Cathedral Cities of France

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

La Rochelle of to-day is perhaps little known to the casual traveller. Inland France has so many attractions that most travellers never get so far as the sea-coast; great churches and great rivers draw them elsewhere, and if they want sea breezes there is always Trouville or Etretat ready to hand. Nevertheless, La Rochelle is one of the most beautiful of sea-ports in France; and this is no faint praise, for all towns of this kind are bound to have a peculiar charm of their own—that kind of charm which belongs to a harbour, and the coming and going of ships, and the open sea beyond. To this the town adds certain attractions of its own, among which are the beautiful colours of the boat-sails, and the old grey forts guarding the harbour on either side. These ancient sentinel towers are relics of the prosperity of La Rochelle, and date back to a day before Buckingham sailed up to the port, before the name of Huguenot had ever been heard in France. On the left hand the Tour Saint-Nicolas, built at the end of the fourteenth century, raises four round crenellated turrets above the harbour; on the other side stands the Tour de la Chaîne, a grim, solid-looking round fortress; and farther on still may be seen the stone flèche of the Tour de la Lanterne, looking from a distance like the spire of a church. And the mention of churches brings us naturally to the Cathedral, which, built in the middle of the eighteenth century, has so very little to say for itself that one cannot help feeling it to be a poor set-off to the sea-board of the town; though perhaps it might in any case be useless to look for beauty of this kind in a town whose inhabitants ranked the adorning of churches as one of the deadly sins of Rome. This cathedral was, it is true, built long after La Rochelle had ceased to be a Huguenot stronghold; but when we remember that the beauty of any former church would have fallen a victim to the fanatic’s hammer, we can forgive the architect, and cease to mourn for what might have been. The Cathedral of La Rochelle is not a thing of beauty, but at any rate it has not displaced anything that might have pleased us better.

From La Rochelle to Bordeaux the road runs by heavy-leafed plantations of every kind of tree, notably acacias, whose great size is particularly apparent to an English eye. Then, as the Bordelais comes nearer, we run down to the smooth, peaceful Charente, winding quietly through its meadow lands, not unlike the upper reaches of the Thames, and yet very unlike in one respect, since the water is completely deserted, and even in the height of summer few pleasure boats disturb its smooth surface. Boating as an amusement per se has very little place in the programme of a French country gentleman, though bathing and fishing are both included in it; and the same thing is noticeable nearer Paris, on the Marne, where a pair-oar gig, if ever it got there, would part its timbers through sheer neglect, and break up in a few months.

Bordeaux itself is worthy of its reputation, and is certainly, strictly speaking, a “handsome” city, with a waterway almost as grand as the Thames at London, spanned by a beautiful bridge of red-brick and stone, built in 1822, which might well serve as a model for some of our London bridges. It is a pleasant place enough when once the fact of its being a large and modern city is accepted; and although it has not the romance of the inland hill-towns nor the picturesque situation of La Rochelle, it has always been a city of note, ever since the Gauls came down to the river and called their settlement Burdigala. For three centuries it belonged to England; the same Countess Eleanor, of whom we heard at Poitiers, brought it to her English husband, Henry II., and for some reason it does not seem to have been included in the general confiscation of English territory under Philip Augustus, so it remained an English town and shared in English victories and defeats until Charles VII. was crowned, and the English retired by degrees to their own land. Bordeaux was also the birthplace of poor, weak, well-meaning Richard II.; and his father, the victor of Poitiers, held his court in the town for some time. Here he held, too, his conference upon the affairs of Castile.

Don Pedro was at that time engaged in a struggle for the Castilian throne with his brother, who was not the lawful heir. Neither prince seems to have been blameless in his conduct, and Edward declared that he only upheld the claim of Pedro on account of his lawful birth, and not from any individual deserts; but this declaration apparently failed to satisfy the rest of the English and Gascons within Bordeaux, and it was finally decided to summon a council, composed of all the barons in Aquitaine, “when Don Pedro might lay before them his situation, and his means of satisfying them, should the prince undertake to conduct him back to his own country, and to do all in his power to replace him upon his throne.” The conference resulted in a decision in favour of Pedro, and by order of the English king a certain number of knights and men-at-arms were sent from Bordeaux to escort the claimant back to Spain and to help him to regain his own, all expenses being paid by Castile—a frugal method of rendering aid!

