How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly
to the level of the roof. Later changes have repaired some of the stupidity of those tasteless renovators.
The very history which had been enacted within the walls of the great abbatial would suffice to make it a national relic. To the Primary-Gothic church which Suger was building came Louis VII for the oriflamme, the banner carried before the army in momentous wars. He shared bed and board with the monks the night before he set forth on the Second Crusade. To the same early-Gothic church, in 1190, came his son Philippe-Auguste, to receive the oriflamme for the Third Crusade. The flame-colored abbey gonfalon on its gold lance flouted the German emperor when Bouvines’ great victory was won in 1214. At the funeral of Philippe-Auguste, in 1223, a little lad of eight marched to St. Denis’ behind his grandfather’s bier. It was the first time that the populace had beheld their future saint-king, and an old record tells how his noble bearing gladdened their hearts. At his side walked Jean de Brienne, king of Jerusalem, leader of the recent Fifth Crusade. When St. Louis came to St. Denis for the oriflamme in 1247, it was to find a totally reconstructed church, for Pierre de Montereau had been many years at work. Joinville in his memoirs described the landing in Egypt of the Royal Abbey’s banner, how for miles the sea was dotted with the gleaming ships of the crusaders, how the king, standing head and shoulders above the rest, on perceiving that the leading vessel which bore the oriflamme had touched shore, leaped into the sea, sword in hand, with the cry, “Montjoye St. Denis!” And uttering the same battle cry of France, princes and knights followed. Five years later, tested by defeat and imprisonment, as fine gold is by fire, Louis IX brought back the oriflamme to St. Denis. Again he returned for it in 1270 for his last crusade. Within a year, the whole nation, in mourning, came out to the abbey. In a reliquary, the king’s bones, embalmed with fragrant spices, had been brought from Tunis, and the new king bore the châsse solemnly, and wherever he paused, on the way from Notre Dame to St. Denis, a memorial cross was erected. But, to give the annals of the abbey church would be to tell the history of the French monarchy.
The first time that the gonfalon of St. Denis was carried against Frenchmen was in 1413, two years before the defeat at Agincourt, in the black days of the Hundred Years’ War, days as fatal to the builders’ art as to the civic life of France. What those dire times were that rent France to shreds, and how la fille de Lorraine à nulle autre pareille came to the rescue, have been sung by a poet whose high destiny it was to fall in recent battle. Charles Péguy, in his poem, linked the momentous epochs of the capital: St. Denis, who brought the Light; Ste. Geneviève, the sentinel patroness of Paris, who guarded it, and Jeanne d’Arc, who lifted up the torch from the mire—the torch which the fallen heroes of the World War have passed on refulgent.
In the V century it was at Geneviève’s instigation that a basilica was raised to honor St. Denis. In the XV century Jeanne d’Arc paid tribute to the first martyr of Paris. Her troops lodged in the town of St. Denis, then moved in closer to Paris, and in a shrine dedicated to St. Denis, in the village of La Chapelle, Jeanne heard Mass, the morning that she led the assault on the walls of Paris, September 8, 1429. When wounded she was carried back to La Chapelle (to-day a dense industrial faubourg of the city), and on St. Denis’ altar she offered tribute. During her trial at Rouen they asked her what arms she had offered to St. Denis.[37]
“A complete knight’s outfit in white, with a sword that I had won before Paris,” was Jeanne’s reply. “And why did you make that offering?” asked the judge, bent on twisting her every act to sorcery. Jeanne answered hardily: “For devotion, and because it is the custom for all men-of-arms when they are merely wounded thus to give thanks. Having been wounded before Paris, I offered my arms to St. Denis because his is the cry of France.”
But let Charles Péguy speak, he who fell between Belgium and Paris in August, 1914:[38]
Comme Dieu ne fait rien que par miséricordes,
Il fallut qu’elle [Ste. Geneviève] vît le royaume en lambeaux,
Et sa filleule ville embrasée aux flambeaux,
Et ravagée aux mains des plus sinistres hordes;
Et les cœurs dévorés des plus basses discordes,
Et les morts poursuivis jusque dans les tombeaux,
Et cent mille innocents exposés aux corbeaux,
Et les pendus tiront la langue au bout des cordes;
Pour qu’elle vît fleurir la plus grande merveille
Que jamais Dieu le père en sa simplicité
Aux jardins de sa grâce et de sa volonté
Ait fait jaillir par force et par necessité;
Après neuf cent vingt ans de prière et de veille,
Quand elle vit venir vers l’antique cité …
La fille de Lorraine à nulle autre pareille …
Gardant son cœur intact en pleine adversité,
Masquant sous sa visière une efficacité, Tenant tout un royaume en sa ténacité, Vivant en pleine mystère avec sagacité, Mourant en plein martyre avec vivacité … Jetânt toute une armée aux pieds de la prière.[39]
CHAPTER III
Some of the Primary Gothic Cathedrals: Noyon, Senlis, Sens, Laon, Soissons
C’est vers le Moyen Âge énorme et délicat, Qu’il faudrait que mon cœur en panne naviguât. … Roi, politicien, moine, artisan, chimiste, Architecte, soldat, médecin, avocat, Quel temps! Oui, que mon cœur naufragé rembarquât. Pour toute cette force ardente, souple, artiste! … Guidé par la folie unique de la Croix Sur tes ailes de pierre, ô folle Cathédrale! —Paul Verlaine, Sagesse, IV.[40]
The cathedral of Paris was also begun in the primary stage of the national art. But Notre Dame of Paris must have a chapter to itself. Before its main parts were completed, Gothic architecture had reached its culminating point. With it ended the primary group and opened what we shall call the Era of the Great Cathedrals, though let it be remembered that all such divisions are arbitrary and made use of merely for clearness. From its first assured steps to its apogee, from the middle of the XII century to the middle of the XIII, the sequence of Gothic architecture is welded too logically to be defined by cut-and-dried nomenclature.
During the XII century, the Gothic cathedrals retained Romanesque features, such as deep tribunes over the side aisles, which gave them a wall elevation in four stories—pier arcade, tribune, triforium (to veil the lean-to roof over the tribune), and clearstory. At first it was common usage to encircle the clustered shafts at intervals with stone rings, but by the XIII century the desire for an unbroken ascending line had grown stronger, and the employment of such horizontal bands died out. The simultaneous use of both round and pointed arch is found in all five of these Primary cathedrals; but after the opening of the XIII century, semicircular and equilateral arches rarely were used at the same time in a church. Slowly, as if with reluctance, the new architecture dropped favorite traits of the old school. Sculpture continued longest faithful to Romanesque traditions.
Noyon,