0257m
What does Boileau do when he is in the country? He makes verses naturally, since his business is to be a poet.
Here, in a valley which answers all my needs,
I buy at little expense solid pleasures:
Sometimes, with book in hand, wandering in the meadows,
I occupy my mind with useful thoughts;
Sometimes seeking the end of a line which I have constructed
I find in a nook of the woods the word which had escaped me....
Behold the solid pleasures of a constructor of verses, the friend of useful reveries. Reporters have recently questioned our men of letters as to how they "employ their vacations."... They have replied in prose by confidences quite like those which Boileau addressed in verse to M. Lamoignon, advocate general.
But at Hautile, Boileau sometimes stopped to dream and rhyme; then, he "jestingly allured the too eager fish"; or, he "made war on the inhabitants of the air"; and he tasted, on returning from the chase, the pleasure of an "agreeable and rustic" repast.
So, when he was about to leave the country, he expressed the ordinary wish of every citizen and of every poet obliged to return to Paris:
Oh, fortunate sojourn! Oh, fields beloved of heaven!
Why, strolling forever through your delicious prairies,
Can I not fix my wandering course here
And, known by you alone, forget the world outside?
Charming verses, of which La Fontaine would not have been ashamed.
And he said a sad adieu to this countryside, whose peace seemed to him sweeter and more salutary in proportion as the years made him feel more deeply the value of calm and especially of silence; he was then forty years old:
Already less full of fire, to animate my voice,
I have need of the silence and the shadow of the woods.
I need repose, meadows and forests.
This is another very pretty line, the line of a quadragenarian...
"By the riverside of Seyne is a marvelous mount upon which formerly was built a castle, over strong and over proud and called La Roche-Guyon. It is still so high and fierce that scarcely may one see to its summit. He who made it and enclosed it, made, at the base of the mount and by cutting the rock, a great cave in the semblance of a house, which might have been made by nature."18
The "over proud" castle is still standing on the summit of the hill, dismantled, breached, ruined, but ever keeping its proud and fierce aspect. As to the house created "by cutting the rock," it has, so to speak, slowly moved away from the slope from century to century. It was at first a sort of den, hollowed beneath the donjon. Then its galleries stretched out and were extended to the edge of the escarpment; then the entrances to the subterranean castle were closed by façades of stone and armed with towers; a fortress was thus built against the rock, and at the same time its ramparts were thrown forward to the Seine. To the gloomy feudal citadel succeeded a chateau of the Renaissance, somewhat less terrible, and the castellans of the eighteenth century changed it in the taste of their time without being able to deprive it of its warlike aspect.
This history of the construction is manifest when we look upon this curious pile of different buildings. Above, the ruin of the donjon; at the foot of the slope and united to it, a grand chateau whose front façade is framed by two towers of the Middle Ages; and before this semi-feudal abode, charming stables in the style of those of Chantilly. A grandiose aggregation, utterly without harmony, almost barbaric, but in which is reflected with attractive clearness the whole past of France, from the invasion of the Normans to the Revolution.
Beautiful furnishings, lovely paintings, fine carvings, adorn the apartments. The walls of the salon are covered with matchless tapestries, which portray the history of Esther. But it is the portraits which monopolize our attention here. Some are mere copies. The others are attributed—correctly—to Mignard, to de Troy, to Nattier. They evoke the glorious or charming memories of the castellans and the chatelaines, and, thanks to them, the whole past of La Roche-Guyon is born again. I do not know that there is in the whole of France a chateau so rich in memories and in history.
0263m
It belonged to the Guys de la Roche, and the wife of one of them, the heroic Perrette de la Riviere, there sustained a siege of five months against the English. In the sixteenth century it belonged to the Sillys, and you may be shown the chamber where, on the morrow of the battle of Ivry, King Henri found a good supper, a good lodging and nothing more, for the virtuous Marquise de Guercheville ordered that his coach should be harnessed, so that he went away to the house of one of his lady friends two leagues from there—an admirable adventure on which a novel might be written. Then La Roche passed to the du Plessis-Liancourts: thus its name is mingled with the history of Jansenism; then to the La Rochefoucaulds: the author of the Maxims dwelt here; then, after the Revolution, to the Rohans, and in 1829 it returned to the La Rochefoucaulds. These names alone are a pæan of glory.