The Cathedral is attributed to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and as it now stands consists of a large nave, without aisles, which were swept away for purposes of roof construction, as at Angers and in Notre-Dame-de-la-Coûture at Le Mans. According to Mr. Bond, an early tower was built in 550, which was noticed by Fortunatus. In plan the building shows the influence of the well-known church of the Cordeliers at Toulouse. “Its western portion is a vast nave without aisles, sixty feet wide internally and nearly two hundred feet in length. Its foundations show that, like that at Angoulême, it was originally roofed by three great domes; but being rebuilt in the thirteenth century, it is now covered by an intersecting vault ... and an immense array of flying buttresses to support its thrust, all which might have been dispensed with had the architects retained the original simple and more beautiful form of roof.”

Within easy distance of Bordeaux is Libourne, a little town upon the Dordogne, which, though now overshadowed by the great port of the Garonne, was in the Middle Ages of almost equal importance in the wine-growing country, and had a special interest as being one of the villes bastides found in several places in the south of France, especially in Guyenne. These really owe their origin to England, for they were founded by Edward I. during his French wars as refuges for those unable to take an active part in the struggle.

Mr. Barker, in his “Two Summers in Guyenne,” gives a very interesting description of these towns, noticing particularly the straight lines of their streets. “In contrast to the typical mediæval town that grew up slowly around some abbey or at the foot of some strong castle that protected it, and in the building of which, if any method was observed, it was that of making the streets as crooked as possible, to assist the defenders in stopping the inward rush of an enemy, the streets of the bastide were all drawn at right angles to each other.” The bastides were built merely for shelter, not, as was the case with other towns, for defence as well, though in the lawless days of the thirteenth century it was sometimes necessary even here to put up a wall, palisade and moat. Libourne has a remnant of such fortification in a quaint old round Tour de l’Horloge with machicolations and a pointed roof. The term bastide was also applied to a single work of defence which, although isolated, formed part of a continuous system of fortification. A single house outside the walls of a town was also called a bastide.

Passing out from Libourne, we reach the very heart of this wine-growing country—a true country of the south it seems in summer, with the endless stretches of vineyards—row after row of green, twisting, climbing wreaths round their stiff, straight poles, under a blazing southern sky, and every now and then a single hill rising suddenly out of the plain, whilst the river slips quietly away in the distance to the sea. On, or rather in, one of these hills the hermit Émilion fixed his cave-dwelling, far back in the legendary years of history; and now—strange contrast!—the town founded by this ascetic, abstemious saint owes its fame to the purple juice of the grape, and sends forth from its slopes not water from his dripping well, but good red wine to gladden the heart of man. A visitor to Saint-Émilion in early summer will find a curious greenness over everything—not only in the freshness of the vineyards. When evening falls the very labourers rise from their task and move home through the dusk like so many green spectres—though from no other cause than from their constant watering of the vines with sulphur-water to kill off the devouring insects.

Irrespective of wine-growers, Saint-Émilion has many things to be seen on its crescent-shaped hill. There is the wonderful church, carved out of the cliff-face, now in ruins, but possessing store enough of massive square piers and round-headed arches to bear witness to its ancient grandeur; and a separate Gothic tower and spire of the twelfth century points a long tapering finger above the narrow creeper-grown streets and low, crowded roofs on the hill-side. The church to which the tower really belongs is not this curious monument carved from the rock, but the collegiate church farther up the hill, now used as a parish church. Other monuments there are besides—the icy-cold, moss-grown vault known as the “Grotte de Saint-Émilion,” where superstitious maidens drop pins into the well to find out when they shall be married; the ruined convent of the Cordeliers, with its grass-grown courts and ivy-covered cloister arcades, and the great walnut tree whose branches shade an empty, silent place where once the brothers chanted and the novices worked at their simple tasks; and the cave-dwellings, where seven of the Girondists hid from the wrath of the Terror, sheltered and fed by a kindly couple who paid later for their good nature by the guillotine, after four of the seven refugees had been captured and executed.