I have kept you so long vacillating about St. Germain, that you are tired of it, and so am I. After all, one derives but little satisfactory evidence from a building so rude, and so frequently altered, but it has been strongly pressed into the history of French architecture, and I could not pass it over; and now, after this terrible digression, I will return to the church at Nôtre Dame, at Chalons, an edifice in many respects similar, but of a much more finished construction, exhibiting more of its original form, and to judge from a comparison of the internal evidence, of a date very little later. It is an excellent specimen of what I have called the first style of French Gothic, but it is not entirely free from alterations. This church is said to have had formerly eight towers, and as many spires. I cannot make out the places of more than four; two at the end of the nave, and two at the entrance of the choir, immediately beyond the transept. Such an arrangement seems not to have been unfrequent; but here, both in this building, and in the cathedral, these towers flank the aisles of the choir: at St. Germain’s at Paris they abut upon the clerestory, and the aisles pass through them. On one of the towers in front, there is a wooden spire, the general form of which is an acute octangular pyramid, with a small square pyramid on the spaces left at each angle of the tower. This is the arrangement of the pinnacles over the buttresses of the cathedral of Rheims, but it has nothing to do with the Saxon towers of this building. The style of these towers much resembles the summit of the western tower of St. Germain, but is more ornamental, the semicircular headed windows being divided by groups of little columns, and the parts subdivided by a detached column. The projections are remarkably bold. There is no pointed arch in any of these towers inside or out, except in the upper story of two of them, and here they are without doubt of a later date; and the architecture of the church, which is mostly pointed, is not so united to the towers as to bring in the parts with perfect regularity. There are two stories of aisles to the nave as well as to the choir, and in some points of view the effect of this is so pleasing, that I feel quite reluctant to condemn it. The upper story cuts in places some ancient mouldings. In this vaulting a is the lowest point of the ridge, b is somewhat higher, and c still higher.
The piers of the chevet are circular, with capitals in some degree resembling those of the Corinthian order, and the slender detached columns behind the choir have, still more nearly, Corinthian capitals and proportions. They present something peculiarly graceful and pleasing in their appearance. As they certainly do not appear calculated to sustain the thrust of an arch, it is difficult to shew a reasonable ground for the admiration one cannot help feeling. The union of circular chapels with the circular end of the choir and its aisles, each part having its ornaments exceedingly well disposed, is also a beautiful circumstance in the external view; but it is rather conceived than seen in this instance, as the outside is much encumbered by small houses, and there are some enormous plain buttresses, on the date of which I will not pretend to decide: if they are posterior to the church, the original ceiling must have been of wood. The pavement is almost entirely composed of old monuments engraved in stone, exactly in the manner of the brass plates in England. Many of them represent the architecture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: one or two, from their extreme simplicity, may be taken from the architecture of the twelfth. There are none in which the arch is not pointed, and the trefoil ornament is always exhibited. Amongst, I dare say, two hundred monuments of this sort, I observed only one figure in mail, and that I could not find again on searching for it; and a fragment of one in plate armour: the earliest date is 1201, but the figures are not perfectly clear. There are also tombs of a blue stone, inlaid with white. I longed for Mr. L.; here were materials for an excellent lecture on the progress and changes of dress among our forefathers. I do not know that there is any thing amongst them which might not be found in England, but at the same time I know no place in England where there is such a collection of costumes.
The cathedral at Chalons has a tower at each end of the west side of the transept, a disposition not at all pleasing. Parts of these towers seem to be of the same date with those of Nôtre Dame, but they have been altered and added to in the seventeenth century, at which time the present vaulting, the two spires, and the whole of the west front, were erected by the Cardinal de Noailles. The body of the edifice appears to belong to the thirteenth century. Its nave has four ranges of windows: those of the clerestory; those of the galleries or triforia, great part of which are opened into windows; of the aisles; and of the side chapels. The last form no part of the original design; they are very low, and it would be an improvement to take them away. The slender spires which surmount the old towers, are perforated in all directions; and though they cannot be much praised, have something of a light and elegant effect. There is a considerable quantity of good stained glass in Nôtre Dame, and some likewise in the cathedral, but not so much; and the great rose window at the west end of the latter is entirely without it. I was in the church in the evening when the setting sun shone full into the building, and produced a painful glare, instead of the rich mellow splendor of painted glass in similar circumstances.