Among the portraits hung on the walls several represent the Marquise d'Enville at various ages. What pretty, fine features! It was this Marquise who created the château as it still exists today, and transformed the old citadel into a home of luxury. Her father, Alexandre de la Rochefoucauld, exiled by Louis XV to La Roche-Guyon, had taken advantage of the leisure given him by the King's disfavor to commence great works in his domain; he had planted trees upon the naked hillside, thrown down the useless embattlements of the fortress and constructed a new pavilion. The Marquise d'Enville succeeded him in 1779 and continued his work. Without thinking of expense, she built, laid out gardens, ordered paintings, tapestries and statues. She was a woman of taste and spirit: she corresponded with Walpole and Voltaire, was intimate with Turgot and Condorcet, declared herself the pupil of the philosophers, and made her salon the rendezvous of the economists. But it was said that she practiced philosophy more than she preached it; she had founded a free school in her village and had engaged nuns to teach in it; in years of bad harvests, she opened charitable workrooms for the poor. She showed herself faithful and open-hearted in her friendships, for she remained the friend of Mlle. de L'Espinasse without ceasing to be the friend of Madame du Deffand. She was one of those aristocrats who worked with candid generosity for the ruin of the aristocracy: the Revolution neither surprised nor frightened her. But, on September 4, 1792, a band of revolutionists at Gisors murdered her son, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, who had sat in the Constituent Assembly among the Constitutionalists. In the following year she was herself denounced, arrested, thrown into prison and owed her liberty, perhaps her life, only to a petition of the citizens of the commune of La Roche-Guyon. She died in 1797 at the age of eighty.
A little way back we met Boileau, dreaming at the foot of the bluff of Haute-Isle. A few steps farther on, at La Roche-Guyon, we meet Hugo and Lamartine; both stopped in this château during the Restoration.
La Roche then belonged to the Duc de Rohan-Chabot.
A short while ago M. Charles Bailie published a fat book upon this personage, who was somewhat slender, somewhat droll, and even, I will venture to say, a little ridiculous. But as this biography gave its author an opportunity to study men and manners of the period of the Restoration, and as this study swarms with new and well-told anecdotes, we gladly ignore the insignificance of the hero. Here is a summary of the life of this cardinal-duke: Auguste de Chabot, born February 29, 1788, followed his father, the Prince of Leon, into exile, and returned to Paris with him in 1800. He was educated in a somewhat haphazard fashion by a refractory Oratorist and later by a former college regent. In 1807, when his grandfather, the Duc de Rohan, died, his father became Duc de Rohan and he himself Prince de Leon. When his father died in 1816 he became Duke de Rohan.
In 1808 he married Mlle. de Séreit, who was seventeen years old. Chateaubriand sometimes said to him: "Come, Chabot, so that I may corrupt you"; but his morals remained irreproachable. He traveled in Italy; he saw Madame Recamier and did not fall in love with her. Queen Caroline distinguished him. "She treated him," said Lamartine, "with a marked favor which promised a royal friendship, if the future cardinal had seen in the most beautiful of women anything else than the delight of the eye." He had pretty features, gave infinite care to his toilet, wrote romantic poems and dabbled in water colors.
0269m
In 1809 he became a chamberlain of the Emperor. In 1815 his wife was burned to death, the laces of her gown having taken fire. In 1819 he entered the seminary of Saint Sulpice and was ordained a priest in 1822. Madame de Broglie thus described him, in the following year: "He had a thin pale face, and, at the same time, a coquettish care for his person which seemed to join honest instincts with former worldly memories; in his face there was a mingling of fanaticism and foolishness."
He went to La Roche-Guyon to preach and on this occasion he chose five hundred volumes from the magnificent library collected by the Marquise d'Enville, piled them up in the castle courtyard and burned them: they were rare volumes adorned with precious bindings. Later he went to Rome, where he expected to be made a cardinal. He returned without the purple; but he had converted Madame de Récamier's chambermaid.
In 1828 he was elevated to the archbishopric of Auch and later to that of Besançon. He dissatisfied the seminarists by untimely reforms; he did not take it amiss that ecclesiastics should wear polished laced boots. He shocked the liberals by his bigotry and the clergy by his luxury. He restored his cathedral; but he spoiled the apse, broke out the crossbars of the windows to replace them by frightful stained glass, demolished the altar, which was a beautiful work of art of the eighteenth century, and cast out a beautiful stone pulpit of the fifteenth century from which Saint Francis de Sala had preached.
He was made cardinal in the month of July, 1830. The fall of the Bourbons forced him to flee to Belgium, whence he passed into Switzerland. After the death of Pius VIII, he took part in the conclave which elected Gregory XVI and officiated at the marriage of the Duchess de Berry to Count Lucchesi-Pali. He returned to his diocese in 1832, where he was received by a riot. He nevertheless remained there and died in 1833 of typhoid fever.
ThePatriote, a newspaper of Besançon, which had opposed him, published the day after his death a courteous article: "We do not doubt that he owed what influence he had to his virtue. He prayed devoutly and the accent of his voice, intoning the chants of the Church, breathed true religion. No one can say what he would have effected among us, if his career had been longer and if he had become reconciled to our Revolution."
... You think, without doubt, of Bouvard and Pécuchet taking notes to write the life of the Duc d'Angoulême. So do I.
Now let us return to La Roche-Guyon.
