WALL OF PHILIPPE AUGUSTE, COUR DE ROUEN.WALL OF PHILIPPE AUGUSTE,COUR DE ROUEN.
The great fortified wall of Philip Augustus began at the north-west water-tower, which stood just above the present Pont des Arts, and passed through the quadrangle of the Louvre where a line on the paving marks its course to the Porte St. Honoré, near the Oratoire. It continued northwards by the Rue du Jour to the Porte Montmartre, whose site is marked by a tablet on No. 30 Rue Montmartre. Turning eastward by the Painters’ Gate (135 Rue St. Denis) and the Porte St. Martin, near the Rue Grenier St. Lazare, the fortification described a curve in a south-easterly direction by the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, where traces of the wall have been found in the Cour de l’Horloge of the Mont de Piété, and of a tower at No. 57. The line of the wall continued in the same direction by the Lycée Charlemagne, No. 131 Rue St. Antoine, where stood anothergate, to the north-east water-tower, known as the Tour Barbeau, which stood near No. 32 Quai des Célestins. The opposite or southern division began at the south-east water-tower, La Tournelle, and the Gate of St. Bernard on the present Quai de la Tournelle, and went southward by the Rues des Fossés, St. Bernard and Cardinal Lemoine, to the Porte St. Victor, near No. 2 Rue des Ecoles. The wall then turned westward by the Rue Clovis, where at No. 7 one of the largest and best-preserved remains may be seen. It enclosed the abbey of St. Geneviève, and the Pantheon stands on the site of the Porte Papale. The south-western angle was turned near the end of the Rue Soufflot and the beginning of the Rue Monsieur le Prince. In a northerly direction it then followed the line of the latter street, crossing the Boulevard St. Germain, and continued by the Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. In the Cour de Rouen, No. 61 Rue St. André des Arts, an important remnant may be seen with the base of a tower. We may now trace the march of the wall and towers by the Rues Mazarin and Guénégaud, where at No. 29 other fragments exist, to the south-west water-tower, the notorious Tour de Nesle[50]whose site is occupied by the Hôtel desMonnaies. The passage of the Seine was blocked by chains, which were drawn at night from tower to tower and fixed on boats and piles. The wall was twenty years building and was completed in 1211. It was eight feet thick, pierced by twenty-four gates and fortified by about five hundred towers. Much of the land it enclosed was not built upon; themarais(marshes) on the north bank were drained and cultivated and became market and fruit gardens.
The moated château of the Louvre, another of Philip’s great buildings, stood outside the wall and commanded the valley route to Paris. It was at once a fortress, a palace and a prison. Parts of two wings of the structure are incorporated in the present palace of the Louvre, and the site of the remaining wings, the massive keep and the towers are marked out on the pavement of the quadrangle.
Many are the stories of the great king’s wisdom. One day, entering the chapter-house of Notre Dame during the election of a bishop, Philip seized a crozier and passing along the assembled canons thrust it into the hands of one of lean and poor aspect, saying: “Here, take this, that you may wax fat like your brethren.” His jester once claimed to be of his family through their common father Adam, and complained that the heritage had been badly divided. “Well,” said the king, “come to me to-morrow and I will restore what is due to thee.” Next day, in the presence of his court, he handed the jester a farthing, saying: “Here is thy just portion. When I shall have shared my wealth with each of thy brothers, barely a farthing will remain to me.”
One of the royal bailiffs coveted the land of a poor knight, who refused to sell. The knight at length died, and the widow proving equally stubborn, the bailiff went to the market-place, hired two porters whom he dressed decently, and repaired with them by night to the cemetery where the dead chevalier lay buried. His body was drawn from the tomb and held upright while the bailiff abjured it to agree before the two witnesses to a sale of the land. “Silence givesconsent,” said the bailiff, and placed a coin in the corpse’s hand. The tomb was closed and the land seized on the morrow, despite the widow’s protests. On the case being brought before the judgment-seat of Philip in the palace of the Cité, the two porters bore witness to the sale. The king, suspecting the truth, led one of the witnesses aside and bade him recite a paternoster. While the man was murmuring the prayer the king was heard of all the court loudly saying: “Yes, that is so: you speak truly.” The recital over, the king assured him of pardon, and returning to the second witness, admonished him also not to lie, for his friend had revealed all as truly as if he had said a paternoster. The second witness confessed. The bailiff, praying for mercy, fell prostrate before the king, who condemned the guilty man to banishment for life, and ordered the whole of his possessions to be escheated to the poor widow.
Of the impression that the Paris of Philip Augustus made on a provincial visitor, we are able, fortunately, to give some account. “I am at Paris,” writes Guy of Bazoches, about the end of the twelfth century, “in this royal city, where the abundance of nature’s gifts not only retains those that dwell there but invites and attracts those who are afar off. Even as the moon surpasses the stars in brightness, so does this city, the seat of royalty, exalt her proud head above all other cities. She is placed in the bosom of a delicious valley, in the centre of a crown of hills, which Ceres and Bacchus enrich with their gifts. The Seine, that proud river which comes from the east, flows there through wide banks and with its two arms surrounds an island which is the head, the heart, and the marrow of the whole city. Two suburbs extend to right and left, even the lesser of which would rouse the envy of many another city. These suburbs communicate with the island by two stone bridges; the Grand Pont towards the north in the direction of the English sea, and the Petit Pont which looks towards the Loire. The former bridge, broad, rich, commercial, is the centre of a fervid activity, and innumerable boats surround it laden with merchandiseand riches. The Petit Pont belongs to the dialecticians, who pace up and down disputing. In the island adjacent to the king’s palace, which dominates the whole town, the palace of philosophy is seen where study reigns alone as sovereign, a citadel of light and immortality.”
