Cathedral Cities of France — Story, Setting & Ideas

in Europe, and every man who called himself a true warrior turned his face eastward to Palestine, Abbeville was destined to play her part in the affairs of the great world outside her walls, and to share in the fortunes of that company of men whose watchword was “Jerusalem.” In the first two Crusades, when the crusading spirit was as yet ardent and pure and had not degenerated into a desire for plunder and rapine, the leaders met within the gates of Abbeville before setting out to the Holy Land.

One can well imagine the stir their presence made within the quiet precincts of the little town, the excitement of the townfolk, the eager crowding of the youth of the place around the standards of these great chiefs, Godfrey de Bouillon, destined to become king of Jerusalem; dark, passionate Robert of Normandy, son of the Conqueror; Hugh of Vermandois, brother to the King of France; Stephen of Blois; Raymond of Toulouse; Robert of Flanders, he who was called the “Sword and Lance of the Christians”; and, lastly, Tancred the chivalrous, the very embodiment of the spirit of the crusaders--and a “very perfect, gentle knight.”

For nearly two hundred years the English ruled Abbeville. When, in 1272, Eleanor of Castile was married to Prince Edward, afterwards Edward I., the town was included in the estates which she brought to England as her dowry; and being near the sea coast, and consequently within easy reach of England, its new lords were able to retain their hold upon the city even after the disastrous close of the Hundred Years’ War had given almost every English conquest back to France. Towards the end of the fifteenth century it fell into the hands of the Burgundian party, but the French crown finally reclaimed it in 1477. Since that time it has twice seen an international alliance concluded within its gates. In 1514, Anne of Brittany, the wife of Louis XII.--“Pater Patria”--died without having an heir in the direct line, and her husband, unwilling that the crown should go to François d’Angoulême, determined to take another wife, and made advances to Henry VIII. for the hand of his beautiful sister, Mary Tudor; and after the negotiations were completed, they were married at Abbeville. As far as Louis’s purpose went, however, the marriage was a failure, as the King died a few months later, and the Duc d’Angoulême, his son-in-law, ascended his throne as François Ier. To his reign belongs the second alliance in the history of Abbeville, the pact signed between the King of France and Cardinal Wolsey, on behalf of Henry VIII., against the common enemy, Charles V.--a figure so commanding, so infinitely greater than his contemporaries, that beside him the brilliancy of François, the gallantry of Henry, and the pomp and magnificence of his favourite Wolsey, seemed entirely eclipsed, and the three men appear almost as puppets, unstable and vacillating, now the closest of friends, and now the bitterest of enemies.

Abbeville still maintains many of the old picturesque landmarks which made it a favourite sketching ground for Prout and for Ruskin. The market-place is surrounded by a number of houses with high pitched gables, coloured in various tints of white, grey and pale green. Some beautiful drawings by Ruskin, executed in pencil and tint, which have lately been exhibited to the public, bear testimony to its picturesqueness, of which a great deal still remains in the side streets and along the river front.

The church of St. Wolfran is late Flamboyant, and is looked upon by Ruskin as “a wonderful proof of the fearlessness of a living architecture,” for, say what one will of it, that Flamboyant of France, however morbid, was as vivid and intense in its imagination as ever any phase of mortal mind. The nave consists of bays having a high clerestory and a triforium screened by rich sixteenth century carving. The ribs of the vaulting fall sheer down without imposts or break of any kind. The low chancel and eastern termination of the church are unworthy of the splendid carving of the western façade.

The approach to Amiens offers no _coup d’œil_ of clustering towers or spires such as an English or Norman cathedral city usually gives us, and the Cathedral itself is hidden as we pass into the heart of the town along the Rue des Trois Cailloux, a street which is said to follow the alignment of the old city walls. Ruskin advises the traveller, however short his time may be, to devote it, not to the contemplation of arches and piers and coloured glass, but to the woodwork of the chancel, which he considers the most beautiful carpenter’s work of the Flamboyant period. Note should be taken of two windows in the Chapel of the Cardinal de la Grange, built about 1375. These are very interesting as foreshadowing in their detail that style of architecture--the Flamboyant--which obtained in France in the fifteenth century and was contemporaneous with the English Perpendicular.

The two western towers look little more than heavily built buttresses, and as towers are not very appropriate in design, being not square, but oblong in plan. They rise little above the ridge line of the nave, whose crossing with the transepts is marked by a beautiful _flèche_, which Ruskin, however, describes as “merely the caprice of a village carpenter.” As he further declares, the Cathedral of Amiens is “in dignity inferior to Chartres, in sublimity to Beauvais, in decorative splendour to Rheims, and in loveliness of figure sculpture to Bourges,” yet it fully deserves the name given to it by Viollet-le-Duc--“The Parthenon of Gothic architecture.”

The height of the nave and aisles is, according to Mr. Francis Bond in his book “Gothic Architecture in England,” respectively nearly three times their span, and the vastness of the fenestration is very striking, particularly in the clerestory, through whose lower mouldings the triforium is negotiated, thus dividing each bay into two storeys, clerestory and pier arch, instead of into three, clerestory triforium and pier arch. This gives the effect after which the French architect strove: one vast blaze of light and colour through the upper windows, coming not only from the clerestory, but from the glazed triforium also; the magnificent deep blue glass typifying the splendour of the heavens. On the other hand, in a sunny clime, builders cared less for light, and preferred the effect of a blind triforium which throws the choir below into gloomy and mysterious shadow. Thus we see that upon the design of the triforium depends to a very great extent the effect of the light and shade of the interior of a great church.

Once, being personally conducted by the dean over one of the cathedrals of the west of England, the writer was suddenly called upon to give the derivation of “triforium.” The word is applied to the ambulatory or passage, screened by an arcade, which runs between the pier arches and clerestory windows, and is considered to refer to the three openings, or spaces, _trinæ fores_, into which the arcading was sometimes divided. It probably has nothing to do with openings in multiples of three, nor with a Latinised form of “thoroughfare,” as suggested in Parker’s Glossary, although the main idea is that of a passage running round the inside of a church, either as at Westminster, in the form of an ambulatory chamber, or of a gallery pierced through the main walls, from whence the structure can be inspected without the trouble of using ladders or erecting scaffolding. M. Enlart in his “Manuel d’Archéologie Française,” derives the word from a French adjective “trifore,” or “trifoire,” through the Latin “transforatus,” a passage pierced through the thickness of the wall; and this idea of a passage-way is certainly suggested by an old writer, Gervase, who, in his description of the new Cathedral of Canterbury, rebuilt after the fire, alludes to the increased number of passages round the church under the word “triforia.” “Ibi triforium unum, hic duo in choro, et in alâ ecclesiæ tercium.”

On the north side of the Cathedral flows the Somme, and there is perhaps no better means of realising the great height and mass of the building than by walking along the river banks, whence we see the old houses, great and small, rise tier above tier under the quiet grey outline of this “giant in repose.”

In an extract from his private diary Ruskin gives the following description of this walk along the river, showing it in an aspect at once squalid and picturesque: “Amiens, May 11th.--I had a happy walk here this afternoon, down among the branching currents of the Somme: it divides into five or six, shallow, green, and not over-wholesome; some quite narrow and foul, running beneath clusters of fearful houses, reeling masses of rotten timber; and a few mere stumps of pollard willow sticking out of the banks of soft mud, only retained in shape of bank by being shored up with timbers; and boats like paper boats, nearly as thin at least, for the costermongers to paddle about in among the weeds, the water soaking through the lath bottoms, and floating the dead leaves from the vegetable baskets with which they were loaded. Miserable little back yards, opening to the water, with steep stone steps down to it, and little platforms for the ducks; and separate duck staircases, composed of a sloping board with cross bits of wood leading to the ducks’ doors; and sometimes a flower-pot or two on them, or even a flower--one group, of wall-flowers and geraniums, curiously vivid, being seen against the darkness of a dyer’s backyard, who had been dyeing black, and all was black in his yard but the flowers, and they fiery and pure; the water by no means so, but still working its way steadily over the weeds, until it narrowed into a current strong enough to turn two or three windmills, one working against the side of an old Flamboyant Gothic church, whose richly traceried buttresses sloped down into the filthy stream; all exquisitely picturesque, and no less miserable. We delight in seeing the figures in these boats, pushing them about the bits of blue water, in Prout’s drawings; but as I looked to-day at the unhealthy face and melancholy mien of the man in the boat pushing his load of peat along the ditch, and of the people, men as well as women, who sat spinning gloomily at the cottage doors, I could not help feeling how many persons must pay for my picturesque subject and happy walk.”

