It is impossible to come into close contact with the exterior of this cathedral except by approaching it from the eastern end. West front there is none. As one has said, "It possesses merely a western end." The western tower, of two non-contemporary orders of Gothic (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), whether viewed from near or far, is far more pleasing than any other general exterior feature. The chevet of the choir extends, as it were, well into the nave, there being no transepts. This is evidently a local custom, recalling the neighbouring cathedrals at Bourges and Auxerre.
The sculptured decoration of the later portion is exceedingly well disposed, and of such magnitude and numbers as to lack that poverty in the ensemble often apparent in a more pretentious work.
The Church of St. Etienne in Nevers, so thoroughly Roman in inception of design and execution of detail, indicates more vividly than any other example that might possibly be taken, the shortness of time in which the Gothic development actually took place. With Notre Dame at Paris full in mind, it is well to recall that these accepted perfect examples of two contrasting types are scarce a hundred and fifty miles apart, and, in point of time, but sixty years. What an exemplification this surely is of the transition which came to the art of church building in the twelfth century; what extraordinary rapidity of conception and development, and how narrow were the confines of the true Gothic spirit, indigenous only to the royal domain, which alone produced the churches which fully merit the concisely expressed definition of Gothic: "A manner of building maintained (sustained) by a system of thrust and counter thrust."
IV
ST. MAMMÈS DE LANGRES
Langres is reminiscent of but one other cathedral city in the north of France; like Laon, it occupies and fortifies the crest of a long drawn out hill, or, to give it dignity, it had perhaps best be called in the language of the native "de la montagne de Langres," since from its apex, it is truly dominant of a wide expanse of horizon.
Of the Burgundian transition type, the Cathedral at Langres, dedicated to St. Jean the Evangel and St. Mammes, is in many ways a remarkable architectural work, but contaminated beyond cure by two overbearing Greco-Roman towers and a portal of the mid-eighteenth century. As a relief, there adjoins the main body of the church, on the southeast, one of those masterworks of the supreme Gothic era,—a canon's cloister of an exceeding thirteenth-century beauty. In other respects, the exterior is of little note except as to its wonderful degree of prominence in the general grouping of the roofs of the town, when the city is viewed from below.
The interior spreads itself out in severe and imposing lines with hardly a remarkable feature in either transepts or nave. The organ-loft, a Calvary, and a marble statue of the Virgin, by Lescornel, a sculptor of Langres, and a few modern sculptured monuments, are the only decorative attributes to be seen, if we except the Renaissance Chapelle des Fonts Baptismaux with its sculptured vaulting on the left.
The symmetrical choir is in itself the true charm of St. Mammes. It has a fine ambulatory, and a range of eight monolithic columns, removed, says tradition, from an ancient Pagan temple. Their capitals are ornamented with carven foliage, grimacing heads, and fantastic animals.