Its pseudo-classic features classify it as one of those structures designated by the discerning Abbé Bourassé as being "cold-blooded and lacking in lustre."
It surely is all of that, and the pity is that it offers no charm whatever of either shape or feature.
It is of course more than likely that Huguenot influence was here so great as to have strangled any ambition on the part of the mediæval builders to have erected previously anything more imposing. And when that time was past came also the demise of Gothic splendour. The transition from the pointed to the superimposed classical details, which was the distinctive Renaissance manner of church-building, was not as sudden as many suppose, though it came into being simultaneously throughout the land.
There is no trace, however, in the cathedral of St. Louis, of anything but a base descent to features only too well recognized as having little of churchly mien about them; and truly this structure is no better or worse as an art object than many others of its class. The significant aspect being that, though it resembles Gothic not at all, neither does it bear any close relationship to the Romanesque.
The former parish church of St. Barthèlemy, long since destroyed, has left behind, as a memory of its former greatness, a single lone tower, the work of a Cluniac monk, Mognon by name. It is worth hours of contemplation and study as compared with the minutes which could profitably be devoted to the cathedral of St. Louis.
IV
CATHÉDRALE DE LUÇON
When the see of Luçon was established in the fourteenth century it comprehended a territory over which Poitiers had previously had jurisdiction. A powerful abbey was here in the seventh century, but the first bishop, Pierre de la Veyrie, did not come to the diocese until 1317. The real fame of the diocese, in modern minds, lies in the fact that Cardinal Richelieu was made bishop of Luçon in the seventeenth century (1606 to 1624).
The cathedral at Luçon is a remarkable structure in appearance. A hybrid conglomerate thing, picturesque enough to the untrained eye, but ill-proportioned, weak, effeminate, and base.
Its graceful Gothic spire, crocketed, and of true dwindling dimensions, is superimposed on a tower which looks as though it might have been modelled with a series of children's building-blocks. This in its turn crowns a classical portal and colonnade in most uncanny fashion.