Vanished Halls and Cathedrals of France

by George Wharton Edwards

[Original]

Lying in the midst of the great forest lands of Chantilly and Hallette, Senlis, until the dissolution of the Carlo-vingian Empire, was the place of royal residence, and even thereafter, to the time of Henry of Navarre, the kings of France preferred it to all others. The Castle was built upon the site of the Roman Prætorium, the ruins of which were pointed out to tourists. The ancient Roman ramparts which still in part surrounded the town were also shown, and the walls were said to be thirteen feet thick. "They enclosed an area, oval in form, one thousand and twenty feet long from east to west and seven hundred and ninety-four feet wide from north to south. At each of the angles formed by the broken lines of which the circuit of two thousand seven hundred and fifty-six feet is composed, stands or stood a tower; numbering twenty-eight and now only sixteen, they are semicircular in plan, and up to the height of the wall are unpierced. The Roman city had only two gates; the present number is five."

The old cathedral was both curious and fascinating, as well as of great beauty. Begun in 1154 on really enormous lines, its original plan was never carried out for want of funds. Century after century it had been rebuilt, altered, extended and replanned, until it had become, as an American architect of renown styled it, "an epitome of French architecture from the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the fifteenth century."

Its companion unfinished, the great southwest tower is of the thirteenth century, and is said to be "unsurpassed by no other spire in France for subtlety of composition and perfection of detail."

One of its beautiful "crocketed" pinnacles was shot away in the bombardment by the Germans in 1915, and the loss left the world poor indeed.

It is certainly a strange sensation for us to watch from a distance the continuous destruction of the great works of art of the world, powerless to prevent it. For us all this loss is personal, poignant, unexampled; a horror that nothing can palliate nor time soften.

The ancient Renaissance tower of St. Pierre had been used as a public market, and also as a cavalry barrack because of its ruinous state. In form it was most curious, being very short and too wide for proportion. While the prevailing style was flamboyant, it contained a certain amount of early Gothic work of considerable interest and value. I regret that I did not make a sketch of it when I was there, for the scene at early morning with the crowds of market people, and the vegetable stalls all about, and rising above them the bare gray walls of the nave and the choir, formed a picture of much quaintness.

The glory of the old cathedral of "Notre Dame" was the beautiful spire upon the southwest tower. Of infinite grace and lightness with its detached pillars, it rose from an octagonal base which supported a sort of canopy in pyramidal form, the whole adorned with a wealth of delicate carving and tracery, and pierced by high dormer lancet shaped windows, about which flew clouds of ravens or starlings.

The great door in the west front reminded one of that at Chartres, and was adorned with figures of Our Lord and the Virgin, some of the figures of the angels being of remarkable character and grace. Inside in the ambulatory, behind the altar, are some of the twelfth century Romanesque capitals, and elsewhere are found other evidences of Roman influence.