During excavations in 1765 a chamber, or bay, of rough workmanship was unearthed in the crypt, and in it was found a tomb inscribed as that of St. Gilles. This is all that remains of the church in which Urban II blessed an altar in 1096. On a buttress of the crypt an inscription states that its foundation was laid Easter Monday of 1116. The abbey had been damaged by an irate count of Toulouse, and Calixtus II asked Peter the Venerable to send from Cluny a new abbot to reorganize things.
The crypt’s north and west walls rose first, but the work was dropped and taken up several times. All the vaulting, whether groin or diagonals, was an afterthought, for all the piers have been rearranged for the masonry roof they now support. Only a few of the westernmost bays of the crypt used diagonals, and as their profiles are the same as those in the choir, building from 1140 onward, they are probably contemporary. Inscriptions on the outer west wall of the crypt prove that in 1142 people were buried there, which would indicate that the present stair to the west portal was not yet arranged. Perhaps for a time they were not sure of making an upper church above the spacious basement. By 1209 that upper nave was built, because Innocent III buried his murdered ambassador beside the tomb of St. Gilles, and when Raymond VI had performed public penance before the portal, we are told that he was brushed against by the crowd, and escaped through the lower church, passing his victim’s new tomb.
The imaged portal of St. Gilles, which inspired the porch of Trinity Church, Boston, is a composite mass of imagery begun in the XII century and continued till St. Louis’ day. Pilfered fragments were made use of, as was only natural in a region where Rome had left many monuments. Some of the pillars are the fluted marbles of antiquity; others are of granite. Fourteen columns and fourteen large images of apostles and angels give unity to the composition, as does the continuous wide frieze.
St. Gilles’ images, strong and short like the figures on the Gallo-Roman sarcophagi near the mouth of the Rhone, are perfectly proportioned to the place they occupy, cold, impersonal figures, more architectural than sculptural, the fruit of an old art, not the beginning of a new tradition, as was the theory of Herr Vöge, who would trace to Provence the origin of French Gothic sculpture. M. de Lasteyrie contended that the Porte Royale at Chartres—first of the Gothic portals, last of the Romanesque—with its long, slender figures in whose visages expression has been attempted, descends from the imaged portals of Burgundy, not from St. Gilles or St. Trophime, but from a nascent rather than a dying art tradition. The Lombard school gave to St. Gilles its lion caryatides, a very popular feature at church doors; Lanfranco, who remade Modena’s cathedral in 1099, had been the first to plant pillars on the backs of lions, perhaps copying some lost work of antiquity.
“A world in itself,” said Prosper Merimée of St. Gilles’ sculptured portal. Under the biblical scenes of the frieze animals crouch and crawl. Some of the frieze groups, such as the Flagellation, are full of spirit, and must be of later date than certain other stiff archaic figures. The Kiss of Judas with its grimacing soldiers is probably a XVII-century restoration. The only time that the Expulsion from the Temple was treated in the older work was here. The sisters Martha and Mary and their brother Lazarus, with Mary Jacobi and Mary Salome, are all imaged at St. Gilles’ door. The tradition of their arrival in Provence was gaining in favor every day while this portico was making.
The savants inform us, though not patriotic Provençal savants, that no mention of the saints of Bethany is to be found in Provence before the middle of the XI century. Monseigneur Duchesne of the Institute of France, who takes saints out of their niches as boldly as any Bollandist, tells us that it was the monks of Vézelay in Burgundy who first imagined the arrival in southern France of Mary Magdalene, in order to explain how it was they possessed her relics, the lodestar of their pilgrim shrine. Then, gradually, the legend grew till it was a remarkably full boatload that landed, in A.D. 40, at Les Saintes-Maries,[254] where the Little Rhone, on which stands St. Gilles, enters the Mediterranean: the risen Lazarus, whose relics were claimed by Autun in 1144; Martha, whose relics appeared at Tarascon in 1187 and caused a new church there to rise;[255] Marcella, the waiting woman of Martha and Mary; Maximinus, one of Our Lord’s disciples; Simon the leper; St. Sidonius; Joseph of Aramathea; and the Blessed Virgin’s sisters, Mary Jacobi, mother of James the Less, and Mary Salome, mother of James and John, and their dark handmaiden Sara, who became the patroness of gypsies.
Monseigneur Duchesne says that a grotto dedicated to the Virgin in the mountains east of Marseilles came to be regarded, by gradual unconscious fabrication, as the Sainte Baume where Mary Magdalene passed years of penitence, for the Midi wove the story of St. Mary the Egyptian with the saint of Bethany. All these holy people who had known the Lord fled from Syria after the martyrdom of St. Stephen and found asylum in southern France. The savants can prove what they will; while in Provence, in the “kingdom of sentiment,” one believes every word of it. Read Mistral’s Mireille and dare to be a skeptic! Under the leaden skies of Paris you may take the Institute’s learning seriously. But gazing at la grand bleu, the frequented highway between Syria and Gaul when Roman Emperors ruled both, you say to yourself that it all could have happened. For hundreds of years the people of Provence have been made better and happier because they have believed that the historic family of Bethany who entertained the Lord were entertained by them.
ST. TROPHIME AT ARLES[256]
| Seigneur, des lois et voies antiques, nous avions quitté; l’austérité, vertus, coutumes domestiques, nous avions tout détruit, démoli.... | Seigneur, pour tant d’aversités, de massacres, d’incendies; pour tant de deuil sur notre France, pour tant d’affronts sur notre front, |
| Seigneur, nous sommes tes enfants prodigues; mais nous sommes tes vieux chrétiens: que ta justice nous châtie, mais au trépas, ne nous laisse point.... | Seigneur, désarme ta justice! Jette un regard par ici-bas; et enfin écoute les cris de meurtris et des blessés!... |
| Seigneur, au nom des pauvres gens, au nom des forts, au nom des morts—qui auront péri pour la patrie, pour leur devoir, et pour leur foi!... | Seigneur, nous voulons devenir des hommes; en liberté— tu peux nous mettre! Gallo-Romans et fils de noble race, nous marchons droit dans notre pays. |
| —(Literal French translation of Mistral’s “Psaume de la pénitence,” 1870.) | |