How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 40

THE CATHEDRAL OF LISIEUX[356]

One must live as one thinks, or else, sooner or later, one finishes by thinking as one lives.--PAUL BOURGET.

Lisieux Cathedral is, with that of Rouen, the least Norman in the province. It claims to be the first built of the Gothic cathedrals of Normandy and the most vigorous. The preceding Romanesque cathedral was grievously damaged by fire in 1136. Arnoul, a prelate who had gone through the disillusioning experience of the Second Crusade, began the present church. Similarities between it and Laon Cathedral, and various other indications, prove that it was building from 1160 to 1190.

Bishop Arnoul, of a line of shrewd Norman diplomatists, profited materially by his ability to keep on good terms with both husbands of Alienor of Aquitaine, Henry of England, and Louis of France. In Lisieux Cathedral he married Alienor to Henry II, which act was to take three hundred years of war and Jeanne's sacrifice to undo. Arnoul was the English king's chief adviser before Becket's ascendancy. It is said that he counseled Henry, after his first quarrel with Becket, to detach one by one the English bishops from their primate, which policy of _divide et impera_ came only too easily to an Angevin-Anglo-Norman. Four times did Bishop Arnoul journey to Sens to negotiate for Henry with the pope, during the Becket controversy. Some of the leading men of his day admired the prelate of Lisieux; but soundly honest men such as Abbot Robert de Torigny of the Mount, and the bishop of Chartres, John of Salisbury, distrusted him entirely--the latter remarked on his political sense in bestowing benefits when he wished to convince a man of his point of view.

Under Bishop Arnoul the nave of Lisieux rose in one campaign, a monument severe and pure, fog-colored like the wintry sky over it, say the townsmen. A note of force is imparted by the st.u.r.dy cylindrical piers.

There is a narthex bay at the western end--a Germanic influence. No trace of vaulting shows in the deep gallery over the aisles, though the triforium arches that open on the central vessel are better suited for a tribune than a blind arcade. Behind that arcade now stands a poorly constructed wall opened here and there by doors, reminding us that once it was the custom for crusaders to store their valuables in the upper galleries of cathedrals.

Some have suggested that Guillaume de Sens was the architect of Lisieux, whose resemblances with his known works at Sens and Canterbury are discernible. Lisieux adhered to the Romanesque tradition of salient transept arms; that to the north lacks a portal; that to the south is an excellent example of plainest Primary Gothic. The transept has an eastern aisle, an arrangement found at Durham, Lincoln, Salisbury, and Peterborough. The first two bays of the choir were built, like the nave, in the XII century; the birth of the apse is marked by a staircase, as at Caen, Boscherville, Fecamp, and Eu.

The ample central tower of Lisieux, not in the first plan, was erected as the choir was gradually extended. In the later-constructed straight bays of the choir, and at the apse, finished under Bishop Jourdain du Hommet, no annulets broke the ascending line of the cl.u.s.tered shafts, quatrefoils were cut in the spandrels, and more and more the structure took on regional characteristics. Arches were set under arches, some of them being acutely pointed, because the Norman preferred to use the same opening of the compa.s.s for all his arches, wide or narrow. It gave his eye pleasure to multiply molds, and his sense of exact.i.tude craved a support for every roll molding. Lisieux' choir, however, avoided what was to become an excessive complication of parts in the Anglo-Norman school. The cathedral is essentially vigorous and severe.

In 1226 a fire necessitated repairs, and Bishop Guillaume de Pont-de-l'Arche took the opportunity to make three ambulatory chapels.

He built the facade towers whose lower walls retained Romanesque parts of the XI century. When the southwest tower fell in 1553 it was replaced by one of pre-Gothic design. The northwest belfry had as prototype the famous one of St. Pierre at Caen. The axis chapel--longer than the XIII-century one it replaced--is a gem of Flamboyant art. On its walls are some small funereal bas-reliefs erected by the cathedral canons.

