—Ernest Psichari (1883-1914).

The cathedral of St. Tugdual obtained its name from the founder of a local monastery, a nephew of St. Brieux, who had crossed from Britain with the returning missionary, St. Germain of Auxerre, and in Armorica had established a religious house which eventually gave its name to a Breton city. No church of the region demonstrates more clearly how difficult it is to obtain full Gothic effect with granite. Lacking sculpture, the art is necessarily abortive.

The interior of Tréguier is dark and forbidding. The capitals of the graceless octagonal piers are merely uncut bands. There are Norman balustrades and a Norman interior passage below the clearstory lights. The name of the architect, Goneder, was recently unearthed by M. de la Borderie. From the previous Romanesque cathedral was retained the Tour Hastings which now terminates the northern arm of the transept. Toward the western end of the church the molds of the archivolts die off in the piers.

The nave rose from 1296 to 1333; then came the pause of the Hundred Years’ War. Building was resumed—always on the original Rayonnant lines—by Bishop Jean de Coëtquis (1450-61), whose relative, of the same name, was finishing the nave of Tours Cathedral. The charming Flamboyant cloisters of Tréguier were made from 1461 to 1468, and with the Tour Hastings they compose one of the oft-sketched architectural groups of the country. St. Tugdual has suffered by wars and revolutions, being damaged by the English in 1347, by the Spaniards in 1592, the Liguers in 1594, and the Revolution’s cyclone passing here as elsewhere.

In the nave of Tréguier Cathedral stands a sumptuous Gothic monument to honor Brittany’s patron saint, Yves de Helori, born in 1253, a mile from the town in the manor of Kernartin—modern Minihy. On the nineteenth of every May Tréguier marches in procession to Minihy to commemorate the good man who cleared the region of evil-doers, built a hospital beside his home that he might himself wait on the stricken, rose at midnight to chant matins, preached sometimes five sermons a day, and was the poor man’s lawyer, so a popular hymn relates: “An advocate and not a thief, a thing almost beyond belief.” The pardon of St. Yves, the Pardon of the Poor, is one of the five chief ones of Brittany. For centuries those who had pending law cases repaired to his primitive tomb. Thus Henry VII, Tudor, crossed from England the year before he won his kingship, to petition the favor of the Breton saint who had supported only just causes in law. Universities selected him as their patron.

St. Yves was the son of a knight who went crusading with St. Louis. When sent, at fourteen, to Paris University, he sat with other young scholars on the rush-strewn floors to listen to the scholastics; even in his student days he visited the sick poor in the hospitals. Before thirty he entered the episcopal magistry, and henceforth his abilities were devoted to the relief of orphans and widows. This good man, after whom myriads of the sons of Brittany have been named, worked assiduously, it is said, to collect funds for the building of the Gothic cathedral of Tréguier.

In a street near the cloisters of St. Tugdual, Ernest Renan was born in 1828, his name deriving from an Irish anchorite of VI-century Armorica. From his Breton father he derived his gravity, respect, faith, and imagination; from his mother’s Gascon stock his irony, gayety, and serenity in skepticism, the result being, as he himself said, a tissue of contradictions. Brittany took his Vie de Jésus as a personal affront. That a son of hers, once destined for the priesthood, should call her dear Christ of Calvary a “sorcerer,” a “demi-impostor,” a “géant sombre,” “un fin et joyeux moralist,” pierced her to the soul. When, beside the cathedral of Tréguier, partisan politics raised a Renan statue (singularly inartistic), whose inscription was taken as an affront by every believing Christian, two million Bretons donated toward the erection of a monumental protest. The Calvary of Reparation stands at the entrance to Tréguier, voicing the cry attributed to the dying Julian the Apostate, “Thou hast conquered, Galilæan!”

The son of Renan’s daughter was that chosen soul, Ernest Psichari, who fell defending Belgium in August, 1914, a death considered by mystic Brittany to be an atonement. He has told of his spiritual anguish, “without defense against evil, without protection against sophistry, wandering without conviction in the poisoned gardens of vice, sick to the soul and ever pursued by obscure remorse, weighed down by the bitter derision of a life ruled by disordered sentiments and thoughts.” In his Appel des Armes and his Voyage du Centurion he has traced his pilgrimage from materialism to Christian belief, taking “contre son père le parti de ses pères.” His grandfather, of Tréguier, in Armorica, had written many years earlier: “The characteristic trait of the Breton race is idealism—the disinterested pursuit of a moral or intellectual aim. The Celt craves the Infinite. He thirsts for it, seeking it beyond all the prizes of the world.”

A SUMMING UP

All our France is in our cathedrals.... Initiation into the beauty of Gothic is initiation into the truth of our race, of our sky, of our landscape.... Gothic art is the sensible, tangible soul of France; it is the religion of the French atmosphere. We are not incredulous; we are merely unfaithful. We have lost at the same time the sense of our race and of our religion. To regain force we must live again in the past, revert to first principles. Taste reigned of yore in our country: we must become French again.