An imaginative description surely, and one that is doubtless not without truth were one able to first come upon this riverside city of mid-France in the twilight, and by boat from the upper river.
Chalons is an ideally situated city, with a placidness which the slow current of the Saône does not disturb. But its cathedral! It is no more like its Parisian compeer than it is like the Pyramids of Egypt.
In the first place, the cathedral towers are a weak, effeminate imitation of a prototype which itself must have been far removed from Notre Dame, and they have been bolstered and battened in a shameful fashion.
The cathedral at Chalons is about the most ancient-looking possession of the city, which in other respects is quite modern, and, aside from its charming situation and general attractiveness, takes no rank whatever as a centre of ancient or mediæval art.
Its examples of Gallic architecture are not traceable to-day, and of Roman remains it possesses none. As a Gallic stronghold,—it was never more than that,—it appealed to Cæsar merely as a base from which to advance or retreat, and its history at this time is not great or abundant.
A Roman wall is supposed to have existed, but its remains are not traceable to-day, though tradition has it that a quantity of its stones were transported by the monk Bénigne for the rotunda which he built at Dijon.
The city's era of great prosperity was the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when its fortifications were built up anew, its cathedral finished, and fourteen churches held forth.
From this high estate it has sadly fallen, and there is only its decrepit cathedral, rebuilt after a seventeenth-century fire, and two churches—one of them modern—to uphold its ecclesiastical dignity.
The towers of the cathedral are of the seventeenth century, but the so-called "Deanery Tower" is more ancient, and suggestive of much that is militant and very little that is churchly.
The interior has been restored, not wholly with success, but yet not wholly spoiled.