That Chartres Cathedral has preserved its wealth of colored glass is proof that it came gently through the ages; moreover, it was constructed solidly, being a pioneer in the use of flying buttresses with double arches united by an arcature. Its lower walls never were weakened by the insertion of side chapels, those customary XIV-century additions. That academic period built at Chartres merely the semi-detached chapel of St. Piat, to which a stair ascends from the ambulatory. In the XVIII century some well-intentioned but misguided canons of the cathedral lined their sanctuary with neo-classic marbles and stucco, and cluttered the plain wall spaces over the pier arches with needless ornament.
In the time of the Revolution, the entire demolition of the big church was proposed, but happily the embarrassment of how to dispose of such a mountain of stone prevented the vandalism. Lead was stripped from the roof to make bullets and pennies. In the XIX century the vast timber covering of the masonry vaults, called la forêt, was burned, but the new steep-pitched roof covered with lead has taken on a greenish hue that blends well with the ancient gray stones.
The easy hill of the town serves as pedestal for Chartres Cathedral. Walk through the little city, whose air of cold propriety is very typical of French provincial life, pass through the Porte Guillaume, and from the boulevard beside the stream study the chief edifice of this Beauce which is “the granary of France.” Observe how salient are the transept arms. Another Romanesque trait is the placing of two towers—unfinished here—between choir and transept. What Huysmans called the maigreur distinguée of youth is a characteristic of this church. In Rheims, the next begun of the big Gothic cathedrals, is no trace of youth’s structural plainness.
As you sit by the stream watching Notre Dame of Chartres, its Flamboyant Gothic tower, perfect of its kind, seems to ride imperiously over the nave; none the less it will be the weather-beaten southwest tower on which the eye will linger longest. Though it was designed to accompany a church of lesser proportions, though it labors under the disadvantage of being overtopped by its sister beacon, nothing can diminish its unparalleled unity. Virile, virginal, aërial, majestic, venerable in youth and youthful in its venerable age, the clocher vieux of Chartres is one of the supreme things of the national art, “full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing.”
THE CATHEDRAL OF RHEIMS[113]
The nation that made a compact with God at the baptismal font of Rheims will be converted and will return to her first vocation. Her errors may not go unpunished, but the child of such virtues, of so many sighs, of so many tears, will not perish. A day will come, and we hope it may not long tarry, when France, like Saul on the road to Damascus, will be enveloped in a supernal light whence will proceed a voice, asking: “Why persecutest thou me? Rise up and wash the stains that disfigure thee. Go, first-born of the Church, predestined nation, race of election, go carry as in the past my name before all the peoples and before all the kings of the earth.”—Address of Pope Pius X, in 1912, to the visiting French cardinals.
The other two of the four great cathedrals have no setting equal to the hill pedestal of Chartres or to the river island of Notre Dame of Paris. Seldom is a French cathedral surrounded by the pleasant precincts and cloisters preserved by the English minsters, and Rheims Cathedral is no exception in its abrupt rise from flat city streets. Its druidical massiveness can easily dispense with a pedestal. Rheims imposes itself. Even in the night its prodigy of magnificence endures. “The huge bas-relief is always there in the darkness,” wrote Rodin. “I cannot distinguish it, but I feel it. Its beauty persists. It triumphs over shadows and forces me to admire its powerful black harmony. It fills my window, it almost hides the sky. How explain why, even when enveloped in night, this cathedral loses nothing of its beauty? Does the power of that beauty transcend the senses, that the eye sees what it sees not?... O Nuit! tu es plus grande ici que partout ailleurs!”[114]
The “masters of the living stone” who built Rheims Cathedral are known to us to-day. Their names were commemorated in a labyrinth that once formed part of the nave’s pavement, a drawing of which has been unearthed by M. Louis Demaison. The obliterated figure in the middle of the labyrinth no doubt represented the bishop who laid the foundation stone. He was Albéric de Humbert, formerly archdeacon of Notre Dame at Paris while the bishops Maurice and Eudes de Sully were raising that cathedral. Builder and crusader, Albéric was a true product of his age. He marched into Languedoc, in 1208, to chastise the Albigensian heretics; he attended Innocent III’s great Council of the Lateran in 1214, and when he ventured again to the East to take part in the crusade of Jean de Brienne, he was captured by Saracens and ransomed by the Spanish knights of Calatrava. He died on the return journey, 1218.
For a man of such energy, it could have been with slight regret that he witnessed, in May, 1210, the destruction by fire of the decrepit church he had inherited, one of whose builders had been Archbishop Hincmar in the IX century. That early cathedral of Rheims had been redressed with a façade by Archbishop Sampson, a friend of Abbot Suger’s, and among the prelates who attended the memorable dedication of St. Denis. His Primary Gothic work, wiped out in the conflagration of 1210, was a loss indeed for art.
Bishop Albéric de Humbert set vigorously to work, and within a year of the fire had laid the corner stone of the present cathedral (1211). By 1241 services were held in the finished choir. An archbishop of the Dreux line (1227-40) gave windows to the upper apse, and although he and the townsfolk were at bitter odds, the building of the great church by both prelate and people went on unabated. The imperious Henri de Dreux, like Pierre Mauclerc, the donor of Chartres’ south rose, was a grandson of that brother of King Louis VII who built the beautiful church of St. Yved at Braine on the highway between Rheims and Soissons. While the cathedral of Rheims was building, another of its archbishops was a Joinville, and in 1270 its sixtieth ruler died on St. Louis’ last crusade.