The builder of Lisieux' Lady chapel was Pierre Cauchon, president of the tribunal that sentenced Jeanne d'Arc to death. He did not erect his chapel, as some intimate, in expiation of his conduct at Rouen in 1431, for he remained to the end the creature of his country's invaders. His detestation of Jeanne, moreover, was a personal affair, since it had been her triumph at Orleans, creating a national hope, that put heart into the citizens of Beauvais to expel their pro-English bishop. The English sent him to buy Jeanne from her captors. After the happenings in St. Ouen's cemetery, by law Jeanne should have been pa.s.sed into the control of the Church, but Cauchon ordered her back to her English prison, and when she again donned male attire, and again a.s.serted that she had heard her voices, her unscrupulous enemies were enabled to accuse her of being a relapsed heretic and wanton, to start a new trial, and condemn her to death. Cauchon himself hastened to the fortress to witness Jeanne's "relapse," and with Lord Warwick he is said to have chuckled over it--"This time she's well caught!" The morning that Jeanne was led to her execution she faced Cauchon fearlessly: "Bishop, I die by your hand. Had I been placed in the prisons of the Church, this would never have happened. You have left me in the clutches of my enemies. I call you before G.o.d, the great judge, to answer for the wrong you have done me." Even as she so spoke a spirited statue now represents Jeanne in Cauchon's Norman cathedral, while her judge is a condemned felon before the bar of history.

Like Arnoul, builder of Lisieux' nave, Cauchon knew how to act a better part. As rector of Paris University he had been esteemed for his learning. But, coming to the parting of the ways, he chose the broad and easy path, and the rest followed. His influence encouraged the University of Paris in its pernicious betrayal of France after Henry V's invasion. Cauchon won the see of Beauvais by defending Jean Sans Peur of Burgundy, in 1407, when the latter had murdered his cousin, the Duke of Orleans,[357] in the streets of Paris. And in the same hour that he thus truckled for advancement, Jean Gerson, the chancellor of Paris University, denounced the ducal crime--destined to be for France of incalculable consequence--and had his house sacked by Burgundians.

Ten years later, at the Council of Constances, in Switzerland Cauchon upheld the murderer, and Gerson rebuked the crime, whereupon he felt it to be wiser to quit Constances in disguise and to pa.s.s his latter life in retirement. Cauchon became the butcher of Jeanne d'Arc, his name forever an infamy; Gerson, dying in poverty and defeat at Lyons, was thought worthy, during two centuries, to be called the author of the _Imitation of Christ_, and before he pa.s.sed away in July, 1429, it was given to him to learn that the Maid had triumphed at Orleans, and to testify that her mission was of G.o.d: _Gratia Dei estensa est in hac puella; a Domino factum est istud_.

Cauchon, ex-bishop of Beauvais, having placed his learning and energies at the service of his country's invaders, ambitiously hoped to obtain Rouen as his thirty pieces of silver, but the Duke of Bedford compromised matters by bestowing on him the lesser see of Lisieux, in 1432. As the national cause prospered the traitor was more and more detested by the populace. When the Burgundian partisans of the English were expelled from Paris, the properties of the bishop of Lisieux in the capital were seized and he himself was mobbed. In 1442 he fell dead suddenly one day while his barber was shaving him. A few years later, when Jeanne was rehabilitated and her judge excommunicated, the populace broke open Cauchon's tomb in the cathedral and flung his bones into the mire. His successor at Lisieux, Bishop Pasquier de Vaux, also one of Jeanne's faithless judges, died alone, deserted, on the day that the French army entered his city as victors, in 1449. The after history of Lisieux Cathedral followed the same course as others in France; 1562 and 1793 wrecked its monuments and smashed its stained gla.s.s. In the Flamboyant Gothic church of St. Jacques--where not a capital breaks the ascending line--are some XVI-century windows, making it the first church with such remaining.

Lisieux can boast of no bishop canonized by the Church, but her citizens are doing all in their power to let Christendom know of the gentle Norman girl, Therese Martin, the "Little Flower," who died in the odor of sanct.i.ty (1897) in the Carmelite convent of the town, before she had reached her twenty-fifth year. Her extraordinary cult, especially among soldiers during the World War, proves that the thirst for sainthood is as strong as ever in the peoples who went crusading and flung themselves toward heaven in cathedrals. Art springs from emotions such as that felt by Frenchmen for the "Little Flower." To ignore such manifestations, as do the rationalists who still are insisting, as dogmatically as before 1914, that France, at root, is the land of Voltaire, is a willful shutting of the eyes to the basic forces that make history.

