Chapter X: Gothic Art in Normandy314 (3)

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 sturdy 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, Fécamp, 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 clustered 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 compass for all his arches, wide or narrow. It gave his eye pleasure to multiply molds, and his sense of exactitude 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 façade 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 Orléans, 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 passed into the control of the Church, but Cauchon ordered her back to her English prison, and when she again donned male attire, and again asserted 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 God, 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 Orléans,[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 pass 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 passed away in July, 1429, it was given to him to learn that the Maid had triumphed at Orléans, and to testify that her mission was of God: _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 glass. 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, Thérèse Martin, the "Little Flower," who died in the odor of sanctity (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 ÉVREUX[359]

Il en coûte cher pour devenir la France. Nous nous plaignons, et
non sans droit, de nos épreuves et de nos mécomptes. Nos pères
n'ont pas vécu plus doucement que nous, ni recueilli plus tôt et à
meilleur marché les fruits de leurs travaux. Il y a dans le
spectacle de leurs destinées de quoi s'attrister et se fortifier à
la fois. L'histoire abat les prétentions impatientes et soutient
les longues espérances.--GUIZOT.

The cathedral of Évreux is not homogeneous like that of Lisieux, but, gathering of different styles though it is, Romanesque, Gothic, early and late, neo-classic, 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. Évreux 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. Évroult, "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 façade 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 Évreux was also destined to be of short duration. In 1194, Philippe-Auguste laid the city in ashes as chastisement for John Lackland's black deed. John had allowed a French garrison into Évreux 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 Évreux 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 Évreux 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 Évreux 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 Séez, must have discussed the new works at Évreux 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 balustrade 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 Évreux. 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 Évreux 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 glass[361] in France is that of the choir of Évreux. 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 glass 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 glass with a solution of silver. Pot-metal glass--that colored in the mass--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 Évreux' 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 Évreux, 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 René 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 Brézé. It is also a memorial of the Great Schism of the West, ended by the Council of Constance, at which the bishop of Évreux was present. Foliate designs cover the grisaille lights of the triforium. The quarries (white, parallel pieces of glass framed together in a lead pattern) are enlivened by strips of colored glass and heraldic ornament.

Louis XI built the Lady chapel of Évreux, 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 glass was ground away in places, and on the white surfaces thus exposed were enameled new colors, so that one piece of glass could exhibit a variety of hues. These windows of Évreux' 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, Évreux opened its gates joyously to the national troops, new works were begun in the cathedral. The actual Flamboyant transept was substituted 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 Tillières 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 façade'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-classic that M. Léon Palustre, the historian of the Renaissance, exclaimed, "_Pour cette fois le moyen âge est bien fini!_" And yet only thirty years separated the façades of uncle and nephew. The southwest tower has been left uncrowned; that to the northwest is an imposing heavy mass in which is the sonorous bell of Évreux, called Gros-Pierre.

THE CATHEDRAL OF SÉEZ[363]

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

"Prudent, modest, and gracious," reads the epitaph of Bishop Jean de Bernières, who, having in large part built the choir of Séez Cathedral, impressing on it his personal qualities, departed this life on Holy Thursday of 1292. Séez 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 masses 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 Séez 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 Bellême 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 Aliéner 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 Prémontré. 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, balustrades, sharp twin lancets under equilateral arches, multiple ridges and multiple supports, circular capitals and bases, interior passageways 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 Séez 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 Évreux, Séez Cathedral possesses a uniform array of XIV-century glass. 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 glass. 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 Séez, 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 Séez 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. Séez 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 Séez 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 Trinité in which parish he was baptized (1027). The XIII century built the Trinité's transept, the XVI century its choir (beneath which passes 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 petite ou plus grande
Le pays des beaux blés et des encadrements,
Le pays de la grappe et des ruisslements,
Le pays de genêts, de bruyère, de lande.
--CHARLES PÉGUY.

In the cathedrals of Rouen, Lisieux, and Évreux, the Norman traits are subordinate to those of the Ile-de-France; at Séez 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 vassals 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.

