The Story of Rouen

by Theodore Andrea Cook

THE NAVE OF ST. OUEN

And it may be that the old Sacristan, for your good fortune, will be living still to tell you of the greatest Englishman he has ever heard of, John Ruskin, who often looked into that quaint mirror of Holy Water, and watched the strange reflection of the arches soaring upwards in the nave.

It was in the Abbey of St. Ouen that on a May Day of 1485, Charles VIII. held a great assembly to deliberate over the concessions to the town after his famous entry into Rouen. To welcome him, poets, machinists, actors, tableaux vivants, marionettes, songs, comedies, and "mysteries," were gathered together regardless of expense. The Dukes of Orléans and Bourbon had arrived before him, and on the twelfth of April they were presented by the Chapterhouse with six gallons of wine of two sorts, and with loaves of the famous bread,[57] in return for which each gave a golden crown to the Cathedral Offertory. Two days afterwards arrived the King himself from Pont de l'Arche with a large and brilliant suite, including the second Louis de la Tremouille, who fought on every battlefield from St. Aubin du Cormier to Pavia, Philippe de Commines the historian, the "Comte de Richemont," soon to be King of England, and many others.

On his way from the Faubourg St. Sever to his lodgings in the Château de Bouvreuil, five stages greeted his progress with loyal allegories. Each bore its title written above in letters of gold or blue or rose upon tin plates. The first was labelled "Repos Pacificque," and represented by means of seven personages an acrostic on the royal name of Charles. The second was "Ordre Politique," and was of a most amazing ingenuity, for no less than forty-four persons were shown on three stages one above the other which all turned round slowly on one piece of timber. On the lowest appeared John the Evangelist with a little angel by his side pointing him upwards to the splendours of the Apocalypse; in the middle twenty-four aged harpers sat and harped, with "lutes and rebecqs" in their hands; at the top shone the "Agnus Dei," the lamb of Rouen from the civic arms, amidst a cloud of evangelists and rainbows. On the third stage, labelled "Uncion des Rois," was figured, with divers changes of scene, the coronation and anointing of David, all arranged by Master David Pinel in token of the joy of Rouen that Charles VIII. had been anointed with the holy oil at Reims which had given strength to Charles VII. to turn out the hated English. "Espoir en la croix" was represented on the fourth by the victory of Constantine over Maxentius, with several "tirements de courtines" or changes of scene. The fifth, styled "Nouvelle Eau Célique," showed the blessings of the new reign after the sufferings of the old one by a fountain which watered the Tree of the People, so that leaves by a marvellous device appeared to flourish naturally upon it, while wine was poured out from beneath for every passer-by to drink, and five fair damsels sang harmoniously. That evening all the shepherds and shepherdesses and other characters in these moving "histories" came down and played a "mystery" before the King. But perhaps the thing that pleased the young Charles most of all, was that gay procession of young gentlemen of Rouen which caracoled before him on horseback, under the leadership of no less a personage than his majesty the King of Yvetôt, the captain of the City Bridge. (See footnote on [page 36].)

In the next days he promised to confirm the charters of the town, assured the canons in the exercise of the Privilège St. Romain, and asked that the procession of the prisoner might pass by his château, which was the more appropriate as the man released had been condemned to death for killing a groom attached to one of the royal suite, who had given wanton and continued provocation. Not till the seventeenth of May were the requests both of the ecclesiastical and the civic authorities fully granted at St. Ouen; the spokesman for each had been Maître Michel Petit, the "chantre" of the Chapterhouse, and by that one fact, if by no other, King Charles must have been properly impressed with the importance of the Church in Rouen.

Before he left the city, he could have seen the exquisite little shrine of St. Maclou in all the fresh untainted delicacy of its first achievement. "The eldest daughter of the Archbishop of Rouen," this marvellous church was the result of one perfect and harmonious plan, and inasmuch as the design of its originator has been faithfully completed, it is far more of an architectural unity than its larger rivals, the Cathedral or St. Ouen. Of these three either one would make the reputation of an English town alone, and the jewelled chiselling and admirable proportions of the smallest of them make a fitting complement to the heavy splendour of the Cathedral on the one hand, and to the dizzy altitudes of the Abbey on the other.

The first Maclou, as may be imagined, was a Scotchman. He fled to Brittany, became Bishop of Aleth, and died in the Saintonge in 561. Ever since the tenth century a shrine had been erected to his memory outside the earliest walls of Rouen, in that morass which gives its name to the Rue Malpalu in front of the present church. Twice burnt and twice rebuilt, it became a parish church within the walls by 1250. A larger building was soon necessary; even during the miseries of the English Occupation it was determined to make the new church worthy of the town that already held the Cathedral and part of St. Ouen; and before 1500 indulgences had been granted by Hugues, the Archbishop, by Cardinal d'Estouteville, and by twenty Cardinals of Rome, to raise sufficient sums of money. In 1437 Pierre Robin, one of the royal architects from Paris, was paid 43 livres 10 sols for a plan and work that must have been begun some eighteen months previously with stone quarried in Val des Leux and Vernon. In 1470 Ambroise Harel was "Maître de l'œuvre," and in 1480 the same Jacques le Roux finished it who worked in the Cathedral. Of individual bequests that of Jean de Grenouville, who was buried in the Chapelle de la St. Vierge in 1466, gave most help. From 1432, when the irreparable ruin of the old church was first recognised, until 1514, the accounts for only seven years have been preserved. In 1520 the spire of wood and lead above Gringoire's lantern was placed on Martin Duperrois' platform, to which a man might ascend without the help of any ladder. In 1735 this was removed, and in 1795 the lead was melted into bullets, and the six bells of 1529 were recast into cannon. In 1868 M. Barthélemy erected the stone Pyramid 83 metres high to hold the fine new bells.[58]

The famous carved doors have been attributed to Jean Goujon, though there is only one figure (the "Caritas" on the left panel of the central porch) that I can believe to be his own workmanship. In all the idea of plan is much the same. There are two divisions, of which the lower contains the "practicable entrance," and is guarded by a caryatid on each side supporting two male figures. Along the lintel runs a line of brackets alternating with cherubs' heads supporting seven figures, four males in high relief with three females in low relief behind them. These figures in turn carry a square panel, carved in high relief above them, representing different scenes on each door, chiefly suggested by the story of the Good Shepherd which is so appropriate to the staple industry of the town. They were begun by 1527 and finished before 1560. Jean Goujon was born in 1520, and was killed during the Massacre of St. Bartholomew while carving on the Louvre. In 1540 he is known to have been at Rouen, and in the next year he worked both here and in the Cathedral. So that he may well have given the design for what he did not personally execute, though no documents exist to prove either.

But if the doors are a trifle disappointing, though only so because of their great reputation, they certainly did not deserve to be mutilated by the Huguenots in 1562; and in 1793 when a barrelmaker's child was slashing the heads of the statues with an axe, the crowd could think of no better comment than "Celui-là sera un fameux patriote!" Of the façade they were intended to adorn, which was probably the work of Ambroise Harel, I have already spoken in describing the exactly reverse plan of the original west front of St. Ouen. It is one of the most delightful tours de force I know in architecture, and when Miss James was drawing for me the frontispiece which adorns this volume, she pointed out that the idea of the curve had been deliberately emphasised to the spectator's eye by building the side porches narrower, and crowning them with lower crests than is the case in the central entrance. The central tympanum represents the Last Judgment, with the Pelican above it that typifies the Resurrection. You may appreciate at once the delicate tracery of lacework in stone which covers this exterior and also the affection felt for its beauties by their guardians, if you will examine the model laboriously built up in wood and paper by an old vicar in the sixteenth century. His ten years of loving toil have been preserved in the Musée des Antiquités, and few better proofs exist of contemporary appreciation of the fine arts.