Chapter IX: Strasburg

The greatest curiosity of Strasburg is the Rhine; after that, its cathedral.

Usually, on entering Strasburg, the first landmark that greets one's eye is the slim, lone spire of the cathedral.

Years ago an itinerant showman travelled about with a model of the celebrated Strasburg clock, and the writer got his first ideas of a great Continental cathedral from the rather crude representation of the Gothic beauties of that at Strasburg, which graced the canvas which hung before the showman's tent.

The clock is still there, in all its mystical incongruity, but one's interest centres in the grace and elegance of the dwindling spire and its substructure of nave, transept, and choir, which dominates all else round about.

Of many eras, the structure of this great Latin-cross cathedral is not harmonious; but, for all that, it is a great Gothic triumph, and one which might well lend most of its details of construction and decoration to any great church, and still add a charm which was hitherto absent.

Strasburg has in all fifteen churches, but the cathedral is possessed of more and greater glories than all the others combined.

From the days when Strasburg was the Argentoratum of the Romans, the city has ever been the scene of an activity which has made its importance known through all the world. It was sacked by Attila and his Huns in 451, and was completely abandoned up to the seventh century, when one of the sons of Clovis built it up anew and gave to it the name of Strateburgum.

Ptolemy is said to be the first writer who mentions Argentoratum, the ancient Strasburg.

What a bitter blow the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, of which Strasburg was the gem, was to France can only be realized by a contemplation of the sentiment which even yet attaches to the event.

That the allied provinces were French in spirit as well as Catholic in religion is demonstrated by the fact that, at the time of the German occupation, there was a population of over a million and a half of souls, of which quite a million and a quarter were of the Roman Catholic faith. About a million and a quarter were natives of Alsace-Lorraine, one hundred thousand were Germans, and thirty odd thousand were foreigners.

The present cathedral was erected on a site that had been consecrated to religion in very early times. It had been a sacred place in the time of the Romans, though the deities worshipped were pagan, a temple to Hercules and Mars having been erected here.

The first Christian church was built, it is believed, in the fifth century, by St. Amand, then Bishop of Strasburg.

This first church of Strasburg, which was a wooden structure, was probably founded by Clovis, 504, and reconstructed by Pepin-le-Bref and Charlemagne. It was mostly destroyed by fire in 873, and in 1002 was pillaged and fired anew by the soldiers of Duke Hermann, who was condemned himself to repair the damage. Lightning destroyed it again in 1007, and, by the time the new structure was thought of, nothing but the crypt of Charlemagne's edifice was visible.

From the proceeds received from Duke Hermann, and contributions from all Christianity, Bishop Werner conceived a vast scheme of a new church which in time was completed and consecrated.

This in turn fell before the ravages of fire, and nothing but a mass of débris remained, from which the present structure was begun in 1277.

The ancient church foundation of Strasburg was peculiarly arranged, after a manner most unusual in a cathedral church. The ground-plan of the ecclesiastical establishment was not unlike those of the monkish communities which were so plentifully scattered over Europe, but it was built for use as a church, and for the bishop and his clerics, instead of being merely a secular monastery.

The following diagram explains this unusual arrangement.

The masonic theory with regard to the construction of these mediæval ecclesiastical monuments is of much interest in connection with Strasburg. The lodge at Strasburg was the earliest in the north of which we have any knowledge, and Ervin von Steinbach himself seems to have been at the head of it, which fact proves that he was one of the first of secular architects engaged upon a great religious work.

A--Habitation of bishops and clerics
B--Cour commune
C--Part assigned to women
D--Part assigned to men
E--For preaching
F--For penitents
G--Doors
H--Altars
I--Pulpits
K--Choir for clergy
]

Great opportunities and privileges were conferred upon him by Rudolph of Hapsburg, and the masonic lodge of which he was the head had the power, over a wide extent of territory, to maintain order and obedience among the workmen under its jurisdiction.

In 1278 Pope Nicholas III. issued a bull, giving the body absolution, and this was renewed by his successors up to the time of Benedict XII.

Iodoque Dotzinger, master of the works at Strasburg in 1452, formed an alliance between the different lodges of Germany.

It was an appreciative Frenchman--and all Frenchmen are appreciative and fond of Strasburg, because of what it once was to them--that said: "_La cathédrale est un merveille unique au monde_." Continuing, he said: "Those who have not seen it know not the _gaieté lumineuse_ of a Gothic church."

All of this is of course quite true from some points of view.

There is, however, something pitiful about the general aspect of this great Gothic church. Its lone spire, standing grim and gaunt against a background of sky, makes only the more apparent the incompleteness of the structure.

Its façade is certainly marvellous, quite rivalling those of Reims and Toul, not so very far away across the French border.

