Cathedral Cities of France

by R. W. S. Herbert Marshall; Hester Marshall

Until the days of the League, the kings of France always found an attraction in the sunny Touraine meadows, and occupied themselves a good deal with Tours itself. On the outskirts of the town is the village of Plessis-les-Tours, where stood the famous fortress of Louis XI., who lived, plotted and died within its walls; here also Louis XII. was proclaimed “father of his people,” and here Henri III. and the King of Navarre met together for a common defence against the League. To an Englishman the name naturally associates itself with Quentin Durward, and calls up a picture of the grim fortress so vividly described by Walter Scott, with its triple moat and high palisades, its dark walls and turreted gateways, defended by three hundred Scottish arches, and the donjon tower “which rose like a black Ethiopian giant, high into the air.” The castle of Plessis was in old days a terror to the countryside; the surrounding forest was a perfect network of man-traps, and the intruder, were he fortunate enough to avoid these, had no chance of escape from the arrows of the Scottish guard in their iron “swallows’ nests” upon the walls. Hardly less mysterious, indeed, is the central figure within these grim surroundings—Louis himself, whose character, with its strange mingling of guile and religious fervour, unfathomable craft and childish superstition, baffled the men of his own day as it has baffled posterity. He was feared by those who served him, and he was obeyed, because a terrible alternative awaited the disobedient; but he was neither loved nor understood. Of love, indeed, he had little need, and it was not his pleasure that men should understand him.

Very little, however, remains to-day of the “verger du roi Louis” to show that it was once the home of kings. It has gone the way of most of the “illusions ... in the good city of Tours with regard to Louis XI.,” and only a few fragments and “inconsequent lumps” share with some modern buildings the site of this royal prison of Plessis-les-Tours.

The western façade of Tours Cathedral, with its two small towers, is a noticeable example of the waning Gothic style. The detail is so “charmingly executed as almost to induce the belief, in spite of the fanciful extravagance which it displays, that the architects were approaching to something new and beautiful when the mania for classic detail overtook them.” Looking eastward from the west door one notices the northerly trend of the Cathedral’s axis, commencing from the transept arches. The choir spreads outward at its first bay, the side walls not following the alignment of the body of the church. The glass is both abundant and magnificent in the nave lights, and the enormous clerestory windows display it to the greatest possible advantage. Unfortunately, the fine rose window in the north transept is marred by the cutting across of a vertical pillar, inserted as a support to the crest of the arch. In both transepts the triforium arches present a curious and novel arrangement, the reason for which is not very apparent. The arches are in a double plane, but the openings are not directly one behind another.

The pier arches of the nave are plain, with simple panel-like spandrils, the piers themselves supporting a very large clerestory and glazed triforium. In the latter the heads of the arches are filled in with rich Flamboyant tracery, either in imitation of the fleur-de-lys, or with varieties of wheel tracery in double plane. The choir is much earlier than the nave, and its bays show a beautiful proportion and harmony in its members, the whole elevation being supported on clustered columns with stalk capitals and square abacus. In the apse the tracery is a slight variant from that of the choir; the arch-heads are here filled in with trefoil instead of quatrefoil tracery. On the north side of the Cathedral are the remains of some cloisters, joined to the main body by two flying buttresses.

To most travellers in France the town of Blois is associated with a château rather than with a cathedral; it is one of a group of towns known and visited for the historic piles which tower above their grey roofs—Amboise and Chambord, Langeais and Chenonceaux, Chaumont and Montrichard. We count Blois with these rather than with the towns famous for their churches, and the bishopstool comes rather as a surprise, or as a thing unconsidered. The Cathedral, built in the seventeenth century and dedicated to St. Louis, occupies a magnificent position, overhanging the grey water-front of the Loire in a fashion which seems to call for some nobler building. However, although built according to a curiously mixed design in bastard Gothic and Renaissance, there is a certain sense of proportion in the interior of the church, the vaulting being especially simple and broad in effect. The nave consists of nine bays, with a low clerestory, terminating in stone panels, which occupy the place usually assigned to the triforium, and are left in the rough with a view to subsequent enrichment by sculpture. The examples of adornment at the east end, however, make one feel that the church has been mercifully spared any further fantasies from the chisel of the Renaissance sculptor.

