The ancient city of Troyes is not only associated with epic poetry—“history before there are historians”—but is linked with the earliest two historians who wrote in the vernacular, Villehardouin and Joinville. “Mes lengages est buens car en France fui nez,” boasted the Champagne poet, who tells us that God listened by preference to his speech, since he had made it lighter and better than any other, of more brevity, of nobler amplitude. Villehardouin’s record of the Fourth Crusade, the Conquête de Constantinople, possesses the same powerful simplicity as the greatest of all chansons-de-geste, Roland. He was born near Troyes, in whose convents lived two of his daughters and his two sisters, and to whose churches he left property.
Our good friend Joinville grew up in the cultivated court of the Countess Marie’s grandson, Thibaut IV le Chansonnier, born in Troyes. Thibaut’s songs blended the courteous poetry of the troubadour tradition with the attic salt of his own most civilized Champagne. In his gallant company Joinville acquired his good manners and inimitable mode of expression.
The last countess of this land of gay singers and soldier-historians was Thibaut’s granddaughter, Jeanne, who inspired Joinville to write his memoirs, helped to build Meaux Cathedral, and founded the College of Navarre where Gerson and Bossuet were to be trained. But, alas! the liberal young heiress of Champagne married the legist king of France, Phillipe le Bel, the executioner of the Templars. When he struck a blow at the international fairs of Champagne by persecuting Lombards and Jews, the great day for Troyes was over. When Jeanne d’Arc—born on the confines of Champagne—revived the nation’s pride, the art traditions latent in the citizens of Troyes flowered once more with magnificence. Only the slow accumulation of centuries could have produced the unemphatic beauty of the gracious St. Martha in Troyes’ Flamboyant Gothic church of the Madeleine.
THE CATHEDRAL OF TOURS.[153]
A religion is the heart of a race; it expresses the emotions of a people and elevates them by giving them an aim: but, unless a God be visibly honored, religion does not exist, and human laws are powerless.... Thought, the fountain of all good and evil, cannot be trained, mastered, and directed except by religion, and the only possible religion is Christianity, which created the modern world and will preserve it.... France is being saved and lost perpetually. If she wants to be saved, indeed, let her go back to the laws of God.—Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850; born in Tours).
The cathedral of Tours does not startle. One is not carried away by it, at first. Its charm is that of the tranquil horizons of the Loire, fleuve de lumière, de vie doucement heureuse, partout de plein effets de lenteur, d’ordre, so Rodin saw it. The beauty of Touraine increases with familiarity because it is touched with that measure, that justness of soul inherited from the classic spirit, that has ever tempered, in the art manifestations of this nation, the sublime overimpassioned consistencies of the Celt and the lofty overexaggerated dreams of the Teuton.
The cathedral of Tours does not aspire to the impossible. It is a rather cold, high-bred church at one with its environment, the gracious garden of Touraine, a satisfying, discreet church and most intensely French. While one rejoices that a Robert de Lusarches aspired to the Infinite at Amiens, one approves the architect of Tours who worked within human possibilities. The choir of the cathedral possesses both delicacy and force. Toward its erection Louis IX granted a quarry and some forest lands near Chinon. The choir must have been nearing its completion when in 1255 the king visited Tours, whose archbishop, Geoffrey de Martel, had lately died a crusader in Palestine.
During the fifty years prior to 1270 the cathedral was building. In 1269 the relics of St. Maurice and his companions from Thebes, who were martyred in Gaul under Diocletian, were transferred to the sanctuary. Those early Christians were the tutelary saints of Tours Cathedral up to the XIV century. Then St. Gatien, the first to preach Christianity in this region, was chosen as patron. La Gatienne the people call their chief church. The cult of the early missionary had been a favorite devotion of St. Martin, third and greatest bishop of Tours, who died as the IV century drew to a close.
Like Lyons, Tours has eminent ecclesiastical memories. The shrine of St. Martin, the most popular saint of Gaul, made the city a frequented pilgrimage for Europe. Gregory of Tours, who ruled this see from 573 to 595, has described the richness of the Byzantine church that stood over the tomb of the great thaumaturge. Like most of the prelates who saved Latin civilization from the Barbarian’s submersion, Bishop Gregory was of Gallo-Roman stock, of a senatorial family of Auvergne who boasted descent from an early Christian martyr of Gaul. In the present southwest tower of la Gatienne are traces of the VI-century cathedral built by this bishop-historian of Gaul, whose pages are a chief source for Merovingian times.[154]
The city of Tours always had two great monuments—the cathedral within the ramparts, the basilica of St. Martin outside the walls. St. Martin’s abbey was the nation’s intellectual leader when the Saxon scholar Alcuin became its abbot (796-804). He made of Tours a Christian Athens. They buried him in his abbatial, where four years earlier Charlemagne’s wife, Luitgarde, had been laid. To-day only two towers stand of St. Martin’s basilica—the Tour Charlemagne, begun by the Blessed Hervé, abbot in 997, hence one of the oldest memorials of the rebirth of architecture associated with the year 1000, and a former façade tower mainly of the XII century. One of the busiest streets of Tours runs up what once was the nave of the abbatial, but, not discouraged, the people of Touraine have erected a new Byzantinesque basilica of St. Martin on the site of the transept’s southern arm. Those two tragic frenzies of forgetfulness, 1562, that scattered St. Martin’s ashes—for which St. Eloi, bishop-goldsmith of Noyon, had made a priceless reliquary—and 1793, that laid in ruins his church in Tours and Marmoutier’s Apogee Gothic abbatial that marked the rock-hewn cells where he had lived a hermit across the Loire, those two blind hours when men thought to erect barriers between themselves and their past, destroyed monuments which, did they exist still, would rank Tours, architecturally, among the first cities of Europe. St. Martin’s church, built by Hervé, became a monument-type,[155] copied by Ste. Foi, Congnes, St. Martial, Limoges, St. Sernin, Toulouse, and the cathedral at Santiago.