Chapter X: Gothic Art in Normandy314 (2)

In 1103 the northern wall of the Romanesque nave collapsed one night as the monks were chanting matins in the choir. It was restored immediately in the same style, and Abbot Roger II took the opportunity to reconstruct the monks' quarters. Above the crypt called Aquilon (c. 1112) he built a cloister, which later was vaulted with diagonals, and over that _promenoir_ was made a dormitory on the same level as the church. During the years that followed the Mount was governed by a man of genius, Robert de Torigni (1153-80), whose chronicle is the most important history of France for that epoch. In the _promenoir_ he entertained, at a banquet in 1158, his sovereign, Henry II, and Aliénor of Aquitaine. They chose him as godfather for their daughter, who, later, as queen of Castile, built the convent church of Las Huelgas by Burgos. Abbot Robert was a pupil of Bec, whose higher standards of intellectual life he brought to the Mount, where he formed a library, built monks' quarters, and added western belfries to his abbatial, though the façade of his day no longer exists.

As the XIII century opened, Normandy became once more a part of the royal domain, after being three centuries under dukes of its own. When Rollo's strong breed ended in the debased John Lackland, the northern province gladly accepted Philippe-Auguste as ruler. How whole-heartedly, how unreservedly French it became it was to prove by its heroic resistance to the English invaders during the Hundred Years' War.[334]

In the frays of 1203, fire had spread from the town that hugged the rock's edge, to the monastic buildings on the summit. Philippe-Auguste, always wisely conciliatory toward new subjects, contributed toward the restorations. With the gift from the king under whom most of the Gothic cathedrals of France were begun, Abbot Jourdan (1191-1212) built the supreme architectural work of the citadel, what is called the Merveille, and a marvel indeed are its three stories that rise, one above the other, hall over hall, two hundred feet in height above the sea, ridged heavily outside by stout buttresses and graced within by pillars, arches, and a sky-gazing cloister.

From the brain of some unknown cowled genius sprang this _mâle_ and splendid conception, built in the very prime of Gothic. Who else but one enamored of meditation would have set his cloister atop of his monastery under the open sky, or have opened on that courtyard of peace a monks' refectory, where, in a flooded stillness of light, the brethren could sit pondering as they listened to one of their number reading from the stone lectern the book which is the spirit of Bernard of Clairvaux incarnate: "Give all for all; seek nothing; call for nothing back. Thou shalt be free in heart and the darkness shall not overwhelm thee." And around them there spread the wide horizon of the sea one hour, of the white ashes of sand the next.

Pacing the lovely skyward cloister one has time to brood on life and death, on God and one's own soul; it refutes a hundred calumnies against monastic life just by being what it is. Serious men enamored of voluntary seclusion carved it unstintingly and set its columns quaintly in triangular order. Love and science contrived the diffused, soothing luminousness of the brothers' dining hall. The present gable windows there are innovations. Originally when one entered one could discern no window, and yet light was everywhere. The side walls, that from the door appear to be blind arcades, are in reality a succession of narrow panel windows--thirty to a side--deeply recessed in stone embrasures that are triangular in shape, because they serve the purpose of buttresses. To have carried the exterior buttress ridges to such a height as is this refectory, set audaciously up in the sky on the Merveille's third story, would have been an awkward procedure; so the nameless monk-architect, because he was a XIII-century man, let his genius lead him, and, "master of the living stone" that he was, contrived a supreme beauty of decoration out of a structural necessity.

The Merveille was erected under a succession of abbots, in one consecutive radiant effort, from 1203 to 1228--a Titan's work. Each of its three stories is divided into two halls; on the ground floor are the almonry, where the pilgrims fed, and a groin-vaulted cellery or storehouse; the top story, as we have seen, consists of open cloister and monks' refectory; and between the upper and lower stories are two of the most vigorous halls ever built; that over the almonry called the Salle des Hôtes because in it were entertained the guests of the monastery, and that to the west, over the cellery, acquiring the name Salle des Chevaliers, from the Order of the Knights of St. Michael, whose members met here. The latter is divided by rows of stout pillars, and served as the common room of the community, where the tireless scholar-scribes illuminated missals and copied manuscripts.

The charter for the military Order of the Archangel, founded in 1469 by Louis XI, welded the name of St. Michael, whom every good Frenchman knew kept a specially friendly eye on France, with that of Jeanne the Maid, who had quitted Domrémy-on-the-Meuse because the voice of her dear archangel rang insistent in her ear: _Fille Dè, va! Je serai à ton ayde. Va!_ It was St. Michael who first roused her to the sense of the great misery there was in the kingdom of France, and in her hour of victory after Orléans she spoke of going to the rescue of the besieged Mount in Normandy. At her trial in Rouen she dwelt on the comfort he had given her.[335] He appeared to her, she said, in the guise of "_un très vrai prud'homme_"--the term loved of St. Louis, who once told Joinville that to be _prud'homme_ meant to be knight in heart, as well as outward bearing. "I believe the words of St. Michael who appeared to me," said Jeanne, at her trial, "as firmly as I believe that Our Lord Jesus Christ suffered death and passion for us. And what leads me so to believe is the good counsel, comfort, and good doctrine St. Michael gave me."

On the completion of the Merveille, the monks continued building. They had finished the officiality hall by the entrance gate of the monastery before the visit of St. Louis to the Mount in 1254, when he came to return thanks for his safety during his late crusade. The XIV century added more defenses till the rock became the most forceful example of mediæval military architecture. Strong walls were needed during its siege by the English who invaded Normandy under Henry V. The Mount's abbot, Robert Jollivet, whose name figures among the well-paid judges at Rouen in 1431, allied himself with the victorious foreigners who had quickly overrun the province. His monks repudiated him, led by their prior, Jean Gonault. Defended by the gallant knight Louis d'Estouteville, they endured the longest siege recorded in history, 1415 to 1450, when, as Jeanne had proclaimed, the invaders were "_boutés tous hors de France_."[336]

In 1429, during the memorable siege, the Romanesque choir of Mont-Saint-Michel's abbey church collapsed. It was impossible then to rebuild it; they had even to sell their altar vessels to carry on the defense. When Normandy was again a part of France the erection of a new choir was undertaken by the abbot of the Mount, who was none other than the distinguished Cardinal Guillaume d'Estouteville, the chief agent in the vindication of Jeanne d'Arc's memory. His layman brother had directed the defense of the Mount during many years. In 1450 were laid down the crypt's nineteen mammoth piers, among the most powerful ever planted. The upper church reached its triforium story by 1469, the year when Louis XI came to the rock to establish his new Order of knighthood, and about 1513 the choir was completed. Many hold it to be superior to all other late-Gothic works in France. There are no capitals, the moldings die away in the shafts, the triforium is glazed. It belongs to the fleeting splendor of Flamboyant art, but without capriciousness. There is no overexuberance, no virtuosity in this vigorous, glad memorial of the nation's reconquered freedom:

Sainte Jeanne went harvesting in France,
And oh! what found she there?
The brave seed of her scattering
In fruitage everywhere.
And where her strong and tender heart
Was broken in the flame,
She found the very heart of France
Had flowered to her name.[337]

Building activities at the embattled abbey ceased after the erection of its beautiful florid choir. The evil consequences of commendatory abbots--those named by royal whim--bore bitter fruit from end to end of France in the relaxed spiritual life of the monasteries. The XVII-century reformers of the Congregation of St. Maur found the Mount's abbot to be a princeling of Lorraine, five years of age. Those scholarly Benedictines carried on excellent research work in local history, but to their neo-classic generation Gothic art was a sealed book.

Deplorable changes went on during three hundred years: an apsidal chapel of the church was made into a staircase, irregular windows were opened in the halls of the Merveille, the cloister was planted as a garden, to the deterioration of the lower structures, and when, in 1776, fire weakened the abbatial, its three westernmost bays were demolished and the present ugly façade put up. After the Revolution pillaged the monastery it became a state prison called Mont Libre, and so continued until 1863. The church was floored midway to serve as a convicts' hat factory. The modern restoration of Mont-Saint-Michel has been, like that which saved the palace of the popes at Avignon, a truly national benefit.

THE CATHEDRAL OF ROUEN[338]

One can say that nothing great ever was accomplished in the Church
without women bearing a part. A host of them stood among the
martyrs in the amphitheater; they disputed with the anchorites the
possession of the desert. Constantine set up the Labarum on the
Capitol, and St. Helena raised the True Cross on the walls of
Jerusalem. Clovis, at Tolbiac, invoked the God of Clotilda.
Monica's tears won the conversion of Augustine. Jerome dedicated
the Vulgate to the piety of two Roman ladies, Paula and Eustochium.
The first lawmakers of monkish life, Basil and Benedict, were
seconded by their sisters, Macrina and Scholastica. The Countess
Matilda held up the tottering throne of Gregory VII. The wise
judgment of Queen Blanche dominated the reign of St. Louis. France
was saved by Jeanne d'Arc. Isabella of Castile led in the discovery
of the New World. And in times closer to our own we see St. Teresa
mixing with bishops, doctors, and the founders of Orders by which
the reform in Catholic ranks was operated. We see St. Francis de
Sales cultivating like a rare flower the soul of Madame de Chantal,
and St. Vincent de Paul passing over to Louise Marillac the most
admirable of his designs, the establishment of the Sisters of
Charity.--FRÉDÉRIC OZANAM.

So much for the abbey churches of Normandy. Many another might be described, but with six Gothic cathedrals to consider, one must refrain. Of the six--Rouen, Lisieux, Évreux, Séez, Bayeux, and Coutances--that of Rouen shows the earliest Gothic work and its character is more French than Norman, as if the river, flowing down from Paris, carried with its waters the characteristics of the art life astir on the banks of the Seine, Oise, Aisne, and Marne.

The least local of Normandy's cathedrals, Our Lady's church at Rouen, has a magnetism distinctly its own--from its florid romantic west front, the most lavish screen ever set up, to the imposing sentry columns that guard its sanctuary. The northwest tower is Normandy's best Primary Gothic, the southwest tower the supremest belfry that sprang up to commemorate the freeing of France from foreign yoke. The façades of the transept and the Lady chapel (whose tombs mark dates in the art history of France) rank with perfect Rayonnant work. Its storied windows are among the richest ever dight by mediæval guildsmen.

Not but that a dozen flaws might be picked in the metropolitan church at Rouen. Were it to be strictly ranked among French cathedrals, it could not be placed among the foremost. But it has gone on embellishing itself century after century with a self-respect so sincere that few care to dispute its claim to stand in the front rank.

On a first visit to Rouen many an amateur prefers the regularity of St. Ouen's abbatial, which in size equals Westminster Abbey.[339] St. Ouen, the classic of Rayonnant design, geometric in tracery, accentuating the ascending line, coldly perfect in construction, possessed still the true _sursum corda_ of Gothic, though the art was fast crystallizing into formulas. The capitals were lessened, and the glazed triforium united to the clearstory in a single composition. Made of fine-textured gray stone St. Ouen is a stately vessel, but, add the critics, "its uniform excellence is average." Gothic lore has not degenerated, but has simply gone too far in the development of its principles, says the mechanical artistry of the last built of the great monastic churches of France, planned before the tragedies of the Hundred Years' War had petrified the national genius.[340]

The cathedral of Normandy's capital is not uniform, but its excellence surpasses the average. It is not homogeneous, its proportions are not absolutely harmonious, but it has profundity, personal character, and flashes of genius. The better it is known the deeper grows affection for it, which is not the case with St. Ouen. In the latter one feels that the cult is the main concern; in the cathedral there is piety of heart.

The early history of Sainte-Marie at Rouen follows the usual course. Norse marauders wrecked the ancient cathedral. Rollo, the first duke, endowed another which was radically reconstructed under an XI-century archbishop, a son of Duke Richard II. In 1063, that Romanesque church was dedicated by Archbishop Maurille (whose tomb is in the present ambulatory) in the presence of William the Conqueror and his good Matilda. Vestiges of the Romanesque edifice are in the first bay of the choir aisle. In it were interred the prodigious Rollo, the Norwegian sea-robber, who sacked half Normandy, sailed up the Seine to terrorize Paris, and up the Loire to overrun Auvergne and Burgundy, and yet, no sooner was he granted the duchy of northern France than the buccaneer gave way to a ruler whose laws were so respected that golden bracelets were left exposed and remained unstolen for years in the forest of Roumare. Rollo was baptized a Christian in Rouen, in 912, and there he wedded a Carolingian princess. When his son, William Longsword, died in 945, he was wearing a gold key that opened a casket containing a monk's robe for his burial; the new rulers were swift to comprehend that monasteries were the chief civilizers in that formative age.

Near Rouen, in 1087, died the Conqueror, sixth in descent from Rollo. "Pirate jostled statesman" in him, too. Mortally wounded at Mantes, he was brought to the priory of St. Gervase--beneath which suburban church still exists intact a V-century crypt--and as he heard the bells of Rouen Cathedral ringing, there rose to haunt him the curses, not loud but deep, of the oppressed Anglo-Saxons, and most piteously he petitioned the Queen of Heaven to draw Her Son's attention to all the religious houses he had built for the people's good on both sides of the Channel. No sooner was he dead than his retainers stripped and robbed him, and through private charity he was carried to his horror-inspiring burial at Caen.

To Rouen, because of its generosity to him in his captivity, Richard Coeur-de-Lion bequeathed his heart. In 1203 the last duke of Normandy, John Lackland, fled from Rouen after the murder of his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, of which the popular voice accused him. Philippe-Auguste entered the city in triumph in 1204, and the building of the new Gothic cathedral started apace.

Notre Dame at Rouen is associated closely with the return of Normandy under French rule. On Easter night, 1200, fire ravaged the city and its chief church. Whether the cathedral then wrecked was that blessed in 1063 by Bishop Robert de Maurille is uncertain. Some think that it was a Romanesque choir and transept which were burned, and a recently built Primary Gothic nave. It may have been an entirely new Gothic church which was destroyed. At any rate, the northwest tower, named after the VII-century bishop, Romanus, and the side doors of the main façade escaped the fire. The preservation of the tower was due, probably, to its position beyond the side aisle. The doors, built about 1180, are ornamented with Oriental incrustations such as are to be seen in the cathedral at Genoa, with which seaport Rouen had trade links.

The Tour Saint-Romain, whose prototypes were the towers at Étampes, Vendôme, and Chartres, was long counted as the oldest Primary Gothic work extant in Normandy, with the chapter house at St. Georges de Boscherville and the chapel of St. Julien, Petit-Quevilly.[341] But as many archæologists now say that the Gothic vault of St. Étienne's nave at Caen may be 1130 just as well as 1160, and that there are still earlier diagonals in the duchy, it remains an open question where the oldest extant ogival work of Normandy is. Mr. John Bilson claims that the diagonals of Lessay's choir pre-date any in the Ile-de-France. However the controversy over the priority of diagonals may be decided, the tower of St. Romain is the first Norman monument that shows the incontestable influence of Gothic of the Ile-de-France type.

The spirit of religious ardor that expressed itself in the northwest tower of Rouen Cathedral was described by Bishop Hugues d'Amiens in a letter, in 1145, to a brother prelate. He tells how volunteers were quitting Normandy to aid in the making of the new tower at Chartres: "In like manner, a large number of the faithful of this, our diocese, and of neighboring regions, put themselves to work on the cathedral church, their mother, forming associations to which no one is admitted unless he has confessed his sins, fulfilled his penances, laid down at the foot of the altar every enmity and revenge, and become reconciled with his enemies in a true peace. Under the lead of one in the band, who is chosen as chief, the people drag heavy wagons in humility and silence." The writer of this famous letter had been a monk of Cluny, and while ruling the see of Rouen he taught school there; he had inherited the traditions of Bec's scholarship through Anselm of Laon. The lower hall of the cathedral tower then begun is considered faultless. Before the close of the century the upper hall was completed, but the belfry story was not added till the late-Gothic day.

After the fire of 1200 work on the new cathedral was pushed on with energy. A master called Jean d'Andely is cited as the architect, a native, probably, of Les Andelys farther up the Seine, where there are two churches so closely resembling the cathedral of Rouen that they are doubtless from the same hand.[342] Another architect, named Enguerrand, is mentioned as quitting work on the cathedral of the capital in 1214, to undertake the abbatial at Bec. A keystone of Notre Dame, of the date 1233, is inscribed by one Durand, mason. He is thought to have been the son-in-law of the original architect, Jean d'Andely.

The first plan of Rouen Cathedral called for tribunes over the aisles, but the idea was given up in order to have the side aisles twice as high as originally designed. The arches by which the tribunes would have opened on the central vessel were retained, however, as was done later with the false tribunes of the abbey church at Eu. In the side aisles, resting on the capitals of the nave's piers, are ringed colonnettes that rise to the ledge above--a ledge constructed to catch the tribune's diagonals (which never were built). By this graceful expedient they cloaked architectural members prepared but not used. The passageway carried from pier to pier above the main arcade of the nave is exceptional. An apsidal chapel projects from each arm of the transept, as in the Romanesque edifices of the region.

The archbishop under whom Notre Dame of Rouen was begun was Walter of Coutance, _Gautier-le-magnifique_ (1184-1207), who willed his fortune to the cathedral, since it was he, devoted public servant of the Plantagenets, and long the chief justice of England, who had urged the chapter to sell its treasure to help ransom Coeur-de-Lion from captivity after the Third Crusade. He himself went as hostage into Germany in order that Richard might be released before his full ransom was raised. Learned, liberal, and affable, Bishop Walter was a man of whom all spoke well.

The choir of Rouen Cathedral showed more the regional characteristics; the arches were more acute and the moldings multiple. The circular piers about the sanctuary have Norman round capitals. We know that in 1235 a bishop was buried in the choir, which must have been entirely finished when, in 1255, St. Louis spent Easter in Rouen as the guest of his friend and counselor, Archbishop Eudes Rigaud (1247-74), a Franciscan, who was to accompany the king on his fatal crusade. The choir's upper windows were reconstructed during the XV century.

About 1280, architect Jean Davy began the south façade of the transept, the Portail de la Calende, so called because there was carved there a mythical animal of that name, considered in ancient times as a symbol of the Saviour, since the superstition was that the sight of a Calende cured illness. The transept façades of Rouen are among the best works of the Rayonnant phase. Their sculpture, says M. Enlart, has not yet the fluid indecision of XIV-century draperies. A pronounced feature of that period are the openwork gables, which, though they may be superbly decorative, are none the less a step away from constructive sincerity, since drip stones made of lacework masonry fail to fulfill their practical function.

The northern door of the transept was named from the canon's library beside it. It, too, like the earlier Calende portal, was paneled with medallions over which many a pharisee has shaken his head. The Middle Ages were neither pharisaic nor prudish. Rouen's little sculptured groups are merely fantastic and popular. They embody no satire against the clergy, as some would intimate; nor are they obscene. To place a centaur or an acrobat in proximity to a scriptural group seemed then no more profane than to illuminate the margins of missals with meaningless frolics. Leeway was allowed the artistic imagination, which here ran largely to grotesques. The medallions of the Calende door were in better sequence and of more vigorous character than those of the Portail des Libraires. Beside this latter entrance is the courtroom of the archepiscopal palace adorned with statues representing Solomon's judgment, in souvenir of the old usage of rendering justice before church doors.

From 1302 to 1320 rose the Rayonnant Gothic Lady chapel of impeccable mechanical skill but not inspired. Long centuries later, during the Revolution, its tomb of the cardinals d'Amboise,[343] in which Gothic sculpture culminated, escaped destruction because the axis chapel served as a granary. Clement V, the builder of Bordeaux' Rayonnant choir, arranged that his nephew, who was archbishop of Rouen and had got into difficulties with the Norman nobles, should exchange his see with Gilles Aycelin, the prelate who was erecting Narbonne Cathedral, brother of the bishop-builder of Clermont's nave. A little later another archbishop of Rouen became the Avignon pontiff who built the audience hall and the chief chapel of the palace on the Rhone. Other XIV-century additions to Rouen Cathedral are the side chapels; every guild and corporation craved thus to honor its own particular patron.

Those contemporary works, Rouen's Lady chapel, the choirs of Bordeaux and Narbonne, Avignon's halls, belong to the phase of the national genius which we call Rayonnant because of its geometric window tracery, a phase aptly designated as metallic by M. Gonse. Artists were fast losing their exquisite feeling for the silhouette; the vertical line was over-accentuated; triforium and clearstory had become one composition. Pitiless logic was drying up the spring of inspiration. When the cathedral of Rouen remade three bays of the nave's triforium, the model taken was the geometric design of that masterpiece of Rayonnant Gothic, the abbatial of St. Ouen. Before the XIV century closed the façade of the cathedral was redressed with arcatures and statues like the west frontispieces of Wells, Salisbury, and Litchfield.

The XV century carried through the chief supplementary works of Sainte-Marie of Rouen in a style frankly florid. Normandy, Artois, and Picardy reveled in the last development of the national art, regions all of them having close links with England. For if much of Flamboyant Gothic was indigenous, as M. Anthyme Saint-Paul contends, if it enveloped and absorbed Rayonnant Gothic, it seems fairly well proved that its two most pronounced traits, the flamelike window tracery and arches of double curvature, came from England. M. Enlart says that ramified vaults were built at Ely, Lincoln, and Litchfield, during the XIII century. By 1304 accolade arches were used; at Merton College, Oxford, is a flame-tracery window of 1310, features not to be found in France before 1375.[344] In the Rayonnant phase lines break; in the Flamboyant they undulate. Rayonnant capitals were diminished; capitals disappeared altogether in the later period, and molds melted into the piers.

Normandy expressed her renewed national dignity with enthusiasm in the flowery, happy architecture we call Flamboyant:

Le Temps a laissié son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluye,
Et s'est vestu de broderye
De soleil raiant, cler, et beau.

So sang Charles, Duke of Orléans, come back from twenty years in English prisons to witness the expulsion of the invader from Normandy:

Il n'y a beste ne oiseau
Que en son jargon ne chante ou crye;
Le Temps a laissié son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluye.[345]

How they built in Rouen! With what vim and emancipated energy! St. Ouen carried forward its nave and raised a central tower. From 1437 to 1480 was built the gallant little church of St. Maclou with a central tower that is one of the best in Normandy, and whose curving front of five arcades is profusely elegant. Similarly large, ornate portals became the vogue in late-Gothic Norman construction. St. Maclou is to the Gothic art of the XIII century what the reel is to the minuet, said an English architect.[346]

In the cathedral of Rouen one noted master succeeded another. Guillaume Pontifs put the belfry on St. Romain's tower (1463-77); built the canon's library, to which he made a staircase from the cathedral's transept; and made the decorated portico leading from the rue St. Romain to the court before the Portail des Libraires. No approach to a church possesses more entirely the atmosphere of the Middle Ages than that. Pontifs began a masterpiece of Flamboyant architecture, the Tour de Beurre (1485-1509), that, as it rises, grows more and more sumptuous, though it never loses its architectural lines. Unfortunately the stone used was of poor quality, which necessitated a coarse sculpture. The transition from square to octagon was gracefully achieved by the one constructive arrangement which originated during the final stage of the national art: to unify the design, flying buttresses were sprung from the corner turrets and the face-shafts to the octagon.[347]

From 1497 to 1507 the master-of-works at Rouen Cathedral was Jacques Le Roux, who continued the Tour de Beurre, finished by his nephew, Rouland Le Roux (1507-20), an artist of the first order. He redressed the upper part of the main frontispiece in order to put it into character with the Tour de Beurre and St. Romain's belfry. After completing the middle portal of the façade he reconstructed the central tower, whose platform he raised a story higher. When Rouen's lantern tower was burned in 1822 the present iron skeleton was contrived, a structure too mechanical to be architecture, but of good effect in the distant views of the city.

The oft repeated renewals of the famous frontispiece of Rouen Cathedral account for its failure to express the interior church structurally, but though merely a screen, it is deservedly popular, "one of the dreams of the Middle Ages," M. Émile Lambin has called it. By moonlight its effect is romantic, almost spectacular. Most popular, too, is another work of Rouland Le Roux, the Palais de Justice which he built with Roger Ango, from 1493 to 1507, for the parliament of Normandy. A pomp and a pageantry carried almost to folly distinguished the generations that raised monuments such as these. In 1520, when Francis I met Henry VIII, not far from Rouen, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, many a lord, says the chronicler, carried on his back his mills and his forests and his meadows. One of the most curious houses in France, Rouen's Hôtel du Bourgtherould, now a bank near the Old Market, is decorated exteriorly by reliefs of the Field of the Cloth of Gold.[348] M. Léon Palustre discovered that the sculpture on its tower, originally polychrome, was a copy of a Flemish tapestry in the possession of that prince of pageantry, Philippe le Hardi of Burgundy.

The archbishop of Rouen from 1493 to 1510 was none other than the Mæcenas of his age, Cardinal George I d'Amboise, chief minister of Louis XII. All over France we have traced the work of that art-loving family--at Paris, Cluny, Clermont, Chaumont, Albi. A nephew of the same name held the see here until 1545, and saw to the erection of his uncle's tomb, designed by Rouland Le Roux, with sculpture by artists of the Michel Colombe tradition as well as those of the Italian Renaissance.

Rouen was so active a center for glassmaking that, in 1317, Exeter obtained windows here, as did Gloucester and Merton College, Oxford. Next to Troyes, Rouen contained the richest collection of colored glass in France. Until the Revolution her eighty lesser churches were filled with it. The best windows left are six lancets in the ambulatory of the cathedral. They belong to the XIII-century school of Chartres and are exceptional in being the only signed windows; "Clement of Chartres" was their maker. The first, given by a company of boatmen, relates the legend of St. Julian Hospitator, who ferried strangers day and night over the river, a story recounted by Gustave Flaubert, a son of Rouen.[349] The other five lancets are of the _Biblia pauperum_ type, teaching dogma to the people. The cold, limpid hues of the XIV century appear in the Lady chapel, and in the chapel of St. Jeanne d'Arc is an interesting Pentecost window of that century; contemporary are the apse lights in the upper choir, where the unsuccessful experiment was tried of continuing the subject from one panel to another--here the arms of the Crucified Lord extend into the lateral lights. The cathedral's west rose is of the XV century; in the transept is a XVI-century window devoted to the ancient bishop Romanus. The abbatial of St. Ouen has, with the choir of Évreux, the best array extant of XIV-century canopy glass figures. So loath were the vitrine artists to give up an architectural design in glass that when the XV century composed scenes instead of single figures for each panel, even those small groups were set in grisaille frames.

The iconoclastic 1562 worked havoc in Rouen. For twenty-four hours a Huguenot mob wrecked tombs, altars, and windows in the cathedral, to such an extent that it lay unused during half a year. One mourns the loss of the cenotaph of good Charles V, made in 1369 by the same Jean de Marville who designed the famous Dijon tomb of the king's brother. Ten years later, in 1572, the Rouen Catholics retaliated by massacring some eight hundred Calvinists in the city on St. Bartholomew's Day.

In the World War Rouen became almost an English city again. This time, however, England, the ancient combatant of France, came not as a detested invader, but as her ally in dire years of distress. It is pleasant to learn that devotion to the Maid of Orleans was not infrequent among the English troops of 1914-18.

JEANNE D'ARC'S TRIAL IN ROUEN[350]

De ma part, je répute son histoire un vrai miracle le Dieu. La
pudicité que je vois l'avoir accompagnée jusques à sa mort, même au
milieu des troupes; la juste querelle qu'elle prit; la prouesse
qu'elle y apporta; les heureux succès de ses affaires; la sage
simplicité que je recueille de ses réponses au interrogatoires qui
lui furent faits par les juges du tout voués à sa ruine; ses
prédictions qui, depuis, sortirent effet; la mort cruelle qu'elle
choisit dont elle se pouvoit garantir s'il y eût de la feintise en
son fait; tout cela dis-je, me fait croire (joint les voyes du ciel
quelle oyoit) que toute sa vie et histoire fut un vrai martyre de
Dieu.--Testimony of ÉTIENNE PASQUIER (1529-1615).

So swiftly followed the fruitage of the sacrifice offered up in the Vieux-Marché on May 21, 1431, that in every part of the ancient city of Rouen sprang up exuberant, vigorous, Flamboyant monuments. The most momentous and the saddest happening in the history of Normandy's capital was the burning at the stake of Jeanne la Pucelle whose relief of Orléans, only two short years before, had saved the nation in its last gasp.

From the church of St. Saviour on the market place they brought her the cross for which she begged on that tragic morning, that the pillory on which her Lord had hung might be held up before her eyes, to strengthen her in her last hour. Long afterward, in 1450, Massieu, the priest-sheriff of her trial, a weak man but less unsympathetic than many in that grim gathering of rascals, testified: "The English feared her more than the whole army of the king of France.... It was they who held the trial and paid its costs. She was taken to the Viel-Marché, having beside her Brother Martin and me, and accompanied by more than eight hundred men at arms, with spears and swords. On the way she made pious lamentation so touchingly that my companion and I could not keep back our tears. She recommended her soul to God and the saints with such devotion that those who heard her wept. All distressed, she exclaimed, 'Rouen, Rouen, must I die here!'"

When the Old Market was reached Jeanne heard herself sermonized as a limb of Satan, a blasphemer guilty of diabolical malice, of pernicious crimes, and infected with the leprosy of heresy. Her sentence read, she fell on her knees and addressed to God prayers so ardent that even the foreign masters of Rouen were moved. Her dear St. Michael she petitioned, too. "As soon as the flames reached her," relates an eyewitness, "she cried out more than six times, '_Jhésus!_' and then a final time, in a loud voice, with her last breath, '_Jhésus!_' And her cry was heard from end to end of the market place, and almost everyone was weeping.... A shiver passed over the assembly.... The people pointed at her judges and said that Jeanne was the victim of a great injustice.... They murmured that such an evil deed should have taken place in their city.... That evening the executioner went to the Dominican convent and confessed in fear, 'I have burned a saint!'... The secretary of the English king turned away from the lamentable spectacle, muttering: 'We are lost. We have burned a saint!" Surrounded by her brutal jailers, at dawn that May morning, Jeanne had said, with confidence, "With God's aid, I shall be this night in His Kingdom of Paradise." As her final cry to her Redeemer rang out, a canon of Rouen Cathedral prayed aloud, "Would to God my soul were where I believe is the soul of this Maid."

The young priest-secretary, the clerk of the court, Manchon, who took down her trial (and let his irresistible admiration for her run over in marginal notes, "_Superba responsio!_"), testified later: "Never did I weep so much over any grief that has come to me, and for a month I could not be appeased. I bought a little missal with the money that came to me from the trial, that I might have cause to remember her in my prayers." The verdict of all impartial men in Rouen, that somber May morning of 1431, was that the whole business from beginning to end had been violence and injustice.[351]

A packed jury had judged her. The president of the tribunal, the renegade selected to prove a saint a sorceress, was Bishop Pierre Cauchon, driven from his see of Beauvais by loyal Frenchmen, as the enemy of his own country. Because the see of Rouen was unoccupied, the English preferred to hold Jeanne's trial there rather than at Paris, where the bishop was not their creature. How abject a tool Cauchon was is to-day shown by old receipts which prove that he was the recipient, on each day of the trial, of a hundred _sols tournois_. For the same ignoble reason many a learned professor "charged his soul."

There was not the faintest shadow of fair play in the process. After Maître Jean Lohier had said to Cauchon that the proceedings were not valid because Jeanne was allowed no counsel, nor were the hearings in public court, and those present had not freedom to express their true opinion, that honest Norman lawyer saw that his only safety lay in quitting the city. "It is an affair of hate," he said to young Secretary Manchon one day as they stood together in Rouen Cathedral. "Deliberately they try to trap her. If only she would not say in regard to her apparitions, 'I know for certain,' but, 'It seems to me,' I do not see how she could be condemned."

Some canons of the cathedral who criticized the trial were thrown into prison, and the English locked up a citizen who remarked that since Jeanne had been judged innocent by the doctors at Poitiers, in a court presided over by the archbishop of Rheims, a second trial was illegal. Three of the younger judges who at first dared to give their true opinion were berated by Cauchon, who bade them quit their ecclesiastical quibbling and let the jurists decide the matter. The testimony of the aged bishop of Avranches, then a resident of Rouen, was set aside because he advised that in matters doubtful touching the faith the case should be referred to a council or to the pope. Because Massieu, the humble court usher, said to a townsman, "I can see nothing but goodness and honor in her," he was threatened with a prison cell where never again would he see sun or moon. The secretaries, Manchon and Boisguillaume, were beaten by the English. A man on the street who spoke well of Jeanne was chased by Lord Warwick with a drawn sword and almost killed. Passions ran high. Lord Stafford drew his dagger on Jeanne in her cell one day because she said that the English would be driven out of France. Even after her execution, when a Dominican in the city spoke kindly of her, he was flung into prison for a year.

Her judges sought to tire Jeanne out by long hours of interrogation; the lawyers themselves came away exhausted from the sessions. Virulent against her was Beaupère, rector of Paris University, who, when routed by the young girl's replies, called her sly. When Cauchon wished to have it appear that she refused to submit to the Church, he made the scribes omit her statement that gladly she appealed to a general council or to the pope. "Ah," cried Jeanne, "you write all that is against me, but you do not write anything for me." The lawyers' subtle questions rained on her thick and fast till she would call them to order with admirable courtesy, "_Beaux seigneurs, faites l'un après l'autre_." Whenever she wished to make no reply to a question came her concise, "_Passez outre_." Secretary Manchon testified before an inquest, twenty years later, "Never could Jeanne have defended herself as she did in so difficult a cause, against so many and such learned doctors, if she had not been inspired."

Sublime to tears are some of the answers made by this young country girl not yet twenty, who could barely read and write, who knew only _Pater_ and _Ave_. When sheeringly asked were she in a state of grace, she replied: "A serious question to answer. If I am, may God keep me so; if I am not, may God put me in his grace. I would rather die than not have God's love." Awe fell on the assemblage and for that day the session broke up.[352]

Yet Jeanne was very human at her trial, too. It was just the well-brought-up country maid, the Jeannette they all loved in Domrémy, who boasted before those callous men: "For sewing and for spinning, I fear no woman in Rouen." Those housewives of Rouen, the "little people of the Lord," to whom Jeanne's thoughts turned in homely fashion, dared only murmur beneath their breath that her process was "a crying injustice," and shame it was that so evil a _cause célèbre_ should take place in their good town. Rouen was terrorized into silence by her foreign master.

Jeanne's five months' imprisonment and final execution at Rouen was a political crime covered with the cloak of religious zeal by a very genius of hypocrisy. John Plantagenet, Duke of Bedford, together with the boy king's great-uncle, the cardinal of Winchester, were the movers behind the scenes. Jeanne never quitted her prison in the castle built by Philippe-Auguste--only a tower of which is extant to-day. From that stronghold the English governed Normandy. Since the opening of the World War an erroneous inscription, placed by partisan politicians in the wall of the episcopal palace of Rouen, has been changed, for it sought to convey the idea that from the prelate's court of justice Jeanne was led forth to her death. Never did she set foot in that officiality building; she was held from the first day to the last in an English prison. From a dark cell in the tower fortress she was conducted through corridors of the same castle to the hall where sat her judges. Massieu, the usher, used to let her slip into the castle chapel for an _Ave_ as she passed its open door, but even that solace was stopped by Estivet. That venomous agent of Cauchon accused Jeanne of ironic replies ill suited to a woman.[353]

Cauchon tried to coerce the young priest-secretaries of the trial, Manchon and Boisguillaume, to falsify their notes, but they proved incorruptible. And twenty years later they, with Massieu, became the chief vindicators of the Maid when the inquests for her rehabilitation were started. Jeanne had felt their unspoken sympathy. Once with pleasant humor she told them not to ask her the same question twice or she would pull their ears. We know from contemporaries that Jeanne's way of intercourse was natural and friendly, _enjouée_, that her attitude was modesty itself, that her voice had a feminine note of sweetness, that she was strong and comely and well shaped, that her hair was dark.

Born in 1412, by the Meuse, in Domrémy, on the old Roman road from Langres to Verdun, in French territory, on the borders of Champagne and Lorraine, she was not yet eighteen when she crossed the ravaged land in the winter of 1429 to rouse Charles VII, then in Chinon Castle. In March of that year she raised the siege of Orléans; in July she witnessed the coronation of her "_gentil dauphin_" at Rheims; in September occurred the assault on Paris, from which siege Charles VII, counseled by traitors, retired, and all winter Jeanne was kept in semiactivity, though chafing to free the land from the foreign yoke. Especially she longed to go to the aid of the besieged Mont-Saint-Michel, and to liberate from his English prison the poet-duke of Orléans, even, she said, if it meant going to London Tower itself. In May, 1430, she was captured by her enemies, the Burgundians. Jeanne's active mission covered only a year. "Several times in my presence," testified the Duke d'Alençon,[354] her companion in arms, "Jeanne told the king she would last but a year, and to look well that he made right use of her." But Charles VII failed her.

After her capture Jeanne spent some months in prisons in northern France, and finally she was sold to the English for a king's ransom. Never in their minds was there any mistake as to who had turned the tide against them. "They had for her a mortal hate," said, in later years, Pierre Minier, one of the judges cowed by the Duke of Bedford; "they thirsted to bring about her death, no matter by what means."

From December, 1430, to May, 1431, Jeanne's martyrdom at Rouen endured. "An iron cage was made for her, and at night she was chained up," declared Secretary Boisguillaume, at the inquest of 1450. "She was incarcerated in Rouen Castle; her guardians were English soldiery of the lowest type; day and night they kept watch ... they made her the object of their mockeries; often she reproached them for it. Her feet were held in irons which were attached to a post." There were scenes in that dark cell, vouched for by witnesses, which are too painful to transcribe.[355] Only when she fell ill was the severity with which she was treated relaxed, lest by a natural death she escape public burning. One day Estivet so vilified her that she had a relapse of fever. Every detail is set down in the process for her rehabilitation, for which the Dominican Bréhal traveled from end to end of France, gathering testimony from those who had known Jeanne. But the chief instrument of her vindication is the word-for-word record of her trial at Rouen in 1431. Not in all history is there a more personal and appealing document. One can hear Jeanne's very accent in her valiant replies to her tormentors. "_Répondes hardiment_," her voices admonished her.

Why did Charles VII, who, before Jeanne appeared, was about to pass into foreign exile, strike no blow to rescue her who had given him back his kingdom? A difficult question to answer. Charles was no hero, though his quality of perseverance was ultimately to make him the instrument that ended the centuries-old Capet-Plantagenet duel. Charles was surrounded by counselors who were jealous of Jeanne's leadership, who represented her captivity as the result of her headstrong character.

In 1449 Charles, _le bien servi_, but not the duly grateful, entered Rouen "in triumph and magnificence as never king in city." Bells rang out and children cried, "_Noël!_" in welcome. In the cathedral the festal throng gathered. Beside the king stood Jacques Coeur, the merchant-prince, who had provided the funds for the reconquest of Normandy, and whose splendor of apparel on this triumphal entry was so to excite the barons' envy that within four years their machinations had him impeached, despoiled, and banished. He who was building at Bourges the finest bourgeois mansion in France, must have observed with interest the host of Flamboyant monuments then arising in Rouen. With Charles VII came, too, his commander in chief, the great Dunois, who had fought with Jeanne, the half brother of the Duke of Orléans, who that day was singing:

"Resjoys-toy, franc royaume de France!
À présent Dieu pour toy se combat."

When Normandy was again French, not many years were to pass before Rouen exonerated herself of the crime of Jeanne's execution. The chief mover of the rehabilitation was the archbishop of the city, the Norman, Guillaume d'Estouteville, son of the hero who in 1415 held Harfleur against the entire army of Henry V, brother of the knight who led the defense of Mont-Saint-Michel, and nephew of Archbishop d'Harcourt, who gave up his see of Rouen to live in exile, rather than swear fealty to a non-French master. Cardinal d'Estouteville saw the propriety of clearing not only Normandy but France and the Church of what had been the political crime of foreigners. Through his efforts Pope Calixtus III, in 1456, revoked the legal decision of 1431, as "iniquitous, malicious, calumnious, and fraudulent." The unworthy Cauchon was excommunicated. A formal reading of the sentence of rehabilitation took place in the big hall of Rouen's episcopal palace: "Considering the quality of the judges and of those who directed the trial, considering that her abjuration was extorted by fraud and violence, in presence of the executioner and under threat of fire, without the accused understanding its full content and terms, considering finally that the crimes charged against her are not proven whatsoever by the process"--thus runs the decree declaring Jeanne's two sentences of condemnation in 1431 to be the work of iniquity. It was ordered that the rehabilitation be read publicly, not alone in Rouen, but in all the chief towns of France.

Rouen celebrated with gladness the justice rendered to the Maid who had saved France in her darkest hour. A solemn procession, in which marched Jeanne's brothers, who had been ennobled by the king, proceeded to the graveyard beside St. Ouen's abbatial, where, twenty-five years earlier, Jeanne had sat alone on a platform above the crowd, just a week before her execution. They had there read to her the twelve accusations--dubbing her witch and wanton--which a doctor of Paris University had drawn up, and then a preacher thundered in vituperation. Jeanne listened gently till she heard Charles VII abused, whereupon she, who had the mystic cult of royalty, lifted up her head bravely: "By my faith, sire," she cried, "my king is a noble Christian. Say what you will of me, but leave my king alone." "Hush her up!" angrily cried Cauchon.

In that cemetery of St. Ouen occurred what now is called proper self-defense on Jeanne's part. She could write her name, but with a smile she signed with a circle, emblem of mockery, and a cross, meaning negation. She hoped to be transferred to the prisons of the Church, where she clamored to be placed. Jeanne signed a paper consisting of seven lines, and afterward they produced an abjuration of fifty lines. Her judge might be a bishop, but never once did she confuse the Church she revered and the unworthy clerics who sat in judgment on her. During the ceremonies of the rehabilitation at Rouen, a great procession marched to the Old Market where had stood Jeanne's funeral pyre, and with solemnity the twelve accusations against her were torn into shreds and burned. Rouen felt happier after rendering that justice, and her renewed self-respect found natural expression in her Flamboyant Gothic monuments.

However, many a long year was to go by before France fully comprehended the martyr of Rouen. Voltaire libeled Jeanne as vilely as the XV-century savants of Paris University. The rationalists of a later day have patronized her as self-hallucinated. But the tide has mounted. "The day that all the bells of the world ring in honor of Jeanne d'Arc, they will sound abroad the glory of France," said Leo XIII, in 1896. The Maid of Domrémy-on-the-Meuse was declared Venerable in 1904, Blessed in 1909, and canonized a saint in 1920. _St. Jeanne d'Arc, ora pro nobis!_

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 Aliénor of Aquitaine, Henry of England, and Louis of France. In Lisieux Cathedral he married Aliénor 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.