Cathedral Cities of France

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

“We may take it for granted,” Mr. Lonergan says in his “Historic Churches of Paris,” “that those who dedicated the church to the Virgin were not influenced alone by the fact that a previous temple in her honour had stood on the banks of the river, but by the impetus given to what Protestants call her ‘worship’ and Catholics her ‘cult’ or devotion in the twelfth century.” From the earliest times there existed, especially among sailors and fishermen, the feeling of devotion to the Virgin Mary. They prayed to her who held the Divine Infant on her knees to intercede for the lives of men who sailed across the waters on dark and starless nights. This worship of the Virgin steadily grew all over France, and the founders of the great monastic orders—Saint Augustin, Saint Benedict, and Saint Francis, and the famous Saint Bernard of Clairvaulx—are all included by Dante as paying special devotion to the Virgin; and history has furnished us with many other names, amongst which are those of Hildebert, the bishop of Le Mans, Yves and Pierre, bishops of Chartres, and the scholar of St. Denis, Pierre Abélard. At no time was this more noticeable than in the centuries following the completion of Notre Dame. In consequence of this great growth of Mary-worship, the Virgin came to be regarded as the protectress of the people—as, indeed, she is to this day—and the Church of Notre Dame began to be the people’s church, a kind of centre, civil as well as ecclesiastical, of the city life. For instance, Notre Dame in Paris became not only the house of worship and prayer, but “the house both of God and man,” and this through no irreverent feeling. The parvis or garden in front of the Cathedral became a gathering-ground for the townsfolk—a remnant of this feeling, it would seem, still exists in the markets which in lesser towns are nearly always held round the church—fairs took place there, the buyers bringing their purchases to be blessed by the priest as they passed the church steps; and the various festivals of the Church gave rise to secular feasts and sports of all kinds, as well as to the performance of the miracle plays which were attended by the people with such simple wonder and reverence, and which in England laid the foundation of the secular comedies.

The monks of Saint Germain originally came from Autun, and at first acknowledged the rule of Saint Basil, which was afterwards exchanged for that of Saint Benedict. After its restoration in the eleventh century the foundations became very powerful, and round its walls grew up the bourg of Saint Germain; later it became the Faubourg of that name, the “intellectual quarter” of Paris, the haunt of all the most brilliant spirits of the day; whose streets were trodden by great men, and marked by the footsteps of genius.

The Abbey Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés likewise owes its existence to the Merovingian Childebert. In the sixth century Childebert went on an expedition against the Visigoths in Spain, and returned triumphant with a number of sainted relics, among them the tunic of Saint Vincent and a magnificent gold cross; and in honour of these trophies and for their safe keeping he built in the fields outside Paris a monastery, which was consecrated by Saint Germain, so the legend says, the very day of its royal founder’s death. The abbey was originally dedicated, in memory of the relics which it guarded, to Saint Vincent and the Holy Cross; but after the death of its first abbot, Saint Germain, in 576, it became known by his name. Before the building of the Abbey of Saint Denis, Saint-Germain-des-Prés was the burial place of the royal house, and a long line of Childeberts, Chilperics, and Chlothars lie at rest beneath its stones. It was pillaged and burnt by the Normans no less than five times, and therefore, when the Abbot Morard set about rebuilding it in the eleventh century, very little was left of Childebert’s old foundation. Part of Morard’s work may still be seen in the present nave of the church; the choir and apse were built later, and date from the second half of the twelfth century, the church being finally consecrated by Pope Alexander III. in 1163.

The wealth of the monastery even so late as the eighteenth century may be gauged by the indignation of Arthur Young, who in his travels through France in 1786-7 of course visited the capital and its many churches, but looked upon everything with the eye of an agriculturist, and only saw in the rich meadows of the Benedictines so much wasted material for a prosperous farm. “It is the richest abbey in France; the abbot has 300,000 liv. a year. I lose my patience at seeing such revenues thus bestowed, consistent with the spirit of the tenth century, but not with that of the eighteenth. What a noble farm would a fourth of this income establish! What turnips, what cabbages, what potatoes, what clover, what sheep, what wool! Are not these things better than a fat ecclesiastic?”

Like Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Sainte Chapelle originated in a sanctuary where precious relics might be safely deposited, though its foundation does not date back to the early zeal of the fresh-converted Merovingian kings, but only to the crusades of Louis the Saint, who brought from the East the Crown of Thorns and some fragments of the True Cross. Legend describes the king as walking bare-foot through the streets of Sens and Paris, displaying his treasure-trove to an adoring multitude; but it soon became necessary to place the relics in sanctuary, and accordingly, in 1245, the celebrated architect, Pierre de Montereau, began to work out his plans under the direction of the king, and completed his chapel three years later. Its form was a curious one, consisting of two stages; the upper one, dedicated to the Sainte Couronne and the Sainte Croix, was reserved for the king and his court; the lower, bearing the name of the Virgin, was given over to servants, retainers, and the general multitude.