Those good people of Lisieux who are mystic-minded, who _believe in order that they may understand_, as Anselm taught at Bec near by, as Plato taught in Greece, feel subconsciously that their "Little Flower,"

who said that only after her death would begin her real mission, is atoning for Pierre Cauchon.[358]

THE CATHEDRAL OF eVREUX[359]

Il en cote cher pour devenir la France. Nous nous plaignons, et non sans droit, de nos epreuves et de nos mecomptes. Nos peres n'ont pas vecu plus doucement que nous, ni recueilli plus tot et a meilleur marche les fruits de leurs travaux. Il y a dans le spectacle de leurs destinees de quoi s'attrister et se fortifier a la fois. L'histoire abat les pretentions impatientes et soutient les longues esperances.--GUIZOT.

The cathedral of evreux is not h.o.m.ogeneous like that of Lisieux, but, gathering of different styles though it is, Romanesque, Gothic, early and late, neo-cla.s.sic, it possesses its own distinct personality. A church of whose choir it has been said by one so competent to compare the cathedrals of his native land as M. Louis Gonse, that it is "one of the fairest bits of Gothic architecture in France," surely can hold its own among more brilliant companions.

Two Romanesque edifices stood in succession on the site, not to speak of the Merovingian and Carolingian cathedrals here. evreux is the _Evora_ of Gallo-Roman times when it was ranked with Rouen and Tours. St.

Patrick came hither in 432 for his consecration as bishop before his apostolate to Ireland. The first of the Romanesque cathedrals was dedicated in 1072 by Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury, but in 1119, when Henry I of England was besieging the city, it was destroyed for strategic purposes, by consent of its bishop, who was in the king's camp. Henry and all his barons gave generous compensation, we are told by Ordericus Vitalis, the English monk who spent most of his life in the Norman monastery of St. evroult, "delighting in obedience and poverty,"

writing a history which is the chief XII-century record of the duchy.

The second Romanesque cathedral was begun in 1126. To it belonged the pier arcade of the present nave and the entire westernmost bay, as well as portions of the facade towers. At one time it was thought that the arches adjacent to the transept were part of the earlier church blessed by Lanfranc, inasmuch as they differ from the profiles of the other pier arches. Further study has demonstrated, however, that the entire arcade belongs to the XII century, since it was not the usage, before 1120, to flank a pier's four faces by columns, as was done here throughout.

The second Romanesque cathedral of evreux was also destined to be of short duration. In 1194, Philippe-Auguste laid the city in ashes as chastis.e.m.e.nt for John Lackland's black deed. John had allowed a French garrison into evreux during his intrigues with the French king, while Richard the Lion-hearted was on his crusade. When word came that his brother was returning to his possessions, John, hoping to placate him for his own treachery, invited the French garrison of three hundred to a feast and, it is said, foully murdered them all. The bishop of evreux had accompanied Richard Coeur-de-Lion to the East and in Cyprus had crowned his bride, Berengaria of Navarre. In the course of time the counts of evreux became kings of Navarre, through the marriage of Berengaria's sister to the Count of Champagne.[360] The niece of Richard and John, Blanche of Castile, brought in her dowry evreux to the French Crown, when she married (1200) the son of that wily augmenter, Philippe-Auguste.

The renewal of the cathedral as Gothic proceeded slowly. By 1230 the nave had merely reached the triforium level. A horizontal sculptured band, such as surmounts it, was not used after that date. The clearstory of the nave is contemporary with the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, and when Louis IX came to his mother's dower city, in 1259, for the consecration of its bishop, who was his personal friend, he and the group of building-prelates with him, from Rheims, Rouen, Coutances, and Seez, must have discussed the new works at evreux with interest. The choir of the cathedral was not undertaken till the close of the century. From 1298 to 1310 it was built in a Rayonnant style fully as advanced as the later abbatial of St. Ouen, at Rouen, with glazed triforium, capitals that are slight bands of foliage, and precocious prismatic profiles. The only distinctly Norman trait is the bal.u.s.trade of the triforium. As the choir was made fifteen feet wider than the nave, its westernmost bay was canted to join the transept, but the effect is not displeasing.

