I have not yet completed all I had to say to you about the Gothic edifices of Paris and its neighbourhood, and indeed it would be unpardonable to omit the church of the once famous abbey of St. Denis. The first church here is said to have been founded by Dagobert about 629.[[12]] We are told by the early writers that it was executed with consummate art; the columns and the pavement were of marble; the interior brilliant with gold, jewels, and precious stones, and the roof of the building immediately over the altar was covered externally with pure silver. In spite of all this magnificence, it was taken down in the following century, to be rebuilt on a larger scale, by Pepin, and it was completed and consecrated in 775 by Charlemagne; in 865 the abbey was occupied and plundered by the Normans, but apparently not destroyed; and it seems to have remained nearly in the same state till the abbacy of Suger, in 1122. This prelate, after repairing the dormitory, refectory, and other parts of the abbey, determined on giving to the church, larger dimensions and a more magnificent character; how much he performed is not certain. It is thought not to have amounted to a complete rebuilding, but that after having restored the towers and the west front, he turned his attention to the interior, and, a part of the church being completed, it was dedicated in 1140. In June, in the same year, he laid the foundation of the rond point, which was finished in 1144, but after this he still continued his restorations till his death, in 1151. Notwithstanding all that was done at this period, the church was in such a state of decay in 1231, that Eudes Clement undertook to rebuild the greater part of it from the ground, in which he was assisted by St. Louis and his mother Blanche. The choir appears to have been nearly finished under this abbot; and the rest of the new work, which consists of the transept and nave was carried on by his successors, and terminated under Matthieu de Vendôme in 1281. Even the western front is not of one style of architecture, and there is much of it which I feel inclined to attribute to Suger, but which the French antiquaries consider as belonging to the older edifice, while some of our English ones would contend, perhaps, that it was built by Eudes Clement. It is not however of the style adopted in the thirteenth century in France, but corresponds with my first style of French Gothic. The day I was there was cold, and I was unwell; and the reflection, that I could return at any time, relaxed my efforts, and now I am about to leave Paris, without having repeated my visit. What appears of the inside, I rather believe to be of the thirteenth century than early in the twelfth; and I should assign to it a later date than that of the cathedral at Amiens, because all the parts are more slender. The windows are very large, and rose-headed. The church seems all window, and as the glass is at present without colour, and the building of a pale stone; the glare is very disagreeable, and diminishes greatly the admiration which the lofty and elegant architecture might justly challenge. Underneath the choir is a crypt, supposed to have been part of the church of Pepin, or, if you will, of Dagobert. Whittington accedes to the former opinion, although some ancient capitals, still remaining, offer models of architecture with the pointed arch; and I rather suppose them to have been part of the erections of Suger, between 1140 and 1150. On one of them is a curious car, and they are worth notice, whatever the date of them may be. Adjoining to the church is a very beautiful sacristy of modern architecture, ornamented with paintings of the present French school, some of which have great merit.
Having now conducted you, as well as I can, to the conclusion of the thirteenth century, I shall look back, and communicate a few gleanings of subjects, either less interesting in themselves, or which I have not had opportunity to examine particularly. At Braine sur Vesle, near Soissons, and at Poissy, I observed churches, perhaps rather Norman than Gothic, which seemed to merit investigation. There is a very pretty little church at Soissons decidedly Norman, although the arch of the doorway is slightly pointed. The church of St. Leger, in the same city, founded by St. Gauzlin in 1129, is not of so early a style, but rather of the first Gothic. The southern front has an opening of three equal simple parts, not united in a common arch: above this is a window with three divisions, and a rose in the head, formed of little pillars placed round a centre, probably the earliest form of a rose, or wheel, or marigold window, but here rather puzzling, as it only forms part of the opening, whereas we usually find the roses kept perfectly distinct in the terminating windows, till the middle of the thirteenth century. At each angle the buttress takes the form of an octangular turret, ending in a little spire of stone, but carved to represent shingles. The gable has only small, square-headed openings, and rises higher than these spires.
At Chartres is a church, dedicated to St. André, whose western front exhibits a handsome Norman doorway, with a triple window of early Gothic, and over that, the arch of a window of the fourth style, probably of the fifteenth century; at which time a choir was added to the original church, extending on arches, across the river. This choir is entirely destroyed, but the arches which supported it remain. There is also a handsome Norman gateway in the castle at Dreux. To return to Chartres; the church of St. Peter is praised by Whittington, at least I suppose him to mean this, by his church and convent of St. Père, built by Hilduard, a Benedictine monk, in 1170. It is also praised in the description of Chartres which I purchased, but I think with very little reason. The windows of the body of the building, divided by moulded mullions, announce a style decidedly posterior to that of the cathedral. The lower part of the choir, and the aisles, are very rude and heavy, and may be much more ancient than the upper part. It is now used as a parish church. At Dreux there is a cathedral of late Gothic, but it is not good either in design or execution, nor is it on a large scale: a small piece, however, on one side, is pretty. At Limay, near Mantes, is a Norman tower and spire; and the present external wall presents a series of arches walled up, which seems to have divided the aisles of the ancient edifice. The inside was so full of people, that I could not enter. The church of St. Germain Auxerre is said to be one of the oldest in Paris: this can only be true of some remaining portions of old work: the west front was built in 1435. The moulded ribs, instead of shafts, the entire want of capitals, and the bases of different heights, would have induced me to assign even a later period.
