Marguerite de Valois (1492-1549), the sister of François Premier, was called the tenth muse even before she became Queen of Navarre, and when she produced her Boccoccio-like stories, afterwards known as the “Heptameron of the Queen of Navarre,” enthusiasm for letters among the noblesse knew no bounds.
The spirit of romance which went out from the soft southland was tinged with a certain license and liberty which was wanting in the “Romaunt of the Rose” of Guillaume de Lorris, and like works, but it served to strike a passionate fire in the hearts of men which at least was bred of a noble sentiment.
What the Renaissance actually did for a French national architecture is a matter of doubt. But for its coming, France might have achieved a national scheme of building as an outgrowth of the Greek, Roman, and Saracen structures which had already been planted between the Alps and the Pyrenees. The Gothic architecture of France comes nearer to being a national achievement than any other, but its application in its first form to a great extent was to ecclesiastical building. In domestic and civil architecture, and in walls and ramparts, there exists very good Gothic indeed in France, but of a heavier, less flowery style than that of its highest development in churchly edifices.
The Romanesque, and even the pointed-arch architecture (which, be it remembered, need not necessarily be Gothic) of southern and mid-France, with the Moorish and Saracenic interpolations found in the Pyrenees, was the typical civic, military and domestic manner of building before the era of the imitation of the debased Lombardic which came in the days of Charles VIII and François Premier. This variety spread swiftly all over France—and down the Rhine, and into England for that matter—and crowded out the sloping roof, the dainty colonnette and ribbed vaulting in favour of a heavier, but still ornate, barrel-vaulted and pillared, low-set edifice with most of the faults of the earlier Romanesque, and none of its excellences.
The parts that architects and architecture played in the development of France were tremendous. Voltaire first promulgated this view, and his aphorisms are many; “My fancy is to be an architect.” “Mansard was one of the greatest architects known to France.” “Architects were the ruin of Louis XIV.” “The Cathedral builders were sublime barbarians.” Montesquieu was more sentimental when he said: “Love is an architect who builds palaces on ruins if he pleases.”
The greatest architectural expression of a people has ever been in its Christian monuments, but references to the cathedrals, churches and chapels of the Pyrenean states have for the most part been regretfully omitted from these pages, giving place to fortresses, châteaux, great bridges, towers, donjons, and such public monuments as have a special purport in keeping with the preconceived limits of a volume which deals largely with the romance of feudal times.
Generally speaking, the architectural monuments of these parts are little known by the mass of travellers, except perhaps Henri Quatre’s ancestral château at Pau, the famous walls of Carcassonne, and perhaps Bayonne’s bridges or the Eglise St. Saturnin and the bizarre cathedral of St. Etienne at Toulouse. All of these are excellent of their kind; indeed perhaps they are superlative in their class; but when one mentions Perpignan’s Castillet, the Château de Puylaurens, the arcaded Gothic houses of Agde, Béziers’ fortress-cathedral, the fortress-church of St. Bertrand de Comminges or a score of other tributary monumental relics, something hitherto unthought of is generally disclosed.
Almost the whole range of architectural display is seen here between the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Gascony, and any rambling itinerary laid out between the two seas will discover as many structural and decorative novelties as will be found in any similar length of roadway in France.