After Louis VIII.’s brief reign of three years, there rises to the throne of France one of the gentlest and noblest of the sons of men, a prince indeed, who, amid all the temptations of absolute power maintained a spotless life, and at death laid down an earthly crown to assume a fairer and an imperishable diadem among the saints in heaven. All that was best in mediævalism—its desire for peace and order and justice; its fervent piety, its passion to effect unity among Christ’s people and to wrest the Holy Land from the pollution of the infidel; its enthusiasm for learning and for the things of the mind; its love of beauty—all are personified in the life of St. Louis.
The young prince was eleven years of age when his father died. During his minority he was nurtured in learning and piety[51]by his mother, Blanche of Castile, whose devotion to her son, and firm and wise regency were a fitting prelude to the reign of a saintly king. Even after he attained his majority, Louis always sought his mother’s counsel and was ever respectful and submissive to her will. When the news of her death reached him in the Holy Land, he went to his oratory, fell on his knees before the altar, submissive to the will of God, and cried out with tears in his eyes, that he had loved the queen, “his most dear lady and mother, beyond all mortal creatures.”
The king’s conception of his office was summed up in two words—Gouverner bien. “Fair son,” said he one day to Prince Louis, his heir, “I pray thee win the affection of thy people. Verily, I would rather that a Scotchman came from Scotland and ruled the kingdom well and loyally than that thou shouldst govern it ill.” Joinville tells with charmingsimplicity how the king after hearing mass in the chapel at Vincennes was wont to walk in the woods for refreshment and then, sitting at the foot of an old oak tree, would listen to the plaints of his poorer people without let of usher or other official and administer justice to them. At other times, clothed in a tunic of camlet, a surcoat of wool (tiretaine) without sleeves, a mantle of black taffety, and a hat with a peacock’s plume, he would walk with his Council in the garden of his palace in the Cité, and on the people crowding round him, would call for a carpet to be spread on the ground, on which he would sit, surrounded with his councillors, and judge the poor diligently.
So rigidly just was the good king that he would not lie even to the Saracens. On his return from the crusade, being pressed by his Council to leave a stranded ship, he called the mariners to him and asked them if they would abandon the vessel if it were charged with merchandise. All replied that they would risk their lives rather than forsake the ship. “Then,” said the king, “why am I asked to abandon it?” “Sire,” they answered, “your royal person and your queen and children cannot be valued in money nor weighed in the balance against our lives.” “Well,” said the king, “I have heard your counsel and that of my lords: now hear mine. If I leave this ship there will remain on board five hundred men, each of whom loves his life as dearly as I do mine, and who, perchance, will never see their fatherland again. Therefore will I rather put my person and my wife and children in God’s hands than do hurt to so much people.”
Vincennes.Vincennes.
In 1238 the king was profoundly shocked by the news that the crown of thorns was a forfeited pledge at Venice for an unpaid loan advanced by some Venetian merchants to the Emperor Baldwin of Constantinople. Louis paid the debt,[52]redeemed the pledge, and secured the relic for Paris. The king met his envoys at Sens, and barefooted, himselfcarried the sacred treasure enclosed in three caskets, one of wood, one of silver and one of gold, to Paris. The procession took eight days to reach the city, and so great were the multitudes who thronged to see it, that a large platform was raised in a field outside the walls, from which several prelates exposed it in turn to the veneration of the people. Thence it was taken to the cathedral of Notre Dame, the king dressed in a simple tunic, and barefoot still carrying the relic. From the cathedral it was transferred to the royal chapel of St. Nicholas within the precincts of the palace. A year later the Emperor Baldwin was constrained to part with other relics, including a piece of the true cross, the blade of the lance and the sponge of the Passion. To enshrine them and the crown of thorns the chapel of St. Nicholas was demolished and the beautiful Sainte-Chapelle built in its place. The upper chapel was dedicated to the relics; the lower to the Blessed Virgin. On solemn festivals the king would himself expose the relics to the people. Louis was zealous in his devotion and for a time attended matins in the new chapel at midnight, until, suffering much headache in consequence, he was persuaded to have the office celebrated in the early morning before prime. His piety, however, was by no means austere: he had all the French gaiety of heart, dearly loved a good story, and was excellent company at table, where he loved to sit conversing with Robert de Sorbon, his chaplain. “It is a bad thing,” he said one day to Joinville, “to take another man’s goods, becauserendre(to restore) is so difficult, that even to pronounce the word makes the tongue sore by reason of the r’s in it.”
LA SAINTE CHAPELLE.LA SAINTE CHAPELLE.
