The builder of Lisieux’ Lady chapel was Pierre Cauchon, president of the tribunal that sentenced Jeanne d’Arc to death. He did not erect his chapel, as some intimate, in expiation of his conduct at Rouen in 1431, for he remained to the end the creature of his country’s invaders. His detestation of Jeanne, moreover, was a personal affair, since it had been her triumph at Orléans, creating a national hope, that put heart into the citizens of Beauvais to expel their pro-English bishop. The English sent him to buy Jeanne from her captors. After the happenings in St. Ouen’s cemetery, by law Jeanne should have been passed into the control of the Church, but Cauchon ordered her back to her English prison, and when she again donned male attire, and again asserted that she had heard her voices, her unscrupulous enemies were enabled to accuse her of being a relapsed heretic and wanton, to start a new trial, and condemn her to death. Cauchon himself hastened to the fortress to witness Jeanne’s “relapse,” and with Lord Warwick he is said to have chuckled over it—“This time she’s well caught!” The morning that Jeanne was led to her execution she faced Cauchon fearlessly: “Bishop, I die by your hand. Had I been placed in the prisons of the Church, this would never have happened. You have left me in the clutches of my enemies. I call you before God, the great judge, to answer for the wrong you have done me.” Even as she so spoke a spirited statue now represents Jeanne in Cauchon’s Norman cathedral, while her judge is a condemned felon before the bar of history.
Like Arnoul, builder of Lisieux’ nave, Cauchon knew how to act a better part. As rector of Paris University he had been esteemed for his learning. But, coming to the parting of the ways, he chose the broad and easy path, and the rest followed. His influence encouraged the University of Paris in its pernicious betrayal of France after Henry V’s invasion. Cauchon won the see of Beauvais by defending Jean Sans Peur of Burgundy, in 1407, when the latter had murdered his cousin, the Duke of Orléans,[357] in the streets of Paris. And in the same hour that he thus truckled for advancement, Jean Gerson, the chancellor of Paris University, denounced the ducal crime—destined to be for France of incalculable consequence—and had his house sacked by Burgundians.
Ten years later, at the Council of Constances, in Switzerland Cauchon upheld the murderer, and Gerson rebuked the crime, whereupon he felt it to be wiser to quit Constances in disguise and to pass his latter life in retirement. Cauchon became the butcher of Jeanne d’Arc, his name forever an infamy; Gerson, dying in poverty and defeat at Lyons, was thought worthy, during two centuries, to be called the author of the Imitation of Christ, and before he passed away in July, 1429, it was given to him to learn that the Maid had triumphed at Orléans, and to testify that her mission was of God: Gratia Dei estensa est in hac puella; a Domino factum est istud.
Cauchon, ex-bishop of Beauvais, having placed his learning and energies at the service of his country’s invaders, ambitiously hoped to obtain Rouen as his thirty pieces of silver, but the Duke of Bedford compromised matters by bestowing on him the lesser see of Lisieux, in 1432. As the national cause prospered the traitor was more and more detested by the populace. When the Burgundian partisans of the English were expelled from Paris, the properties of the bishop of Lisieux in the capital were seized and he himself was mobbed. In 1442 he fell dead suddenly one day while his barber was shaving him. A few years later, when Jeanne was rehabilitated and her judge excommunicated, the populace broke open Cauchon’s tomb in the cathedral and flung his bones into the mire. His successor at Lisieux, Bishop Pasquier de Vaux, also one of Jeanne’s faithless judges, died alone, deserted, on the day that the French army entered his city as victors, in 1449. The after history of Lisieux Cathedral followed the same course as others in France; 1562 and 1793 wrecked its monuments and smashed its stained glass. In the Flamboyant Gothic church of St. Jacques—where not a capital breaks the ascending line—are some XVI-century windows, making it the first church with such remaining.
Lisieux can boast of no bishop canonized by the Church, but her citizens are doing all in their power to let Christendom know of the gentle Norman girl, Thérèse Martin, the “Little Flower,” who died in the odor of sanctity (1897) in the Carmelite convent of the town, before she had reached her twenty-fifth year. Her extraordinary cult, especially among soldiers during the World War, proves that the thirst for sainthood is as strong as ever in the peoples who went crusading and flung themselves toward heaven in cathedrals. Art springs from emotions such as that felt by Frenchmen for the “Little Flower.” To ignore such manifestations, as do the rationalists who still are insisting, as dogmatically as before 1914, that France, at root, is the land of Voltaire, is a willful shutting of the eyes to the basic forces that make history.
Those good people of Lisieux who are mystic-minded, who believe in order that they may understand, as Anselm taught at Bec near by, as Plato taught in Greece, feel subconsciously that their “Little Flower,” who said that only after her death would begin her real mission, is atoning for Pierre Cauchon.[358]
THE CATHEDRAL OF ÉVREUX[359]
Il en coûte cher pour devenir la France. Nous nous plaignons, et non sans droit, de nos épreuves et de nos mécomptes. Nos pères n’ont pas vécu plus doucement que nous, ni recueilli plus tôt et à meilleur marché les fruits de leurs travaux. Il y a dans le spectacle de leurs destinées de quoi s’attrister et se fortifier à la fois. L’histoire abat les prétentions impatientes et soutient les longues espérances.—Guizot.
The cathedral of Évreux is not homogeneous like that of Lisieux, but, gathering of different styles though it is, Romanesque, Gothic, early and late, neo-classic, it possesses its own distinct personality. A church of whose choir it has been said by one so competent to compare the cathedrals of his native land as M. Louis Gonse, that it is “one of the fairest bits of Gothic architecture in France,” surely can hold its own among more brilliant companions.
Two Romanesque edifices stood in succession on the site, not to speak of the Merovingian and Carolingian cathedrals here. Évreux is the Evora of Gallo-Roman times when it was ranked with Rouen and Tours. St. Patrick came hither in 432 for his consecration as bishop before his apostolate to Ireland. The first of the Romanesque cathedrals was dedicated in 1072 by Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury, but in 1119, when Henry I of England was besieging the city, it was destroyed for strategic purposes, by consent of its bishop, who was in the king’s camp. Henry and all his barons gave generous compensation, we are told by Ordericus Vitalis, the English monk who spent most of his life in the Norman monastery of St. Évroult, “delighting in obedience and poverty,” writing a history which is the chief XII-century record of the duchy.