Under the southern flank of the shattered cathedral nestles the diamond of Primary Gothic art in France, the transept arm built by the crusading bishop, Nivelon de Chérisy. As by a miracle it has escaped. The most exquisite thing in France, many of us hold it to be. It has drawn its devotees back to Soissons time and time again, this perfect thing so little heralded. They would test a second and a third time the overpowering first impression it had made. Perhaps it had been some happy mood, some subtle lingering shadows of the late afternoon, that had touched it momentarily to an ethereal grace. And then standing face to face again with its small and stately beauty, those who love this early-Gothic monument of France know that its power is not a chance or borrowed comeliness.
Sit before it for hours; study the mystery and play of its lights and shadows; try to seize in what lies its young poesy of grace, its maturity of dignity, “its invincible impression of virginity.” In vain to analyze it. Can that intangible quality which is sheer inevitable beauty be dissected? Those who fall under the spell of its supernal loveliness lose all false shame that would prune adjectives, lest their praise be excessive. No glow of words can convey the something celestial here. The nave and the choir of Soissons Cathedral are XIII-century Gothic at its prime, and yet they seem merely to be the setting for a jewel, for the small apse preceded by one bay, which is the transept’s southern arm. That apse and bay are the culmination of the Romanesque ideals, and at the same time, indissolubly part of the new and richer art, they crown the Primary Gothic hour.
Soissons’ chief church is better documented than Laon’s. Bishop Nivelon I de Chérisy (a Chérisy fell on the field of honor in 1914) occupied the see from 1176 to 1207. The Romanesque cathedral which he inherited had become inadequate, so the bishop gave land from his episcopal garden, and about 1180 the foundation of the south arm of the transept was laid. Like Noyon’s transept, it terminated in a hemicycle, and its interior elevation was also in four stories, but here was attained a consummate symmetry not achieved at Noyon. Soissons’ curving transept arm is exceptional in having an ambulatory. The apsidal chapel which opens in its eastern wall has over it a similar chapel that gives on the tribune gallery. Slender columns with stilted arches are planted at the entrance of each of these chapels in the gracious fashion originated by the Champagne school of Gothic. It was born of a necessity, in order that a more regular vaulting might be built over the curving aisle. St. Remi at Rheims had used the same arrangement. So many are the points of resemblance between Soissons’ transept arm and the choir of St. Remi’s abbey church that it is thought the architect of the Champagne abbatial proceeded to Soissons later; there are the same profiles, the same plan, the same encircling frieze of sculpture. At Soissons, the architect had grown bolder and dared to diminish his supports. To have made Soissons’ curving wall of arches and colonnettes proves him to have been, not only well practiced in mason-craft, but a man of genius who had visions. He here created a thing apart. The exterior of the transept’s arm is unimpressive and plain; the lower windows are round-arched. Inside, the pointed arch reigns, however. “The king’s daughter is all glorious within.”
The prelate who built Soissons Cathedral was a remarkable personage and played a foremost part on the Fourth Crusade. Villehardouin tells us that it was Bishop Nivelon de Chérisy who was sent as an envoy to Innocent III, when against papal commands the Crusaders had turned aside to capture the Christian city of Zara on the Dalmatian coast. The bishop-ambassador found the pope at Viterbo and obtained from him the raising of the excommunication on condition that the knights should proceed direct to Palestine. We all know how, a second time, they went filibustering. Among the first to scale the walls of Constantinople was Nivelon de Chérisy; with him was the bishop of Troyes. When the chief barons met to elect the first Latin emperor of Constantinople, it was Bishop Nivelon who passed out to the waiting crowd to announce that Baldwin of Flanders had been chosen—Baldwin who began the Cloth Hall at Ypres—and it was he who crowned Baldwin in St. Sophia. When that new emperor was captured by the Bulgars the bishop of Soissons returned to Europe for aid.
All the time that he was absent in the Holy Land Nivelon had devoted the revenues of his see toward the renewal of the cathedral. Strangely enough, it was this same prelate who also built Soissons’ choir, which in scale and plan differs so radically from the transept arm. The fleeting hour of Primary Gothic was over. The new art was moving forward swiftly; irresistible the development of its principles and impossible at such a time that the work of one decade could be similar to the decade preceding it unless, as at Laon, the primitive plan was insistently adhered to. Whoever the master that designed Soissons’ choir and nave, he incorporated the perfect transept into his bigger church with reverence. Not to dwarf it was his main care, for he bowed before the touch of perfection in his predecessor’s work, and sought to give to his own monument, different though it was, a like clarity and noble simplicity. Examine the skill with which choir and nave are joined to the small transept arm. It is lower than they, it has four vertical stories to their three, and yet no discrepancy is felt. It was as if the new builder said: “Here is a miracle of force and grace, done in a fugitive hour never to be recaptured. Let us enshrine it fittingly.”
In 1212 services were held in the finished choir. The nave proceeded without interruption and was in use in the first years of St. Louis’ reign. Probably the final touches were given to it by that bishop of Soissons of whom Joinville tells, Mgr. Jacques de Castel, fort et vaillant homme, who started with the king on the crusade of 1248. After Mansourah’s battle and the disastrous retreat toward Damietta good Bishop Jacques felt such a desire “to go to God” that he rushed alone to attack the infidels, whose swords soon “dispatched him to God’s company with the martyrs.”
Singular good taste has at all times guided the builders of Soissons. The XIV century decided to make a northern arm to the transept; and as if to avoid all hint of rivalry with its peerless neighbor, the new structure was finished by a flat end wall without a portal.
The cylinder piers of Soissons choir and nave are a distinguishing trait of the church interior, neither too high nor too short. Before each is engaged a slender shaft which rises to the level of the springing and causes the edifice to appear more lofty than its reality. Everywhere, in the church, the fitting of the stones was done with peculiar nicety, though the picking out of the mortar lines in black, a recent innovation, was a sad mistake. In the choir and nave the clearstory windows were an advance on those of Chartres, their model, for the lights were made longer, and the oculus, above the twin lancets, smaller, which gave greater compactness to the whole composition. St. Gereon at Cologne copied these windows. Marburg’s church also was aided by Soissons.
The talc of this desolate city during the World War is heartrending. The Germans first entered Soissons on September 1, 1914. The mayor had fled. But an admirable woman, Madame Macherez, the widow of a senator, went to the état-major of the Prussians and assumed the responsibility to keep order among the civilians: “Le maire c’est moi.” Already the poets of France have enshrined the memory of this heroine of sixty winters who saved her city from pillage:
Le regard bleu comme strié de lave
De Jeanne Macherez qui nous sauva Soissons.
Ah! la vieille brave!