At another time they were talking of the duties of a layman towards Jews and Infidels. “Let me tell you a story,” said St. Louis. “The monks of Cluny once arranged a great conference between some learned clerks and Jews. When the conference opened, an old knight who for love of Christ was given bread and shelter at the monastery, approached the abbot and begged leave to saythe first word. The abbot, after some protest against the irregularity, was persuaded to grant permission, and the knight, leaning on his stick, requested that the greatest scholar and rabbi among the Jews might be brought before him. ‘Master,’ said the knight, ‘do you believe that the Blessed Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus and held Him at her breast, and that she is the Virgin Mother of God?’ The Jew answered that he believed it not at all. ‘Then,’ saidthe knight, ‘fool that thou art to have entered God’s house and His church, and thou shalt pay for it.’ Thereupon he lifted his stick, smote the rabbi under the ear and felled him to the ground. The terrified Jews fled, carrying their master with them, and so,” said St. Louis, “ended the conference. And I tell you, let none but a great clerk dispute: the business of a layman when he hears the Christian religion defamed is to defend it with his sharp sword and thrust his weapon into the miscreant’s body as far as it will go.”
Louis, however, did not apply the moral in practice. Although severe in exacting tribute from the Jews, he spent much money in converting them and held many of their orphan children at the font. To others he gave pensions, which became a heavy financial burden to himself and his successors. He was stern with blasphemers, whose lips he caused to be branded with a hot iron. “I have heard him say,” writes Joinville, “with his own mouth, that he would he were marked with a red-hot iron himself if thereby he could banish all oaths and blasphemy from his kingdom. Full twenty-two years have I been in his company, and never have I heard him swear or blaspheme God or His holy Mother or any Saint, howsoever angry he may have been: and when he would affirm anything, he would say, ‘Verily it is so, or verily it is not so.’ Before going to bed he would call his children around him and recite the fair deeds and sayings of ancient princes and kings, praying that they would remember them for good ensample; for unjust and wicked princes lost their kingdoms through pride and avarice and rapine.” The good king essayed to deal with some social evils at court, but in vain:[53]he could only give the example of a pure and chaste life. When he was in the east he heard of a Saracen lord of Egypt who causedall the best books of philosophy to be transcribed for the use of young men, and he determined to do the like for the youth of Paris. Scribes were sent to copy the Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers, preserved in various abbeys in France. He had a convenient and safe place built at the treasury of the Sainte-Chapelle, where he housed the books. Scholars had free access to them, and he himself was wont in his leisure time to shut himself up there for study, reading rather the Holy Fathers than the writings of the best doctors of his own time.
Louis was a steadfast friend to the religious orders. On his return from the Holy Land he brought with him six monks from Mount Carmel and established them on the north bank of the Seine, near the present Quai des Celestins; they were subsequently transferred to the University quarter, on a site now occupied by the Marché aux Carmes. The prior of the Grande Chartreuse was also prayed to spare a few brothers to found a house in Paris; four were sent, and the king endowed them with his Château de Vauvert, including extensive lands and vineyards. The château was reputed to be haunted by evil spirits, and the street leading thither as late as the last century was known as the Rue d’Enfer. Louis began a great church for them, and the eight cells, each with its three rooms and garden, were increased to thirty before the end of his reign; in later times the order became one of the richest in Paris and occupied a vast expanse of land to the south of the Luxembourg. The fine series of paintings illustrating the life of St. Bruno, by Le Sueur, now in the Louvre, was executed for the smaller cloister of the monastery. The Grands Augustins were established on the south bank of the Seine, near the present Pont Neuf, and the Serfs de la Vierge, known later as the Blancs Manteaux, from their white cloaks, in the Marais. They were subsequently amalgamated with the Guillelmites, or the Hermits of St. William, and at no. 14 of the street of that name some remains of their monastery may yet be seen. The churchof the Blancs Manteaux, rebuilt in the seventeenth century, also exists in the street of that name.
REFECTORY OF THE CORDELIERS.REFECTORY OF THE CORDELIERS.
