Historic buildings

by Unknown

The Fourteenth Century erected in France four churches of a peculiar grandeur and magnificence: the Cathedral of Saint Quentin; the abbey of Saint Bertin, Saint Omer; Saint Nazaire of Carcassonne and Saint Ouen of Rouen. The first two have disappeared, but the two others have come down to us almost intact, and both of them derive their disconcerting basilicas from the end of the Thirteenth Century; Saint Urbain of Troyes is a piece of stone jewelry.

We shall have less trouble in characterizing briefly the marvellous building of Saint Ouen, than in describing Notre-Dame (Rouen). The edifice is longer, less ample, clearer, and more of a unity as far as the structure is concerned, and it is deprived of those brilliant accessories which engross the attention. It is, by all odds, superior in harmony and compactness of the execution and inferior in size. The one attracts poets, the other is preferred by men of learning. Everybody will appreciate the subtlety.

Now, first of all and very briefly, here is the history of this abbey. Upon the ruins of an oratory constructed in this very place by the indefatigable Saint Victrice about 535, Clotaire erected a large church dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Paul. In the last years of the Seventh Century, Saint Ouen restored it and wished it to be his sepulchre. According to the Life of that great bishop attributed to Fridegode, a monk of Canterbury, it was a building of noble appearance, constructed of square stones in the Gothic style. It is useless to discuss these words, quoted on account of their curiosity, but which might well be accounted for by some alteration in the text, and, in any case, have but little meaning for us. After the appearance of the Northmen, the abbey experienced varied fortunes: it was sacked and demolished in 841, repaired in 1046 by the Abbé Nicholas of Normandy, son of Duke Richard III., and it was burned to the ground several times. A fragment of Nicholas’s apsis at the end of the nave is preserved under the name of Chambre aux clercs: a portion of the hemicycle arched cul-de-four is ornamented very coarsely, but it is strongly built.

But to resume: there was no glory for the monks of Saint Benoît here until the beginning of the Fourteenth Century and the advent of the Abbé Jean Roussel. This Jean Roussel, born in Quincampoix, near Rouen, and known, nobody knows why, by the nick-name of Marc d’ Argent, was a very original personage. Active, discreet, prudent, energetic, and devoted to everything under his charge, he re-established the monastic discipline and by the wisdom of his administration doubled the revenues; and, as Suger did before him at Saint Denis, he resolved to rebuild his abbey according to the latest developments in architecture. We do not know who was his master in this work; but certainly it must have been some clever man who had carefully studied Amiens, Beauvais, Troyes and Séez. Within a few years, the work was sufficiently advanced for his conception to have become definitive. His successors had nothing more to do than to follow out his ideas. Materials were not stinted. The quarries of Chaumont, Vernon and Saint-Leu furnished their magnificent calcareous stone, of fine grain mixed with silex. As the Abbé was never at a loss for funds, it was popularly imagined that he coined gold, and many a legend exists upon this subject. The truth is, he knew how to economize with large sums, obtained from the King important rights regarding the cutting of wood in the forest Verte and created disinterested good-will around him. In the year 1318, the first stone was laid, and in the year 1339, when he died, more than 79,936 livres (2,600,000 francs of our money) were paid to the stone-cutters. The inscription placed on his tomb, destroyed in 1562 by the Calvinists, described the state in which he left the church, the choir and the eleven transept chapels comprising the large terminal chapel were finished: the large pillars of the transept were only lacking the tower, the two arms of the transept were approaching completion, and doubtless also the nave was quite advanced.

The Hundred Years’ War retarded the work without actually interrupting it. We find Charles VI. in 1380 allowing 3,000 livres to the Abbé Arnaud du Breuil to hasten the work. The portal called des Marmousets at the south arm of the transept is now given over to the sculptors. However the hour for rapid achievement has passed. It is not until 1439 that the two roses of Master Alexandre de Berneval and his legendary pupil unfold at the extremities of the transept. Under Admiral d’ Estouteville, Archbishop of Rouen and Abbé of the monastery, the entrance to the choir was closed by a precious Gothic rood-screen; but the nave had yet to be finished, and the central tower and the façade had yet to be done. The Abbé Bohier at the very last of the Fifteenth Century, finished the building. The delicious square tower, eighty-two metres high, set off with bays, with gables and corner buttresses upon which are grafted the flying-buttresses of the octagonal belfry with the open-worked crown, is of the same date, the same style, and, perhaps, of the same hand as the Tour de Beurre. We possess the plan of the façade, drawn at this time by an unknown artist. It recalls the taste of the Normans for the porches under bell-towers of which few examples are to be found outside of their province after the Thirteenth Century. This master conceived two large, square towers placed diagonally, of a most original effect of perspective, and beneath which opened two lateral porches whose sheltered arches broke the draughts and were very converging and very convenient for the entrance and exits in and out of the church of the several filing processions. We are astonished to think that such a picturesque arrangement was never carried into effect. The execution of the plan was never commenced. The two bell-towers had been carried up to twenty metres and then abandoned. Their dimensions frightened the architect Grégoire, who in 1840 was charged with enriching Marc d’ Argent’s façade, and he pulled down the stumps to build those two towers with their thin spires and that commonplace façade with its dry lines that we now see.