Montalembert, Marchangy, Berryer, Dupan-loup, Hugo, Lamartine, were there the guests of the Abbé-Duc de Rohan.
How Hugo made the acquaintance of the Due de Rohan and visited him at La Roche-Guyon; how, terrified by the princely formality which reigned as well in the chapel of the château as in the dining room, he fled after two days; finally how the Duc de Rohan gave Lamennais to Hugo as a confessor, may be read in Volume II ofVictor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie. We must not neglect to consult also the severe but exact work of M. Biré.
Lamartine wrote one of his most admirableMeditationsat La Roche-Guyon:
Here comes to die the world's last echoing sound;
Sailors whose star has set, ashore! here is the port:
Here, the soul steeps itself in peace the most profound,
And this peace is not death.
In the note which he left as a sequel to this poem, Lamartine relates that, in 1819, the Due de Rohan was introduced to him by Duc Mathieu de Montmorency. "We became close friends without his ever making me feel, and without my ever allowing myself to forget, by that natural tact which is the etiquette of nature, the distance which he indeed wished to bridge, but which nevertheless existed between two names which poesy alone could bring together for an instant." This is exquisite, with an affectation of respect which borders on impertinence.
The Meditation is entitled Holy Week at La Roche-Guyon. Not a line of this grand lyric piece reveals that it was conceived in this place rather than in any other. Lamartine has thus attempted to justify his title: "The principal ornament of the château," he writes, "was a chapel hollowed in the rock, a true catacomb, affecting, in the cavernous circumvolutions of the mountain, the form of the naves, the choirs, the pillars, the rood-lofts, of a cathedral. He induced me to go to pass Holy Week there with him. He took me there himself.... The religious service,pious voluptuousnessof the Duc de Rohan, was celebrated every day in this subterranean church, with a pomp, a luxury, and holy enchantments, which intoxicate youthful imaginations...."
The picture is delightful. Unfortunately it entirely emerged from the "youthful imagination" of Lamartine. The subterranean church still exists at La Roche-Guyon, just as in the time of the Duc de Rohan. But the triple chapel, cut in the hill, and sufficiently lighted from outside, has nowise the appearance of a catacomb. There are no "cavernous circumvolutions," naves, choirs, pillars, rood-lofts. The cathedral is composed of three little vaulted rooms....
And I now think of the honest Boileau. He would not have mystified us or himself in this manner! It is true that you and I would give the whole epistle to Lamoignon for this single line:
Sailors whose star has set, ashore! here is the port.
THE light softens and dims, even in these days of the dog star, and, under this heaven of palest azure, the puissant harmony of verdure and red bricks announces the neighborhood of Flanders. Only the stone towers of the cathedral dominate with their gray mass the ruddy buildings and the leafage of the gardens.
Noyon possessed immense convents which were razed during the Revolution. Scattered remnants still mark the sites of these monasteries; here an apse transformed into a storehouse, there the façade of a chapel. The monks have departed; but the town has retained a monastic aspect; and it is a place where one might make a retreat. In the silence of the melancholy streets, the pavements seem to ring more sonorously, and the passer listens with surprise to the echo of his steps between the silent houses....
Upon the market place, the delicate and florid façade of the old Hôtel de Ville of the Renaissance calls up the images of communal life, peculiar to the little cities of the north; we look for the belfry tower, we expect to hear the chimes; but the disputatious commune of the Middle Ages is now a wise, sad and pensive little town. In the staircase, sculptures in high relief portray the heavy gayeties of northern climes; but Noyon is now a wise, sad and decent little town.
On the same square stands a curious fountain provided by the liberality of an eighteenth-century prelate. Statues of the cardinal virtues decorate its pedestal from which rises an obelisk, surrounded by emblems and allegories; we see there a Cupid caressing a lamb, quivers, arrows, a hound,—symbols of innocent love and of fidelity. An inscription placed upon the monument recalls to the people of Noyon that among them Chilpéric II was buried, Charlemagne consecrated and Hugh Capet elected king. I do not know whether this inscription is as old as the fountain: it has a certain grandeur in its conciseness; let us praise the towns which thus array themselves in their past glories, and recall the part which they have played in the destinies of France....
With its houses of brick and its gardens surrounded by high walls, its silence and its memories, Noyon would merit the tenderness of its people, even if Noyon did not possess its admirable cathedral....
What a charming picture is made by the apse, with its radiating chapels! Torch holders ornament the flying buttresses, which were restored in the eighteenth century: they drive to despair the pure archaeologists and fill with joy men without taste who, insensitive to unity of style, love to hear monuments tell their history, their whole history. To this harmonious apse is joined the treasury, and then a fine structure with wooden panels of the sixteenth century, the library of the canons: its street floor was formerly arcaded and sheltered a market; alas! it has been walled up,... Behind, the buildings of the chapter house, hovels, turrets, an arcade thrown across the street, a high crenellated wall, surround the cloister and the flanks of the cathedral; and the picturesqueness of these disordered lines is delightful.