The choir of Bayeux is a masterpiece of Norman Gothic erected by Robert des Ablêges (1206-31), who died a crusader, and by the two successive bishops. In the nave those prelates surmounted the Romanesque lower walls with Gothic windows and vaulting; a balustrade marks the division between the dissimilar parts. They reinforced the façade towers, and made five western doorways--although the church behind possessed only three aisles.

The student who would comprehend at a glance the difference between the æsthetic equipoise of the Ile-de-France and the sumptuous Gothic of Normandy can do nothing better than to place side by side the pictures of Bayeux' choir and the curving transept end of Soissons. Those whose taste has been formed by English minsters may prefer Bayeux, those whose loiterings have made them familiar with the cradle-land of the national art of France will find their ideal in the classic restraint of Soissons. Scarcely a square foot of Bayeux' choir is unadorned. Each spandrel is pierced by trefoils and quatrefoils, and at the apse the triforium spandrels are entirely covered with foliage. There are acutely pointed arches, and arches under arches. Mold has been added to mold, and each roll molding has its own colonnette. There are carved friezes at different levels, and the horizontal line is still further accentuated by balustrades. At the sanctuary curve double pillars stand one behind the other. Even the vault web is decorated with the portraits of bishops. As the choir surmounts Odo de Conteville's crypt it is raised above the procession path. Some of its side chapels open, one on the other, above a dividing wall, as in the Gothic choir of the Abbaye-aux-Hommes at Caen, an arrangement repeated with beautiful effect at Coutances. At the birth of the apse are turrets; there are corner towerettes with staircases on each of the western belfries.

The Norman façade, as a rule, is very plain, lacking rose window and galleries, and with undeveloped portals. Two marked stories usually divide it--that of the entranceway and the big window story over it. Often the towers are disengaged awkwardly from the massive, nor is the transition from shaft to pyramid accomplished with subtlety. Yet the Norman church has great compensations to offer. Few edifices in the classic region of the Oise, Seine, and Marne present a more complete exterior than this chief church of Bayeux that stands so proudly over the flat little city, unencumbered by houses, raised on a dignified platform where the ground slopes to the east.

The cathedral's transept is Rayonnant Gothic of the XIV century, in which day were added the various side chapels whose tracery is geometric. When Jeanne d'Arc had given France a new soul, Bayeux raised its lordly central tower "to praise God in the sky." It was undertaken by a wealthy prelate, Louis d'Harcourt (d. 1479), of the same family as the bishop who had built the Romanesque wall of the nave. He planted his Flamboyant octagon on the square XIII-century lantern, but the actual top story of the transept-crossing tower is modern. Bayeux almost lost her notable beacon in the XIX century, when fissures appeared, and a zealous restorer thought to demolish it whereas all that was needed was consolidation. The ancient Romanesque piers at the four corners of the _croisée_ were found incased in XIII-century masonry.

Opposite the cathedral in the town library is an invaluable historical document, the Bayeux Tapestry,[367] the oldest extant large amount of the art of design in the mediæval centuries. Many a vicissitude it has had: lost from view till Montfaucon, the learned Benedictine of St. Maur's reform, unearthed it in 1720, and again, during the Revolution's disorders, used as covering for ammunition carts till an enlightened citizen redeemed it. Originally it comprised one seamless piece, just sufficient to encircle the nave of Bayeux Cathedral, for which, indubitably, it was made. Every summer solstice, on the dedication day of Odo's church, it adorned the cathedral, "the toilet of St. John," it was named, a very simple toilet, for, though called a tapestry, it is really a drab linen band twenty inches wide, two hundred and thirty feet long, with the design alone worked in worsted of eight colors.

