How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

       Table of Contents

      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 СКАЧАТЬ