We spent all the day in going about, passing through the internal galleries of the cathedral; the curve in the nave is very perceptible. The roof was poorly painted for the sacre of Charles X. with white fleurs de lis on a blue ground; it is very massive in its vaulting, the pitch, perhaps, not perfectly agreeable to the eye.
We had a letter from M. D'Alzon to the Archbishop, but he had left Reims a day or two before; we had another from M. Gaduel to the Supérieur of the Séminaire, which M. took in the afternoon. About 8 o'clock we both went there, and had some talk with him and the professors, one of whom, M. Lassaigne, gave us a translation of Gioberti against Cousin, and recommended me Le Prêtre Juge et Medicin dans le Tribunal de la Penitence, which I got. I gathered from their discourse that confession is the great chain which holds together the whole Christian life; it is practised weekly by the pupils: communion is entirely free. A great many priests of the neighbourhood confess still to the supérieur (M. Aubry), their old teacher: forty he said. I asked them if they could conceive a Christian life maintained without confession: they said, hardly; that it was involved in our Lord's words, "whose sins ye do retain," &c., which power could only be exercised upon each individual case, after knowledge of the facts, such as of course can only be obtained by auricular confession. I alleged to the Supérieur the strong expressions often used to the Virgin Mary, instancing "les satisfactions infinies du Fils de Dieu et de sa Mère:" he condemned them and this. I spoke of St. Bonaventure's Psalter; he did not seem acquainted with it, and regretted that I did not stay till the morrow, when he would have gone over it with me, and weighed the words. But at last he said, St. Bonaventure is not the Church, though he is a saint and doctor of it. They were very kind and cordial, and I should have liked to see more of them.
Wednesday, July 23.—At 5 o'clock the bell of the cathedral sounded long and loud over our heads, leaving no excuse for those who chose to slumber on. I got up, and found two places by the diligence for Laon. M. was in a great hurry, so I exercised a piece of self-denial and woke him, and we hurried off. It was, indeed, with great regret I departed from under the shadow of that noble church, feeling that I left so much of its beauty undiscerned, or rather so few of its forms impressed on the mind. We were four hours and a half reaching Laon, from 6 to 10½, in the intérieur; two fat women and a child made it latterly very uncomfortable. The country flat for some way, then hills and fine prospects. But the position of Laon is very remarkable indeed, a triangular hill rising out of a great plain: in short, another Enna, though not so lofty. The resemblance is very marked indeed, and presented itself to me again and again. Near to one corner of the triangle rises the cathedral, with its four lofty towers, two at the west end, and one at each end of the transept; there are the beginnings of two others, and all six were intended to have had spires as lofty as themselves; the south-west had one, which was taken down. Their present height is, the S.W. 220 feet each, (French,) the N. and S. 235. They are very striking, but want their crown of spires, and are in the most splendid situation for such a building which I ever saw. The view is accordingly very extensive, to the north flat, but to the south terminated by fine hills. We viewed these towers in a great number of positions, on the promenades, and from another corner of the triangle, to the south. The church within is very stately; early English, 400 feet long, and quite uniform in style, or at least with only here and there a decorated window, as in the S. transept. The curve of the roof is very beautiful; after Reims it struck us as low, though at least 80 feet high. The west front is fine, though the portals require more work to conceal their vast depth. I could not but greatly admire the skill of the architect of Reims, who had evidently studied and adopted the towers and western front of this church, which is said in its time (1130) to have been the finest in France, and yet has produced a work incomparably more beautiful, and quite original. Laon has a double triforium, making four stages in its interior.
We walked about here a great deal. The situation is one of the finest I have ever seen; it inspires a sort of elevation in the mind. Beyond the church a caserne is building, and a fort already made—a bad exchange for the tower of Louis d'Outremer. The church of St. Martin is very disappointing inside, being very low. As the diligence was full for the night, we hired a cab, to take us to St. Quentin. It took us from 5½ to 11½, stopping half an hour at La Fère. Road generally flat, and very bad indeed, having no pavé to La Fère. We saw a village church or two, Norman in style. Our conveyance was one of the most uncomfortable I ever experienced; besides that we were overwhelmed with bags and coats. Our driver served at eighteen in one of Napoleon's battles, and had carried off a token in a sabre cut on the cheek; it was the battle of Fleury, where, he said, "L'Empereur était trahi." So the French guide-book says of the battle of Crecy: "Les Français perdirent 30,000 par la faute du Comte d'Alençon."
Thursday, July 24.—We are at l'Hôtel du Cygne: comfortable enough. The church is of first-rate beauty; the nave, from its great height and purity of style, even more striking than that of Reims inside; and so the transept: but the choir and many parts of the church have swerved from the perpendicular, and are braced with iron,—a sad drawback. The architect has raised his central building, with extreme boldness, to an enormous height; but he has not thrown strength and breadth enough into his aisles to resist the pressure. The windows throughout of geometric tracery, remarkably beautiful; and the pillars of the nave spring from the ground to the roof without capital at the lower arches, and are of great beauty, an advance certainly on Reims, and in one respect on Amiens, in that they are not merely cylinders, with columns at the four corners, but have two colonnettes introduced again between these, which produces an effect of great lightness. Beautiful end of north transept, a decorated window below, an open triforium of eight lights, and a vast decorated window terminating in a great rosace above—stained glass. The apse of seven windows, with most brilliant stained glass, beginning from a second transept of great beauty, making a double cross, the southern part flamboyant. I think the nave of this church, and the apse and arrangements of its chapels might be profitably studied as an almost perfect specimen; it may compete with Amiens and St. Ouen, and undoubtedly surpasses Reims. Height, 128 English feet; vaulting of roof very beautiful. We went in at 11 o'clock, and found preparations for a funeral of some importance: presently all the choir was filled with well dressed persons; and the body being deposited under a catafalque, surrounded with burning tapers, in the centre of the nave and transept, mass was chanted. The black velvet chasuble, and the copes and other robes to match, like all the dresses of the Roman clergy, are very handsome. We went into the upper part of the choir, but I could not avoid noticing with what indifference most of the attendants on the funeral treated the holiest rite of the Church; they were, no doubt, unbelievers; and some ragged boys close beside me were a serious annoyance, incessantly spitting, laughing, and talking. The west end of this church has been barbarized in the style of 1681, most ugly to behold; it seems to have been intended to have two towers, but no part of them at present exists. We went through the roof of the church, and caught a view from the strange-looking steeple which rises over the croisée. The country round is not remarkable—flat, and in parts wooded. Rest of the day spent in writing. Found some common prints of details in the life of the Holy Family which pleased us.
Friday, July 25.—At 6 o'clock we started by the diligence to Amiens by Peronne—had the coupé with an English woman, who got in a few miles on the road. The country not remarkable—some hills and a fertile succession of corn-fields. Reached Peronne a little before nine, and breakfasted there. Several fortifications and drawbridges both entering and going, but they did not seem kept up with much care. The Church, de la Renaissance, not remarkable. The rest of the road to Amiens a fine broad country, with occasional hills, of average beauty. No view of Amiens cathedral but from the last hill, a few miles off, and then it looked small, I suppose from the vastness of the plain in which it stands. We did not reach Amiens, a distance of only 82 kiloms. from St. Quentin, till after three o'clock. At the last stage some young seminarists got out of the rotonde, and were met by their mother and sisters, as it seemed: they were apparently peasants, very humbly clad, and of the most ordinary demeanour. I saw what education had done for the young men (who had not received the tonsure): even the retired life and poor salary of a country curé would be a great elevation in the scale of society to them. I would not mention this invidiously, but the lot of the French Curé de Campagne has sometimes appeared to me so painful, that it was a relief to see its bright side even in a material point of view.
I went to my old quarters at the Hôtel de France, and we were shown into the same room I had occupied two years before. We got a light dinner and set off to the cathedral. The first sight of its west front was almost painful after that of Reims, there being certainly a confusion and want of harmony in its parts; while the southern tower being left twenty feet lower than the northern combines to spoil the effect. But I was no sooner in the interior than a full sense of its prodigious superiority to every other building we had seen established itself on my mind; and the impression my first visit two years ago made was more than repeated. Only St. Ouen may enter at all into competition; but the vast proportions of Amiens, combined with the great purity of its style, more than counterbalance the, if any, superior grace and lightness of the other. In the evening we walked out to the west, in the hope of catching a good view of the cathedral, but we could not find the right place. Amiens has nothing else remarkable which fell under our observation.
Saturday, July 26.—After breakfast we went to the cathedral, and passed over all the galleries inside and outside, and the roofs. The best external view from the building itself is on the north tower; the arcs boutants of the choir and the whole arrangement are much more striking than those of the nave. The guide, a very intelligent man, assured us there was no danger apprehended within or without to any part of the building. As far as M. and I could judge, we thought it would last as easily for the next 500 years as it had gone through the last. The view through the eight compartments of the upper chamber of the central clocher is pretty; it seems to fit into so many frames the city and the vast plain in which it stands. We saw the towers of Corbie. In the inside I noticed four particulars of its great superiority, over and above the unequalled proportions of the whole.
1st, The triforium and its windows, especially of the choir; these windows commence on the east side of the transept. In the rest there are arches, which have been filled up with masonry from the beginning. I think this triforium superior to that of St. Ouen, chiefly from the geometric character of its forms; whereas those of St. Ouen approach to the perpendicular. Each bay has six divisions, save the five of the apse, which have four.
2nd, The windows of the clerestory, all of pure geometric tracery. I measured one on the south side of the nave, nineteen feet three inches wide, clear light.