Turrets, towers, and temples

by Unknown

THE CATHEDRAL OF STRASBURG.

The church has never been finished. The apse, miserably mutilated, has been restored according to that imbecile, the Cardinal de Rohan, of the necklace fame. It is hideous. The window they have selected is like a modern carpet. It is ignoble. The other windows, with the exception of some added panes, are beautiful, notably the great rose-window. All the church is shamefully whitewashed; some of the sculptures have been restored with some little taste. This Cathedral has been affected by all styles. The pulpit is a little construction of the Fifteenth Century, of florid Gothic of a design and style that are ravishing. Unfortunately they have gilded it in the most stupid manner. The baptismal font is of the same period and is restored in a superior manner. It is a vase surrounded by foliage in sculpture, the most marvellous in the world. In a dark chapel at the side there are two tombs. One, of a bishop of the time of Louis V., is of that formidable character which Gothic architecture always expresses. The sepulchre is in two floors. The bishop, in pontifical robes and with his mitre on his head, is lying in his bed under a canopy; he is sleeping. Above and on the foot of the bed in the shadow, you perceive an enormous stone in which two enormous iron rings are imbedded; that is the lid of the tomb. You see nothing more. The architects of the Sixteenth Century showed you the corpse (you remember the tombs of Brou?); those of the Fourteenth concealed it: that is even more terrifying. Nothing could be more sinister than these two rings....

The tomb of which I have spoken is in the left arm of the cross. In the right arm there is a chapel, which scaffolding prevented me from seeing. At the side of this chapel runs a balustrade of the Fifteenth Century, leaning against a wall. A sculptured and painted figure leans against this balustrade and seems to be admiring a pillar surrounded by statues placed one over the other, which is directly opposite and which has a marvellous effect. Tradition says that this figure represents the first architect of the Münster—Erwyn von Steinbach....

I did not see the famous astronomical clock, which is in the nave and which is a charming little building of the Sixteenth Century. They were restoring it and it was covered with a scaffolding of boards.

After having seen the church, I made the ascent of the steeple. You know my taste for perpendicular trips. I was very careful not to miss the highest spire in the world. The Münster of Strasburg is nearly five hundred feet high. It belongs to the family of spires which are open-worked stairways.

It is delightful to wind about in that monstrous mass of stone, filled with air and light hollowed out like a joujou de Dieppe, a lantern as well as a pyramid, which vibrates and palpitates with every breath of the wind. I mounted as far as the vertical stairs. As I went up I met a visitor who was descending, pale and trembling, and half-carried by the guide. There is, however, no danger. The danger begins where I stopped, where the spire, properly so-called, begins. Four open-worked spiral stairways, corresponding to the four vertical towers, unroll in an entanglement of delicate, slender, and beautifully-worked stone, supported by the spire, every angle of which it follows, winding until it reaches the crown at about thirty feet from the lantern surmounted by a cross which forms the summit of the bell-tower. The steps of these stairways are very steep and very narrow, and become narrower and narrower as you ascend, until there is barely ledge enough on which to place your foot.

In this way you have to climb a hundred feet which brings you four hundred feet above the street. There are no hand-rails, or such slight ones that they are not worth speaking about. The entrance to this stairway is closed by an iron grille. They will not open this grille without a special permission from the Mayor of Strasburg, and nobody is allowed to ascend it unless accompanied by two workmen of the roof, who tie a rope around your body, the end of which they fasten, in proportion as you ascend, to the various iron bars which bind the mullions. Only a week ago three German women, a mother and her two daughters, made this ascent. Nobody but the workmen of the roof, who repair the bell-tower, are allowed to go beyond the lantern. Here there is not even a stairway, but only a simple iron ladder.

From where I stopped the view was wonderful. Strasburg lies at your feet,—the old town with its dentellated gables, and its large roofs encumbered with chimneys, and its towers and churches—as picturesque as any town of Flanders. The Ill and the Rhine, two lovely rivers, enliven this dark mass with their plashing waters, so clear and green. Beyond the walls, as far as the eye can reach, stretches an immense country richly wooded and dotted with villages. The Rhine, which flows within a league of the town, winds through the landscape. In walking around this bell-tower you see three chains of mountains—the ridges of the Black Forest on the north, the Vosges on the west, and the Alps in the centre....

The sun willingly makes a festival for those who are upon great heights. At the moment I reached the top of the Münster, it suddenly scattered the clouds, with which the sky had been covered all day, and turned the smoke of the city and all the mists of the valley to rosy flames, while it showered a golden rain on Saverne, whose magnificent slope I saw twelve leagues towards the horizon, through the most resplendent haze. Behind me a large cloud dropped rain upon the Rhine; the gentle hum of the town was brought to me by some puffs of wind; the bells echoed from a hundred villages; some little red and white fleas, which were really a herd of cattle, grazed in the meadow to the right; other little blue and red fleas, which were really gunners, performed field-exercise in the polygon to the left; a black beetle, which was the diligence, crawled along the road to Metz; and to the north on the brow of the hill the castle of the Grand Duke of Baden sparkled in a flash of light like a precious stone. I went from one tower to another, looking by turns upon France, Switzerland, and Germany, all illuminated by the same ray of sunlight.