When the Incarnation was of account
Thirteen hundred, less twelve, which it failed of."
In which legend, while you stand where once it was written (it was removed—to make the old pavement more polite—in the year, I sorrowfully observe, of my own earliest tour on the Continent, 1825, when I had not yet turned my attention to Ecclesiastical Architecture), these points are noticeable—if you have still a little patience.
14. 'The work'—i.e., the Work of Amiens in especial, her cathedral, was 'déchéant,' falling to ruin, for the—I cannot at once say—fourth, fifth, or what time,—in the year 1220. For it was a wonderfully difficult matter for little Amiens to get this piece of business fairly done, so hard did the Devil pull against her. She built her first Bishop's church (scarcely more than St. Firmin's tomb-chapel) about the year 350, just outside the railway station on the road to Paris; [4-7] then, after being nearly herself destroyed, chapel and all, by the Frank invasion, having recovered, and converted her Franks, she built another and a properly called cathedral, where this one stands now, under Bishop St. Save (St. Sauve, or Salve). But [Pg 100] even this proper cathedral was only of wood, and the Normans burnt it in 881. Rebuilt, it stood for 200 years; but was in great part destroyed by lightning in 1019. Rebuilt again, it and the town were more or less burnt together by lightning, in 1107,—my authority says calmly, "un incendie provoqué par la même cause détruisit la ville, et une partie de la cathédrale." The 'partie' being rebuilt once more, the whole was again reduced to ashes, "réduite en cendre par le feu de ciel en 1218, ainsi que tous les titres, les martyrologies, les calendriers, et les Archives de l'Evêché et du Chapitre."
15. It was the fifth cathedral, I count, then, that lay in 'ashes,' according to Mons. Gilbert—in ruin certainly—déchéant;— and ruin of a very discouraging completeness it would have been, to less lively townspeople—in 1218. But it was rather of a stimulating completeness to Bishop Everard and his people—the ground well cleared for them, as it were: and lightning (feu de l'enfer, not du ciel, recognized for a diabolic plague, as in Egypt), was to be defied to the pit. They only took two years, you see, to pull themselves together; and to work they went, in 1220, they, and their bishop, and their king, and their Robert of Luzarches. And this, that roofs you, was what their hands found to do with their might.
16. Their king was 'à-donc,' 'at that time,' Louis VIII., who is especially further called the son of Philip of August, or Philip the Wise, because his father was not dead in 1220; but must have resigned the practical kingdom to his son, as his own father had done to him; the old and wise king retiring to his chamber, and thence silently guiding his son's hands, very gloriously, yet for three years.
But, farther—and this is the point on which chiefly I would have desired the Abbé's judgment—Louis VIII. died of fever at Montpensier in 1226. And the entire conduct of the main labour of the cathedral, and the chief glory of its service, as we shall hear presently, was Saint Louis's; for a time of forty-four years. And the inscription [Pg 101] was put "à ce point ci" by the last architect, six years after St. Louis's death. How is it that the great and holy king is not named?
17. I must not, in this traveller's brief, lose time in conjectural answers to the questions which every step here will raise from the ravaged shrine. But this is a very solemn one; and must be kept in our hearts, till we may perhaps get clue to it. One thing only we are sure of,—that at least the due honour—alike by the sons of Kings and sons of Craftsmen—is given always to their fathers; and that apparently the chief honour of all is given here to Philip the Wise. From whose house, not of parliament but of peace, came, in the years when this temple was first in building, an edict indeed of peace-making: "That it should be criminal for any man to take vengeance for an insult or injury till forty days after the commission of the offence—and then only with the approbation of the Bishop of the Diocese." Which was perhaps a wiser effort to end the Feudal system in its Saxon sense, [4-8] than any of our recent projects for ending it in the Norman one.
18. "A ce point ci." The point, namely, of the labyrinth inlaid in the cathedral floor; a recognized emblem of many things to the people, who knew that the ground they stood on was holy, as the roof over their head. Chiefly, to them, it was an emblem of noble human life—strait-gated, narrow-walled, with infinite darknesses and the "inextricabilis error" on either hand—and in the depth of it, the brutal nature to be conquered.