For ten days the Germans occupied the town. The first battle of the Marne caused their departure on September 12th. Then a French reverse in January, 1915, let them draw near enough to the city to bring it within the range of fire, and such was its tragic fate till the Germans’ strategic retreat in the spring of 1917. The enemy had intrenched himself solidly in the vast quarries on the left bank of the Aisne, and month after month poured his fire on desolated Soissons. Then came the final grand act of the war. Rolling forward in overwhelming numbers in March, 1918, the invaders drove the French troops from Soissons after a desperate resistance in the streets. There they encamped until the first days of the following August, when the French army re-entered the smoking ruins of a dead city over which stood a phantom cathedral.
Noyon, Senlis, Sens, Laon, and Soisson, are with Notre Dame of Paris the first cathedrals of the national art. They are far from being the complete list of Primary Gothic monuments, which includes such churches as the Trinité at Vendôme, two churches at Étampes,[63] the collegiate of Notre Dame at Mantes, the Trinité at Fécamp, and Lisieux Cathedral. There are the two towers built in an hour of religious enthusiasm: the clocher vieux at Chartres and the belfry of St. Romain at Rouen. The nave of Angers Cathedral is the Primary Gothic of the Plantagenet school.
The Attica of Gothic art is the Ile-de-France, and where Picardy touches it on the north, and Champagne on the south. In that land filled with never-to-be-forgotten churches speaks the clarity of French genius in its classic simplicity. The beauty of such churches comes from their rightness of proportion, that quality which gives the most enduring joy in architecture, beyond all richness of detail or startling effect. From such churches one learns the difference between the architect born and the architect made. The supreme quality of proportion must be innate; it is never acquired. The artist blessed with it may only produce a small masterpiece, such a church as that of St. Yved of Braine or a St. Leu-d’Esserent, but one is sure that he would not exchange the glow which his work gave him for the fame of building even a Strasbourg.
It is in the early-Gothic churches of the Ile-de-France that the taste is best purified and trained. There the sense of beauty is spiritualized. In them art gives an entity to what is ethereal, art seems to make tangible what is impalpable. In them the heart feels the loveliness of the space inclosed as the eye rejoices in the inclosing walls. There is something of poignancy in such churches. Standing in all the promise of their youth, of the youth of the greatest architecture the world ever produced, they gravely admonish us that beauty even as theirs is but a momentary lifting of the veil. To such churches the memory returns with nostalgic regret amid the magnificence of the Gothic expansion, when the leaves opened wide to show the golden pollen. But the sadness which the early-Gothic churches of France rouse in the soul, is it not the stumbling name we give to an eternal Hope? “There are no hours in this cathedral,” wrote Rodin of Soissons; “there is Eternity.”[64]
THE ABBATIALS OF ST. REMI AT RHEIMS, AND NOTRE DAME AT CHÂLONS-SUR-MARNE[65]
There are two things for which all the Faithful ought to resist unto blood, Justice and Liberty.—Pierre de Celle, Abbot of St. Remi (1162-81).
Before closing our crowded chapter on Primary Gothic cathedrals, let us add a few notes on a few early-Gothic churches. Those of chief interest, in the story of the national art, are the big abbey churches at Rheims and at Châlons, sister monuments, equal in size to cathedrals. So closely do they resemble each other in plan and ornamentation that it is thought one architect planned both. They are the earliest Gothic edifices in Champagne.
Notre Dame at Châlons-sur-Marne was reconstructed soon after 1157. Three periods of work appear in it. The transept and the four towers—which give an imposing air to the church—belong to the Romanesque rebuilding of 1130. The towers which stand between choir and transept are not set symmetrically, since, in that to the south, use was made of the foundations of an earlier tower, a boundary mark between the lands of the big abbey and those of the bishop of Châlons.
In 1157, the Romanesque choir of Notre Dame collapsed, and when rebuilt the citizens of the ancient city on the Marne displayed the same pious enthusiasm as had the men and the women of Chartres in 1145. In 1165, Guy de Bazoches, then a canon of Châlons Cathedral, wrote to his sister to describe how all ages and conditions brought material to the new church of Notre Dame-en-Vaux, and how the people, harnessed to carts, sang canticles as they labored. When the new Gothic choir was under way the nave of 1130 was remodeled. The pier arches and the tribune arches were made pointed, and the upper walls were raised in order that a Gothic vaulting might be added.
Notre Dame’s choir is very beautiful. Its three apse chapels open on the ambulatory, by columns and stilted arches, perhaps the first time this disposition of Champagne Gothic was used. Soon it was repeated in St. Remi at Rheims. Auxerre and St. Quentin also used it, and it reached its apotheosis in the ethereal charm of Soissons’ transept. Notre Dame at Châlons was in other ways a precursor; here first were set in each bay of the clearstory three windows side by side, a triplet of lancets that started the complex fenestration of the new art. In its first plan were no flying buttresses, but they were soon added when it was found that the thrust of the upper vaulting was not sufficiently counterbutted. In the XV century the Flamboyant south porch was built. Of the XVI century are some rich windows of the school of Troyes, now set in the nave’s aisles. One of them represents the victory of Spain’s crusaders over Islam at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, and is the best battle scene depicted in colored glass. With its beautiful Gothic cathedral, its immense abbatial, and all of its churches rich with storied windows, one is profoundly grateful that Châlons-sur-Marne only for a short hour early in the World War formed part of that “ligne doulereuse et triomphale, ce ruban de pourpre et de lumière qui s’étend de Belfort au rivage des Flandres, la Voie Sacrée.”