How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly
to the see of Paris from Auxerre where he had begun the Gothic cathedral. The galerie des rois, whose date is about 1223, was no doubt his work. Such galleries are found only in cathedrals in the royal domain, and it is just as likely that they honor the kings of France as the kings of Judea as some maintain. The majority of the larger statues of Paris Cathedral are restitutions. Viollet-le-Duc had an English sculptor, George Frampton, make the gargoyles and grotesques of Notre Dame, since the Revolution wrecked most of the exterior sculpture.
Still another noted scholastic, Guillaume d’Auvergne (1228–29), was to rule the see of Paris while its chief church was building. He finished the northwest tower, which differed slightly in size and details from that to the south; across the face of the former are ten statues, whereas nine only are set before its companion tower. Perhaps a change of architects caused the disparity, or it may be that when the houses were cleared away for the erection of the north tower, more space was available. Bishop Guillaume d’Auvergne’s writings show him to have been one of the most original thinkers in the XIII century, a theologian, a philosopher, a mathematician, and one versed in Arab and in Greek literature. He became for St. Louis a kind of prime minister in ecclesiastical business, and, like the king, he founded hospitals and houses of charity. There is a charming page in Joinville’s reminiscences concerning this able man. A priest expressed his doubts to him on the Eucharist. Bishop Guillaume asked if he tried to resist the temptations, and he replied that he did so with all his force. “Now I,” said the good bishop, “have not a single doubt about the Real Presence. I am like the fortress of Montleheri, safe in the heart of France, far from the danger line; but you, who fight unceasingly, are like the king’s fortress of Rochelle in Poitou, on the frontier. Now, of us two, whom will the king most honor for guarding his fortresses?”
Peasant and prince, crusader and scholar, humanist and mathematician, men of exemplary lives, born rulers and guides, such were the builders of Notre Dame of Paris, and their ability and sincerity live eternally in their work.[82] They gave free wing to the soul in raising their great church, while they cheerfully accepted the human law of working within limits. No cathedral in France shows more clearly the relation between builders and building, more clearly vindicates the ideals of its age. The partisan historian may cite his instances to prove that the religion of that age was superstitious. While Notre Dame stands, such charges are refuted. It is a historical document as potent for the vindication of the truth as the Divina Commedia itself.
When Bishop Guillaume d’Auvergne had finished the towers of Notre Dame he caused to be made the open arcade from which they emerge, as from a royal peristyle. About the same time side chapels were inserted between the buttresses, and the line of small rose windows, which had hitherto marked the triforium story, was done away with, in order that the clearstory windows might be lengthened. Only step by step were the builders learning that they might open the entire space between the active members of a Gothic structure; the upper windows of Chartres had passed on the lesson to Paris.
The plan of the first architect was adhered to throughout, and since the later masters-of-works were likewise natives of the Ile-de-France and innate in them a classic restraint and a hardy daring (the hall-mark of the best Parisian art to this day), the cathedral of Paris was homogeneous. Midway in the XIII century Jean de Chelles, a precursor of Rayonnant Gothic, lengthened the transept arms by a bay and finished them with admirable façades. His name, and the date 1257, are cut on the foundation stone of the south façade. The sculpture of that southern entrance honors St. Stephen, since on the site had once stood a church dedicated to the first martyr; the tympanum of the door is another chef-d’œuvre of Notre Dame. Jean de Chelles was the first to use perforated gables. It is thought that on the north façade worked Pierre de Montereau, the architect of St. Denis. As the XIII century merged in the XIV Pierre de Chelles, probably a son of Jean, directed the making of the apse chapels and the superb flying buttresses which leap unhesitatingly over chapels and aisle and tribune gallery. He added the big tribune windows with gables.
The classic restraint which is the leading quality of Notre Dame was never poverty. Sculpture was lavish where it should be. At the portals the Scriptures were set forth in detail and saints were held up for the edification of the people. The signs of the zodiac were carved, as well as the personification of the seasons and the months. Pinnacle and parapet were weighted with winged beast or demon, and the useful water spouts, or gargoyles, were chiseled as crabbed images. However, one should always remember, in climbing the towers of Notre Dame, that most of the present stone monsters are modern, and it is one of the weaknesses of the restorer to overemphasize the grotesque in the art of the Middle Ages.
A strange world of fabulous creatures dwell on the roof of Our Lady’s church—conceptions that are half terrible and half fantastic, imaginations that are survivals of the old pagan superstitions which Christianity could not wholly extirpate. The XII and XIII centuries were not so far removed in time from the invasions of the northern Barbarians, and the Church made concessions to primitive inheritances. Artists were allowed to carve on roof or pinnacle the chimeras and vampires which through long centuries had haunted the imagination of their ancestors, provided that they expounded the truths of Christian doctrine in such principal places as portals, façades, and choir screens. Might not a mocking grotesque beside an angel be taken as emblem of the external antagonism of the animal and the spirit in man? The choir screen of Notre Dame of Paris is sculptured with the apparitions of the risen Lord, from Easter Day to the Ascension. “If Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain.”[83]
The cathedral of Paris during the first centuries of its existence was the setting of many national scenes. Here the kings of France deposited their crown and renewed their vow to be just fathers of their people. Before its altar their newborn heir was blessed. In 1182 the main altar of Notre Dame was consecrated, and three years later the patriarch of Jerusalem preached from it the Third Crusade. On the eve of both his crusades St. Louis prayed here, and in 1270, when his remains were brought back from Tunis, they rested in Notre Dame for a solemn night of chanted mourning.
In Notre Dame the Duke of Bedford had his nephew, Henry VI of England, crowned as king of France. Factional hate and a foreign enemy in control caused a Te Deum of rejoicing to be sung in this, the most national of French cathedrals, when the news came that Jeanne the Maid had been taken prisoner before Compiègne, in 1429, but solemn reparation was made in 1456, when, in the presence of Jeanne’s mother and brothers, the bishop of Paris (a Norman, and brother of the poet Alain Chartier) opened in Notre Dame the inquest that was to lead to the Rehabilitation of the heroine of Orleans.
To the hidden places over the vaults of Notre Dame fled the illustrious chancellor of Paris University, Gerson, to whom during two centuries was attributed the Imitation of Christ. In 1407 he had reprobated the murder of the Duke of Orléans (builder of Pierrefonds) by the Duke of Burgundy (of the regal Dijon tomb), and the mob rose and sacked his house. It is said that for months Gerson lay concealed in Notre Dame, alone with his books, and given over to prayer and meditation.
The present stained glass in Notre Dame is modern, save for the north, south, and west rose windows, the trilogy of light usually found in big cathedrals. The roses of the transept belong to the Paris school which led in the art of glassmaking during the second half of the XIII century. So large were the spaces then to be filled that the scrupulous patience of the St. Denis craftsmen was no longer possible. Backgrounds had to be made quickly by bold, simple trellis designs, and as the most frequent background was a red trellis on a blue field, and the juxtaposition of red and blue makes violet, in too many of the windows of that period prevails a melancholy purplish hue. Originally the choir of Notre Dame boasted some glass given by Abbot Suger himself to the preceding Romanesque cathedral. In the XVIII century, those over-confident gens de goût, the cathedral canons, whose taste admitted only the neo-classic, substituted uncolored glass for the ancient windows. They say that when the workmen were removing Suger’s priceless glass, they were dumfounded by its deep, ineffable blue.[84]
Many a treasure of Notre Dame was destroyed by the Revolution, and the church itself was put up for sale and escaped demolition by merest chance. It served as Temple of Reason, as warehouse, as fête hall. Again, during the Commune, in 1871, for the purpose of destroying it, chairs were piled high in the choir and set on fire, but brave men broke in the doors