The scheme is the perjury of Harold and its punishment, hence its suitableness as an embroidery for a church. It begins with Harold and ends with his death at Hastings. His oath of allegiance to William, given at Bayeux, is pictured. Odo is shown saving the Normans from retreat at the battle of Hastings. Some have thought he would not have dared to glorify himself till after the death of his brother, William. The tapestry was made, probably, from 1067 to 1077, immediately following the successful conquest of England, and is a contemporary, therefore, of the _Chanson de Roland_, composed by a Norman anterior to the First Crusade. The embroidery was done before 1085, since the Conqueror's seals of that date show armor similar to that pictured in the canvas; the sequence of the scenes indicates they are subsequent to Wace's poem (c. 1160).

Critics have thought, from the inscriptions, that Anglo-Saxons made the tapestry. It is known that the textile art flourished in Kent, the province ruled by Odo; in Normandy, too, the industry was popular. M. Levé, in the most recent monograph of this precious legacy from the past, contends that a Norman who was favorable to William the Conqueror made it, and that the popular attribution to Queen Matilda is not unlikely. She may have had the work done as a gift for Bayeux Cathedral while Odo was still in royal favor. The war-like bishop died as a crusader journeying East, and lies buried in Palermo Cathedral. The people despised Odo, and would openly mock as he passed, "Fie on the bishop who married adulterous King Philip to adulterous Bertrada de Montfort."

A century after Harold's oath to Duke William, in Bayeux, and in the same hunting-seat, at Bures, near the city, occurred a scene of passion whose consequences were momentous. Bishop Henri de Beaumont was at work on the cathedral's transept and upper nave when Henry II came to Bayeux to spend the Christmas season of 1170. For seven years western Christendom had watched his feud with the exiled primate of Canterbury. The lesser people of France and England considered that the prelate defended their liberties by his defense of church liberty. For how, they asked, can a churchman rebuke lay injustices if he owes his position to the very culprits he should censure?

A pretense of reconciliation between Henry and his whilom intimate had recently been brought about. Becket felt its hollowness, since none knew better than he that the Angevin monarch's besetting sin was duplicity and a merciless vindictiveness when his will was successfully crossed. As he parted with the king he had looked steadily at him, saying, with meaning: "I think I shall never see you again," and Henry Plantagenet had cried, vehemently, "Do you take me for a traitor?" Soon after word was brought to the king that Becket, newly arrived in England, was again stirring up difficulties. Henry flew into one of his madman passions hereditary in his blood from Fulk Nerra, from the Conqueror, too; frenzied words broke from him, their purport being the upbraiding of his followers that he lacked a friend to rid him of this upstart priest. Immediately four of his courtiers started for England, and as December of 1170 closed, Canterbury Cathedral was the scene of a bloody assassination.

Becket dead was more formidable than Becket alive. Frightened by the indignation roused by the murder, Henry conceded what the primate had contended for. The Canterbury martyr became a frequent theme with the mediæval artist. At Coutances, Chartres, Angers, and Sens are medallion windows that relate his story. Twice he is honored in Bayeux Cathedral, in the sculpture of the southern portal and in a window of the transept. The popular voice of Europe canonized St. Thomas, and his grave at Canterbury became the loadstone of an international pilgrimage. The XIV-century poet has related how Merrie England rode down to Kent in the first spring days, when that Aprille with his shoures sweet hath pierced to the root the drought of Marche, and with the new-liveried year the _wanderlust_ awakes:

Then longen folk to goon on pilgrimages ...
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Englelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.[368]

THE CATHEDRAL OF COUTANCES[369]

Art is the stammering of man driven from his terrestrial Paradise
but not yet arrived at the heavenly Paradise. Ever has he recalled,
ever will he recall, the lost beauty. He is fallen: beauty's
sanctuary is shut to him, but the exile traces a sketch of his
original home in the strange land where he finds himself. Does not
art fill in the intellectual life the same place that hope does in
the moral? Art is man's trial to embody his ideals, it is a
presentiment and a souvenir.--ERNEST HELLO, _Philosophie et
Athéisme_.