The triple porch of the façade is rich in sculpture, the most remarkable groups being "The Wise and Foolish Virgins," "The Prophets," "The Last Judgment," and "Christ and the Twelve Apostles."

A great rose window, a reminiscence of the masterpieces so frequently seen in France, also decorates this elaborate façade.

The south portal is in the form of two round-arched doorways, and is a survival, evidently, of one of the earliest epochs of this style of construction. It is ornamented with bas-reliefs and statues symbolical of the triumph of Christian religion. There has recently been erected before this portal a statue of the great architect of the fabric, Ervin, and another of his son.

The spire, one of the most elevated in Europe, is 440 feet, while that of Cologne is 482 feet, Rouen is 458 feet, and Notre Dame at Paris but 200 feet in height.

Usually church edifices are grim and gray; but Strasburg presents, in its sandstone of the Vosges, a beautiful tone, which in the westering sun of a summer's day can only be described as a rose-pink, and is like no other church edifice in Europe, unless it be the cathedral at Rodez in Mid-France, which Henry James called mouse-coloured, but which in reality is a sort of warm, deep rose.

A fine lacework of _colonnettes_ covers the entire façade, which six centuries have turned to the colour of iridescent copper organ-pipes.

But the real grandeur and dignity of the architecture stands out boldly in spite of the ornate turrets and the mass of sculptured detail, in a way which stamps the fabric imperially as a giant among its kind.

Of the spire, Victor Hugo wrote thus (Strasburg was yet French, and not German as it is to-day): "The truly adorable achievement of the builders of this cathedral is its spire. It is a tiara of stone crowned with a cross. It is prodigious, gigantic, but of great delicacy. I have seen Chartres; I have seen Antwerp. Four _escaliers à jour_ ascend spirally the four towerlets at the angles. The steps are very high and narrow.... To mount to the lantern one would have to follow the workmen, who appear to be continually engaged on the fabric. The stairways are no more, simply bars of iron set ladderlike in the masonry.

"From the spire one sees three mountain ranges: the group of the Black Forest to the north; the Vosges to the west; and the Alps to the south.

"One stands so high that the country-side appears no longer as the country-side; but, like the view from the castle at Heidelberg, a mere geographical map.

"At the time of my visit a great cloud rose up from the valley of the Rhine, and framed the panorama for a dozen leagues in truly eerie fashion. As I went from one tower to another, I saw about me la France, la Suisse, and l'Allemagne."

It was in 1277 that the celebrated architect, Ervin von Steinbach, began the construction of the portal of the cathedral at Strasburg, and above its great doorway one may yet read, if he be keen of eyesight and knows where to look for it, this inscription:

ANNO. DOMINI. MCCLXXVII. IN. DIE.
BEATI.
URBANI. HOC. GLORIOSUM. OPUS.
INCOHAVIT.
MAGISTER. ERVINUS DE STEINBACH.

Ervin died in 1318, and his son continued the work up to the first landing, or platform, of the towers.

In the archives of the cathedral are still to be seen the designs on which father and son worked in achieving the portal and towers, as well as those of the spire, the north porch, the pulpit, and the organ-buffet. Not all of these are contemporary, but the first, at least, are the very drawings which were handled by Maître Ervin and his son in the latter years of the thirteenth century.

The following lines of Longfellow describe the religious fervour of the great architect perhaps more truthfully than could prose.

"...A great master of his craft,
Ervin von Steinbach; but not he alone,
For many generations laboured with him,
Children that came to see these saints in stone,
As day by day out of the blocks they rose,
Grew old and died, and still the work went on,
And on and on and is not yet completed.

"...The architect
Built his great heart into these sculptured stones,
And with him toiled his children, and their lives
Were builded with his own into the walls
As offerings to God."

It is perhaps not possible to write of Strasburg's cathedral without giving its great clock more than a passing thought.

The legendary history of the clock at Strasburg is as follows:

The cathedral being terminated, the magistrates of the city desired to ornament its tower with a great clock which should be unique in all the world.

No one came forth to undertake the commission, until a workman, much advanced in years, agreed for a certain sum to produce a clock which should be superior to all others then existing.

After some years of incessant work, he produced the first of Strasburg's wonderful mechanical clocks full of moving figures and symbols.

In lieu of recompense, the magistrates, desiring that their city should be the sole possessor of such a work, accused the old man of having had resource to the aid of the devil in producing so weird a timepiece, and condemned him to torture and the loss of his eyesight.

Upon a pretext of making some further arrangement of the works before the execution of his sentence, the old man was allowed once more to mount the tower. Instead of adjusting the clock, he deranged it in some way so that its chimes never rang out as intended, and thus the magistrates and the citizens of Strasburg were, in a way, avenged for the injustice done the inventor. This famous clock of Strasburg's tower is now only a memory.