On the other side of the apse appears a lamentable breach. Here formerly stood the chapel of the bishopry; it was attached to the crossing of the church and thus the little portal of the transept was exquisitely framed. This thirteenth-century chapel was long since abandoned; it had lost its ancient roof; but these ancient walls should have been respected. To free the cathedral, they have been leveled to the ground.... Not quite, however, for the owner of a cellar excavated beneath this chapel resisted the efforts of the architect.
Today the remnants of the little edifice still remain. And they have not even the appearance of a ruin, but the piteous aspect of a demolition. Thus has been destroyed a truly beautiful grouping, and the cathedral, quite contrary to good sense, has been isolated from the ancient bishopry to permit the people of Noyon to walk all around their church. At least, this is the only benefit they have received from it.
Before the east front of the church lies a little square surrounded by the tranquil and substantial homes of the canons. Upon the piers of each door, great vases swell their paunches and project their stone flames: this is the leit motiv of the eighteenth century. The canons for whom these beautiful homes were constructed had only to cross the parvis to enter the cathedral. This rises before their houses with its massive towers, which are not crowned by spires, but in which the mixture of the plain arch with the pointed marks the originality of the building. The vast porch, with three doorways whose sculptures were sacked by the Revolutionists and then by the administrators of the Restoration, preserves an inimitable majesty....
The exterior of this church charmed us especially by its picturesqueness; within, it gives us an impression of perfect beauty.
It ravishes us at first by the balance of its different parts, by the justness of its proportions. Its plan is a masterpiece. In almost all our cathedrals we admire the choir, then we admire the nave; if we wish to take in the whole edifice at a single glance, we are still astonished by its grandeur and majesty, but our eye no longer experiences the same delight nor our mind the same satisfaction. If we take up a position at the entrance of Notre Dame de Noyon, in that species of vestibule which opens on the first bay of the nave and which here rises to the height of the vaulting, we have before us an absolutely harmonious work. The glance can travel as far as the apse without being arrested by any discordance. There is, I believe, no Gothic church where the dimensions of the nave correspond in so happy a fashion to the dimensions of the choir. The unity of the monument is incomparable. The choir seems to be the completion, the expansion of the long Gothic structure. The nave seems to make its way to this circle of light, without haste, with a tranquil and bold rhythm which is produced by the regular alternation of its naked columns and its pilasters flanked by tiny pillars....
0279m
This forms the beauty, so to speak, the intellectual beauty, of the cathedral of Noyon. But its most original character, by which it enchants our imagination and impresses itself in our memory, is the marvelous combination of the pointed and the circular arch.19It is charming among all those charming churches which rose in the twelfth century in the valleys of the Oise and the Seine, and in which architects endowed with genius knew how to bring together the round arcs of the declining Romanesque and the pointed arches of the Gothic at its dawning. In no other place did the art of these constructors display itself in so refined and subtle a manner; nowhere else can we find so complete a success; in no other region has the marriage of tradition and moderation given birth to a more exquisite work.
Consider the elevations of the nave: the arches which separate the nave from the side aisles break in ogives; the tribunes are pierced with pointed apertures divided by little columns and surmounted by trefoil windows; the light penetrates this triforium through Romanesque windows; above these tribunes runs a little gallery whose arches are circular, and higher still the twin windows of the clerestory are framed with semicircular arches. In the transepts, whose two arms end in apses, there are other combinations, but the two varieties of arches are always fraternally associated; the Gothic and the Romanesque alternate from the ground to the vaulting. In the choir, finally, the arcades, round-arched in the two first bays, are pointed at the back of the apse and the lines of the clerestory reproduce the same arrangement; the tribunes are cut in points and the arches of the gallery are divided in trefoil. To this diversity of lines we must add the diversity of decoration. Two styles are here juxtaposed: here are the monsters, the grotesques and the foliage of Romanesque art, and there the more sober and truthful sculpture of Gothic art.
But—here is the miracle—all these contrasts appear only when we closely analyze the elements of the edifice. They never make discords; they never enfeeble the impression of grace, ease and perfection which we experienced when we entered Notre Dame de Noyon.
There has been much discussion about the date of the construction of this church.
This question was not in the least embarrassing to Jacques Le Vasseur, the dean of the chapter, who published in 1633 a volume of 1400 pages, entitledAnnales de Véglise cathédrale de Noyon. For him, the choir where he went every day to sing the psalms had been built by Saint Médard in the sixth century; Charlemagne had constructed the nave; then, after the year 1000, "our choir was refreshed, our nave completed, our belfries added, for the accomplishment of the work." Nevertheless he added: "At least the experts judge that these works and manufactures are of these times...." The excellent Le Vasseur was not, in any case, the man to contradict them in their judgments, for he consecrated a chapter of his book to demonstrating that the foundation of Noyon by Noah was "probable"; and it is easy to guess the reasons which he extracted from philology.
The "experts" of the nineteenth century looked a little closer. When they had learned to distinguish Romanesque art from Gothic art, they quickly succeeded in classifying the cathedral of Noyon among the monuments of the transition. In a vital and eloquent study which he published in 1845, in which in describing the cathedral of Noyon he studied the origins and celebrated the beauties of Gothic art, Vitet maintained that this cathedral was "conceived and entirely outlined from 1150 to 1170 and that it was entirely carved, finished off and completed only toward the end of the century or perhaps even a little later." These dates are not quite exact: M. Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis has demonstrated this by the archives and by the archaeological examination of the monument itself; he has proved that the choir was finished in 1157, the nave in 1220, that the vaultings fell in a fire at the close of the thirteenth century and that the church was then repaired.... And I refer you to his excellentHistoire de la cathédrale de Noyon.20
The two arms of the transept are rounded in the form of an apse. This plan is frequently met with in Romanesque cathedrals, and especially in those of the lower Rhine. We find it also in the cathedral of Tournai, and it was doubtless from the latter that the architects of Noyon borrowed the idea of their transept, for until the middle of the twelfth century the two dioceses were united under the same pastoral staff. Besides, if I were an archæologist, I would study attentively the plans of these two churches: perhaps this comparison would explain some of the peculiarities of Noyon. Nothing can be more graceful than these two circular arms, where the variety of the arches gives an additional charm to the curved lines.... But here behold the malice of the restorers.
The north arm has not been restored. Several of its windows were bricked up in the eighteenth century; the ground-floor windows have been replaced by niches decorated with statues, and at the end of the apse a little door has been opened to communicate with the sacristy. The men who thus treated a venerable monument of the Middle Ages were vandals, I admit. But there is, just the same, a very pleasing and very delicate reminiscence of the Renaissance in the decoration which they plastered over the twelfth-century walls. They diminished the light in this part of their church; but is not this better than the crude daylight which enters through the clear panes? In short, they altered the character of the ancient edifice, but they left it accent and life.
Turn toward the opposite arm. It also had been modified in the course of centuries, but it has recently been restored to its original condition. A door gave communication with the bishop's garden; it has been suppressed. Several openings had been blocked up, but have been reopened. In short, it has been restored; and it is just for the purpose of better restoring it that they have, as I have described, demolished the little chapel of the bishopry. All this was accomplished with the rarest skill and the most exact science. This apse now presents the aspect of a perfect scheme of architecture. It is light, it is clean, it is finished. But where is the accent? Where is the life? The most vandal of the vandals are not always those we would suspect.
Under the crossing of the transept stands the chief altar of white marble. Its table is a vast rounded console, supported by the uplifted hands of six angels of gilded bronze and surmounted by a little circular temple. The steps of the altar, the friezes and the capitals of the little temple are ornamented with chiseled copper. It is a very beautiful work of art of the style of Louis XVI. It was put in place in 1779.
Until the eighteenth century, the cathedral had retained its old altar of the thirteenth century: placed, according to the ancient custom, at the very end of the apse, without candles, without crucifix, without tabernacle, it was a simple table surrounded by curtains which were opened only at the elevation of the host; the altar cloths varied according to the office of the day; the altar screen was adorned with precious shrines.
Now, in 1753, an architect and inspector of buildings of the King, who resided at Compiègne, Louis Godot, proposed to the chapter of Noyon the designing of an altar "à la romaine." His project pleased the chapter, which accepted it, despite the violent opposition of Claude Bonne-dame and several other canons, who were displeased with the proposed destruction of the Gothic altar.
Godot, who proposed also to replace the ancient choir stalls, to demolish the rood-loft and to surround the choir with gratings, prepared a sketch. The chapter appropriated the sum necessary for the work. But Bonnedame and his friends were not through; they addressed a request to the lieutenant-general of the bailiwick, invoking the fathers of the church, the liturgy and respect for ancient things. The intendant of the province-ship came to Noyon to pacify the chapter. But Bonnedame became more and more intractable. The King remitted the affair to the council of state. The opposing parties again brought forward their liturgical arguments, and added that the sum asked for the decoration of the choir would be better employed if used to reconstruct the vaultings which threatened to collapse. Experts were appointed to examine the condition of the vaultings and declared it to be excellent. Bonnedame did not wish to confess himself vanquished and reasserted his grievances. Godot replied and set up the authority of Michelangelo: it should be quite permissible to place the altar in the transept at Noyon, since it was thus done at Saint Peter's in Rome! The council of state finally ratified the first decision of the chapter and completed the discomfiture of Bonnedame and his partisans.