If the exterior aspect of Bayeux is admirable, that of Coutances Cathedral is superb. The high hill of the town is its pedestal. Few architectural views in France are finer than the silhouette of Coutances against the sky. And when its crowning cathedral is seen rising from a mist, it appears to ride the clouds like a mighty ship--a vision of Norman energy as memorable as the Mount of the Archangel off this very coast, in the bay of St. Michael.

As the archives of Coutances Cathedral were destroyed by the Huguenots, documentary proof of its date is lacking. Midway in the XIX century even serious students contended that this Apogee Gothic edifice was the church dedicated in 1056 by a hero of Hastings' battle, Bishop Geoffrey de Mowbray. Like Odo of Bayeux, the sword, not the crozier, should have been his emblem. He was the holder of two hundred lordships. He it was who, in Westminster Abbey, in 1066, mounting a tribune, asked the cowed Anglo-Saxons if they would consent that Duke William of Normandy assume the title, king of England, and the next day an enormous tax was imposed on the conquered race as "joyous tribute" to their new rulers. Geoffrey gave up residence in his Norman see to be castillan of Bristol, but, taking part in Odo's intrigues, he was driven from the country with the cry, "Gallows for the bishop!"

This ambitious baron-prelate obtained donations for his Romanesque cathedral when he journeyed in southern Italy and the East, where ruled his Norman kinsmen. When the archæologists Bouet, A. de Dion, and Abbé Pigéon found parts of Geoffrey's church englobed in the present nave and façade of Coutances, the heated controversy over the date of the cathedral ceased. The core of each façade tower is Bishop Geoffrey's, as are some of the piers in transept and nave, and the nave's upper wall (re-dressed as Gothic about 1230). The tribune of the fighting bishop lies unused behind the present triforium, whose wall arcades plainly show a succession of transformations.

The Romanesque cathedral was injured by fire in 1218. Bishop Bivien de Champagne planned a new church which his successor, Hugues de Morville (1208-38), started. That prelate, and his two successors, built the choir with its double aisles of different height, and the central tower carried on triumphal piers of multiple molds. "What inspired idiot dared fling those stones toward the sky!" exclaimed the great engineer, Vauban, before the lantern of Coutances. The transfused gentle light that falls from its windows tranquilizes the entire church. Even the laie-haunted Viollet-le-Duc likened it to St. Christopher bearing the Christ Child before an image of the Virgin, in her honor. Joinville would have called it prayer in action.

The _Deus absconditus_ impression conveyed by the mystical choir of Coutances is another of its ravishing qualities. As at Bourges and Le Mans, the inner aisle is so high that it possesses its own triforium and clearstory; however, it avoided the stunted aspect of Bourges' main clearstory by omitting the triforium altogether in the central vessel. The choir of Coutances has retained more of the warmth of atmosphere that induces piety of soul than any other Norman cathedral, save that of Rouen. Not mere brilliant talent, but genius and faith, built it. It is almost triple-aisled, inasmuch as columns were planted in the outer aisle slightly before the walls that divide the radiating chapels. Throughout the church are these lesser arrangements that charm--such, the opening of the nave's chapels, one on the other above the dividing walls. The ends of the transept have tribunes like many Romanesque churches of the duchy. There are the usual Norman characteristics of a double-walled clearstory with different tracery in each wall, friezes of sculptured foliage, balustrades, acutely pointed arches, pierced ornament, and a generous multiplication of molds, each with its own support.

Two architects designed the church; one made the nave and the other--thought by M. Lefèvre-Pontalis to be the same Thomas Toustain who planned the apse of Le Mans Cathedral--constructed the choir, lantern, transept, and perhaps the spires of the western towers. Under Bishop Jean d'Essay (1251-74) the cathedral was finished. Louis IX was the guest of that prelate when he came to render thanks at the national shrine of St. Michael for his safe return from Palestine.