In 1217 the first of the Preaching Friars were seen at Paris. On the 12th of September seven friars, among whom were Laurence the Englishman and a brother of St. Dominic, established themselves in a house near theparvisof Notre Dame. In 1218 the University gave them a home near St. Genevieve, opposite the church of St. Etienne des Grez (St. Stephen of the Greeks), and in the following year, when St. Dominic came to Paris, the brothers had increased to thirty. The saint himself drew up the plans of their monastery in the Rue St. Jacques, and always cherished a particular affection for the Paris house. Their church was opened in 1220, and being dedicated to St. Jacques, the Dominicans were known as Jacobins all over France. St. Louis endowed them with a school; they soon became one of the most powerful and opulent of the religious orders, and their church, a burial-place for kings and princes. The Friars Minor soon followed. St. Francis himself, in his deep affection for France, had determined to go to Paris and found a house of his order, but being dissuaded by his friend, Cardinal Ugolin, sent in 1216 a few of his disciples. These early friars, truepoverelli di Dio, would accept no endowment of house or money, and supporting themselves by their hands, carried their splendid devotion among the poor, the outcast, and the lepers of Paris. In 1230 the Cordeliers, as they were called,[54]accepted theloanof a house near the walls in the south-western part of the city. St. Louis built them a church, and left them at his death part of his library and a large sum of money.[55]They too became rich and powerful and their church one of the largest and most magnificent in Paris. St. Bonaventure and Duns Scotustaught at their school of theology. Their monastery in the sixteenth century was the finest and most spacious in Paris, with cells for a hundred friars and a vast refectory, which still exists. The king also founded the hospital for 300 blind beggars, known as the Quinze-Vingts (15 × 20) now in the Rue de Charenton, and left them an annualrenteof thirtylivres parisis, that every inmate might have a mess of good pottage at his meals. Until Cardinal de Rohan, of diamond-necklace fame, effected the sale of the buildings in 1779 to a syndicate of speculators, an act of jobbery which brought his eminence a handsome commission, the hospital was situated between the Palais Royal and the Louvre. Originally it was a night shelter, whither the poor blind might repair after their long quest in the streets of Paris. The king subsequently gave them a dress on which Philip le Bel ordered afleur-de-lysto be embroidered, that they might be known as the “king’s poor folk.” They wereprivileged to place collecting-boxes and to beg inside the churches. Since, however, the differences in the relative opulence of churches was great, the right to beg in certain of the richer ones was put up to auction every year, and those who promised to pay the highest premium to the funds of the hospital were adjudicated the privilege of begging there. This curious arrangement was in full vigour until the latter half of the eighteenth century, when the foundation was removed. Twelve blind brothers and twelve seeing brothers—husbands of blind women who were lodged there on condition that they served as leaders through the streets—had a share in the management of the institution. Luxury seems to have sometimes invaded the hostel, for in 1579 a royal decree forbade the sale of wine to the brethren and denounced the blasphemy with which their conversation was often tainted. In 1631 they were forbidden to use stuffs other than serge or cloth for their garments, or to use velvet for ornament.
The establishment of the abbey of St. Antoine, of the Friars of the Holy Cross and of the Sisters of St. Bega or Béguines, were also due to the king’s piety, and the whole city was surrounded with religious houses. “Even as a scribe,” says an old writer, “who hath written his book illuminates it with gold and silver, so did the king illumine his kingdom with the great quantity of the houses of God that he built.”
Louis was, however, firm in his resistance to ecclesiastical arbitrariness. The prelates complained to him on one occasion that Christianity was going to the dogs, because no one feared their excommunications, and prayed that he would order his sergeants to lend the secular arm to enforce their authority. “Yes,” answered the king, “if you will give me the particulars of each case that I may judge if your sentence be just.” They objected that that appertained to the ecclesiastical courts, but Louis was inflexible, and they remained unsatisfied.
Many were the king’s benefactions to the great hospital of Paris, the Hôtel Dieu. Rules, dating from 1217, for the treatment of the sick poor were elaborated in his reign with admirable forethought. The sick, after confession and communion, were to be put to bed and treated as if they were the masters of the house. They were to be daily served with food before the nursing friars and sisters, and all that they desired was to be freely given if it could be obtained and were not prejudicial to their recovery. If the sickness were dangerous the patient was to be set apart and to be tended with especial solicitude. The sick were never to be left unguarded and even to be kept seven days after they were healed, lest they should suffer a relapse. The friars and sisters were to eat twice a day: the sick whenever they had need. A nurse who struck a patient was excommunicated. In later times, lax management and the decline of piety which came with the religious and political changes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries made reform urgent, and in 1505 the Parliament appointed a committee of eightbourgeois clercsto control the receipts. The buildings were much increased in 1636, but were never large enough, and in 1655 the priory of St. Julien was united to the hospital. “As many as 6000 patients,” says Félibien, writing in 1725, “have been counted there at one time, five or six in one bed.” No limitations of age or sex or station or religion or country were set. Everybody was received, and in Félibien’s time the upkeep amounted to 500,000 livres per annum. The old Hôtel Dieu was situated to the south of Notre Dame, and stood there until rebuilt on its present site in 1878.
The king was ever solicitous for the earthly weal of his subjects and made an unpopular peace with England against the advice of his Council. “Sirs,” he protested, “the land I give to the king of England I give without being held to do so, that I may awaken love between his children and mine who are cousins germain.”
Rue de Venise.Rue de Venise.
Louis sought diligently over all the land for thegrand sage hommewho would prove an honest and fearless judge, punishing the wicked without regard to rank or riches;[56]and what he exacted of his officers he practised himself. He punished his own brother, the Count of Artois, for having forced a sale of land on an unwilling man, and ordered him to make restitution. He inflicted a tremendous fine on the Sire de Coucy, one of the most powerful of his barons, for having hanged three young fellows for poaching. The whole of the baronage appealed against the sentence, but the king was inexorable. As Joinville was on his way to join ship at Marseilles for the crusade in Palestine, he passed a ruined château:—it had been razed to the ground as a warning to tyrannous seigneurs, who robbed and spoiled merchants and pilgrims. Louis forbade the judicial duel in civil cases; he instituted the Royal Watch to police the streets of Paris; he registered and confirmed the charters of the hundred crafts of Paris and gave many privileges to the great trade guilds.
