ST. GILLES[252]
Noms des Morts pour la Patrie,
Qu’on vous trie
Selons vos provinces; puis,
Pour propager votre culte,
Qu’on vous sculpte
Sur la borne et sur le puits!...
Mais d’abord, que votre zèle
Vous cisèle
Sur les maisons mêmes d’où
Pour aller vers le martyre,
Ils partirent
Dans le soleil du mois d’août.
... On lira sur la corniche
Pauvre ou riche:
“Mort pour nous ... un tel ... un tel....”
Trois fois, tous bas, comme on prie,
On s’écrie:
“Morts pour nous ... pour nous ... pour nous!”
—Edmond Rostand (1868-1918; born in Marseilles).[253]
To this day on the stones of St. Gilles’ abbatial are the graffiti of ships and warriors—a king among them—scratched by the swords of St. Louis’ crusaders before they crossed to their death in Africa, 1270. The sadly dilapidated bourg which is St. Gilles to-day played a prominent part in the important centuries of the Middle Ages. Many were the popes and kings who visited it to venerate the tomb of the VIII-century hermit, Ægidius, from Athens, whose cult was widely spread over western Christendom, as many a church image and window showing the holy man and his fawn remain to tell.
The counts of Toulouse were the chief patrons of the abbey. On the First Crusade, Raymond IV of Toulouse bore the title Count of St. Gilles. Raymond VI held here, in 1208, an interview with the papal legate, Guy de Castelnau, the after-consequences of which precipitated the Albigensian wars. Angry words were uttered by the count when the legate rebuked him for shielding the heretics, and the next day the legate was murdered by one of the count’s retainers as he was about to cross the Rhone. Thereupon Innocent III declared the Albigensian Crusade. In the following year Raymond VI performed penance before the church door of St. Gilles—the last public canonical penance of the Middle Ages. The disasters of the house of Toulouse diminished the abbey’s building funds.
The discussions over the date of St. Gilles have been of importance because of its relation to the school of Provençal sculpture of which the most notable monument is its triple portal. Before St. Gilles’ western end is a mass of composite imagery, of different dates and material, yet composing an architectural unit. Six bays of the nave are covered by a masonry roof of the XVIII century; only the piers and side walls of the edifice are ancient. Beyond the nave lie the ruins of the choir, in which has been installed an open-air archæological museum.
Did the choir of St. Gilles still stand, it would be the best Gothic monument in the south of France, exceptional in possessing an ambulatory and radiating chapels. At its entrance still exists a spiral staircase, the vis de St. Gilles, the first of its kind constructed, which many a mason of the Middle Ages journeyed hither to see. The steps compose an annular vault, winding like a corkscrew.
According to M. Labande, the choir of St. Gilles was built from 1140 to 1175, and at first there was no intention of vaulting it with diagonals. As the walls rose, however, a Gothic vault was prepared for. The nave, whose capitals have well-cut acanthus leaves, was erected from 1175 to 1209. It could not have been finished when in 1265 Clement IV rebuked his fellow citizens of St. Gilles for their delay in completing their church. Clement had been a local lawyer—a Romanesque house is still pointed out as his—by name, Guy Fouquet, or Fulcodi. The death of his wife caused him to embrace religion. When raised to St. Peter’s chair, such was his dread of nepotism that he wrote to his daughters they were not to expect matches any more important than if he were a simple knight; we learn that the well-admonished young ladies failed to obtain any husbands at all. This pope, whom St. Louis called “notre aimé et féal Guy,” instigated the crusade of 1270, which was associated in the hour of its departure with his own town.
Despite his exhortation, St. Gilles’ choir was joined to its nave only in the XIV century, as is proved by the rows of Rayonnant Gothic foliage on the capital of the nave’s easternmost bay. The XVI-century religious wars devastated the abbey, which now was held by Calvinists, now by Catholics; and finally the Huguenots, after using the church as a citadel, ordered that it be razed. The tower was mined and its fall wrecked all around it, but the arrival of the king’s troops saved the edifice from entire destruction; as the masonry roof had collapsed, a bastard-Gothic restoration of the nave was undertaken from 1650 to 1670. Then came the Revolution; the choir was sold and its stones carted away. So dead seemed all appreciation of the national art that the constitutional curé of St. Gilles clamored for the demolition of the famous triple portal, as its images “were insupportable reminders of past servitude, recalling the odious feudal régime, displeasing to lovers of liberty and equality.” Till the middle of the XIX century the church was abandoned.