This upper chapel, which was then and still is to-day the chief glory of the building, was on a level with the royal apartments in the adjoining palace, and could thus be reached without descending into the court and re-ascending by the staircase. This chapel was the joy of Saint Louis’ life, and during his reign no cost was spared in order to make it a fitting receptacle for the relics which he venerated and believed in as simply as a child, and for which he is said to have paid to the Byzantine emperor the enormous sum of two million livres. As it now stands, the Sainte Chapelle has been almost completely restored, and this restoration, which was carried out in the last century, was embarked upon none to soon, judging from the accounts given of the state of the church after the Revolution. To begin with, it had been desecrated under the rule of the Goddess of Reason, and used for storing legal documents and papers; the beautiful glass of its windows, with its marvellous minuteness of design, was either destroyed or irregularly patched up; the spire was gone, and so was much of the sculpture and ornament, both outside and inside. There it stood, this monument of the piety of St. Louis, its founder forgotten, its glory departed, and its actual structure in danger of being swept away. Even its ancient surroundings, the Great Hall, the Cour de Mai, and the Cour des Comptes of Louis XII., had vanished; their place was occupied by modern law-courts, and the half-ruined church seemed hopelessly out of date and out of place. By a great stroke of good fortune the balance turned in its favour; it was decided not to pull it down, but to restore it as a chapel attached to the courts, where the lawyer might hear Mass; and, thanks to the care and skill of the restoring architect, it stands to-day in all essentials much as it did when Louis IX. worshipped there with his courtiers, when the light from the tall windows streamed in upon the bright armour and rich garments of hundreds of noble figures, staining them with new and wonderful colours, and when the courts below were alive with a motley crowd, townsfolk of Paris, pressing to get a sight of the king’s majesty, servants and retainers thronging round the doors or filing into Mass in the Chapel of the Virgin below, whose low roof and vaulting really gave it the appearance of a crypt to the soaring chapel of the Crown and Cross above it.

Until the time of Henri II. the kings of France lived in the great “Salle des Pas Perdus” as their royal palace; then the Parlement of Paris—a purely legal body—took possession of it, and the easy-going canons of the Sainte Chapelle ministered not to princes and nobles, but to the brisk, alert gens de la robe, who were quick to note and to laugh at their comfortable ecclesiastical placidity and ridiculous petty quarrels. Boileau, the famous satirist, was the son of a registrar, and grew up under the shadow of the law-courts, and it was he who in his “Lutrin” victimised the poor, ease-loving prebends and canons more than any of his fellows, though one of these canons was his own brother, and after Boileau’s death heaped coals of fire upon the head, or rather, upon the memory, of the poet, by allowing his bones to rest within the building at whose servants he had so mercilessly mocked. The lawyers still have the possession of the Sainte Chapelle; but all stalls and seats have been removed and its doors are opened once a year only, when the autumn session begins, being inaugurated by the “Messe Rouge,” celebrated by the Archbishop of Paris himself.

The Benedictine foundation of Saint Denis, though it stands outside the walls of the city, in a suburb where the tangle of machinery and smoke of factories make strange surroundings for the peace of the cloister, must always claim a right to come within the story of France’s capital, since it is the last resting-place of France’s kings. The legends of Paris and its saints ascribe the original foundation of the abbey church to the following story, which has come to be very well known, concerning as it does the patron saint of France. Saint Denis, who, as we have seen, was the first to evangelise in the marshes of Lutetia, suffered martyrdom under the Valerian persecutions in the third century, in the city where his good work had begun; but after his head had been struck off, the body, instead of falling lifeless at once, rose up from the block, took the head in its hands, and walked out of the city to the neighbouring town of Catulliacum, where it finally sought refuge in the villa of one Catulla, a Roman lady of noble and good repute, who instantly took possession of her sainted charge and gave him Christian burial within her garden. So far is legend; at any rate, a chapel was erected over the shrine, and became, of course, an object of pilgrimage for many years. Then comes the story of Dagobert, the rebellious young prince who sought sanctuary in the chapel against the wrath of his father; and, inspired by a vision of the saint, promised to build a church on the same site. Accordingly, on his accession to his father’s throne, the Abbey and Church of Saint Denis were founded in about 769. In the following century the Benedictine monks purchased their immunity from Norman invaders by large sums of money; but this contract seems to have availed them little, since the pirates, probably hoping for fresh plunder, despoiled the monastery as they had despoiled Saint-Germain-des-Prés. After this the foundation fell into a terrible state of neglect. Its abbots were fighting men—not necessarily ecclesiastics, for many nobles in those days held lay abbacies; Hugh Capet, for instance, was abbot of Saint Martin at Tours—and not until the day of the famous Suger did it recover anything like its ancient prestige. Suger was an old pupil of the Benedictines at Saint Denis, and a fellow-scholar there with the young prince Louis l’Eveillé, afterwards Louis VI., whose chief minister he became in later days. In the days of his prosperity the abbot devoted himself to restoring and beautifying the church, and left full instructions to be carried out by his successor, when death prevented him from finishing what had been so nobly begun. The work languished again, however, until the reign of Louis IX., when Eudes de Clément and Matthieu de Vendôme took up the plans once more, and completed the church very much as we now see it.