The more recent works of a similar nature have a history less sordid and unpleasant. The first clock of the cathedral, placed inside the church at the crossing, dated from 1352, and of course was a remarkable work for its time.

Two hundred years later it was intended to replace it with another, but the work was never achieved, so a third was begun with an effort to outdo the ingenuity which had made possible the fourteenth-century astronomical wonder.

It was planned in 1571, under the direction of Conrad Dasypodius, of Strasburg, and his friend Daniel Volkenstein, an astronomer of Augsburg. It was completed in 1574, restored in 1669 and 1732, and ceased its labours through the stress of time in 1790.

The present great clock, certainly an unseemly and incongruous adjunct of a great church, was commenced on the 24th of June, 1838, and installed on the 31st of December, 1842. Its construction is supposed to have reflected great credit upon its designer, one Schwilgu, a clock-maker of Strasburg. Nothing was preserved of the more ancient timepiece, except its elaborate case, which was restored and further embellished.

At the base of the tower, on the summit of which is placed the crowing cock, is a portrait of the designer. "This great man," say the local patriots, died an octogenarian in 1856.

In 1723 a subterranean tremor sent the tower of Strasburg's cathedral a foot out of plumb. It speaks well for the solidity of the construction that no ill effects resulted, and to-day there are no evidences, to the casual observer, of this deflection.

The beauty of Strasburg's cathedral was in so great repute in the middle ages that Jean Galeaz Marie, Visconti Sforza, in 1481, demanded of the magistrates of the city the name of an architect capable of completing his cathedral at Milan.

In a vaulted chamber attached to the cathedral proper are two strangely curious memorials. They are nothing more or less than two mummies which, for their better preservation, have been varnished, and the costumes which they anciently wore have from time to time been renewed.

One is the mummy of the Count of Nassau-Saarbruck, who died in the sixteenth century, and the other is that of a young girl of perhaps twenty years, supposed to have been his daughter.

The ancient church of St. Bartholomew is another of Strasburg's ecclesiastical shrines which ranks high among great churches.

It dates from the second half of the thirteenth century, but frequent additions have been made in more recent times.

It possesses a remarkable monument which shows a painted "Danse des Morts," with figures of nearly life size. It is a fresco on the inner walls of the overhanging canopy of a tomb. The painting dates from the fifteenth century, but was only discovered in 1824, on the occasion of a general renovation of the church.

The choir was begun in 1308 and completed in 1345. Its height and its general airiness, and the lightness of its vaulting and arches, unite in making it quite unusual and most worthy of note.

This ancient church to-day is occupied by the Protestants, and the edifice has been divided up in a somewhat sacrilegious manner in order to provide within its walls for a library and a museum.

Strasburg has another great church in St. Thomas, a vast ogival edifice which has some good glass, but which is remarkable above all else for the number of its sepulchral monuments, both ancient and modern.

At the end of the choir is found one of those wonders of French sculpture, an allegorical grouping of figures on the tomb of Maréchal de Saxe.

It was erected in 1777 by Pigalle by the order of Louis XV. For a background it has a pyramid of gray marble, at the base of which is the following inscription:

MAVRITIO SAXONI
CVRLANDIAE ET SEMIGALLIAE DVCI
SVMMO REGIORVM EXERCITVVM
PRAEFECTO
SEMPER VICTORI
LVDOVICVS XV
VICTORIARVM AVCTOR ET IPSE DVX
PONI IVSSIT
OBIIT XXX NOV. ANNO MDCCL. AETATIS
LV.

Standing in the centre of the pyramid is a figure of the maréchal descending toward the sarcophagus below. A figure representing Death is lifting the lid, and another, representing France, is endeavouring to stay his hand. Flags, a reversed torch, and other symbols, with another figure representing the genius of war, complete the details of this elaborate monument.

There is little of anything but Gothic, more or less pure, visible at Strasburg; but, in spite of this, it is alleged that, from Carlovingian times onward, there was here a colony of artisans who had been sent from Lombardy on account of the increased interest in the north in church-building. If this is so, they must have pushed onward down the Rhine, as they left but little impression here, and, while Rhenish church-building was manifestly not Gothic in its inception, here at Strasburg there are certainly no evidences of the Comacine builders of Charlemagne's time.

Strasburg's ancient episcopal palace was built in 1731-41 by Cardinal de Rohan. It was bought by the city before the Revolution and transformed into a _château impérial_, and became later the home of the local university.

The edifice known in early days as the "Maison de l'Oeuvre Notre Dame," and more recently as "Stift zu unser lieben Frauen," was built in 1581, numerous Gothic sculptures from the cathedral being used in its construction. There is here a remarkable spiral staircase in the light and delicate flowered Gothic of its time.