St. Jacques de la Boucherie has a fine Gothic tower of the latest style; it was erected in the reign of Francis I. St. Severin, St. Martin, St. Nicholas des Champs, St. Gervais, St. Étienne du Mont, and St. Eustache, form an instructive series of the downfall of Gothic architecture in Paris. In general they are not beautiful, yet there are in each of them some happy effects. St. Severin is the best, because the purest Gothic, and it has an air of space and lightness, which is very pleasing; but it is on a small scale, and the workmanship rude. Some parts of it are of a much earlier style.
The Count Alexandre la Borde is preparing an interesting work on French antiquities. The monuments of the thirteenth century are plentiful in France, and many of them exquisitely beautiful. Buildings of an earlier period are said to be more abundant in the south; and M. La Borde was so good as to shew me drawings of some ancient churches in those parts, of the greatest magnificence. Large edifices of the fourteenth, and beginning of the fifteenth century are rare, but of these he also has some beautiful drawings. The style of them much resembles that of our decorated Gothic, but what has been very happily called the perpendicular style seems never to have prevailed in any part of France, either as to the disposition of the tracery in the windows, or to the palm-tree vaulting exhibited in King’s College Chapel. There are here and there some traces of an approximation to the latter, but they are heavy and awkward. The last specimen free from the decorations of Roman architecture in Paris is, probably, St. Gervais, built in 1581 (omitting all consideration of the western front, which was added in 1616). The first, in which Roman decorations are introduced, is, I believe, St. Eustache, and in this point of view both these churches merit attention; in the former a crown-like pendant in the centre of the vault of the Lady Chapel is curious, and many think it beautiful. The latter church is altogether Grecian in its parts, throughout the nave and transepts; but their disposition and arrangement, the lofty proportions, and the general effect, are completely Gothic. The vaulting of the rond point is by a rather complicated system of ribs; that of the Lady Chapel is still more intricate, and is indeed a very curious example of the architecture of the time, and much admired by the French antiquaries: it is however heavy and unpleasing, and has the air rather of a modern imitation, than of late Gothic. I observed a date of 1640 on one part of the north transept. The church was begun, according to Le Grand, on the 19th of August, 1532, and finished 1642; the portico was added in 1754: as that of St. Étienne du Mont was rebuilt by Francis I., the date of these two churches could not have been far apart.
Even to the last age of French Gothic it is rare to see any mouldings along the ridge of the vault, and the groining, with the exception of the oblique groining which I attempted once to describe to you, is generally simple, and varies very little from first to last. Before I left England this subject had excited my attention, but I did not arrive at any satisfactory conclusion. In some of our Saxon architecture, for example, we have groins, where the ridge of the cross vaulting is considerably arched; but I am not sure that the principal vault forms, on the line of the ridge, a series of arches, as it does in the continental architecture, and so remarkably in the church of St. Germain des Prés. In our Gothic of the thirteenth century I believe the cross vaulting is always arched on the ridge, and the ridge of the principal vault forms also a series of arches nearly flat; but whether these arches are the same in the cross vaulting and principal vaulting, whether they are pointed, or segments of circles, is what I have not been able to determine. In our last style of Gothic architecture, two very different modes of vaulting prevailed; one was nearly that formed by a portion of a sphere cut off by four vertical planes, or like a handkerchief exposed to the wind, and held by the four corners. The arch was, however, seldom quite circular, but had something of a point; the other was formed by courses spreading out beyond each other half round a common centre, so that the vault was formed by a number of funnels touching each other; or rather, while they touched, to form the principal vault, they cut each other to form the cross vaulting. These funnels were universally concave on the section, not straight lines forming regular cones; the intermediate spaces were either left flat, or filled up with pendentives smaller than the funnels, but of the same form. This sort has been called the palm-tree vaulting, because the ribs, gracefully spreading from the tops of the little shafts, present something of the form of a palm-tree, and as this is a much prettier name than funnel-shaped vaults, we will, if you please, adopt it. If you imagine these palm-trees to close against each other in all directions, you will have an arrangement differing less in its appearance from the first than you would readily imagine. If you suppose a square room covered with a true groin, and cut off in the height of the vaulting, the plan at the section would take the form shewn at a,
in the Gothic of the thirteenth century, it will frequently, I believe, have the shape at b,
the angles of the groins being rather kept back; on the method first described it will be as at c: