The arches and walls of the church were, under Henry IV., covered with rich paintings, which
in time became half effaced. The church has been recently restored, and attracts great numbers of pilgrims from the neighboring departments. It consists of a nave and five chapels. Over the main altar is the revered statue, full of sweet, sad grace, at the feet of which so many have sought consolation. On one of the capitals in the nave is sculptured an episode from the old Roman du Renard, in which the fox takes the guise of a preacher to a barnyard auditory, who do not perceive the store of provisions already accumulated in the hood thrown back on his shoulders. This species of satire was one of the liberties of former times of which artists largely availed themselves.
Another chapel of Notre Dame de Pitié is at Sainte-Gemme, built against the walls of an old feudal castle—a cave-like oratory of the thirteenth century, beneath a square tower, simple, antique, severe. Its gilt statue of the Mother of Sorrows and a few old frescos of the Passion are the sole ornaments, unless we except the arms of the old lords of Sainte-Gemme, carved among the arches. When the castle was besieged by the Protestants in the sixteenth century, the châtelaine and her attendants betook themselves to the foot of the altar, where they prayed with fervor while the lord of the place defended it against the attacks of the enemy. A superhuman power seemed to aid him. After a few days the siege was raised, and he came, with his handful of brave followers, to ascribe the deliverance to Our Lady of Pity. The chapel became celebrated, and so great at times was the affluence of the pilgrims that services were held in the court of the castle before an altar set up beneath a venerable elm. Every Friday,
in the good old times, the chaplain piously read the Passion according to St. John in this chapel, and then sang on his knees the Stabat Mater with the verse,
“Quando corpus morietur,
Fac ut animæ donetur
Paradisi gloria,”
to obtain a happy end for the dying.
In the middle of the sixteenth century Dominique de Cuilhens was appointed chaplain of Sainte-Gemme. He was born in the vicinity—in the old manor-house of Cuilhens, which falling into his possession in the year 1569, he at once drew up a will in which he founded the little hospital of St. Blaise for the poor, and bequeathed to the needy of the parish the annual sum of forty-five livres, which the magistrates of the place, who were the executors, continued to pay till 1789.
In 1648 the lord of Sainte-Gemme, about to join the royal army in Catalonia, made a will, in which, in order to encourage morality in the town, greatly weakened by the troubles of the times, he gave the interest of a thousand livres, to be distributed annually by the rector and consuls of the place to girls of irreproachable morals about to marry—a legacy regularly paid till 1792.