Such a sweep of fragile glass was possible because the play of thrusts and counterthrusts had been calculated to a certainty. Technically, Beauvais is the extreme expression of the Gothic theory. It perfected the pier by making it elliptical, widest where fell the greatest strain, north and south. It is said that its error lay in certain false bearings, that some of the intermediate buttresses were balanced half on air without direct ground supports. That may have been temerarious, since building material of perfect quality is required when chances are taken. Certainly Beauvais pushed to its rigid consequences the law of equilibrium, allowing no excess in the supporting members, but it was not a builder’s folly.
M. de Lasteyrie has called its plan a chef-d’œuvre of lightness. Though the architect pushed his technique to the extreme limit of the law of thrust and counterthrust, he did not pass beyond the possible, and had he employed the hard, resistant stone of Burgundy the history of the cathedral church he built would not be a tale of disasters. What brought about the collapse of Beauvais’ vaults was the use of inferior stone.
Sometimes one feels in the hardihood of this cathedral a trace of everweening pride, as if its certitude of excelling tended to virtuosity. The stupefying ascending lines, strong-willed and carried out with science, seem as much to vaunt the enterprise of their builder as pay homage to the Creator. Some of the lesser churches, that humbly and tentatively reached out toward perfection, make a deeper appeal than does stupendous Beauvais. Was man meant for the superlative on earth? And one remembers that Bishop Milon de Nanteuil was a proud man of the world, very unlike that true pastor of souls, Maurice de Sully, who with unpretentious diligence raised Notre Dame of Paris. Such criticisms would be silenced, perhaps, had Beauvais a nave from which could be viewed its overwhelming choir. Truncated as it now is, it is necessary to crane the neck in order to see its clearstory windows. So colossal a thing should be led up to gradually; it cries out insistently for its missing nave.
Fatality seemed always to pursue Beauvais. After terminating a noble Flamboyant transept, the ambitious citizens were lured into the scheme of a central tower, when a church of such height should have at its crossing merely a slender spire. Instead of proceeding to build a nave, they raised a lantern that lacked merely a few feet of the enormous height of St. Peter’s dome in Rome. It was a day of tower building in France, and Beauvais, ever hopeful beyond its resources, thought to outvie all others. On feast days lights were hung in its spire’s open stonework for the illumination of the entire countryside. For five years only the giant beacon stood. On Ascension Day of 1573, just after the congregation had left the church to walk in procession, the tower fell with an appalling noise, covering the whole town with dust. Only one bay of the nave has been built, its piers have disappearing moldings, amorphous profiles, and no capitals whatever. Beauvais stands a massive fragment, and there seems little chance that the truncated church will ever be completed.
THE CATHEDRAL OF TROYES[143]
With travail great, and little cargo fraught,
See how our world is laboring in pain;
So filled we are with love of evil gain
That no one thinks of doing what he ought,
But we all hustle in the Devil’s train,
And only in his service toil and pray;
And God, who suffered for us agony,
We set behind, and treat him with disdain.
Hardy is he whom death doth not dismay.
The feeble mouse, against the winter’s cold
Garners the nuts and grain within his cell,
While man goes groping, without sense to tell
Where to seek refuge against growing old....
The Devil doth in snares our life enfold.
Four hooks he has with torments baited well;
And first with Greed he casts a mighty spell,
And then, to fill his nets has Pride enrolled,
And Luxury steers the boat and fills the sail,
And Perfidy controls and sets the snare.
Thus the poor fish are brought to land.
—Count Thibaut IV of Champagne.[144]
Beneath the present choir of Troyes Cathedral are Gallo-Roman walls, and a succession of edifices have stood on the same site. From the cathedral of the V century started the bishop, St. Loup, “the friend of God,” when he went forth to check Attila the Hun, “God’s scourge,” and the barbarian was touched by spiritual fear and retired. That same good bishop of Troyes was the companion of St. Germain of Auxerre, on the notable journey north, when they blessed the gentle child Geneviève in a village near Paris, marking her as a vessel of election.
Probably the cathedral immediately preceding the present one was in large part early-Gothic. Fire wiped it out, in 1188, and preparations for a new basilica were started by the energetic Bishop Garnier de Trainel, who went on the Fourth Crusade, and was among those, says Villehardouin, who scaled the walls of captured Constantinople along with his friend Nivelon, the bishop-builder of Soissons.
The first stone of the new cathedral at Troyes was laid in 1206 by Bishop Hervé (1206-23), an able man who had been advanced by the observant prelate of Paris, Eudes de Sully. For almost twenty years Bishop Hervé worked on the choir, considered one of the best chevets in France. During his episcopate Troyes was a brilliant center of European trade and culture. Blanche of Castile and young Louis IX passed some time in the city when Thibaut IV the Singer, related to the royal line, was attacked by the clique of rebellious barons who plotted against the boy king. There had been considerable romancing about the volatile, inconstant Thibaut’s admiration for Queen Blanche, who was a married woman before he was born. His own mother, Blanche of Navarre, another of the able women rulers of that day, gave generously to the new cathedral of her capital city.
In 1228 a storm damaged the rising structure, necessitating years of tiresome repairs. Pope Urban IV, as a native son of Troyes, contributed. During the last forty years of the XIII century the transept was building. It showed traces of English feeling derived perhaps from Edmund Plantagenet, a son of the builder of Westminster Abbey, who had married the dowager Countess of Champagne. His ward Jeanne, Thibaut the Singer’s granddaughter, inherited the countship of Champagne, the kingdom of Navarre, and by marriage became the queen of France.