The Hundred Years' War caused a cessation of works at evreux. Dire years were they for the city ruled by Charles le Mauvais, a "demon of France," "perfidy in person." He plotted ceaselessly against the national party, not because he leaned to the English side, but that he was obsessed by his own superior claims to the French crown, being by both father and mother directly of St. Louis' line. His high abilities--and he was learned, eloquent, and handsome--were wasted in mischief making. In 1365 he gave up his city of evreux to the flames.

Charles the Wicked is pictured in the cathedral's clearstory windows, in the fourth on the north side of the choir, and across the sanctuary from him, in another light, is his wife, a Valois, sister of the French king, Charles V, and his art-loving brothers at Dijon, Angers, and Bourges.

She possessed Mantes by her dower right, and added to its collegiate church the Rayonnant chapel of Navarre, in which are portrait statuettes representing her daughters. Her four brothers, says M. Anthyme Saint-Paul, were the paramount influences in the formation of French Flamboyant Gothic, from 1365 to 1415.

The best array of XIV-century gla.s.s[361] in France is that of the choir of evreux. The windows are not forceful, like XIII-century medallion-mosaics, any more than the Rayonnant stonework framing them resembles hardy Apogee Gothic. The hues, while limpid and pleasing, show none of the lovely half-tones which the Flamboyant-Renaissance day was to achieve. Large plates of gla.s.s were employed in order that fewer leads might darken the window. White was overused, as well as the recently discovered yellow, called silver-stain, obtained by fusing the surface of white gla.s.s with a solution of silver. Pot-metal gla.s.s--that colored in the ma.s.s--had hitherto been used exclusively. Effective backgrounds were obtained by damasked patterns. In each panel was a single figure in an architectural setting of grisaille and silver-stain, which frames grew so elaborate, by the middle of the century, that perspective was represented.

The earliest example of a canopy type of window is in evreux' upper choir--the third light on the north side. It was the gift of the _grand queux_, or cook, of France, Guillaume d'Harcourt, who died in 1327. The two windows presented by the bishop of evreux, Bernard Cariti (1376-83), show progress in architectural backgrounds, and the donor is drawn from life. In the canted bay of the choir (north) is a XV-century window of the Saintes Maries, whose alleged relics were given to the bishop here by good King Rene of Anjou. The window commemorates Normandy's newly acquired freedom, hence its portraits of Charles VII, his son, the future Louis XI, and the seneschal of Normandy, Pierre de Breze. It is also a memorial of the Great Schism of the West, ended by the Council of Constance, at which the bishop of evreux was present. Foliate designs cover the grisaille lights of the triforium. The quarries (white, parallel pieces of gla.s.s framed together in a lead pattern) are enlivened by strips of colored gla.s.s and heraldic ornament.

Louis XI built the Lady chapel of evreux, in whose windows he depicted his coronation. In the lily-petals formed by the Flamboyant tracery of the mullions are pictured the barons who attended the king's investing.

Instead of the single figures in each panel, hitherto popular, small groups were now set under the vitrine canopies, and subjects heretofore unknown in western iconography appeared, such as the Transfiguration, the Woman of Samaria, the Marriage at Cana. They were pictured just as the mystery plays of the day presented them on the stage. In the Tree of Jesse, at the end of the chapel, the new process of abrasion was employed, by which the color of flashed gla.s.s was ground away in places, and on the white surfaces thus exposed were enameled new colors, so that one piece of gla.s.s could exhibit a variety of hues. These windows of evreux' Lady chapel belong to the transition hour between the earlier tradition that treated a window as an adjunct of the architecture, and the later tradition that composed a window as an independent painted picture.[362]

When, in 1441, evreux opened its gates joyously to the national troops, new works were begun in the cathedral. The actual Flamboyant transept was subst.i.tuted for a decrepit Romanesque structure, whose ground plan it followed, hence it is too narrow for its height; seen from the interior of the church, the octagonal lantern appears cramped. The lacework stone spire of the crossing was one of the first in the region.

For sixty years during the XVI century two prelates of the prominent Tillieres family held the see; to Ambrose le Veneur is due the superlatively ornate Flamboyant north front of the transept, an unanswerable proof that if Gothic art was soon to end it was not of inanition it expired. To put the northern flank of his church in accord with the facade's festival of lace stone he re-dressed the chapels along nave and choir. His nephew, Bishop Gabriel le Veneur, undertook to remake the west frontispiece in a style so neo-cla.s.sic that M. Leon Pal.u.s.tre, the historian of the Renaissance, exclaimed, "_Pour cette fois le moyen age est bien fini!_" And yet only thirty years separated the facades of uncle and nephew. The southwest tower has been left uncrowned; that to the northwest is an imposing heavy ma.s.s in which is the sonorous bell of evreux, called Gros-Pierre.