In 1720 the king put on a second time the crusader’s badge, “the dear remembrance of his dying Lord,” and met his death in the ill-fated expedition to Tunis. Louis was so feeble when he left that Joinville carried him from the Hôtel of the Count of Auxerre to the Franciscan monastery (the Cordeliers), where the old friends and fellow-warriors in the Holy Land parted for ever. When stricken with the plague the dying king was laid on a couch strewn with ashes. He called his son, the Count of Alençon, to him and gave wise and touching counsel, and, after holy communion, he recited the seven penitential psalms, invoked “Monseigneurs St. James and St. Denis and Madame St. Genevieve,” crossed his hands on his heart, gazed towards heaven and rendered his soul to his Creator.Piteuse chouse est et digne de pleurer le trépassement de ce saint prince, says Joinville, to whom the story was told by the king’s son—“A piteous thing it is and worthy of tears the passing away of this holy prince.”
The bones of the dead king, from which the flesh[57]had been removed by boiling, were sent for burial to St. Denis, which he had chosen for the place of his sepulture. The Sieur de Joinville,[58]his friend and companion, from whose priceless memoirs we have chiefly drawn, ends his story thus:—“I make known to all readers of this little book that the things which I say I have seen and heard of the king are true and steadfastly shall they believe them. And the other things of which I testify but by hearsay, take them in a good sense if it please you, praying God that by the prayers of Monseigneur St. Louis it may please Him to give us those things that He knoweth to be necessary as well for our bodies as for our souls. Amen.”
King Louis was tall of stature, with a spare and graceful figure; his face was of angelic sweetness, with eyes as of a dove, and crowned with abundant fair hair. As he grew older he became somewhat bald and held himself slightly bent. “Never,” says Joinville, when describing a charge led by the king, which turned the tide of battle, “saw I so fair an armed man. He seemed to sit head and shoulders above all his knights. His helmet of gold was most fair to see, and a sword of Allemain was in his hand. Four times I saw him put his body in danger of death to save hurt to his people.”
TWOepoch-making developments—the creation of Gothic architecture and the rise of the university—synchronise with the period covered by the reigns of Philip Augustus and St. Louis, and may now fitly be considered.
CATHEDRAL OF ST. DENIS.CATHEDRAL OF ST. DENIS.
The memory of the Norman terror had long passed from men’s minds. The Isle de France had been purged of robber lords, and with peace and security, wealth and population had increased. The existing churches were becoming too small for the faithful and new and fairer temples replaced the old: the massive square towers, the heavy walls and thick pillars of the Norman builders blossomed into grace and light and beauty. Already in the beginning of the twelfth century the church of St. Denis was in urgent need of extension. On festival days so great were the crowds pressing to view the relics that many people had been trodden under foot, and Abbot Suger determined to build a larger and nobler church. St. Denis is an edifice of profound interest to the traveller. In the west façade (1140) we may see the round Norman arch side by side with the pointed Gothic, and the choir completed in 1144 was the earliest example of a Gothic apse. But Suger’s structure was nearly destroyed by fire in 1219, and the upper part of the choir, the nave and transepts, were rebuilt in 1231 in the pure Gothic of the time. Great was the enthusiasm of the people as the new temple rose. Noble and burgess, freeman and serf, harnessed themselves like beasts of burden to the ropes and drew the stone from the quarry. All would lend their aid in raising the new houseof God and of His holy martyrs, and the burial-place of their kings. In 1161 Maurice de Sully, a peasant’s son, who had risen to become bishop of Paris, determined to erect a great minster in the place of Childebert’s basilica, which was no longer adequate to the demands of the time. The old church of St. Stephen[59]and many houses were demolished together with the cathedral, and a new street, called Notre Dame, was made. Sully devoted the greater part of his life and private resources to the work. The king, the pope, seigneurs, guilds of merchants and private persons, vied with each other in making gifts. Two years were spent in digging the foundations, and in 1163 Pope Alexander III. is said to have laid the first stone. In 1182, the choir being finished, the papal legate consecrated the high altar. At Sully’s death, in 1196, the walls of the nave were erect and partly roofed. The transepts and nave were completed in 1235.
NOTRE DAME: PORTAL OF ST. ANNE.NOTRE DAME: PORTAL OF ST. ANNE.