A glance at the general plan of the building is necessary. Nothing could be simpler than this general arrangement: a polygonal choir and chapels between the buttresses; a lantern in the centre; some rather narrow branches of the transept; a large nave moderately wide, but very long with some quite narrow tributaries. The total length amounts to 138 metres; the width of the nave is restricted to twenty-six. What does this matter if these proportions are well united? What astonishes us beyond everything is the evident charming intention. There are no walls beyond those that are necessary; it is all tracery with support. The second impression is received from the forms; with the exception of a few architectural details in the bay near the porch, the style is perfectly homogeneous. There is no spirit of creation here; it is that admirable spirit of refinement and adaptation of the Fourteenth Century. As at Saint Urbain de Troyes, all the arches spring from pillars and all the ribs return to them, where, to employ the synthetic formula of Viollet-le-Duc, “the piers are nothing more than projections in clusters of the different profiles of the arches.” What then is the use of capitals under such conditions? They are more detrimental than useful. Moreover, you find no trace of them except in the oldest parts of the choir. The ribs of the arches instead of being strictly fastened against the walls cross the mass to leap outside in bracing arches and archivolts. Exactly as at Séez, the triforium drops very low and ends, not in a massive ledge but in a gallery of lace-work, in order to allow you to see from the nave across its spaces between the arches the dazzling lucidity of the windows of the gallery. And everywhere is manifested this threefold intention: elevation, ease and open-work.

And what windows to adorn these masses of filagree work! The most varied, the finest and the richest of the period of Louis XII. at its apogee. Patriarchs and martyrs, prophets and holy abbés, kings and sibyls stand out on all sides in the hues of brilliant and soft jewels. We have no longer the frank mosaic of former days giving life to the light, and bestowing upon it a certain mystical impression; they are not the simple large figures under sumptuous baldaquins brightened with silver gilt; they are, most frequently, the glass pictures of the Renaissance. We are astonished at the perfection of their treatment. Several subjects are those that the Thirteenth Century took pleasure in evoking; witness the legend of the pilgrim of Saint-Jacques, whose son, unjustly hung, is kept on the gibbet by the saint himself and recognized as innocent. Nothing seems to me, however, so memorable here, as much on account of the subject as for the treatment, as the series of sibyls—those pagans to which the Middle Ages had begun to give a Christian fate and which the Sixteenth Century treated so voluptuously. This is why they assume a new importance at Saint Ouen. The artist took pleasure in painting them under the adornments of elegant ladies, in landscapes bristling with buildings. Above all, I cannot forget the charming sibyl of Samos, in her embroidered robe covered with orfèvrerie and jewels, two doves pecking at her feet in the midst of a piece of country scenery, and treated so to speak, in the manner of a portrait. This series of glass extending from one end of the church to the other and almost from top to bottom, forms an immense, translucent and radiant tapestry. It seems as if a breath might annihilate it. But no, it remains hard, rigid and as if incorporate with the very wall. Solid bars of iron, cutting the bays, give it an indestructible armature. The evanescent dream of the period has eternalized itself in a fairy-like vision.

What beautiful roses are cut out in the transept! On the central one, God the Father appears on his throne of gold, above the adoring kings. The other, with its more complicated outlines, shows us the Glory of Paradise. You know the tradition attached to these two architectural flowers with the resplendent lobes? Alexandre de Berneval having designed the first, became jealous of one of his disciples who traced the second, and in anger, killed him. To expiate the crime he had to die by the hands of the hangman. Who invented this story? The master lies yonder, in the second chapel down the nave to the right, by the side of one of his pupils, or, perhaps with his son Colin. Can any one believe that the monks would admit under any pretext beneath the holy vaults the body of an assassin and honour him with a superb sepulchral stone? Upon the stone the two architects live again in their long robes lined with vair, and their large hats. The older, his compass in his hand carving out a quarter-round, the younger one making a plan, the feet of both resting on a lion, and above them a Gothic daïs. The older is Berneval who died in 1440: the inscription tells us this. Of the younger we know nothing, for the inscription concerning him was never made.

There is no fine carving to note in the interior of the abbey. Many of the pillars in the nave were ornamented with statues in the style of the Fourteenth Century, but placed in niches that retreat a little. Broken in 1794, when the building was used as a forge, they have never been restored. The destruction of the rood-screen dates from 1791, at the time of the departure of the monks and the erection of the parish church. This rood-screen must assuredly have spoiled the perspective of a building so frankly conceived for the effect in perspective. But if one wants to delight in sculptured scenes, it is before the portail des Marmousets that he must betake himself. Beneath a finely arched porch, is a door that is condemned to-day. The statue of Saint Ouen, decapitated by the Reformers, and the pier covered with little bas-reliefs, relates in detail the life and miracles of the holy bishop. On the tympanum, three zones of perfect figures describe the death of the Virgin, her funeral, her assumption and her entrance into heaven between two angels who are playing the organ and the rebeck. A curious popular invention has found its place in the funeral scene, where an impious Jew trying to make an attempt upon the coffin has to see the Archangel Michael cut off his hands and St. Peter give them back to him, whilst converting him. This decoration is of an exceptional vivacity and delicacy of carving.

From the public garden, we can take in the development of the apsis. The elegance of design and the working-out are seen in all their grandeur from here. From the pinacled buttresses spring the graceful double flying-buttresses responding exactly to the spring of the arches that are distributed and repeated with such wise judgment. Above the chapels with their pyramidal roofs runs a balustrade of quatrefoils inscribed in a curved quadrangle reproduced at the base of the top. These charming galleries whose stone rivals ironwork, in its extraordinary precision of the cutting, define the essential lines of the plan through the bristling lines of the secondary forms. They represent calm and order surrounded by agitation.