Castles and Chateaux of Old Burgundy

by M. F. Mansfield

When Cluny was but a mere hamlet, in the year 910 A.D., Guillaume, Duc d’Aquitaine et Comte d’Auvergne, founded this abbey, which became one of the most celebrated in the universe. From the first its abbés were cardinals and princes of Church and State.

In 1245 Pope Innocent IV. visited the abbey with a train of twelve cardinals and scores of minor churchmen. The Sainted Louis and the queen, his mother, enjoyed hospitality within its walls, and the Emperor of Constantinople, and a throng of followers, all found a welcome here; and this without incommoding the four hundred monks who were attached to the foundation. Pope Gelasse II died at the abbey, and the Archbishop Guy of Vienne was here elected Pope, under the name of Calixtus II, by a conclave assembled within its halls. To-day the pride of the former powerful abbey rests only on its laurels of other days. Its superb basilica has practically disappeared. Only its foundations, five hundred and fifty feet in length, are to be traced. The extensive library has disappeared, and only certain of the walls and roofs and a few minor apartments of the former palatial conventual buildings remain to suggest the one time glory.

The rich plain of Cluny was, in 910 A.D., but a forest called the “Vallé Noire” when the Abbé Bernon with a dozen brothers founded the celebrated Abbey of Cluny, called the “cradle of modern civilization.”

Of the conventual buildings the most remarkable features still standing are the south arm of the great transept of the abbey church, the massive octagonal tower, of a height of sixty metres, another slighter octagonal clocher, and the Chapelle des Bourbons.

Cluny’s old houses, or such of them as remain, have been to a large extent rebuilt and remodelled, but still enough remains to suggest that the old monastic city was a place of luxury-loving and worldly citizens as well as monks. Here and there a flying stair, a balcony, a loggia, or a rez-de-Chaussée arcade suggests a detail almost Italian in its motive. Colonnettes divide a range of windows and pilasters support stone balconies and terraces here and there in a most pleasing manner, and with a most surprising frequency,—a frequency which is the more pleasing, since, as has been said, scarcely anything of the sort is to be seen here in more than fragmentary form, though indeed all the architectural orders and devices of the ingenious mediæval builder are to be noted. The Revolution respected Cluny, but the Empire and “La Bande Noire” condemned it to destruction.

The Abbatial Palace, a palatial dependence of the abbey, where lodged visiting potentates and prelates, escaped entire destruction, and is to-day the chief ornament of the town. A national educational institution now occupies the halls and apartments of this great building where lords and seigneurs and churchmen once held their conclaves.

A fine Gothic portal leads to the inner court of this magnificent edifice, which was erected by two abbés, Jean de Bourbon and Jacques d’Amboise. Each had built a separate dwelling on either side of the great portal. That of the Cardinal de Bourbon is unlovely enough, as such edifices go, but has an air of a certain sumptuousness notwithstanding. That of Jacques d’Amboise is a highly ornate work of the Renaissance, and now serves as the Hôtel de Ville, whilst the other houses a local museum and library.

A garden of the formal order surrounds the two edifices and covers a goodly bit of the ground formerly occupied by the other buildings attached to the abbey. Entrance to this garden, and its Palais Abbatial, as the ensemble is officially known, is through a double Romanesque portal, as much a militant note as the rest is religious.

Cluny’s Hôtel Dieu is another remarkable souvenir of old. Within are various monuments and statues of churchmen and nobles which give it at once a lien on one’s regard. There is a luxurious monument to one of the Abbés of Cluny; another, that the Cardinal de Bouillon erected to his father, Maurice de la Tour d’Auvergne, Duc Souverain de Bouillon, Prince Souverain de Sedan.

Here and there about the town an old feudal tower or house-front juts out in close communion with some banal modern façade, but the whole aspect of the city of some four thousand inhabitants to-day is, when viewed from a distant approach, as of a feudal city with no modernities whatever. Near acquaintance disabuses one of this idea, but, regardless of this, the aspect of Cluny, the monastery and the city, is one of imposing and harmonious grandeur, hardly to be likened to any similar ensemble in France or beyond the frontiers.