In 1218 an ingenious and sacrilegious thief, climbing to the roof to haul up the silver candlesticks from the altar by a noose in a rope, set fire to the altar cloth, and the choir was seriously injured. Sully’s work had been Romanesque in style, and choir and apse were now rebuilt in the new style, to harmonise with the remainder of the church. The builders have preserved some of the best of the Romanesque twelfth-century work in the portal of St. Anne’s, under the south tower, and the magnificent iron hinges of old St. Stephen’s were used for its doors. The chapels round the apse and the twenty-eight figures of the royal benefactors from Childebert I. to Philip Augustus, on the west front, were not completed until the end of the thirteenth century. The choir of St. Germain des Prés and the exquisite little church of St. Julien le Pauvre were built at the end of the twelfth century, and the beautiful refectory of St. Martin des Champs was created about 1220. But the culmination of Gothic art is reached in the wondrous sanctuary that St. Louis built for the crown of thorns, “the most precious piece of Gothic,” says Ruskin,“in Northern Europe.” Michelet saw a whole world of religion and poetry—tears of piety, mystic ecstasy, the mysteries of divine love—expressed in the marvellous little church, in the fragile and precious paintings of its windows.[60]The narrow cell with an aperture looking on the reliquary, which St. Louis used as an oratory, is still shown. The work was completed in three years, and has been so admirably restored by Viollet-le-Duc that the visitor may gaze to-day on this pure and peerless gem almost as St. Louis left it, for the gorgeous interior faithfully reproduces the mediæval colour and gold. During the Revolution it was used as an granary and then as a club. It narrowly escaped destruction, and men now living can remember seeing the old notices on the porch of the lower chapel—Propriété nationale à vendre. Only once a year, when the “red mass” is said at the opening of the Law Courts in November, is the church used; and all that remains of the relics has long been transferred to the treasury of Notre Dame. The old Quinze-Vingts, the Chartreux, the Cordeliers, St. Croix de la Bretonnerie, St. Catherine, the Blancs Manteaux, the Mathurins and other masterpieces of the Gothic builders have all disappeared.
Gothic architecture was eminently a product of the Isle de France. The thirteenth century rivals the finest period of Greek art for purity, simplicity, nobility and accurate science of construction. Imagination was chastened by knowledge, but not systematised into rigid rules. Each master solved his problem in his own way, and the result was a charm and a variety, a fertility of invention, never surpassed in the history of art. Early French sculpture is a direct descendant of Greek art, which made its way into France by the Phœnician trade route. French artists achieved a perfection in the representation of the human form which anticipated by a generation the work of the Pisani in Italy, for the statues on the west front of ChartresCathedral (1150-1160) are carved with a naturalness and grace which the Italian masters never surpassed, and the marvellously mature and beautiful thirteenth-century silver-gilt figure of a king, in high relief, found in 1902 immured in an old house at Bourges and exhibited in 1904 among the Primitifs Français at the Louvre, was wrought more than a century before the birth of Donatello. Some fragments of the old sculptures that adorned St. Denis and other twelfth- and thirteenth-century churches may still be found in the museums of Paris. The influence of the French architects, as Emile Bertaux has demonstrated in the first volume of hisArt dans l’Italie Meridionale, extended far beyond the limits of France, and is clearly traceable in the fine hunting-palace, erected for Frederic II. in the thirteenth century, at Castello del Monte, near Andria, in Apulia. But the names of those who created these wonderful productions no man knoweth; the great masterpieces of the thirteenth century are anonymous. Jean de Chelles, one of the masons of Notre Dame, has left his name on the south portal and the date, Feb. 12, 1257, on which it was begun, “in honour of the holy Mother of Christ,” but nothing is known of him. The Sainte-Chapelle is commonly attributed to Pierre de Montereau, but the attribution is a mere guess.
13th Century Sculptures from St. Denis (Restored).13th Century Sculptures from St. Denis (Restored).
NOTRE DAME—SOUTHERN SIDE.NOTRE DAME—SOUTHERN SIDE.
Nor did the love of beauty during this marvellous age express itself solely in architecture. If we were asked to specify one trait which more than any other characterises the “dark ages” and differentiates them from modern times, we should be tempted to say, love of brightness and colour. Within and without, the temples of God were resplendent with silver and gold, with purple and crimson and blue; the saintly figures and solemn legends on their porches, the capitals, the columns, the groins of the vaultings were lustrous with colour and gold. Each window was a complex of jewelled splendour: the pillars and walls were painted or draped with lovely tapestries and gorgeous banners: the shrines and altars glittered with precious stones—jasper and sardius and chalcedony, sapphire and emerald, chrysolite and beryl,topaz and amethyst and pearl. The Church illuminated her sacred books with exquisite painting, bound them with precious fabrics, and clasped them with silver and gold; the robes of her priests and ministrants were rich with embroideries. So insensible, so atrophied to colour have the eyes of moderns grown amid their drab surroundings, that the aspect of a building wherein skilful hands have in some small degree essayed to realise the splendour of the past dazes the beholder; a sense of pain rather than of delight possesses him and he averts his gaze.
La Sainte Chapelle.La Sainte Chapelle.