Chalons was the first place where I observed in common use the semicircular tiles, which are usually shown to us in Italian landscapes, but they were small and ill laid, and had a crowded effect.
We left Chalons early on the morning of the 30th of April, and for the first six leagues saw nothing but a boundless common field. The diligence does not change horses, but stops to rest them for an hour or two in the middle of the journey. The harness was partly rope, and partly leather, and some of the traces were chains. The rope traces are rather apt to break, because no one thinks of putting new ones, as long as there is any chance that the old ones will hold out the stage, but the chain traces are worse. They are originally slight, but when a link gives way its place is supplied by a bit of leather; this seldom lasts long, and it is not uncommon for it to give way a second time in the same stage, but with the most heroic perseverance the postillions apply another piece of leather. I have not yet met with the phenomenon of an iron chain entirely of leather, but I hope to see some considerable approach to it. The latter half of the ride presented to our view a range of hills, about two miles distant on the left, not very high, but steep and broken, the upper part mostly covered with wood, and the lower with vineyards. These hills form the edge of the materials occupying the Paris basin, which every where exhibit a strong contrast to the rounded swells of the chalk country. There were also some little hills on the right, but these were naked, except a few groups of trees at the base. This, though not a beautiful landscape, was a considerable improvement on the shelterless plain of the morning. There was something at least to amuse the imagination, but it did not last long, and we returned long before reaching Rheims to the usual expanse of common field.
LETTER IV.
GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE.
Paris, May, 1816.
Having conducted you to Rheims, I now proceed to give you an account of what I saw there, and if it should contain a few digressions as long as those in my last, I hope you will forgive me, for this Gothic Architecture offers continual temptations to lead me out of the direct road. I shall begin, not with the cathedral, but with a much more ancient building, which is supposed to have served as a cathedral before the present edifice was erected. The church of St. Remi is said by Whittington to have been dedicated in 1049. I know not whether he mean the nave or the choir, but they are certainly of different periods. The Recueil des Abbayes, &c. says it was built in the time of Charlemagne, and consecrated by Leo IX., who was pope from 1048 to 1054; the nave, except the vaulting, is much in the style of St. Germain des Prés, at Paris, but the pillars are of various shapes, and do not seem the result of one design. There are two stories of aisles to the nave, and to the straight part of the choir, and above these are the principal windows of the clerestory, with semicircular heads, and over them a range of circular openings, which I do not recollect to have seen elsewhere. The buttresses, externally, are alternately semicylindrical with a small projection, and rectangular with a very considerable one; the first are parts of the original structure, and evidently denote the roof to have been of timber, and not vaulted; indeed all the vaulting appears to be posterior to the walls and piers; the latter were probably added at the same time with the vaulting which rendered them necessary. The middle of the western front is a restoration, in which many old parts have been re-used, and the fragments of marble and granite render it probable that the spoils of some Roman building were employed in the ancient edifice. The two old towers remain, the southern doorway, and the window over it are beautiful specimens of what I have denominated in a former letter, the third style of Gothic; and are probably of the fourteenth century. The choir is of the first style, very much resembling that of Nôtre Dame at Chalons, and though this church is certainly inferior in general effect to the one just mentioned, yet some of the partial views it presents are, I think, superior to any thing there. The flying buttresses of the choir are supported, on their first separation from the building, by a little column; and a narrow gallery, which surrounds the clerestory, passes between these columns and the body of the church. The same disposition prevails at Nôtre Dame at Chalons, at Amiens, and at the cathedral at Rheims. There are some granite shafts of columns in the church, which have perhaps belonged to an ancient temple.
Under this church is a crypt, where we are shewn the tombs of Clothaire the First, and of Sigismond, king of Burgundy. The former died in 561, probably at Soissons; the latter was thrown with his wife and family into a well at Orleans, and we should not certainly expect to find him in the same chapel with one of his principal enemies at Rheims. A simple vault, or succession of vaults of small dimensions, can give us no internal evidence of the time of its construction.