George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers

by George Edmund Street

The Bishop of Laon lives elsewhere I fancy, as our landlord made much of his having come expressly to join in a procession through the city which we witnessed on Sunday afternoon. This procession was new to me and may as well be recorded: it visited a number of altars got up in a temporary manner, elevated on high flights of steps, and decorated profusely with flowers, garlands and drapery. These were erected in every available space, and I suppose by the zeal of the neighbors in each locality. As the time for the procession came, all the good people of the city hung up white sheets over the fronts of their shops so that the whole street bore a most singular appearance, though the universal white was here and there relieved by the old pieces of tapestry with some sacred story on it hung out by some more well-to-do person.

Presently through the dense crowd came the procession—first, girls bearing banners and draped in white, then other banners, clergy, acolytes, censer-bearers and lastly the bishop under a square velvet baldachin carried by priests, walking between two priests, bearing a monstrance with the Host.

At intervals the censer-bearers turned and censed and then went on again, till they reached an altar, which the bishop always ascended and gave the benediction from it, displaying the Host to the people all kneeling below. The procession was followed and kept in some order by soldiers whose band, alternately with the choristers, accompanied the march. In half an hour after the return of the bishop from his rather long procession the town had resumed its old look, the white sheets were gone, and the altars pulled down or denuded of all their ornaments. All the towns we had been in had been preparing for the same fête, which was to be greatest at Lille, where “Notre Dame de la Treille”—whose day it was—is looked on as the patron of the city.

From the cathedral we went to the church of S. Martin at the other end of the main street. The general effect of the exterior is very good, and very superior to the interior,—which is very simple, rather bad in its design, and much modernized. The south transept front is very fine and remarkable for the boldness of the mouldings on its buttresses and strings. The west front is, after this, the finest portion of the building, being a very ornate addition in middle-pointed to the old Romanesque church. It is very picturesque and I liked it much.

From the church we turned down into a walk which follows the line of the old ramparts and nearly surrounds the city. The view, from this part of it, of the cathedral standing on a sort of promontory, with the cluster of houses around it, the vine-covered hill sloping down rapidly to the valley on the right, and then the flat vale, lined all over with rows of poplars, and finished against the horizon with fine hills, was most charming. Indeed I have never seen any town of which the views were so invariably magnificent as they are always round old Laon. We saw no other old church here, save one below the hill with a central tower and low spire, which looked at all as though it might be worth visiting. In the street close to the south transept of the cathedral is a gable end of a good middle-pointed house.

We left Laon in the coupé of a small diligence at 6 P.M. for Rheims, grateful in the extreme for the one fine day which we had as yet had—nowhere so grateful as here, where every turn disclosed some view or some subject of which a bright sun was the most indispensable adjunct.

Our going to Rheims afforded no incidents. When we crossed the hills from Laon and descended towards the broad valley of Champagne we had a most glorious view, simple in all its detail, but full of beautiful colour, and rich and verdant in the extreme. One small village we passed on the way had a church of which I managed to get a sketch while we changed horses. I went inside and found the whole church fitted with open seats on a raised wooden floor. The central tower is groined and has only a small apse to the east, and the effect of this inside is exceedingly good. The south aisle consists of a series of compartments running north and south, the roofs boarded on the under side and coved or canted, and descending not on arches across the aisle but on beams. The steeple was, I think, the only part groined. From this village to Rheims our journey was made in the dark and it was nearly eleven as we drove along under the shadow of the great walls of the cathedral and into the gate of the inn which faces its west front, where happily we found rest for our weary limbs....

June 19.

It rained fast when I turned out early this morning and continued to do so perseveringly all the day. This was miserable and perhaps has made my recollection of Rheims less pleasant than it ought to be.

The west front with its three great doorways is very magnificent. The two steeples, which are developments from the Laon idea, and like Laon unfinished, are at present not large enough for the porch and look too much like turrets, and yet they are of immense size. The substitution of second-pointed mouldings in these steeples for the first-pointed shafts of those at Laon, is unfortunately not an improvement. The whole porch is covered in the most lavish manner with elaborate sculpture of the very finest character and detail, but it is generally spread over the whole surface and gives perhaps an effect of littleness and fritter to the whole front. The detail of the pinnacles and flying buttresses at the sides is unusually fine, and all of the same fine early middle-pointed date—that of the apse and the chapels surrounding it is equally fine. The northern transept is also a fine composition, but the parapets were intended to have flanking towers and these are carried up in the same way as those both at Rouen and Chartres, hardly on a sufficient scale to be looked on as towers. Their great open belfry windows produce a fine effect. The three doors of the north transept are all very fine, though the sculpture on some of them is of earlier date than that of the west front, and of very ingenious execution.