Under the government of St. Hugues, grown old and gray, Cluny had reached the summit of worldly power, and of moral influence; with him, her best days passed. On the 29th April, 1109, the priests, loudly lamenting, were gathered round the body of their dead saint. Clothed in his sacerdotal robes, he lay, for three days, in the church, and a great crowd of lords and ladies, of bourgeois, woodsmen, labourers from field and vineyard, women and children, came to kiss his feet, and lift his raiment to their lips. On the day before, Bernard de Varennes heard Saint Denis the Areopagite announce to him, in a vision, that, if he wished to see again, for the last time, his friend and abbot, Hugues of Cluny, he must haste to the dying man. Bernard obeyed the summons, but, on his arrival, fell sick and remained three days in a lethargy. When he came to himself, he said to the monks around him, "Unhappy man that I am. I had come to salute my abbot, and he is dead before the grace is granted me. But what I might not see with the eyes of the body, I saw with the eyes of the spirit. I saw the dwellers in Heaven descend among men, and the Mother of God, brighter than the morning star, standing in the midst of the monks around the death-bed of Seigneur Hugues. At the moment of the passing of his soul, spirits, armed with arrows, flew to seize upon it, but the Mother of Mercy, raising her hand, struck them with terror, and put them to flight, as the wind scatters the autumn leaves. Martin, the pearl of priests, Benedict the sun of abbots, at the head of the heavenly cohorts, bore the soul of Hugues into a fair and fertile vineyard, that there it might rest awhile. Hugues, perceiving me in this place, addressed me thus: 'Eat, dear friend, these bunches of white grapes, eat and rest with me awhile; not for long am I here. When my feet are freed from the swelling and the dust of a long earthly pilgrimage, I shall pass into the home that God hath prepared for me throughout eternity. Recommend to Pons, my successor, to treasure humility and innocence, to forget his own needs for those of others, and to follow my example of monastic rule.'"
Pons did not follow Hugues' example of monastic rule. When his vanity, weakness, and love of pomp had alienated a portion of his following, he resigned his abbacy and retired. His successor, Hugues II. held office only a few months, when the task of presiding over the destinies of Cluny passed to Pierre le Vénérable, the last of the great abbots, a name that already links us in memory with him whose destiny it was, by a return to simplicity, as a source of strength, to rival, and, for a time, to exceed the power of Cluny. I speak of St. Bernard, the champion of the Cistercian order. We shall meet him again at Citeaux and elsewhere.
It is probable that St. Hugues himself, by acquiring such great wealth for the abbey, prepared its ultimate downfall. Be that as it may, though the rhyming Burgundian proverb,
"En tous pays ou le vent vente L'Abbaye le Cluny a rente,"
may not have been coined until a later century, it is certain that Cluny was fast acquiring wealth, and succumbing to a luxury utterly alien to the Spirit of Him Whose benediction was upon the poor and the humble. It was natural that the order, following the fashion of the age, should wish to house worthily the many priceless relics brought back by pious, though too credulous, crusaders from the Holy Land, and the members of the Clunisian school of art soon learned to vie with one another in fashioning châsses for the miraculous rod with which Moses brought forth water in the desert, or for the stone from Mount Sinai on which he kneeled when he received from God the table of the law, or for the alabaster vase from which Mary Magdalen anointed the Saviour's Feet.[88]
As the treasures grew in number, the skill of the artificers, and their passion for exercising it increased simultaneously, until, at last, the story of the treasures of Cluny, in the monastic inventories, is like a tale from the "Thousand and one Nights," told in gold and jewels. When there were no more relics to work for, the monks turned to what was next to hand, and soon, from the crosses, from the pastoral baton, from the candelabra of gold and silver, of crystal and ivory, from the draped altars, from the pontifical mitres, even, diamonds and rubies flashed, opals sparkled with their changing rays, while, sometimes, a softly-shining pearl dropped from the Abbot's sandal, as he stepped into the blaze of light in which the great altar was bathed.
Not less gorgeous were the sacerdotal robes, woven always of the most precious stuffs, and in the choicest colours, and worked, on body and sleeves, with an infinite number of designs, lions and griffons, kings and dragons, angels, eagles, leopards and serpents, crosses, arms, lilies, and roses. All the rich and varied symbolism of the times shone out from the robes of Cluny. Nor were the altars, statues, and tombs less gorgeous. The magnificent châsse of St. Hugues was of precious wood, entirely covered with silver, the reliefs representing, in gold, the mysteries of the Life and Death of the Saviour. The pictures and altar pieces were similarly treated. One of the statues of Mary was of gold; she held in her hand a silver candle adorned with great pearls; she was crowned with a golden crown; precious stones flashed upon her brow. The Infant Christ was playing with a golden rattle, and wore, upon His Baby head, a golden crown enriched with rubies and emeralds.
To such a Cluny there could only be one end. Her days, as a spiritual force, were spent. Henceforth, to the religious world, she was to be no more than a splendid memory; yet the soul of goodness that ever lives and moves in things seemingly evil, had reserved wonderful uses for the work that deft hands, otherwise idle, were still fashioning in the cloisters of Cluny. Her lions, her lilies, her crosses in wrought gold, her symbols in chased silver and in precious stones, had already awakened the spirit of emulation in a thousand brooding minds. Who shall tell the debt that Gothic art owes, that we, its inheritors, shall ever owe to the decadence of the mother abbey.