Nor were the churches of those early times anything more than an exquisite expression of what men were surrounded by in their daily lives and avocations. The houses[61]and oratories of noble and burgess were rich with ivories exquisitely carved, with sculptures and paintings, tapestry and enamels: the very utensils of common domestic use were beautiful. Men did not prate of art: they wrought in love and simplicity. The very word art, as denoting a product of human activity different from the ordinary daily tasks of men, was unknown. If painting was an art, even so was carpentry. A mason was an artist: so was a shoemaker. Astronomy and grammar were arts: so was spinning. Apothecaries and lawyers were artists: so was a tailor. Dante uses the wordartistaas denoting a workman or craftsman, and when he wishes to emphasise the degeneracy of the citizens of his time as compared with those of the old Florentine race, he does so by saying that in those days their blood ran pure evennell’ ultimo artista(in the commonest workman). Let us be careful how we speak of these ages as “dark”; at least there were “retrievements out of the night.” Already before the tenth century the basilica of St. Germain des Prés was known as St. Germainle doré(the golden), from its glowingrefulgence, and St. Bernard declaimed against the resplendent colour and gold in the churches of his time. Never since the age of Pericles has so great an effusion of beauty descended on the earth as during the wondrous thirteenth century in the Isle de France and especially in Paris.[62]
We pass from the enthusiasm of art to that of learning. From earliest times, schools, free to the poor, had been attached to every great abbey and cathedral in France. At the end of the eleventh century four were eminent at Paris: the schools of St. Denis, where the young princes and nobles were educated; of the Parvis Notre Dame, for the training of youngclercs,[63]the famousScola Parisiaca, referred to by Abelard; of St. Genevieve; and of St. Victor, founded by William of Champeaux. The fame of this teacher drew multitudes of young men from the provinces to Paris, among whom there came, about 1100, Peter Abelard, scion of a noble family of Nantes. By his wit, erudition and dialectical subtlety he soon eclipsed his master’s fame and was appointed to a chair of philosophy in the school of Notre Dame. William of Champeaux, jealous of his young rival, compassed his dismissal, and after teaching for a while at Melun, Abelard returned to Paris and opened a school on Mont St. Genevieve, whither crowds of students followed him. So great was the fame of this brilliant lecturer and daring thinker that his school was filled with eager listeners from all countries of Europe, even from Rome herself.
Abelard was proud and ambitious, and the highest prizes of an ecclesiastical and scholastic career seemed within his grasp. But Fulbert, canon of Notre Dame, had a niece, accomplished and passing fair, Héloïse by name, who was an enthusiastic admirer of the great teacher. It was proposedthat Abelard should enter the canon’s house as her tutor, and Fulbert’s avarice made the proposition an acceptable one. Abelard, like Arnault Daniel, was a good craftsman in his mother tongue, a facile master ofversi d’amore, which he would sing with a voice wondrously sweet and supple. Now Abelard was thirty-eight years of age: Héloïse seventeen.Amor al cor gentil ratio s’apprende,[64]and Minerva was not the only goddess who presided over their meetings. For a time Fulbert was blind, but scandal cleared his eyes and Abelard was expelled from the house. Héloïse followed and took refuge with her lover’s sister in Brittany, where a child, Astrolabe, was born. Peacemakers soon intervened and a secret marriage was arranged, which took place early one morning at Paris, Fulbert being present. But the lovers continued to meet; scandal was again busy and Fulbert published the marriage. Héloïse, that the master’s advancement in the Church might not be marred, gave the lie to her uncle and fled to the nuns of Argenteuil. Fulbert now plotted a dastardly revenge. By his orders Abelard was surprised in his bed, and the mutilation which, according to Eusebius, Origen performed on himself, was violently inflicted on the great teacher. All ecclesiastical preferment was thus rendered canonically impossible: Abelard became the talk of Paris, and in bitter humiliation retired to the abbey of St. Denis. Before he made his vows, however, he required of Héloïse that she should take the veil. The heart-broken creature reproached him for his disloyalty, and repeating the lines which Lucan puts into the mouth of Cornelia weeping for Pompey’s death, burst into tears and consented to take the veil.
A savage punishment was inflicted by the ecclesiastical courts on Fulbert’s ruffians, who were made to suffer thelex talionisand the loss of their eyes: the canon’s property was confiscated. The great master, although forbidden to open a school at St. Denis, was importuned by crowds of young men not to let his talents waste, and soon a countryhouse near by was filled with so great a company of scholars that food could not be found for them. But enemies were vigilant and relentless, and he had shocked the timid by doubting the truth of the legend that Dionysius the Areopagite had come to France.
In 1124 certain of Abelard’s writings on the Trinity were condemned, and he took refuge at Nogent-sur-Seine, near Troyes, under the patronage of the Count of Champagne. He retired to a hermitage of thatch and reeds, the famous Paraclete, but even there students flocked to him, and young nobles were glad to live on coarse bread and lie on straw, that they might taste of wisdom, the bread of the angels. Again his enemies set upon him. He surrendered the Paraclete to Héloïse and a small sisterhood, and accepted the abbotship of St. Gildes in his own Brittany. A decade passed, and again he was seen in Paris. His enemies now determined to silence him. St. Bernard, the dictator of Christendom, denounced his writings. Abelard appealed for a hearing, and the two champions met in St. Stephen’s church at Sens before the king, the hierarchy and a brilliant and expectant audience. Abelard, the ever-victorious knight-errant of disputation, stood forth, eager for the fray, but St. Bernard simply rose and read out seventeen propositions from his opponent’s works, which he declared to be heretical. Abelard in disgust left the lists, and was condemned unheard to perpetual silence. The pope, to whom he appealed, confirmed the sentence, and the weary soldier of the mind, old and heart-broken, retired to Cluny. He gave up the struggle, was reconciled to his opponents, and died absolved by the pope near Chalons in 1142. His ashes were sent to Héloïse, and twenty years later she was laid beside him at the Paraclete. A well-known path, worn by generations of unhappy lovers, leads to a monument in Père-la-Chaise Cemetery at Paris which marks the last resting-place of Abelard and Héloïse, whose remains were transferred there in 1817.
It is commonly believed that Abelard’s school on MontSt. Genevieve was the origin of the Latin Quarter in Paris, but the migration to the south had probably begun before Abelard came, and was rather due to the overcrowding of the episcopal schools. Teachers and scholars began to swarm to the new quarter over the bridge where quiet, purer air and better accommodation were found. Ordinances of Bishop Gilbert, 1116, and Stephen, 1124, transcribed by Félibien, make this clear. So disturbed were the canons by the numbers of students in the cloister, thatexterneswere to be no longer admitted, nor other schools allowed on the north side where the canons lodged. The growing importance of the new schools, which tended to the advantage of the abbey of St. Genevieve, soon alarmed the bishops, and the theologians were ordered to lecture only between the two bridges (the Petit and Grand Ponts.) But it was Abelard’s brilliant career that attracted like a lodestar the youth of Europe to Paris, and made that city the “oven where the intellectual bread of the world was baked.” Providence, it was said, had given Empire to Germany, Priestcraft to Italy, Learning to France. What a constellation of great names glows in the spiritual firmament of Paris: William of Champeaux, Peter Lombard, Maurice de Sully, Pierre de Chartreux, Abelard, Gilbert[65]l’Universel, John of Salisbury, Adrian IV., St. Thomas of Canterbury. Small wonder that the youth of the twelfth century sought the springs of learning at Paris!
NOTRE DAME AND PETIT PONT.NOTRE DAME AND PETIT PONT.
The Seine from Pont de la Concorde.The Seine from Pont de la Concorde.
There was no discipline or college life among the earliest students. Each master, having obtained his license from the bishop’s chancellor, rented a room at his own cost, and taught what he knew—even, it was sometimes complained, what he did not know. We read of one Adam du Petit Pont, who, in the twelfth century, expounded Aristotle in the back-room of a house on the bridge amid the cackle of cocks and hens, whoseclientèlehad many a vituperative contest with the fish-fags of the neighbourhood. The students grouped themselves according to nationalities, andwith their masters held meetings in any available cloister, refectory, or church. When funds were needed, a general levy was made; any balance that remained was spent in a festive gathering in the nearest tavern. The aggregation of thousands of young men, some of whom were cosmopolitan vagabonds, gave rise to many evils. Complaints are frequent among the citizens of the depredations and immoralities of riotousclercs, who lived by their wits or bytheir nimble fingers, or by reciting or singing licentious ballads: thepaouvres escolliers, whose miserable estate, temptations, debauchery, ignoble pleasures, remorse and degradation have been so pathetically sung by François Villon, master of arts, poet, bohemian, burglar and homicide. The richer scholars often indulged in excesses, and of the vast majority who were poor, some died of hunger. It was the spectacle of half-starvingclercsbegging for bread that evoked the compassion of pious founders of colleges, which originally were simply hostels for needy scholars. On the return of Louis VII. from a pilgrimage to Becket’s shrine, his brother Robert founded about 1180 the church of St. Thomas of Canterbury and a hostel for fifteen students, who, in 1217, were endowed with a chapel of their own, dedicated to St. Nicholas, and were then known as the poor scholars of St. Nicholas.[66]In the same year a London merchant, passing through Paris on his return from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was touched by the sight of some starving students begging their bread. He founded a hostel for eighteen poor scholars at the Hôtel Dieu, who in return for lodging and maintenance were to perform the last Christian rites to the friendless dead. This was the college of the Dix-huit, afterwards absorbed in the Sorbonne. In 1200 Etienne Belot and his wife, burgesses of Paris, founded a hostel for thirteen poor scholars who were known as thebons enfants. In all, some dozen colleges were in being when St. Louis came to the throne. In 1253, St. Louis’ almoner, Robert of Cerbon or Sorbon, a poor Picardy village, founded[67]a modest college of theology, and obtained from Blanche of Castile a small house above the palace of the Thermæ. Here he was able to maintain a few poor scholars of theology and to facilitate their studies. Friendscame to his aid and soon sixteen were accommodated, to whom others, able to maintain themselves, were added. In 1269 a papal bull confirmed the establishment of thepauvres maistres estudiantsin the faculty of theology at Paris. Even when enriched by later founders it was still calledla pauvre Sorbonne. By the renown of their erudition, the doctors of the Sorbonne were the great court of appeal in the Middle Ages in matters of theology, and the Sorbonne became synonymous with the university. Some of the hostels were on a larger scale. The college of Cardinal Lemoine, founded in 1302 by the papal legate, housed sixty students in arts and forty in theology. Most were paying residents, but a number ofbourses(scholarships) were provided for those whose incomes were below a certain amount. Eachboursierwas given daily two loaves of white bread of twelve ounces, “the common weight in the windows of Paris bakers.”
In 1304, Jeanne of Navarre, wife of Philip the Fair, founded the college of Navarre for seventy poor scholars, twenty in grammar, thirty in philosophy, and twenty in theology. The maintenance fund seems, however, to have been inadequate or mismanaged, for we soon read of the scholars of the college walking the streets of Paris every morning crying—“Bread, bread, good people, for the poor scholars of Madame of Navarre!”