THE CATHEDRAL OF SeEZ[363]

Il y a plus d'une sorte de chevalerie, et les grands coups de lance ne sont pas de rigueur. a defaut d'epee, nous avons la plume; a defaut de plume, la parole; a defaut de parole, l'honneur de notre vie.--LeON GAUTIER, _La Chevalerie_.

"Prudent, modest, and gracious," reads the epitaph of Bishop Jean de Bernieres, who, having in large part built the choir of Seez Cathedral, impressing on it his personal qualities, departed this life on Holy Thursday of 1292. Seez has been called a little sister of Chartres. It is well set, but of unpretentious dimensions. Its twin spire-crowned western towers will be improved when the ma.s.ses of masonry now propping them are removed. The interior is white and clean, almost to prudery, which may be due to the renewal of choir and transept in modern times.

Never from its inception have restorations ceased in this church. Not that Seez overstepped the possibilities of Gothic equilibrium, but it made incautious use of the calcined foundations of the Romanesque cathedral to which it succeeded. That earlier church had been erected by Bishop Yves de Belleme after two cathedrals had been wiped out by the Norse invasions. Brigands had nested beside his church, and in seeking to dislodge them he had set fire to his own sanctuary, for which act he was rebuked by Leo IX at the Council of Rheims in 1049. He took as his penance the replacing of the cathedral at his own expense, and since he was connected with the rich Norman princes of Italy funds soon poured in. The edifice he erected was destroyed in the unceasing petty wars waged against each other by the husbands of Aliener of Aquitaine.

The nave of the actual cathedral, the part first undertaken, rose from 1220 to 1240 under Bishop Gervais, a member of the Order of Premontre.

After the pause of a generation, its upper vaulting was constructed. All the traits loved by the Norman are here; friezes below triforium and clearstory, bal.u.s.trades, sharp twin lancets under equilateral arches, multiple ridges and multiple supports, circular capitals and bases, interior pa.s.sageways contrived skillfully. Subdivision and multiplication of parts reign supreme; merely for the pleasure it gave his eye the Norman increased the molds of his archivolts. There are diagonals here of so generous a profile that little vault-web shows. The Norman was partial to shadow decoration. He covered his walls with holes cut into foiled shapes which lent themselves to ever-changing contrasts of light and shade. In each spandrel of the main arcade is cut an elaborate rosette before which stands the shaft that mounts to the vault-springing. No Ile-de-France architect had thus obstructed his pierced ornament.

The choir of Seez was begun soon after the nave, but about 1270 was entirely reconstructed as a Rayonnant vessel, designed audaciously to weigh as little as possible on defective foundations. The sanctuary was raised above the ambulatory, with no screen between. The capitals were slight. Here again appeared a trait of Norman redundancy--rain-guards or weather-drips over the main arches and the wall arcading; an Ile-de-France master had relegated such crocketed gables where they belong--to the exterior walls of a church.

Like evreux, Seez Cathedral possesses a uniform array of XIV-century gla.s.s. Above and below the canopied figures in the clearstory lights are panels of grisaille. The triforium was among the first to become one composition with the upper windows, by means of stone mullions; its quarry designs are bordered with strips of colored gla.s.s. The transept, built from 1290 to 1330, has in its side walls excellent images of the prophets. Its roses are linked by mullions with the row of windows below; the north rose traces a star with rays. In 1373 a fire damaged the edifice, and its reconstruction continued through the foreign wars.

The Bishop of Seez, Robert de Rouvre, proved loyal to the national cause and quitted his city for the wandering court of Charles VII, rather than take oath to Henry V. This patriotic Norman prelate knew Jeanne d'Arc, not at her trial at Rouen, but in her triumphal hour of the coronation at Rheims.

