The city which gave its name to the terrible episode of the XIII century lies forty miles east of Toulouse. The local saying is, “Who has not seen the cathedral of Albi and the tower of Rodez has seen nothing.” Albi Cathedral yields to none in its gaunt majesty. It stands apart in one’s visions of travel, as unique a memorial of past history as the Mount of the Archangel off the coast of Normandy, as Vézelay looking out over the soft valleys of Burgundy, as Le Puy on its basaltic pinnacles. Never was a monument more absolutely itself.
Unfrequented Albi was once in the stir of life, and over its stone bridge, built nine centuries ago, have passed the notable folk of the Middle Ages[235] as they wended their way to Santiago Compostela, whither all the world was going in those days. Time-scarred houses border the reddish Tarn; dark, decayed streets climb the hill. At a curve of the river, bastions and ramparts rise in terraces to a fortified episcopal palace and—crowning all—the enormous bulk of the cathedral. Its long, stark wall strikes the sky in a formidable straight line. The west façade is a massive donjon, four hundred feet above the Tarn. No welcoming west portals here, no extended transept arms of sacrificial mercy, no soaring buttress, no leaping pinnacles. Not the lore of Christ, “Do as you would be done by,” seems to have inspired Albi, but the Hebraic spirit of breaking one’s enemies’ bones, as if the Jehovah of the Old Testament, outraged by Albigensian blasphemies, here asserted himself in a temple that would forever be a looming menace for heretics.
Albi’s forbidding structure rose between those two harsh epochs—the Albigensian Crusade and the Hundred Years’ War. Its aggressive mass was planned by a most aggressive churchman, Bernard, Cardinal de Castanets, the city’s learned bishop detested of the people as their uncompromising feudal master, as well as a spiritual chief so harsh in his inquisitorial functions that a pontifical commission was appointed, in 1306, to repair his excesses. In 1282 Bernard de Castanets laid the first stone of Albi Cathedral and for twenty years he and the chapter contributed a twentieth of their revenues. The church was finished by the sixty-fifth bishop, Guillaume de la Voulte, in the last years of the XIV century.
To approach the cathedral at its apse end is not so picturesque as from the river side, but it is formidable enough. The prodigious apse rises abruptly, imperiously, from the town square. One fairly shivers beneath its Tolosan brick walls, overtowering and overpowering, broken merely by a few narrow windows—surely the narrowest ever made in a Gothic church—and by uniform bastion-tower buttresses. Gargoyles, of as alien an aspect as those of the Jacobins’ at Toulouse, crane their gaunt necks from the upper walls, as if asking what manner of Gothic this is.
Albi Cathedral is the meridional interpretation of the national art. The traditions of Rome held tenaciously in southern France, where builders disliked to show the machinery by which their edifices stood. The buttresses at Albi are in larger part hidden within the church under the guise of walls between the side chapels. The flying buttress is uncommon in the Midi. Like Rome again, with her preference for an unencumbered floor space, Albi’s immense interior is unbroken by aisles. The vault’s diagonals spring over a width of sixty feet—a span unrivaled by any in the north. Albi Cathedral is a vast hall three hundred feet long, one hundred feet high, not high enough for its length, perhaps, but few will regret having the marvelous frescoed ceiling, “the missal of St. Cecilia,” brought nearer to the eye.
The tutelary of this fortress-church is the gentle patroness of music. Half the fascination of Albi comes from its convincing inconsistencies. It would seem that not Cécile—doubly feminine and gracious under her French name—but Michael Archangel with a brandished sword, should guard this rugged pile. As if the good people of Albi felt the incongruity, they added, long after Bishop de Castanets’ day, a southern portal preceded by a porch, the baldaquin, with all its elaborate Flamboyant tracery executed in a creamy-white marble in which surely Cécile, saint though she was, must have felt a personal satisfaction. An architect of genius set that marble porch of Albi against its red time-dulled walls, ’alabaster on corall’; one takes liberties with Chaucer’s rime:
And southward in a portal on the wall
Of alabaster white on red corall
An oratorie riche for to see,
In honor of the Roman Cicily.
To ascend to the marble baldaquin one passes under a fortified sculptured gateway, erected by the Dominican bishop of Albi, Dominique de Florence (1392-1410). The marble portal and porch were executed under Bishop Louis I d’Amboise (1472-1502) and his successor, Louis II d’Amboise (1502-11) his nephew, belonging to an enlightened family all of whose members excelled in affairs, war, letters, and art, leaving their memorials at Chaumont on the Loire, their feudal seat, at Cluny, Paris, Clermont, Gaillon, and Rouen.
Louis I d’Amboise also adorned the interior of his cathedral by the sumptuous screen of white stone that surrounds the choir, leaving a passageway between it and the side chapels. The rood-loft, or jubé (so called because from its balcony the clerk chanted Jube Domine dicere before the gospel), is sculptured with the ermine of Anne of Brittany and the lilies of France, being made about 1499, when Anne wedded Louis XII. Bishop Louis at Albi was brother of the king’s prime minister, Cardinal Georges d’Amboise.