The diocese of Digne, among all of its neighbours, has survived until to-day. It is a suffragan of Aix, Arles, and Embrun, and has jurisdiction over the whole of the Department of the Basses-Alps. St. Domnin became its first bishop, in the fourth century.
The ancient Romanesque cathedral of Notre Dame—from which the bishop's seat has been removed to the more modern St. Jerome—is an unusually interesting old church, though bare and unpretentious to-day. It dates from the twelfth century, and has all the distinguishing marks of its era. Its nave is, moreover, a really fine work, and worthy to rank with many more important. There are, in this nave, some traces of a series of curious wall-paintings dating from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries.
St. Jerome de Digne—called la cathédrale fort magnifiante—is a restored Gothic church of the early ages of the style, though it has been placed—in some doubt—as of the fifteenth century.
The apse is semicircular, without chapels, and the general effect of the interior as a whole is curiously marred by reason of the lack of transepts, clerestory, and triforium.
This notable poverty of feature is perhaps made up for by the amplified side aisles, which are doubled throughout.
The western portal, which is of an acceptable modern Gothic, is of more than usual interest as to its decorations. In the tympanum of the arch is a figure of the Saviour giving his blessing, with the emblems of the Evangelists below, and an angel and the pelican—the emblem of the sacrament—above. Beneath the figure of the Saviour is another of St. Jerome, the patron, to whom the cathedral is dedicated.
A square, ungainly tower holds a noisy peal of bells, which, though a great source of local pride, can but prove annoying to the stranger, with their importunate and unseemly clanging.
The chief accessories, in the interior, are an elaborate organ-case,—of the usual doubtful taste,—a marble statue of St. Vincent de Paul (by Daumas, 1869), and a sixteenth or seventeenth-century statue of a former bishop of the diocese.
Digne has perhaps a more than ordinary share of picturesque environment, seated, as it is, luxuriously in the lap of the surrounding mountains.
St. Domnin, the first bishop, came, it is said, from Africa at a period variously stated as from 330 to 340 A. D., but, at any rate, well on into the fourth century. His enthronement appears to have been undertaken amid much heretical strife, and was only accomplished with the aid of St. Marcellin, the archbishop of Embrun, of which the diocese of Digne was formerly a suffragan.