Far better is the Church of St. Nicolas, whose twin towers stand out dark and sharp midway between the water-front and the overhanging mass of the Château. It belongs to the tenth and eleventh centuries, and has not been much restored except by whitewash, which covers most of the interior, but allows a good deal of old work to be seen, especially in the north aisle, where, near the pulpit, we find round-headed windows very deeply splayed. The nave has five bays, and a blind triforium, consisting of an arcade of four small arches in each bay, the last two eastward having only three arches set in the blind wall. These last bays are much ruder than the others, especially on the south side. The clerestory has twin lights, with a rose in the head of the arch, as is seen in the Cathedral at Chartres. The transepts are good, and the little corbel-tables running the whole way round, form a series of those grotesque and curiously unecclesiastical faces of men and beasts which we find so often in early church sculpture. In this particular series a gridiron plays a prominent part, which is curious, as the church appears to have no connection with Saint Lawrence. Behind the choir is an old chapel dedicated to Saint Joseph, which has a Romanesque apse; and it is noticeable that in this part of the church the roof groining is simple—that is, without ribs. In the lantern, which is in the form of a cupola, each pendentive is terminated by the figure of a saint in its niche.

High above Saint Nicolas a steep flight of steps leads up to the great Château which has made history for the town below. The most striking view is from the other side, where the magnificent “aile François I^er” rises in imposing fashion above the high road; but the entrance is in the Louis XII. wing to the east, and here the beautiful inner court opens out a varied display of richness. The eastern wing itself contains the private apartments of Louis XII. and his wife, Anne de Bretagne—these are now converted into a local museum and picture gallery—and the lower storey is in the form of an arcade, with unrestored capitals of the fifteenth century. Facing this is the wing of “ruled lines and blank spaces,” constructed by Gaston d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIII., upon the foundations of a wing erected by his ancestor, the poet-duke Charles, whom Henry V. took prisoner at Agincourt, and whose son became Louis XII. The old castle of the Counts of Blois had been sold to the Orléans family by the last of the line in 1397, and the new possessors, each in his day, occupied themselves in restoring and embellishing it. So zealous indeed, in this respect, was Duke Gaston, that, had not fate intervened, not only the west wing but the entire building would have been pulled down to make way for his plans. Happily for posterity, this devastation never took place, and the François I^er wing, the chief treasure of the Château, is still preserved to us much as it was at the end of the sixteenth century, at which time Blois may be said to have reached the zenith of its fame in the history of France. The Château was then a royal residence, and the roll of its inhabitants forms a long list of illustrious names, foremost among which stand those of Catherine dé Medici and Charles IX., Henri III., and the King of Navarre, and the famous Henri de Guise, who met his death here through the suspicion and jealousy of the king, his cousin. In the Guise tragedy the chief interest of the Château appears to centre. Dark hints concerning “le Balafré” are thrown out during the progress through a succession of dim, empty rooms—council room and bed-chamber, oratory and private closet, some flooded with sunshine, others dark with the strange misty curtain that age will sometimes hang across an old chamber, and through whose thin veil one seems to see the shades of those old-time kings and queens, walking, plotting and praying as they did when the Château was alive with the tread of men. All this appears to lead up to the scene of the Guise murder, and as the guide reaches the royal bed-chamber and points through a doorway here and down a passage there, one seems to have reached the heart of the tragedy. There, in the long council-room, the Balafré stood, warming his hands by the fire, when the message came that the king awaited him in a cabinet at the far end of the wing; here, in an ante-room close by, Henri III. lifted the curtain and watched the enemy to his death; there in the dark, narrow passage—too narrow even to allow of his drawing sword—Guise found himself caught like a rat in a trap; here, in the king’s own chamber, he doubled back for safety, and met his death at the foot of the royal bed. It is all very thrilling and very real; and little as there is to love in Henri de Guise, one cannot but pity the man for the manner of his death; and there seems nothing but justice in the murder of the king himself a short time afterwards. This second tragedy took place outside the old dungeon, a gloomy round tower with cross-barred windows and a heavy iron door, behind which the Cardinal de Guise, brother of the Balafré, suffered imprisonment at the hands of his jealous cousin. In the centre of the dungeon floor is a trap door, which, considering the general atmosphere of the place, one naturally associates with an oubliette, but which more probably represented the head of a well, run up through the building in order that the inhabitants of the castle should not suffer from want of water in siege time.

It is curious to note that the historical description to which the visitor listens to-day as he follows his guide through those empty chambers at Blois is almost exactly the same as that given a hundred and twenty years ago. Arthur Young, travelling in France in 1787, paid a visit to Blois, and gives the following account of the Château and its history: “We viewed the castle for the historical monument it affords that has rendered it so famous. They show the room where the council assembled, and the chimney in it before which the Duke of Guise was standing when the king’s page came to demand his presence in the royal closet; the door he was entering when stabbed; the tapestry he was in the act of turning aside; the tower where his brother the cardinal suffered, with a hole in the floor into the dungeon of Louis XI., of which the guide tells many horrible stories, in the same tone, from having told them so often, in which the fellow in Westminster Abbey gives his monotonous history of the tombs.”