How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly
is as harmonious and as intellectual as it is graceful.—Cardinal Newman.
St. Leu d’Esserent is one of the small but perfect churches of the classic Ile-de-France that satisfy both eye and soul by the exquisite justness of their proportions. Its serene white charm is unobtrusive. Only a master of the inmost heart of France could have produced the assured rightness of its proportions. Unforgettable are the moments spent in this Benedictine abbatial on the Oise; sometimes up and down its lovely white avenue flits some happy lost bird, rejoicing in the paradise of quietude he has found.
The quarries round St. Leu d’Esserent were noted, and many a church of France has been made of their firm white stones. The origin of Gothic art is comprised, thinks M. Lefèvre-Pontalis, in this region where good quarries abounded, with Senlis taken as a center. A line from Senlis to Laon, if carried round, would pass through Rheims, Provins, Montereau, Étampes, Vernon, Amiens, Péronne, St. Quentin. Well within that circumference lies St. Leu d’Esserent.
The Benedictine church stands on prominent foundations overlooking the river loved of Corot and Daubigny. The priory was founded and presented to great Cluny by a knight of Esserent as thank-offering for his ransom from the Saracens by monks of St. Benedict. Of the church built in that XI century, there remain only the two stout columns, with archaic capitals, which now are embedded in the westernmost bay of the nave.
About 1150 the present church was begun, and for a century continued building, in three distinct bouts of work. First was made the west façade, only one of whose Romanesque towers was ever finished with a spire, the octagonal faces of which were relieved by curious lancelike ridges not repeated elsewhere. In the narthex, or porch between the towers, was tried an experiment to eliminate the so-called domical shape of the first Gothic vaults. The transverse arches were loaded with masonry to raise them to the vault’s apex. Experimental also are the ungainly diagonals, in part ornamented with Norman chevrons, that span the tribune over the forechurch (c. 1150). The ribs are not free of the vault web, so elasticity is missing.
During the last quarter of the XII century, the chevet was built, as were the two towers placed beside the apse, an arrangement derived from Rhenish churches. Of that time, too (c. 1180), is the double bay, surmounted by a sexpartite vault which precedes the apse. There is no transept. The recently finished choir of Senlis Cathedral influenced the ambulatory and apse chapels of St. Leu. At Senlis and here occur the earliest examples of double flying buttresses. The six bays of the nave were added about 1220, after a pause in the works. Previously, each bay of the church had been lighted by a single lancet; now two lancets surmounted by an oculus were used, which added much dignity to the exterior aspect of the edifice. Over the axis chapel was built a second story. The unvaulted tribunes, above the side aisles, were transformed into a sort of triforium by building a wall slightly behind their arcaded openings. As that wall was pierced by some odd little square windows, this may be regarded as one of the first essays of a glazed triforium, the feature which was soon to develop into the decorative richness of St. Denis, Troyes, Le Mans, Tours, and Beauvais.
CHAPTER IV
Notre Dame of Paris and Other Churches of the Capital[71]
It is important to meditate often and with ardor and respect on the documents which the ancestors have left us.—St. Thomas Aquinas.
Of the four, the cathedral of Paris was the first built, and traits of the Romanesque epoch lingered in it, such as the tribune galleries over the side aisles, the division of its interior wall into four vertical stories, and the Byzantine feeling of its earlier sculpture. The piers were massive single columns of true majesty. In the sixth pier of the nave, counting from the east, an experiment was tried when an engaged shaft was added to its front. The seventh pier (c. 1192) marks a date in the development of Gothic structure since with it was made the type of ground support which was to predominate in the XIII century—four engaged shafts around a central pillar. When the middle core was made elliptical, as at Beauvais, the type pier was achieved.
Notre Dame of Paris used the sexpartite system which calls for alternating ground supports. Either the uniform piers here were laid before a sexpartite vault was thought of, or else the architect preferred them for æsthetic reasons, and in this case he certainly was right. Double aisles about both nave and choir differentiate the interior of Notre Dame of Paris from that of the average cathedral. The far-stretching aisles of this church compose vistas of unsurpassed picturesqueness and variety of perspective. Some have said that the central nave is not sufficiently wide for such a stretch of lateral aisles, and have found a certain monotony in the clearstory, tribune, and pier arcade being of equal height. Originally, beneath the clearstory were small circular unglassed apertures giving on the rafters over the tribune. Those oculi were done away with during the XIII century, when the clearstory windows were lengthened for the better lighting of the church. During his able restoration of Notre Dame, M. Viollet-le-Duc found hidden under the pavement some of the discarded window frames, and he took the liberty (which many regret) of replacing a few in the bays near the transept, thus marring the uniformity of the interior.
Despite the enlargement of the upper windows and the changes made to give more light to the tribunes, none can deny that, in gloomy weather, Notre Dame can be somber and even cavernous. Yet who, of its devotees, would have it different? Supreme cathedral it is for that supremest of hymns, the Dies Iræ—sound and sense and vision welded. To exchange its severe majesty for an expanse of brilliant glass—save Suger’s glass—is unthinkable. In Notre Dame you comprehend the spectacular repentances of the Middle Ages. Here, when pestilence stalked the city or the enemy was at the gate, have echoed the Miserere and the Libera nos, Domine.[72]
There is an individuality in the cathedral of Paris that overrides every criticism. Perpetually does the worshiper find in it new aspects, in the dim, low aisles full of mystery, in the gleam of transept windows as seen through the tribune arches while one listens, perhaps, to a lenten friar preacher discoursing of sin, justice, and the judgment to come; here on the very spot where Dominic himself taught the same sobering lessons; here where, six hundred years later, his son, Lacordaire, held the manhood of Paris spellbound. Or, again, one gazes down the length of the church, with its incomparable perspective, while around one rise the voices of strong men fresh from the battle of Verdun, fresh from their firm “They shall not pass,” and their Magnificat of thanksgiving to Notre Dame swells in a volume of sound like the eternal sea. The crusaders of St. Louis’ time prayed, too, for strength in Notre Dame of Paris.[73]
The curve of the sanctuary as seen from the west end of the nave is one of the splendors of the monument, and no chevet ever built surpassed it. The cause of the magic is practical—a structural problem solved, as is the case with the best aspects of Gothic art. At that eastern curve extra piers were inserted between the double aisles in order to obviate the difficulty of vaulting such irregular trapeze-shaped sections.
The enthusiast maintains that the exterior of Notre Dame surpasses that of all other cathedrals. Certainly better transept façades were never made nor was apse more romantic than that of the chief church of Paris, as it rises in three grandiose steps, with flying buttresses of wide span leaping with an audacity that fairly catches the breath; and again the success is a case of sound science solving a problem.
The west façade is an accepted classic, “an architectural glory of France,” irreproachable. Once the intelligence has grasped its pre-eminence, allegiance to it will