The choir has a series of carved stalls in wood, which are unusually acceptable. In the choir, also, is a ciborium, in alabaster, with a reliquaire which is said to contain three fingers of John the Baptist, brought to Savoie in the sixth century by Ste. Thècle.
The crypt, beneath the choir, is, as is most frequently the case, the remains of a still earlier church, which occupied the same site, but of which there is little record extant.
XXII
ST. PIERRE DE ST. CLAUDE
St. Claude is charmingly situated in a romantic valley of the Jura.
The sound of mill-wheels and the sight of factory chimneys mingle inextricably with the roaring of mountain torrents and the solitude of the pine forest.
The majority of the inhabitants of these valleys lead a simple and pastoral life, with cheese-making apparently the predominant industry. Manufacturing of all kinds is carried on, in a small way, in nearly every hamlet—in tiny cottage ateliers—wood-carving, gem-polishing, spectacle and clock-making, besides turnery and wood-working of all sorts.
St. Claude, with its ancient cathedral of St. Pierre, is the centre of all these activities; which must suggest to all publicists of time-worn and ennuied lands a deal of possibilities in the further application of such industrial energies as lie close at hand.
In 1789, when Arthur Young, in his third journey through France, passed through St. Claude, the count-bishop of the diocese, the sole inheritor of its wealthy abbey foundation and all its seigneurial dependencies, had only just enfranchised his forty thousand serfs.