In his “Miscellaneous Studies” Walter Pater says: “The builders of the Church seem to have projected no very noticeable towers; though it is conventional to regret their absence, especially with visitors from England, where indeed cathedral and other towers are apt to be good and really make their mark.... The great western towers are lost in the west front, the grandest, perhaps the earliest, of its species--three profound sculptured portals; a double gallery above, the upper gallery carrying colossal images of twenty-two kings of the house of Judah, ancestors of our Lady; then the great rose; above it the singers’ gallery, half marking the gable of the nave, and uniting at their topmost storeys the twin, but not exactly equal or similar towers, oddly oblong in plan as if meant to carry pyramids or spires. In most cases, those early Pointed churches are entangled, here and there, by the construction of the old round-arched style, the heavy, Norman or other, Romanesque chapel or aisle, side by side, though in strange contrast, with the soaring new Gothic nave or transept. But the older manner of the round arch, the _plein-cintre_, Amiens has nowhere or almost nowhere, a trace. The Pointed style, fully pronounced, but in all the purity of its first period, found here its completest expression.”

LÂON, RHEIMS AND SOISSONS

“We passed Lâon in the dark,” is a confession frequently made by travellers. The Geneva express used to stop here for dinner, and during the brief interval allowed for coffee and cigarettes many a traveller has gazed up at the great buttressed hill, silhouetted against a twilight sky, and wondered what manner of place it might be, half-fortress, half-church, rising some three hundred and fifty feet out of the plain with its crest of towers and houses.

If Paris is the type of the island cities of Gaul, surely Lâon may be called the type of the hill cities. “Lâon is the very pride of that class of town which out of Gaulish hill-forts grew into Roman and mediæval cities. None stands so proudly on its height; none has kept its ancient character so little changed to our own day. The town still keeps itself within the walls which fence in the hill-top, and whatever there is of suburb has grown up at the foot, apart from the ancient city.”

Geologically, Lâon is a limestone island in the denuded plain of Soissonais and Béarnais, and was a Celtic stronghold, as its name, a contraction of _Laudunum_, shows, _dun_ standing for a hill fortress. The town resembles in plan a blunt crescent, one horn of which is occupied by the cathedral and citadel. An electric railway connects the upper with the lower town, and a street from the market-place leads through the Parvis to the very beautiful west façade of the church. Cathedral, strictly speaking, it is no longer, for at Lâon we have another of those instances, always somewhat melancholy, of a deserted bishopstool. Here it is almost more pathetic, when we remember that the Bishop of Lâon was second in importance only to the Archbishop of Rheims himself, and, going back to the days of William Longsword, we find Lâon not only a bishopric, but a capital town--one of the great trio of cities which ruled northern France and fought amongst themselves for the chief mastery. There was the Duke of Paris in his capital; there was the Duke of the Normans, an outsider who by force of arms had settled at Rouen, and was a source of continual trembling to the Parisian duchy; and there was the King of the Franks on the hill-top at Lâon, nominally suzerain of both the others, but really in daily fear lest one or other, or both, should swoop down and storm his hill-fortress and add the royal city of Lâon to lands which in those days went to any man who could get possession of them.

Tradition says that St. Béat, who lived towards the close of the third century, gathered his faithful together in a small chapel hewn out of the rock, over which was built later on the cathedral church of Notre Dame. This church, according to M. Daboval, seems to have been still in existence in the fifth century, and was even then of sufficient importance to attract thither many scholars who wished to study the Holy Scriptures. In the twelfth century the cathedral, Bishop’s palace, and many other churches were burnt down, owing to communal troubles during the bishopric of Gaudry. The present cathedral has one specially distinctive feature: the east end, instead of being apsidal, follows the English type of a square termination. There are other churches in the neighbourhood built on a similar plan, which suggests the possibility of English architects having been engaged in their construction. Lâon is, however, in one important feature, a variant from the common arrangement in English churches of the eastern wall. It has there a great circular window only, instead of the immense wall of glass usually adopted in this country. The bays of the aisles are four-storied, in pairs, with alternating piers, and of great beauty, the ribs of the vaulting springing from clusters of light shafts. There is a large ambulatory over the aisles, “which are built up in two stories, both of them vaulted, and the upper vaulted aisle giving valuable abutment to the clerestory wall.” This internal arrangement appears to have been in favour with the architects of the early French Gothic style.

The twenty-eight side chapels are enclosed by some very lovely screens of a later date, which, being erected during the latter part of the sixteenth century, and of Renaissance design, are considered by the ultra-Gothic mind to clash with the rest of the cathedral. Nevertheless they are very beautiful in proportion and appropriateness, reticent in design, and admirable in execution.

Viollet-le-Duc, in his review of the cathedral of Lâon, says that it has a certain ring of democracy and is not of that religious aspect that attaches to Chartres, Amiens, or Rheims. From the distance it has more the appearance of a château than of a church: its nave is low when compared with other Gothic naves, and its general outside appearance shows evidence of something brutal and savage; and as far as its colossal sculptures of animals, oxen and horses, which appear to guard the upper parts of the towers, are concerned, they combine to give an impression more of terror than of a religious sentiment. One does not feel, as one regards Notre Dame de Lâon, the stamp of an advanced civilisation, as at Paris or at Amiens. Everything is rude and rough; it is the monument of a people enterprising and energetic and full of great virility. They are the same men as are seen building elsewhere in the neighbourhood--a race of giants.

As we approach Rheims from Paris, Lâon, or Soissons, there is very little sign of the vineyards which one associates with the champagne country. The “vine-clad” hills lie to the south in the Epernay district. Here to the north of the city we see only well-watered, well-timbered country, lush meadow-lands, and even market-gardens, reminding us more of the upper reaches of the Thames valley than of a wine-growing country.

Rheims chiefly recommends itself to the English mind as the place where the kings of France were crowned. It would seem also as though the fact of being crowned at Rheims was a patent of royalty, so to speak, to the kings themselves, since, as Freeman remarks, their rights were never disputed after their anointing with the _sainte ampoule_. “Every king of the French crowned at Rheims,” he says, “has been at once a Frenchman by birth and the undisputed heir of the founder of the dynasty. Hugh and his son Robert, neither of them born to royalty, were crowned, the one at Noyon, the other at Orléans. Henry the Fourth, the one king whose right was disputed, was crowned at Chartres.”

Like Soissons, like Lâon, like Bourges even, Rheims has carried down to modern times the remains of that prestige which must always attach to a royal city, even though the royalty have long ago departed from it. It moreover brings us once again to the story of Joan the Maid. It is the scene of her mission’s fulfilment, of France’s triumph, of the beginning of that monarchy which Louis XI. established in its complete form and which the later Bourbons wrecked; and here, when the crown is safe on her king’s head and Charles VII. has his own again, does Joan ask her reward--permission to return to her flocks in the fields of Domrémy. And but that this boon was too simple to grant, Joan’s story might have ended with this, her greatest triumph, instead of in the market-place at Rouen.