M. Lefèvre-Pontalis, from whom I borrow this anecdote, cites with honor the names of the canons who, under the leadership of Bonnedame, showed themselves in these circumstances "the defenders of good archaeological traditions." Let us therefore praise the canons Du Héron, Cuquigny, Bertault, du Tombelle, Antoine de Caisnes, Pelleton, Mauroy and Reneufve, who showed a meritorious zeal for the protection of an altar of the thirteenth century. Such sentiments are not common among churchmen, even in 1905; they were still more rare in 1754. Yes—for the love of principle—let us celebrate this pious pigheadedness.
Only... only, when I look at the altar "à la romaine" conceived by Godot, I ask myself, with all sorts of remorse and scruples, whether Bonnedame or his adversaries were right. This Roman altar is a pure marvel of elegance. The angels of gilded bronze which support the table, and which are attributed to Gouthièze, are delightful statuettes; the copper garlands and emblems which decorate the marble are of the finest workmanship; the little temple elevated above the tabernacle is delicate in taste, despite its Trianonesque appearance... And what an unexpected harmony between this charming bibelot and the old cathedral of the twelfth century! Yes, this altar is in its right place, in spite of the liturgy, in spite of the proprieties, in spite of the respectable prejudices of Bonnedame. An exquisite harmony exists between the curve of the steps, the table and the tabernacle, and the rounded forms of the choir and of the transept. What foolishness is this unity of style!
Then Bonnedame was wrong? I do not know, but, today, we must honor his memory and recommend his example; for, if some one today decided to plan to remove the Romanesque altar of the cathedral of Noyon, it would be to substitute for it a Neo-Gothic altar, which would be abominable, encumbering and out of place: on this point there is no doubt.
Godot's altar just escaped being treated by the Revolutionists as the Gothic altar had been by the canons. A mason wished to break down this monument of superstition. But a representative of the people interfered and made this brute understand that what he thought were angels were goddesses of love, that the bunches of grapes and the ears of wheat were not the emblems of the Eucharist, but those of the cult of Ceres and of Bacchus. The altar was spared and became that of the Goddess of Reason. Persons who today still share the opinion of Bonnedame, will perhaps find that the representative of the people did but reëstablish the truth. Let us reprove such a manner of thought....
Of the cloister of the cathedral, there still remains only a single gallery. The rest, very dilapidated, was tom down by the workmen of the fabric of Notre Dame de Noyon in 1811.
On this gallery opens the great chapter hall, an admirable Gothic nave where the restorers have done their work. In the cloister itself, their zeal was more moderate and more discreet. They repaired the broken roofs, bound with iron the falling columns, respected the breaches and the breaks.
As the great walls on which the destroyed triforium rested still stand, the aspect of the place has not changed, its intimate beauty has not been violated. One may still enjoy there the eternal silence, shadow, freshness and coolness.... One hears there only the droning of the flies, while, in the midst of the area, a grand weeping willow shades an old well with rusty iron fittings.
Under the cloister fragments of carving have been laid, and in this pile of stones we discover with melancholy a few admirable fragments. Some beautiful tombstones have been set up along the walls....
The afternoon is torrid. It is pleasant to linger under these arches and deliver oneself to the pleasures of epigraphy. Let us decipher the epitaphs.
Here is that of a Bishop of Noyon, M. Jean François de La Cropte de Bourzac, who died January 23, 1766. Three distichs commemorate the humility of the defunct, his piety, his devotion to the King. Below these Latin verses, which are elegantly banal, we discover a name which excites our curiosity: Gresset. It was, in fact, the author ofVert-Vertwhom the canons retained to compose the epitaph of their bishop. It is doubtful whether our Bonnedame, the enemy of Roman altars, would have aided the poet in glorifying the virtues of M. Jean François de La Cropte de Bourzac: for it was in fact under the rule of this bishop that an abandoned architect undertook the new decoration of the choir of the cathedral of Noyon.
Upon a great tombstone is represented the Last Judgment. We see there the Great Judge, the angel who sounds the trumpet and declaims: Surgite, mortui, venite, the defunct who rises from his tomb, hangs his shroud on the arm of the cross and says to the Lord: Domine, jube ad me venire, other open sepulchers and scattered bones. Below these images we read these lines, which lack neither force nor savor21:
The body of Gilles Coquevil,
Were he rich or poor, noble or vile,
Before being laid to rot here,
Is without food and drink
Awaiting the Judgment
And the decree of the last day
Where we must all...
Render account of past evils.
May God give his soul promptly
Pardon, and so to all trespassers.