The west façade of Coutances is very Norman: plain portals, no rose window, and a staircase on a corner of each belfry. The lines of the towers rise uncrossed by horizontal bar from ground to tapering point. "Ponder them well," old Villard de Honnecourt would have said before the faithful sentinel towers of Coutances, that seem planted "like the spear of a man-at-arms." This severe church front was not meant for romance like the façade of foreign-trading Rouen, or for royal pageants like that of wine-growing Rheims. The basic forces that lead to architectural character were different here. Northern men in an outpost of France facing the dangers of the sea, built the façade of Coutances, men who had won this province by the sword, who with the sword were seekers for new conquests to the north, to the south. Taken with the central tower, the belfries of Coutances compose an unequaled group. The apse exterior is equally admirable; the flying buttresses, as at Notre Dame, at Paris, clear both aisles of the choir by a single hardy leap.

The adventurers of Normandy who made the brilliant, if ephemeral, kingdoms of Apulia, Sicily, and Antioch, were the sons and grandsons of a Norman knight called Tancred de Hauteville,[370] whose manor lay not far from Coutances. The people have chosen to call certain statues on their cathedral's northern outer wall by the names of Roger and Robert de Hauteville, and their descendants of the next generation--Bohemund, who used the Holy Wars to push his own fortunes, and his cousin, Tancred, the idealist of the First Crusade. Probably the "Tancred" statues--which now are restorations--were intended by the XIII-century sculptors for Hebrew kings. In the southern kingdoms founded by the stalwart offshoots of a simple knight of Normandy, the local architectural traits predominated, but such Norman influences appear as the central lantern and intercrossing arches (at Monreale), acutely pointed arches, and lobed rosettes cut in the spandrels (in the hospital at Palermo), west towers with corner staircases in turrets, an aisle preceding the chapels that open on the east wall of the transept (the cathedral of Cefalu, c. 1145). There are Norman traits in the cathedrals of Bari and Barletta, the latter having false tribunes like those of Eu and Rouen.[371]

At Coutances the XIV century added side chapels to the cathedral. During a siege in 1356, English stone bullets damaged the church; Charles V had it restored and fortified. Bishop Silvester de Cervelle (1371-86) built the Lady chapel, some lateral chapels, and added to the façade its only ornamentation--the colonnade connecting the towers. When Jeanne d'Arc's good name was to be vindicated, a bishop of Coutances was named by Rome as one of the three judges in the process of rehabilitation. "Would to God," exclaimed the pope, "that I had bishops of Coutances. The Church would be well governed." Olivier de Longueil, _vir gravis_, _vir bonus_, _vir mutis_ (like his own cathedral), was endowed with the ideal qualities for a judge--independence and firmness. His boyhood friends were the Estouteville brothers, one the defender of the Mount, and the other the most active agent in the clearing of the Maid's name.

The cathedral of Coutances suffered much in the religious wars. So devastated was it in 1562, when from end to end of Normandy, as at a given signal, priests were slaughtered at the altar, tombs violated, church windows broken, and images shattered, that it lay long unused. The collapse of some vault sections made a thorough restoration necessary.

To the south of Coutances, at Avranches,[372] once stood another cathedral of Normandy, begun in 1109, dedicated in 1120, and later changed to Gothic. It was exceptional in having no transept. An inscription in the street marks the spot where, before its northern portal, Henry II of England did public penance in 1172, and received absolution from the papal legate for his guilt in the murder of St. Thomas Becket. Alas! like the cathedrals of Cambrai and Arras, the Revolution brought about the ruin of Avranches. "_L'égalité s'était faite dans les ruines_," says one of its biographers. After the sacking of 1794 the historic church collapsed. Ruskin has nobly lamented its loss: "Did the cathedral of Avranches belong to the mob who destroyed it any more than it did to us who walk in sorrow to and fro over its foundations?"

THE GOTHIC ART OF BRITTANY[373]

Chez les Bretons un double courant: l'esprit de liberté, l'esprit
de tradition; et pour les concilier, les pousser tous deux vers un
même but et vers un but supérieur, la flamme, la passion de
l'idéal, si ardente chez nos bardes et nos saints, si vivante, si
puissante toujours dans l'âme bretonne, et qui l'a jetée tout
entière dans la religion de l'idéal par excellence: la foi du
Christ. Liberté, tradition, idéal: voilà le triple facteur de la
vie intime et de la vie publique, de la vie nationale des
Bretons.--LÉON SÉCHÉ.

Brittany was a late comer in the national art and much is it to be regretted, for had her building energies been aroused during the Romanesque epoch, her storm-worn granite rock would have then best expressed her regional character. Among the few Romanesque works of Brittany are the crypt of Nantes Cathedral; the nave of St. Aubin's church within the corselet of stone at Guérande; a stalwart central tower over monastic Redon--cradle of Breton history-making, St. Gildas de Rhuys, which M. Lefèvre-Pontalis places in the first quarter of the XI century; the church of the Holy Cross, at Quimperlé, radically remade after the fall of its tower in 1862 (the Gothic-rib masonry roof beneath that tower dating before 1150); a Templar's church at Loctudy; the Bréléverez church beside Lannion. Equally rare are Brittany's Gothic monuments of the first part of the XIII century, Dol Cathedral being one of the few. As the era of Apogee Gothic drew to a close the cathedrals at Quimper, St. Pol-de-Léon, and Tréguier were rising. So was that rude mass of granite, the cathedral at St. Brieuc, and the churches of Rosporden and Guingamp.

In the XIV century was built the Kreisker tower, parent of a generous progeny. Sea-going people are lovers of high towers, and Brittany is dotted with them. Over the flat, bleak land of Léon the _clochers à jour_ are a glory. With passion the Breton admired his landmarks. As he sailed home from long months in the northern fisheries, they were the first signals of welcome. To express his affection, he sometimes inscribed the Canticle of Canticles on his tower: "Who is this that cometh up from the desert flowing with delights?" No village felt itself too humble to attempt an imitation of the Kreisker at St. Pol-de-Léon.

By far the greater number of Breton churches belong to the Flamboyant Gothic day, and at that time the most energetic builder was Finistère, the far-western stronghold called Armorica before the Celts from Britain fled in the V and VI centuries from invading Saxons to the inviolate refuge of these other dwellers by the sea. St. Jean-du-Doigt was built from 1440 to 1513, and when almost completed, Anne, duchess of Brittany and twice queen of France, visited it to pray for a cure. Her daughter, Claude, also queen of France, was equally generous to the shrine. St. Jean's Pardon of the Fire, in the latter days of June, is one of the five big Pardons of Brittany.

Anne of Brittany's device, the ermine, is carved on many a façade of France. Both her husbands were notable art patrons. For her Charles VIII rebuilt the château at Amboise, and for her Louis XII began the château at Blois, and at Loches made an oratory that bears her name. The _Book of Hours_ of Anne of Brittany has never been surpassed. It was for her a liberal education to live in contact with her second husband's minister of state, Cardinal Georges I d'Amboise, who is said to have employed practically every Flamboyant and Renaissance architect and sculptor of the time on his château at Gaillon, and whose tomb in Rouen Cathedral retains much of the truly French spirit of Michel Colombe's school. Brittany benefited artistically by the royal marriages of her last duchess: Anne gave the Breton Colombe the opportunity to make his _chef-d'oeuvre_--the splendid ducal tomb in Nantes Cathedral.

The ermine of Anne of Brittany adorns the lintel of Folgoët, to which she added a tower, after her visit in 1505. That stately late-Gothic collegiate church, standing in a little Breton village above Landerneau, possesses an apostle porch--a feature popular in Brittany--a richly sculptured _jubé_ of three arcades, and altars of green Kersanton granite. On one of its altars the corporation of masons carved compass, rule, and hammer. And in like manner, as emblems of patriotic service, might be inscribed the names of the twelve villagers who, at personal sacrifice, when their church was to be demolished in 1808, bought it as a gift for their commune. On many a shrine can modern Finistère inscribe the names of those of her sons who fought for their country in the World War. Just as it was given Breton sailors of the XV century to raise the siege of Mont-Saint-Michel, so at Dixmude, in the autumn of 1914, they checked the drive toward Calais of other invaders of French soil. Brittany, with her profound cult of the dead, will consecrate one of her noblest Calvaries to the memory of Dixmude's heroes:

