersion, Bishop Gregory was of Gallo-
Roman stock, of a senatorial family of Auvergne who boasted descent from
an early Christian martyr of Gaul. In the present southwest tower of la
Gatienne are traces of the VI-century cathedral built by this bishop-historian
of Gaul, whose pages are a chief source for Merovingian times.[154]
The city of Tours always had two great monuments—the cathedral
within the ramparts, the basilica of St. Martin outside the walls. St. Martin’s
abbey was the nation’s intellectual leader when the Saxon scholar Alcuin
became its abbot (796-804). He made of Tours a Christian Athens. They

buried him in his abbatial, where four years earlier Charlemagne’s wife,
Luitgarde, had been laid. To-day only two towers stand of St. Martin’s
basilica—the Tour Charlemagne, begun by the Blessed Hervé, abbot in 997,
hence one of the oldest memorials of the rebirth of architecture associated
with the year 1000, and a former façade tower mainly of the XII century.
One of the busiest streets of Tours runs up what once was the nave of the
abbatial, but, not discouraged, the people of Touraine have erected a new
Byzantinesque basilica of St. Martin on the site of the transept’s southern
arm. Those two tragic frenzies of forgetfulness, 1562, that scattered St.
Martin’s ashes—for which St. Eloi, bishop-goldsmith of Noyon, had made a
priceless reliquary—and 1793, that laid in ruins his church in Tours and
Marmoutier’s Apogee Gothic abbatial that marked the rock-hewn cells
where he had lived a hermit across the Loire, those two blind hours when
men thought to erect barriers between themselves and their past, destroyed
monuments which, did they exist still, would rank Tours, architecturally,
among the first cities of Europe. St. Martin’s church, built by Hervé,
became a monument-type,[155] copied by Ste. Foi, Congnes, St. Martial,
Limoges, St. Sernin, Toulouse, and the cathedral at Santiago.
It is said that twenty centuries of human effort are represented by the
stones of Tours Cathedral.[156] In the base of its façade towers are remains
of the city’s III-century walls, which had been constructed in their turn with
the big stones stolen from the local Roman temples of 50 B.C. For sixteen
centuries Mass has been said on this site. In the southwest tower are
vestiges of Gregory of Tours’ VI-century church, and in the northwest tower
traces of the Romanesque cathedral on which worked the philosopher and
theologian, Hildebert de Lavardin, the most popular poet of his age and one
of the builders of Le Mans Cathedral before promoted to be Tours’ sixty-
fourth archbishop (1125-34). In refuting Berengar, a canon of Tours, who
taught a confused doctrine concerning the Eucharist, Bishop Hildebert was
the first to use the term “transubstantiation” in its theological sense. It is
said that the custom of elevating the Host in the Mass resulted from the
eucharistic controversies started by Berengar.
In 1167 a fire, caused by a quarrel over crusaders’ treasure, between
Louis VII and Henry II Plantagenet, destroyed the Romanesque cathedral of
Tours. Bishop Joscion, who died in 1173, planned to construct a Plantagenet
Gothic church, since Touraine was in large part under Angevin control, and
to the church he began belongs the graceful bombé vault borne on eight

slender branches beneath the northwest tower. In 1191 Richard Cœur-de-
Lion came to his city of Tours to receive the crusaders’ insignia before his
venture to the East. His ransom drained the land of building funds. For that
cause or another, the projected work at Tours languished. The actual choir
was begun only about 1210, when the city had become a part of the royal
domain, and its new master Philippe-Auguste wrote that he held the church
of Tours to be one of the chief jewels of his crown, and that whosoever
molested it touched his (the king’s) person.
We do not know who was the original architect of la Gatienne. Étienne
de Mortagne, who designed the Benedictine church at Marmoutier, is
mentioned, in 1269, as master-of-works at the cathedral, but by that time its
choir was completed. That choir, while making no pretense of being
sublime, is a monument of noble robustness, displaying within and without
the veriest genius of good taste. The vista closing the eastern end of the
church is one of the most satisfactory in France, owing to its right
proportion. In this, Tours derives directly from Amiens. Its pier arcade
comprises one-third of the interior wall elevation; and the triforium and
clearstory make up the other two-thirds—clearstory being double the height
of triforium. At Tours the relation of span and height is admirable, and both
are well correlated with length. Seen in perspective down the nave, the
three stories of colored glass around the sanctuary are the supreme
impression of this church interior, and seldom does one pass from its west
portal without turning back for a lingering look at that harmonious chevet
of consecrated light. Through the pier arches can be seen symmetrically the
windows of the apse chapels. The design of the glazed triforium is excelled
by no other in France; though serving as a kind of pedestal for the upper
lights, it retains its own entity.
When the choir of Tours was completed, the builders proceeded at once
to erect the transept which, the stones themselves say, must have been
finished as the XIII century closed. The nave’s easternmost bays touching it
belong to the first years of the next century, as do the two rose windows of
the transept. The northern rose is irreproachable in design and of the same
scintillating jewel tradition as XIII-century glass.
The Hundred Years’ War, here as elsewhere, checked building activities.
When they were resumed at Tours, happily the first plans were adhered to,
so that choir and nave are homogeneous. As the church advanced toward
the west, the window tracery changed from Rayonnant to Flamboyant, the