The cathedral of Seez was twice pillaged during the religious wars. The Huguenots tore the lead from the roofs, and piled the art treasures in the aisles for bonfires. One doubly regrets the loss of the nave's windows which would have completed the coherent scheme of color decoration that distinguishes the church. Seez was neglected for centuries, its decrepitude becoming such that the priests at its altars were inconvenienced by wind and rain, and not so inconsequent, after all, then seemed the interior weather-guards. The much criticized restoration of M. Ruprich-Robert was a necessity, even though it may have been too radical.

Of the six Norman cathedrals, that of Seez is the least known, yet it lies but a few miles beyond Falaise, visited by most travelers in Normandy. In the streets of the Conqueror's birthplace they still sing, "_Vive le fils d'Ariette, Normans, vive le fils d'Arlette!_" A statue of William faces the Trinite in which parish he was baptized (1027). The XIII century built the Trinite's transept, the XVI century its choir (beneath which pa.s.ses a street), and the Renaissance appears in a porch of faultless taste.[364] The donjon of the castle belongs to the XII century, though the guides will point out a window whence Duke Robert the Magnificent first beheld the maid Arlette.

THE CATHEDRAL OF BAYEUX[365]

Mais c'est toujours la France, ou pet.i.te ou plus grande Le pays des beaux bles et des encadrements, Le pays de la grappe et des ruisslements, Le pays de genets, de bruyere, de lande.

--CHARLES PeGUY.

In the cathedrals of Rouen, Lisieux, and evreux, the Norman traits are subordinate to those of the Ile-de-France; at Seez all is Norman, and altogether Norman, too, are Bayeux and Coutances, the gems of the duchy's Gothic school. The cathedral of Bayeux stands on the site of one burned in 1046. After that fire Bishop Hugues began a Romanesque cathedral which was continued by his successor, Odo de Conteville, a half brother of the Conqueror. The fair Arlette, the tanner's daughter of Falaise, after the death of Duke Robert the Magnificent, was joined in lawful wedlock with a Norman baron. Her son, Odo, without the slightest vocation, was made a bishop at seventeen--precisely the feudal debasing of the priesthood which Gregory VII was combating. At the battle of Hastings, when he had blessed the troops, he sprang to his charger and led the cavalry. A XII-century canon of Bayeux, Robert Wace, in his rimed history of the Norman dukes, the _Roman de Rou_, tells how, at Hastings, the Norman minstrel, Taillefer, "famed for song, mounted on a charger strong, rode on before, awhile he sang of Roland and of Charlemagne, Oliver and the va.s.sals all, who fell in fight at Roncevals."

As governor of Kent, Bishop Odo deepened, by his injustices, the hate of the dispossessed Anglo-Saxons for their new masters. On an excursion against Durham he so harried the countryside that it lay waste for a hundred years. When to his misgovernment was added the folly of grandeur--for this unbalanced feudal bully intrigued to wear the papal tiara, to succeed to the great-hearted champion against iniquity, Gregory VII--his brother, William, thought it best to shut him up. From 1047 to 1096 Odo held the see of Bayeux. The Romanesque cathedral which he completed was blessed in the presence of William the Conqueror and Matilda, in 1077, on which occasion the bishop presented to his church a candelabrum such as can be seen at Hildersheim. Bayeux' crown of light hung from the high vaults until wrecked by the Calvinists in 1562.

Of the cathedral built by this anomalous prelate very little remains.

The crypt is of his time, parts of the outer walls, and the body of the west towers in their lower halls; their upper stories were re-dressed later. The crypt was forgotten till 1412, when, in digging for a certain bishop's tomb they unearthed it. Odo's cathedral was in part destroyed in 1106 when Bayeux was besieged and burned by Henry I of England.

Another fire in 1160 made rebuilding imperative, and even before the latter disaster Bishop Philippe d'Harcourt (1142-62) had begun a new Romanesque church. To it belonged the core of the actual transept-crossing's piers and the lower part of the nave, which is considered the richest Romanesque[366] work extant. The flat wall above the pier arcade is covered with geometric designs, interlacings, and chevrons. The curious carved disks, in the spandrels of the arches, represent Oriental animals and the grotesques that are to be found in Celtic illuminations. Some have thought that the exotic sculptures of Bayeux derived directly from an ivory coffer, of the IV-century Hegira, brought home by crusaders for the treasury of their cathedral. Oriental Byzantium was their common origin.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Choir of Bayeaux Cathedral (1210-1260). Typical of Normandy's Elaborate Gothic_.]