[CHAPTER VI]
It is time to turn from Cluny of the past to Cluny of the present. We have not far to go; for the town is still the abbey, and will be so yet, I hope, for many a year to come.
Early on the first morning of our stay, we left the little Hotel de Bourgogne, which stands on the site of the nave, in the very shadow of the last remaining gaunt tower of Cluny. The entrance to the alley is through the façade of the ancient "Palace of the Pope Gélase," as it is called, a fine, fourteenth-century building, restored—rebuilt one might say—in 1783, and fronting on the old courtyard of the monastery, now known as the Place de la Grenelle, or the Place du Marché, on the opposite side of which is a building that was once the monastic stable. The upper story of the façade has fine Gothic windows, forming almost an arcade. The trefoiled tracery is satisfactory, and exquisitely carved faces look down upon you from the corbels of the drip-stones. It was to Cluny, during the abbacy of Pons, that Gélase II., ill-treated and threatened by the partisans of Henry V., fled for rest and refuge; and here, a few days afterwards, lying upon ashes, clothed in the robe of the Benedictine order, and surrounded by his cardinals and the monks of the community, says a contemporary, he died "as in his own house."[90] This palais du pape Gélase is now the principal building of the secondary school, the "Ecole nationale des Arts et Métiers," established in the precincts of the abbey. We wandered for an hour about the building, endeavouring to fashion again, in our minds, Cluny as it was.
Standing in that echoing transept, the sole relic of the great Mother Church of Western Christendom, following the noble shafting up to where, above the mutilated capitals, sculptured with all the naive skill and courage of the time, the eye can reach the lofty vault, and follow round the fluted pilasters of the triforium arcades, I felt that, of all the thousand acts of Vandalism that the incredible, immeasurable folly and ignorance of man have inflicted upon a long-suffering world, this is the most insufferable, the most unpardonable. I can understand, I can almost forgive, a Puritan Cromwell, blinded by a fanaticism, that, though savage and ignorant, was yet, in intention, religious, battering down the statues of Mary from their niches, and shattering with fusilades the glass that, for hundreds of years, had bathed in loveliest colours the sunlit aisles of our Gothic cathedrals; but this I can neither understand nor pardon—that those who, discarding all other religions, have bowed the knee to Reason, as the most divine attribute of man, should have found, in her name, a warrant to drive a street through the abbey's cloister garth, and blast, with the dynamiter's bomb, the hoary arches of Cluny.
This chapel of the normal school, as it now is, was once the southern limb of the great transept. With the tower of the Eau Bénite, the smaller tower of the Horloge, and the Chapelle Bourbon, it is the sole remaining relic of the church itself. Until after 1823, the transept was open to the wind and rain, which threatened ruin to the fabric. It was decided, therefore to close the gaping arches of the collateral on the east and west, and to build a wall on the north side. The immense height of the transept, emphasized by the vaulting shafts, is made more striking by the small space within which it is viewed, and the blind gallery and clerestory, with their arcades, and coupled, engaged columns, and fluted pilasters, enable one to break through, in imagination, that northern wall, and get a realistic glance, east and west, into the sanctuary, and down the five aisles of the church as it was.
The two chapels remaining in the transept, are those of St. Martial and St. Stephen. The former, half domed and lighted by three windows, is similar in style to the original apsidal chapels; that of St. Stephen is fine Gothic work of the first half of the fourteenth century. Here was buried Pierre de Chastelux, abbot from 1322 to 1343, who bought the Palais des Thermes, at Paris, where Jean de Bourbon, a century later, was to commence the Hotel de Cluny. Here, too, was buried, in the middle of the chapel, Jacques d'Amboise (1480-1510), the successor of Jean de Bourbon, and the completer of the Palais Abbatial, here at Cluny, and of the Hotel de Cluny at Paris. The brickwork of the south wall of the transept still shows the position of the two doors, one for ordinary use, and one processional gateway, leading into the cloisters.
The most important remaining building is the Chapelle Bourbon, which was added to the south end of the smaller (eastern) transept by Abbot Jean de Bourbon (1456-1480), who had his own private oratory here, whence he could assist, through an aperture in the wall, at the ceremonies before the great altar in the sanctuary. Enough remains of the decoration of the chapel to show, at a glance, that it was a good example of late Gothic art. Around it were ranged, on a series of sculptured corbels or consoles, the heads of fifteen prophets, painted in colours. They are not lacking in expression, but are clumsy and heavy. These busts served as supports for fifteen stone statues, those of St. Paul, the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, and the twelve Apostles, all of which have disappeared, no one knows whither. The guide told us that one of these statues, that of Christ, was in gold, and all the others in silver; a statement which, if it be true, accounts sufficiently for their disappearance. The only thing of interest remaining in the grounds of the école normale is the thirteenth-century bake-house, close to the Tour du Moulin, by the river wall.
The ancient wall of the abbey is broken down in many places, and part of it is engulfed by the buildings of the town erected against it. Of the interior towers of the abbey—besides those of the church—only two remain, the Tour du Moulin, and the Tour des Fromages. The first, as we have just seen is close to the river, and the second is close to the church of Notre Dame. The origin of its curious name is not known. Of the exterior relics of the abbey, the most interesting, architecturally and historically, is the great entrance gate, which is high up on the side of the hill, at the top of the road leading from the Hotel de Bourgogne, the street that extends along the site of the nave, the narthex, the porch, and the parvis of the basilica. On your right, as you mount the rise, you pass part of a gateway, to the crevices of whose moulded stones cling rock plants and grasses—a beautiful, time-mellowed ruin—all that remains of the gate of the narthex.