Before witnesses and the ruler of Provence, Charles II d’Anjou (nephew of St. Louis), was opened one of the sculptured tombs in the Gallo-Roman noble’s funeral crypt now under the nave of St. Maximin. In the sarcophagus was found a manuscript, in a wooden coffer, relating that in the year of the Incarnation, 716, on December 6th, under King Odoin, the body of Mary Magdalene had been moved from its alabaster tomb, in this same crypt, to the plainer tomb of St. Sidonius, in order to save it from those felons, the Saracens. The uncritical mind of the age accepted the obvious forgery as genuine. It was worded in XIII-century, not VIII-century Latin, the use of the term Incarnation for dating was an anachronism, and no such king as Odoin ever existed. Why should it have been expected that Saracens would spare one tomb more than the other, asks the courageous Monseigneur Duchesne. But why feel too critical of the pious fraud, since the genuine enthusiasm it aroused led to the building of the most imposing Gothic church in Provence and the one most pure in style, an edifice that inspired the imposing modern church of St. Vincent de Paul at Marseilles.

In 1295 Charles II d’Anjou[262] (1285-1309) began St. Maximin, which he passed into the care of the Dominicans. Abbé Albanès has discovered that the architect’s name was Jean Bandier. During two centuries the Angevin rulers of Provence continued the church, and good King René finished it before he died in 1480. As the first plans were adhered to, the edifice possesses unity save for a few Flamboyant windows in the aisles. Those side aisles of St. Maximin are almost as high as the central vessel; they braced the main span and did away with the need of flying buttresses. Traits of Midi Gothic are the exceedingly narrow windows, the lack of a triforium, and uncut bands for capitals, though the omission of sculpture may be due to the fact that the abbatial belonged to a mendicant Order, vowed to poverty. St. Maximin’s piers soar majestically from pavement to vault springing, nor has nobility of proportion been sacrificed in its severe granite interior.

AIX-EN-PROVENCE[263]

Le désordre des malheureux est toujours le crime de la dûreté des riches.—Vauvenargues (1715—47; born in Aix-en-Provence).

The cathedral of St. Sauveur is a composite edifice needing skilled archæologists to decipher it. Its semicircular apse, without ambulatory or chapels, was begun by Bishop Rostan de Noves. Its nave, of the XIV century (with typical capitals whose foliage is disposed in two bands), shows vestiges of a far more ancient church. The nave’s north aisle is neo-classic. The south aisle, called Corpus Domini, is Romanesque, and was held to be the ancient cathedral, since it conforms to the classic type of the regional Romanesque school, such as the Dom at Avignon.

M. Labande has demonstrated that this pre-Gothic portion of Aix Cathedral was originally a church for the laity, built between 1150 and 1180 and dedicated to St. Maximinus, and that it was planted along the side of a church for the canons, dedicated to Notre Dame in 1108. Vestiges of this latter church are the ancient parts in the actual nave of St. Sauveur.

The Corpus Domini has its own sculptured doorway, and three bays covered by a barrel vault carried on pointed arches. Over the fourth bay is a shallow cupola ridged with eight pilasters in a manner inherited from ancient Rome. Classic, too, are the columns now arranged to form a baptistry.

Aix was the capital in Provence of the art-loving Anjou princes of the Capetian line. Under them in 1476 was begun St. Sauveur’s beautifully restrained Flamboyant Gothic façade and tower. In the nave is a stone reredos of 1470 called the Tarasque, from the dragon of St. Martha represented in it, and under King René’s inspiration was made the splendid triptych of the Burning Bush by the French primitif, Nicolas Froment, born in Avignon, but impregnated with the Flemish spirit of Van Eyck. King René kneels in one panel, and his second wife, Jeanne de Laval, in the other; the outer side of the folding panels is painted in grisaille. The Burning Bush was taken as a symbol of the Virgin’s integrity. The carved doors at the west entrance of St. Sauveur, rich with prophets and sibyls, are ranked with the noted doors of Beauvais and Rouen.

While the church of St. Maximinus, or the present south aisle of St. Sauveur, was building, a student at the University of Aix, across the way from its cathedral, was St. Jean de Matha (1156-1213), one of those good men of history who accomplished a great work but are overlooked by posterity. In Aix he passed his leisure waiting on the poverty-stricken sick. Then he went up to the Paris schools to perfect himself in theology, and good Bishop Maurice de Sully, then building Notre Dame, became interested in him, and with the prior of St. Victor’s, after attending the young Midi noble’s first Mass, prophesied that this was a soul chosen of God. Because Jean de Matha had been born in the south, a witness of Islam’s piracies, he vowed himself at his first Mass to the redemption of Christian captives. His fellow student at Paris, Innocent III, approved the new Trinitarian Order called popularly Maturins because their Paris house was dedicated to St. Maturin. So rapidly did it spread that before long it had fifty houses in far-off Ireland, and as many in England. In its annals are the names of all the western nations. Jean de Matha, until his death, passed backward and forward to Africa. When the first boatload of redeemed captives landed at Marseilles a cry of thanksgiving rose in Christendom. Sometimes a brother of the Order would remain in a captive’s place, when his funds for ransoming prisoners gave out. In Granada, Maturins were martyred. In the year 1260 five thousand Christians were redeemed from Islam prisons by these devoted men. And for five centuries the good work went on, so that we hear of Trinitarians freeing Christians from Mohammedans in the reign of Louis XIV. Cervantes was released from African captivity by the sons of St. Jean de Matha, else we would have no Don Quixote. All through the dark episodes of the Albigensian wars these lives of unobtrusive Christian charity endured. Their deeds have not been trumpeted to the winds. I dare say the historian who rings the changes on the Tuez-les-tous phrase never heard of St. Jean and his Maturins.

AVIGNON[264]