Que ces noms soient sur l'église!
Qu'on les lise
Sur le granit des piliers ...
Que, sur la roche sévère
D'un Calvaire,
Solitairement inscrit,
A travers la pastorale
Vespérale
Le nom du mort pousse un cri![374]

Other Flamboyant Gothic monuments of the ancient duchy are the choir of the cathedral of St. Pol-de-Léon; the cloister, porch, and central tower of Tréguier Cathedral; the chapel of Notre Dame-des-Portes at Châteauneuf-du-Faou; Notre Dame in the little city of Vitré, that claims to be, with Avignon, the most entirely mediæval walled town in France; St. Jean and Notre Dame at Lamballe, which latter XIII-century church, with foundations hewn out of the solid rock, was rebuilt and fitted with XVI-century windows; St. Mélaine, at Morlaix, rebuilt, 1482, and possessing a towering baptismal font of carved wood; and Notre Dame at Kernascleden, between Le Faouët and Guéméné, the work of two brothers named Bail.

The making of stained glass flourished in the later Middle Ages at Quimper, Tréguier, and Vannes. Good windows are to be found at Dol, Quimper, Guérande, Ploërmel (where the church has a rich Flamboyant façade pignon), at Kergoat, Moncontour, Les Iff (where the donors were the Laval-Montmorency family), at Plélan, Plogonnec, and at Penmarc'h, whose Pardon of the Rosary occurs on the first Sunday of October. Because the popular gatherings called pardons are among the basic forces that have helped to mold the architecture of the ancient duchy, they are important for the student of the builder's art.

The late-Gothic churches that cover Brittany are rich in ecclesiastical furniture, carved baptismal temples, and panels sculptured with the quaint usages of burial and marriage, or with agricultural scenes, such as those at St. Goueznon (1615), at Bannalec (1605), at La Roche-Maurice near Brest, and at Notre Dame-la-Grâce, near Guingamp, the latter two churches possessing some "storied windows richly dight." At Kerdévot is a wooden reredos, at Roscoff a very beautiful alabaster one of the XV century; at Lambadec a _jubé_ dated 1480; at St. Fiacre-du-Faouët (whose pardon comes on the first Sunday of July) a rood-loft of richly carved wood, unfortunately painted in crude colors; at Quimperlé, in the church of Ste. Croix, that is fashioned in memory of the sepulcher shrine at Jerusalem, is a _jubé_ almost wholly of the Renaissance.

Because of her pardons, Brittany's religious ceremonies took place largely in the open air, even as each of her tribes, each _plou_, in prehistoric times had gathered around her solemn menhirs and dolmens. Hence the Breton made much of churchyards, placing in them his Calvaries, profound expressions of a people's emotions carved primitively in the regional coarse granite. The Lord's Passion had vivified the Celtic soul ever since Christianity took possession of it. As granite is unyielding to sculpture, many a Breton turned to wood to express his verve, carving his church beams like the prow ends of ships.

Morlaix[375] is a good center from which to visit many of the notable revered places. Close by, in the village of Plougonven, is the oldest Calvary extant (1554). A few miles away is that of St. Thégonnec (1610), a shrine invoked for the cure of beasts, where beneath a statue of Our Lady is inscribed: "We beg you, _Madame Vièrge_, to accept our first bull." Near the church is one of the isolated chapels called ossuaries in which were gathered the bones of the past generations when they had had their turn in the churchyard's consecrated ground. The chapel bears an inscription from Maccabees: "It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins." Bedrock in the Breton is his instinct to join his progenitors and his descendants in a permanence of spiritual emotion.[376] No other people of the earth risk life more freely than these frequenters of the deep-sea fisheries; nowhere is the cult of the dead more tenacious, because it is considered that they who have fallen asleep with Godliness have great grace laid up for them.