Years ago an itinerant showman travelled about with a model of the celebrated Strasburg clock, and the writer got his first ideas of a great Continental cathedral from the rather crude representation of the Gothic beauties of that at Strasburg, which graced the canvas which hung before the showman's tent.
The clock is still there, in all its mystical incongruity, but one's interest centres in the grace and elegance of the dwindling spire and its substructure of nave, transept, and choir, which dominates all else round about.
Of many eras, the structure of this great Latin-cross cathedral is not harmonious; but,[{98}] for all that, it is a great Gothic triumph, and one which might well lend most of its details of construction and decoration to any great church, and still add a charm which was hitherto absent.
Strasburg has in all fifteen churches, but the cathedral is possessed of more and greater glories than all the others combined.
From the days when Strasburg was the Argentoratum of the Romans, the city has ever been the scene of an activity which has made its importance known through all the world. It was sacked by Attila and his Huns in 451, and was completely abandoned up to the seventh century, when one of the sons of Clovis built it up anew and gave to it the name of Strateburgum.
Ptolemy is said to be the first writer who mentions Argentoratum, the ancient Strasburg.
What a bitter blow the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, of which Strasburg was the gem, was to France can only be realized by a contemplation of the sentiment which even yet attaches to the event.
That the allied provinces were French in spirit as well as Catholic in religion is demonstrated by the fact that, at the time of the[{99}] German occupation, there was a population of over a million and a half of souls, of which quite a million and a quarter were of the Roman Catholic faith. About a million and a quarter were natives of Alsace-Lorraine, one hundred thousand were Germans, and thirty odd thousand were foreigners.
The present cathedral was erected on a site that had been consecrated to religion in very early times. It had been a sacred place in the time of the Romans, though the deities worshipped were pagan, a temple to Hercules and Mars having been erected here.
The first Christian church was built, it is believed, in the fifth century, by St. Amand, then Bishop of Strasburg.