In the same church, beside the door of the cloister, a singular face surmounts an interminable epitaph. It is the face of an old mandarin, uniformly bald and symmetrically wrinkled. We see the man to the middle of his body, his arms folded and his thumbs down. His mien, his pose, the expression of his face, have something indescribably Chinese. On his breast appears a mysterious object, in the shape of an ostrich egg, on which is engraved a column with these words:Ito fidens.... It is necessary to read the epitaph to find the key to the riddle. This mandarin is Jacques Le Vasseur, canon and historian of the church of Noyon, whose name I have already mentioned in connection with the origins of the cathedral. The epitaph commences with a terrible pun upon the Latin name of Le Vasseur, Vasserius. A golden vase, it is there said, vas aureus, is hidden in this tomb, but it should not tempt the cupidity of any one, for it contains only virtues. It is this symbolic vase that is carved upon the stone. The*column is that which guided the confident canon towards his eternal home: fidens ito... And we learn also—in a delightful Latin which I translate clumsily,—that "this man of good lived, in every place, niggardly for himself, generous for others; that is why, dying, he left little except mingled rare and precious books, preferable—by the declarations of the wise—to the treasures of the Orient as much as to the magnificent and tinkling adornments of the North...."
All these puerilities do not lack charm, especially when they keep us in the cool shadow of a cathedral, at the hottest and most blinding hour of the day....
The day declines. It is the moment when all the beauty of the cathedral is revealed. Now the contrasts of lights and shades become more moving. A soft green clarity fills the choir, and lends to its architecture a more subtle and airy grace; it filters through the high openings of the nave, illuminates the pointed arches of the vaulting, accentuates the ramifications of the arches; the whole structure appears lighter and more triumphal.
We return toward the great open doors, and, after the magnificence of the church, savor the delicate and peaceful intimacy of the town. In the triple bay of the portal is framed the little square of the parvis where, ranged like canons in the choir, the houses of the chapter seem to slumber in the twilight, and... at the end of a narrow street, roofs, gables and dark clumps of verdure outline themselves against a rosy sky....
SOISSONS is a white, peaceable and smiling city whose tower and pointed spires rise from the bank of a lazy river, in the midst of a circle of green hills: town and countryside call to mind the little pictures which the illuminators of our old manuscripts painted with loving care. Here is France, pure France: nothing of that Flemish air assumed by the little towns of the valley of the Oise, with their brick houses, such as exquisite Noyon, like a greatbéguinage. Precious monuments relate the whole history of the French monarchy, from the Merovingian crypts of the abbey of Saint Médard to the beautiful hotel built on the eve of the Revolution for the intendants of the provinces. In the midst of the narrow streets and the little gardens, a magnificent cathedral extends the two arms of its great transept; on the north a fiat wall and an immense expanse of glass; on the south, that marvelous apse where the pointed and the rounded arch mingle in so delicate a fashion.
One cannot omit a malediction in passing on the architect who, to the dishonor of the interior of this monument, marked off each stone with black joints, checkering it in such an exasperating manner that all the lines of the architecture are lost.
A promenade through the streets of this lovable town is charming. Today, I would like to entertain you with the most celebrated of the monuments of Soissons, the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes.
Of this monastery, which was one of the most beautiful and richest in France, there remains only the façade of the church, the remains of a cloister of the fourteenth century, traces of a cloister of the Renaissance, a few buildings of the seventeenth century, and a magnificent Gothic hall, the refectory of the convent.
How the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes was reduced to a state of ruin is an interesting chapter of the history of vandalism, which I will briefly relate to you. Then we will see what steps would be necessary to save the refectory building.
Founded in the eleventh century, the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes followed the rule of Saint Augustine. Its monks were Joannist canons. Their duty consisted in celebrating mass within the monastery and in acting as curates in the forty parishes which belonged to the community in the dioceses of Soissons and of Meaux. Ninety canons remained encloistered; fifty priests served the parishes. Because of their holiness and their knowledge, the Joannists had acquired such renown during the Middle Ages that Cardinal Jean de Dormans confided to the monks of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes the direction of the college of Dormans-Beauvais founded by him at Paris.
The gifts of kings, nobles and citizens gave the canons means wherewith to undertake the construction of a great church. About 1335 they laid the foundations of the nave and the towers. At the end of the fourteenth century the walls of the nave were finished, and the towers had risen to the level of the great rose window. The plunderings of the Abbé Remy d'Orbais, and later the wars of the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, interrupted the work, and it was not until about the end of the fifteenth century that the vaultings and the tiles were put in place. The two towers were not finished until later, the smaller in the last years of the fifteenth century, the greater in 1520. The construction of the church had occupied more than two hundred years.22
In 1567, two years after the death of the last canon regular of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, the Protestants devastated the abbey: the library and the treasury were plundered, the stained glass and the statues were broken, the carvings were burned and the fountains demolished. The commendatory monks took little pains to repair the damages.
At the beginning of the Revolution, there were no more than thirty monks in the monastery. They were expelled, and the nave of the church was used as a military bakeshop.
There is a widely believed legend that the church was demolished during the Revolution. This is absolutely false. At this time, as the roofs were not well looked after, a bay of the vaulting fell; but, under the Consulate, the monument was still solid and a few repairs would have sufficed to preserve it. It was torn down by a bishop of Soissons, Msr. Leblanc de Beaulieu.
It is a painful story. I have before me the administrative documents of this abominable destruction, documents which were brought to my attention by M. Max Sainsaulieu, the architect of the historic monuments of Soissons. These documents are instructive.
On August 1, 1804, the churchwardens of the cathedral and parish church of Soissons address themselves to the mayor of the city and disclose to him that their church is in great need of repairs and that these indispensable works will cost 23,786 francs. "The desire," they write, "to lighten as much as possible this charge upon our town, has suggested to us a means which would totally free us from it, at least for several years. This means consists in obtaining from the government the right to dispose of the former church of the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, in order to employ the products of its demolition for the conservation and repair of the cathedral. It will not be difficult for you, Monsieur le Maire, to convince the government by a description of the present condition of this church, and by a relation of the accidents which almost happened two years ago and again recently, by the falling of various parts of it, that the total demolition of this structure will produce no real disadvantage to the national treasury and will contribute advantageously to public safety...."
Behind the churchwardens, it is really the bishop who demands the demolition of the church. As a matter of fact, on April 25, 1805, by a decree given at the Stapinigi Palace, the Emperor orders that the prefect of the department of the Aisne, at the instance of the Bishop of Soissons, shall put at his disposal the church of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, "in order that the materials coming from the church may be used in the repair of the cathedral": the inhabitants of Soissons must merely, in exchange for this concession, consolidate the walls of the other parts of the abbey which have been granted to the Administration of Powder and Saltpeter.
Mgr. Leblanc de Beaulieu receives his decree. Meanwhile the inhabitants of Soissons are alarmed at this project of demolition, protest against the plan of the prelate and take their grievances to the prefect. It is often assumed that before the advent of romanticism no one in France cared for the monuments of the Middle Ages. Now, as early as 1805, the news that the church of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes is about to be destroyed excites the indignation of the people of Soissons. The archaeologists make ready for battle. The prefect writes to the bishop (June 26, 1805): "Monsieur, I am receiving a great number of complaints against the approaching demolition of the church of Saint-Jean: the inhabitants of Soissons appear to be extremely attached to this edifice, which they regard as a precious monument of the arts. I have the honor to forward to you a copy of a historical summary which has been forwarded to me. As it belongs to you, Monsieur, to decide the fate of this church, which is at your disposal, I can only confide in what your good sense and your enlightened love for the arts will suggest to you."
His "enlightened love for the arts" does not in the least inspire the bishop with a desire to save the church; but the complaints of his flock embarrass him, and he explains to the prefect that he himself cannot proceed in a regular manner, that it is unsuitable that a bishop should have "personal connection with the demolition of a church." And, for four years, matters remain at this stage.
Finally, in 1807, disdaining the protests and triumphing over his own scruples, the bishop awards the glass and the ironwork to a certain Archin. In 1809 he empowers his notary to treat in his name with the contractors for demolition. All that he accords to the inhabitants of Soissons is the preservation of the façade.
The bargain is concluded between "Antoine Isidore Petit de Reimpré, imperial notary, domiciled at Soissons, in the name and endowed with the powers of Mgr. Jean Claude Leblanc-Beaulieu, Bishop of Soissons and Laon, baron of the Empire and member of the Legion of Honor, of the first part; and Leonard Wallot, building contractor, and Pierre-Joseph Delacroix père, carpenter...." By the terms of the agreement, the two towers and the portals must remain intact, and the contractors are even obliged to do certain work of consolidation. But nothing will remain of the nave and the choir of the church: "All the parts to be demolished shall be demolished down to and including the foundations. The rubbish caused by the demolition shall at first be thrown into the vaults of the church; consequently the ceilings of the aforesaid vaults shall be demolished, the ground shall be perfectly leveled and the surplus of the rubbish shall be transported into the fields." This is not all. The bishop reserves for his own share a hundred and sixty cubic meters of ashlar! The price of the sale was fixed at three thousand francs.
For six hundred dollars, they leveled to the ground a marvelous Gothic edifice, the largest church of the diocese except the cathedral; the choir was composed, as a matter of fact, of two bays, the transept likewise of two bays, and the nave of five; it was sixty meters long and twenty-six high. It is an excellent custom to carve upon the monuments the names of those who have built and repaired them. It would not be ill if upon the ruins of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes an inscription should recall the absurd demolition and the name of its author, Mgr. Leblanc de Beaulieu.
In 1821 the demolition was not yet complete, for Wallot found some difficulty in selling his ashlar. It is said that several houses of Soissons were built with the stone of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes.