Cathedral Cities of France Part 9

He made an early entrance into the cultivated world, preaching his first sermon, upon a subject chosen at random, in the salon of the Hotel Rambouillet, when hardly out of his teens; and the Marquis de Feuquieres, who had introduced him into this society of Precieuses, soon found reason to be proud of his protege. The young man was destined to go on as he had begun; a few more years saw him established as Canon of Metz, the close friend of Conde and of the Calvinist Paul Ferri, with whom he never tired of disputing theological questions in a perfectly amicable spirit, acting up to his maxim of "liberty in doubtful things"; and finally his reputation brought him to Paris, where he preached during Lent, 1656, and brought before the world the sermon as he created it, purified from the profanities of an immoral age, strengthened by his steadfast simplicity, and quickened by the fire of his eloquence.

Bossuet found that in spite of himself his fame as an orator--a fame after which he had never striven--was firmly established in the capital, and after he had preached before the king in the chapel of the Louvre his success was practically a.s.sured. Honours and dignities came fast upon him; he became Bishop of Condom, and in the following year (1670) was entrusted with the education of the Dauphin, while the Academie Francaise opened its doors to his genius, and in 1681 he was appointed to the See of Meaux. Hardly had Bossuet settled down, however, in the quiet little _eveche_, with its pleasant green garden, than he was called out again into the world of noise and controversy. In 1682 Louis XIV. convoked the famous a.s.sembly of clergy to discuss the breach which had lately disclosed itself between the State of France and the Papacy.

The king contended for the right of patronage over any vacant sees or benefices, claiming that so long as they remained unoccupied, their revenues fell due to the Crown; and called together the clergy of the realm to uphold his right and to draw up a code of rules that should set a line between spiritual and temporal authority. Bossuet preached the sermon which was to open the Convocation; and his clear practical sense and eloquent denunciation of the encroachments of the Papacy destroyed the remnants of Pope Innocent's power in France. He summed up the case in four clauses. First, "That the Pope has no temporal power over kings"; secondly, "That his spiritual authority is inferior to that of a general a.s.sembly"; thirdly, "That, in consequence, the use of this authority ought to be regulated by the canons of the Church and by customs generally approved"; and last, "That the papal decision on matters of faith is only infallible by consent of the Church." Thus did Bossuet establish the privileges and the liberty of the Gallican Church.

As soon as possible the great bishop disengaged himself from the affairs of the nation, and was occupied, not in gaining fresh honours, but with the care of his diocese. The picture of his last years is a graceful and pleasant one, and shows the great man leading the life of a simple country priest; writing sermons in his study or garden, directing his convents, schools and hospitals, visiting his poor and sick people, even catechising the children of Meaux; and at times retiring into the seclusion of the monastery of La Trappe, to gather strength and courage for the better fulfilment of his pastoral duties.

The old timber water-mills behind the Town Hall are the outward sign of one of the great industries of Meaux. They have withstood for many generations the rus.h.i.+ng torrents of the Marne, which threaten to undermine the starlings and timbers of the mills and to engulf them in its waters. These for some reason or other are almost as green as the outpourings of the Rhone at Geneva. It would be interesting to know if Meaux possessed any feudal right over the neighbouring peasants, compelling them to come and wait their turn at the mill, and pay whatever price might be demanded, and forbidding them, even in times of heavy yield, to get their corn ground elsewhere. Such oppressions actually existed in the villages attached to the great chateaux, where the seigneur had a right to keep huge rabbit-warrens and pigeon-houses, whose inhabitants devastated, year in, year out, the surrounding crops of the peasants.

The little city of Senlis, with its girdle of Roman walls and watch towers, is one of the most attractive places within reach of Paris. It is situated about thirty-five miles to the northeast, in the midst of the great forest land of Hallatte and Chantilly. Until the dissolution of the Carlovingian empire Senlis enjoyed the privileges of a royal residence, and, indeed, down to the time of Henri de Navarre the kings of France continued to visit the city, and were lodged in a castle built on the site of the Roman praetorium. The ruins of this castle, some of which date from the eleventh century, may still be seen among the attractions of Senlis; and of even greater interest are the Roman ramparts which surround the town and which were built when it still held its position as the towns.h.i.+p of the Silvanectes. These walls, "twenty-three feet high and thirteen feet thick, are, with those of St.

Lizier (Ariege) and Bourges, the most perfect in France. They enclosed an oval area 1024 feet long from east to west and 794 feet wide from north to south. At each of the angles formed by the broken lines of which the circuit of 2756 feet is composed, stands or stood a tower; numbering originally twenty-eight and now only sixteen, they are semicircular in plan, and up to the height of the wall are unpierced.

The Roman city had only two gates; the present number is five."

As one approaches the town from the station through the boulevard, the Renaissance tower of Saint Pierre and the beautiful _fleche_ of the Cathedral stand right ahead. The first of these two churches is now desecrated and converted into a large market hall, having previously been used as cavalry barracks. It is short and broad, having only three bays to the nave, two to the choir, and an apse of three lights; but it has one very marked feature, which is also seen, though to a lesser extent, in the Cathedral of Saint Gatien at Tours--the axis of the choir trends northwards, making with the nave an angle of some seventeen to twenty degrees. There is a certain amount of early Gothic work worth notice, but the prevailing style is Flamboyant; in the two last side chapels of the choir some curious vaulting is to be found, resembling rude attempts at fan tracery with heavy keyed pendants.

The Cathedral of Notre-Dame covers during its construction a period of some four hundred years, and is probably only part of what was originally designed. The glory of the building is the beautiful spire to the south-west tower. Rising from a base octagonal in plan, the angles are lightened by detached pillars supporting a pyramidal canopy; the upper dormer windows are high and lancet-shaped, with the back of their gables sloping downwards and forming a sharp angle with the richly crocketed spire. Internally the church is a mixed product of the Transition and Flamboyant architects; the large clerestory windows may have been rebuilt later when the vaulting was constructed. In the ambulatory behind the altar the twelfth-century capitals remain, showing archaic Romanesque sculpture; and traces of this early work are to be found in many other parts of the building. The large west door is of the Chartres type; in the tympanum are the figures of our Lord and the Virgin Mary, with a representation of the resurrection of the dead; some of the figures are flying upwards, while others are being tenderly awakened by angels swinging censers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SENLIS]

Long before the train arrives at Beauvais the Cathedral is seen like a huge fortress in the distance, overtopping the quiet, modest landscape of the Therain valley; and its great size is more acutely felt as one approaches its south doorway along the streets of little white-painted houses and shop-fronts. The immediate effect of the interior of this marvellous building is startling. Whatever emotion has been aroused in the architectural traveller by the glories of Amiens, Chartres, or Bourges, is for the moment entirely eclipsed by the first view of the choir of Beauvais, whose clerestory windows soar upwards with such a restless vitality as almost to pierce the vaulting. These choir bays look like shafts of masonry so elongated, so delicate, that one trembles for their stability. And this sensation gradually increases. The sense of strength and repose gives way to a feeling that this great "church in the air" is struggling against dissolution, and that its vast flying b.u.t.tresses are only just sufficient to withstand the tremendous strain that is constantly being exerted on the building. It is only fair, however, to the architect of Beauvais choir to say that he was hampered by the want of means and probably also by the insufficient site a.s.signed to him for the planning out of his Cathedral. Had he worked under more favourable conditions he would have accomplished "an incomparable work,"

for it is not, as Viollet-le-Duc remarks, "the theory" that was fatal to its construction, but the execution, which is poor and mediocre. The lesson learnt from the Beauvais architect's temerity on the one hand, and from his beautiful disposition of plan on the other, was of the greatest value to the designers of other Cathedrals executed at the same time--notably that of Cologne, which was constructed more or less contemporaneously with Beauvais.

West of the Cathedral is the _Ba.s.se uvre_, a building which Fergusson describes as an example of the Latin style, and a stepping-stone from the Roman basilica to the Gothic church. This intermediate style is noticeable in the Romanesque church of S. Vicenzo alle Fontane in Rome, where the bay is divided simply into pier arch and clerestory, showing in very simple terms an arrangement nearly approaching to Gothic.

Of the history of Beauvais there is but little to be said, for it possesses none worthy of the name, or rather--since every town must have a story of some kind--none which a.s.sociates itself to any great degree with outside events. It was established in the Roman era as the capital of the Bellovaci, under the name of Caesaromagus; it was Christianised by Saint Lucian, who for his good works suffered martyrdom within the town; and later on it became the head of a counts.h.i.+p. This dignity, however, Beauvais did not long retain, for in the tenth century the temporal power of the count was vested in the spiritual power of the bishop, and any celebrity which the town may have attained was henceforth of purely ecclesiastical order.

It did, however, play a prominent part in the peasant revolt known as the "Jacquerie" in the fourteenth century. A body of peasants, "without any leader," says Froissart, rose up with the intent to exterminate the upper cla.s.ses--a forerunner of the Revolution--and perpetrated the most horrible atrocities upon every knight and n.o.ble they could lay hands on in Beauvais. "They said that the n.o.bles of the kingdom of France, knights and squires, were a disgrace to it, and that it would be a very meritorious act to destroy them all; to which proposition every one a.s.sented as a truth, and added, shame befall him who should be the means of preventing the gentlemen from being wholly destroyed."

When the revolt grew, instead of being crushed, the "gentlemen of Beauvoisie" were forced to send for help out of France, since matters were come to such a pa.s.s that "in the bishoprics of Noyon, Laon and Soissons, there were upwards of one hundred castles and good houses of knights and squires destroyed." Aid soon came, notably from Flanders, Hainault and Navarre, the king of Navarre especially signalising himself by putting three thousand rebels to death in one day. "When they were asked," says the chronicler, "for what reason they acted so wickedly, they replied they knew not, but they did so because they saw others do it; and they thought that by this means they should destroy all the n.o.bles and gentlemen in the world."

Edward III. besieged Beauvais in 1346, but without success, and it only fell into English hands in 1420 through the treachery of Bishop Pierre Cauchon, whose name also appears as one of the witnesses against Joan of Arc at Rouen eleven years later. The memory of this latter offence so preyed upon his mind that when he became bishop of Lisieux--having presumably been ejected from the see of Beauvais--Couchon sought to expiate his sin by dedicating a chapel to the Virgin in the Cathedral of Saint Pierre.

Hearing of the siege of Compiegne by the Burgundian forces, Joan had left Charles's army, which was still dawdling by the Loire in a state of inaction, and marched off to Compiegne to relieve his party there.

Arrived without the town, she soon headed a sortie against the Burgundians; they were driven back, and it is probable that the expedition would have been attended by the success which, to do her justice, had up to this moment crowned the efforts of the Maid, had not a body of Englishmen come up unexpectedly between her and the town and driven her into a corner. She was of course speedily captured. As soon as the news reached Paris both the University and the Vicar of the Inquisition demanded her person. Cauchon, however, stood firm. The Maid, he contended, had been captured within the diocese of Beauvais, and he, as the foremost prelate of the English party, claimed the right of putting her on trial; and after having paid to Burgundy 10,000 livres for this right, sent the Maid to Rouen, there to stand on her trial for sorcery, before a court of which Cauchon was president; and this fact alone might reasonably destroy all hope for poor Joan.

Another fourteenth-century bishop of Beauvais brought his diocese before the world in no small degree. Jean de Dormans was not only bishop; he became Chancellor of France, and obtained from Rome the rank of a cardinal, under the t.i.tle of the Four Crowned Saints. In Paris Dormans endowed a foundation which still bears the name of College de Beauvais, though what remains of the building serves as barracks, and the light of learning has left its precincts for ever. The old college is now united to its neighbour, the College de Presle; but the fourteenth-century chapel dedicated to Saint John the Evangelist still stands almost intact, though it, too, has been desecrated, and now serves the use of the military occupiers. Formerly there stood within this chapel six life-size figures, representing three men and three women of the Dormans family, and it is believed that when mediaeval fragments were pieced together to form the chapel of Abelard and Heloise, which is now part of the burial-ground of Pere-la-Chaise, the figure of one of these ladies of the fourteenth century was used to represent that of Heloise.

One name there is on the page of their history which the inhabitants of this town remember with a veneration almost equal to that which the Orleannais regard Joan of Arc, and whose memory even now receives an annual tribute. It is that of another Jeanne, poor and obscure, who rose to heroism in the moment of her city's danger, and who, though she did not lead a mighty host to victory nor bring a monarch back to his own, yet saved her city from the encroachments of Burgundy, and gave the women of Beauvais a right to their country's esteem. The besieging army of Charles the Bold probably never received such a surprise as on that day in the year of grace 1472, when Jeanne Hachette led her _concitoyennes_ through the streets of Beauvais, menaced the foe from the ramparts, and actually bore away with her own hands one of the Burgundian standards. The banner is still kept in the Hotel-de-Ville; and every year, on the feast of Ste. Angadreme, a grand procession marches through the streets, in which the women are given the right of precedence over the men, in memory of the brave deeds of Jeanne and her sisters.

Chapter Eighteen

PARIS AND SOME OF ITS CHURCHES

As a Cathedral city, Paris hardly comes within the scheme of this book.

It has been written about so much and so often, and occupies, both architecturally and historically, such a position as would scarcely justify any but a full and detailed description. This great city, the living, moving source of one of the greatest nations of to-day, and at one time the mainspring of Europe itself, is not to be pa.s.sed over with a few terse remarks; it is as though one tried to compress the history of France itself into a single chapter. On the one hand, a short sketch can hardly hope to do justice to Paris; on the other, to describe it at such length as it deserves would not be dealing fairly by the lesser towns, and further, this length would be so great as to render absurd its inclusion in a book of traveller's notes. Rather let it be regarded here in the light of _point d'appui_ from which other places may be visited which do not lie on the direct route from Paris to the provinces. Without attempting any architectural description, however, it may be as well, before we pa.s.s outside the city walls, to mention three churches within Paris of which ill.u.s.trations are given here, and to offer the briefest possible outline of their early history and foundation, as well as that of the great city of which they form a part.

"Paris did not, like London, simply grow into the capital of a kingdom already existing. The city created first the county and then the kingdom, of which it was successively the head." In those days Paris ranked no higher than Soissons, Sens, Laon, Orleans, or Rouen; and in ecclesiastical dignity it was inferior to some of them, being, it is true, an episcopal see, but not a metropolitan. Certainly, as we have seen, it was approved as a military station by Caesar, and beloved as a residence by Julian; and the great position the city now holds in modern Europe and the modern world is rather apt to bias our estimate of these early honours, which were undoubtedly shared by many other of the Gallic cities. Because Paris is now a metropolitan see, the centre of political and social France, we have a tendency to think that in all times the city must have ruled her neighbour towns in this way; whereas it was only by very slow degrees--long after it had become the seat of royalty and the nominal capital of France--that Paris acquired an influence beyond the bounds of her own territories. The great lords of Burgundy, of Aquitaine, of Anjou, of Champagne--they were va.s.sals to the king, they paid him homage, they gave him their military service, but they and their domains formed no part of France; they were almost as separate from any head or centre as were the wide-scattered Teutonic states east of the Rhine. Nor was this felt to be in any way a disadvantage; the kings in Paris would doubtless have welcomed the firm allegiance of these kings in all but name, because it would have meant a fresh access of power, an added strength wherewith to face their other foes; but no idea of national unity had any place in their calculation. Paris had made for herself a dominion, and the time was to come when that dominion should stretch from the sea on the north, south and west, to the river and to the mountains on the east; but as yet that time had not arrived.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PONT MARIE, PARIS]

One more event which took place after Paris became the capital of France may be recorded here. This is the attempted siege in the days of Joan of Arc, which followed as the sequel to the king's coronation at Rheims.

Having subdued so many cities in the north of France, and given to Charles VII. the crown of his ancestors, it was but natural that Joan should be anxious to lead him in triumph into his capital, which at present declared for the enemy, and was occupied by Cardinal Beaufort's English troops and the army of Burgundy. The newly-crowned king, however, apparently considered that he had borne his share of the burden in the late proceedings at Rheims, and seemed in no hurry to march upon Paris. Riding through the smaller towns, seeing their gates flung open wide to him, and receiving the homage and acclamations of the people, were occupations far more congenial to his indolent tastes than bestirring himself to take the field again; and to their infinite annoyance Joan and d'Alencon perceived that he was gradually but surely working his way down to his castles on the Loire, from whose pleasant meadows they knew well that he would never return. The only wonder is that the Maid did not lose all patience and leave this dilatory prince to his fate. Instead of this she set out with the Duc d'Alencon to Saint Denis, leaving Charles at Compiegne, whence he followed them, "very sore against his will," as far as Senlis. Meanwhile each day of delay gave the English time to strengthen their position within the capital; and Joan found that having brought the king to Senlis was by no means the same thing as conquering his unwillingness to strike what she and her party believed might be, if rightly directed, the final blow. Each time the Maid and d'Alencon set out to invest Paris, messages came from the royal camp, commanding them to desist and return to Saint Denis. Finally the truth came out; the king cared more for peace and ease on the Loire than for glory in war, and desired to leave the camp. Had Joan believed less firmly in the divine right of kings, it is probable that she would have rebelled and besieged Paris on her own responsibility; on the other hand, had Charles been left to the counsels of d'Alencon and the brave captains Dunois and La Hire, there is reason to suppose that he might have been persuaded to follow where Joan led, and might under her guidance have subdued Paris in a very short time. But there were the king's favourites to reckon with, and these were not men of war, but of peace, and not always of peace with honour--the foolish La Tremouille and the crafty Archbishop of Rheims, one of Joan's worst opposers--and these advisers easily worked upon the king's indolent good-nature to find in the eagerness of the Maid an undue desire for fresh conquest. As it was, Joan saw nothing before her but to obey the man to whom, as she believed, G.o.d had given the right to go or stay, to fight or to lie in peace, as his Majesty chose. She went to the statue of the Virgin at Saint Denis, bearing her armour; and there, kneeling in the church, she dedicated to Our Lady of Victories the helmet, hauberk and coat of mail in which she had done so many great feats of arms; and then rose and followed her king on his journey to the pleasant lands of the Loire.

The early history of Paris lies buried in the unrecorded pages of the life of primaeval man. Its origin is humble in comparison with that of other capitals, although it bears a strong a.n.a.logy to those surrounding physical conditions to which Venice owed its existence. Its cradle, according to M. Hoffbauer, _Paris a traverse les ages_, was a small narrow island in the middle of the young Seine, which had then cut for itself its channel through the alluvial plains which had been left by the retiring sea towards the end of the Geological Tertiary period at the close of the glacial epoch. It was part of a group of five islands, of which three very soon disappeared, their soil being probably used either for embankments or for purposes of defence. As in the great estuary leading up to the mora.s.s surrounding London, many changes had been wrought by the hand of man in the general appearance of the Paris basin. It is true that the great embankments constructed by the Romans to keep the waters of the Thames within defined limits are not to be traced in the valley of the Seine, yet the rude habitations of wattle huts built on whatever hillocks were attainable entailed embankments to a certain extent which should keep the Seine within its bounds at times of extraordinary flood. As it stands to-day Paris is in one of the most fertile parts of the territory; it is on the banks of a great river which brings to it by its main stream and by its affluents the tribute of the richest provinces; it is surrounded by materials most necessary for the construction of its public and private edifices; and it is endowed by nature with all the fruitful resources tending towards the aggrandis.e.m.e.nt both of power and fortune.

The condition of the early inhabitants of the Paris basin was that of one continual warfare against the denizens of the jungle, which with its rich and abundant vegetation covered the surrounding country. Caverns and other places chosen for their abodes were disputed with lions, hyenas and tigers. The chase was their only means of subsistence (the art of husbandry being entirely unknown), and the number of stone hatchets and harpoons, fis.h.i.+ng-hooks, lances, &c., found deeply buried in the alluvial soil, bear testimony to the struggle for existence amongst the early inhabitants of the Seine valley.

Caesar, when he was appointed commander of the Gauls in B.C. 59, found their central point of Paris inhabited by a Cymric or Celtic population, which he calls Gauls in his language but Celts in their own, and separated from the Belgae by the Seine and Marne. Caesar wrote the place "Lutetia," and when he convoked the inhabitants of Gaul to this town the neighbouring tribe was designated as "Parisii," and allied to the powerful clan of the Senones.

With reference to the meaning of the word "Parisii," M. Bulet, in the "Dictionnaire Celtique," says that "bar" or "par" means in Celtic a boat (_bateau_), and that the low Bretons call the cargo of a boat "far."

Herodotus (book ii., 96), in his description of the method of floating boats down stream on the Nile by means of a raft fastened on in front with a stone dragging behind, calls the boat "baris," and says that some of them are many thousand talents burthen. They were probably flat-bottomed, and similar to those now seen on the rivers. The Celtic word "par," signifying a boat, might well have produced the name Parisii, meaning boatmen, men who pa.s.sed all their life in the "baris."

The most ancient emblem of Lutetia which has been preserved from antiquity is that of the prow of a boat which one sees sculptured on the springing of the vault of the Roman palace of the Thermes, built on the left bank of the Seine; the powerful a.s.sociation of the Nautae Parisiaci, which is found at the head of the Parisian Navigation represented by the prow of a boat, has therefore a direct Celtic or Gallic origin. Living only in rude cabins the early inhabitants naturally possessed no public building. Caesar therefore conceived the idea of convoking the Gaulish chiefs into one central place or forum, and ordered to be built a "Suggestum," a tribune from which he could harangue the a.s.sembled headmen. This is considered by some French architects as the earliest indication of their _edilite naissante_. As further evidence of their building and engineering capability, the inhabitants of Lutetia threw out bridges to join their island to the main banks of the river. Caesar frequently refers to the bridges built by the Gauls, such as the one at Melun, on the Seine, another across the Allier, near Vichy, of which ancient foundations and piers have been found, another at Orleans, and of such slender construction as to have especially attracted his attention, and, finally, the bridge of Lutetia across the main arm of the Seine, the predecessor of the present Pont Notre Dame, which has also left traces of its ancient piers.

In Rome the Nautae Tiberis were a corporation who enjoyed the privilege of carrying corn and other produce from Ostia to the capital; similar a.s.sociations existed in Gaul in addition to the Nautae Parisiaci, and on a wall of the amphitheatre of Nimes is an inscription in which as many as forty places are mentioned where corporations enjoying the same privileges and immunities existed. No wonder the territory of the Parisii increased in commercial activity. Watered by the Seine, the Marne and the Oise, its trade routes by land and by water were fully organised and guarded by powerful a.s.sociations which existed almost before the Roman Conquest, and attracted the attention of the writer Strabo. It soon developed under such advantages into a prosperous and enlightened city. Roman buildings took the place of the Gallic huts, Roman laws governed the city, Roman customs and manners prevailed amongst the inhabitants, and by the time the first messengers of Christianity had penetrated into Gaul Lutetia had become a city not of the Gauls, but of the Romans. Curiously enough it was from Rome also that these early messengers came, to preach their doctrine to a Roman city. The pioneers were Saint Denis, generally confounded, for the sake of the antiquity of the Gallican Church, with the convert of Saint Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite, and two companions, Eleutherius and Rusticus; and their work was carried on by Martin of Tours, one of the bravest soldiers of the Emperor Julian, who left the army to preach the faith in Gaul, and to stamp out the cult of the old pagan G.o.ds. Speaking of Julian, moreover, may serve to remind us that it was at Paris that he was first proclaimed emperor; here was his palace before his imperial honours came upon him, and here, he declares in his own writings, were spent the three happiest winters of his life, showing that even in these early times Lutetia was a fair and pleasant city, as it is to-day.

In the following centuries Gaul was overrun with tribes from the east, Goths and Visigoths, Alemnanni and Huns, Burgundians and Franks. The last-named broke down the Roman defences all over the land and seized upon Paris. A new era now began for the city. Under Clovis, the first Frank king, it became the official capital of the State in 508, and from this time forward takes its place as one of the great cities of France.

After the conversion of Clovis, abbeys and churches were built, great bishops and great saints preached and wrote their message, and indeed the ecclesiastical fabric of the city seems to have grown up more quickly than the civil fabric, until the time of Charlemagne, when craftsmen's guilds were established, Jewish capitalists admitted within the walls, and a mercantile reputation founded. Then a second time the work of the conquerors seemed to be undone. The Northmen, more terrible invaders than Goths or Franks, plundered the coast-lands and presently swept up the Seine past Rouen to Paris, where they worked such havoc as the town had never before known. The streets were set in flames, the monasteries were sacked and burnt, the priests and monks were ma.s.sacred without mercy; yet all this evil was to end in better things. The very persistency of the Normans in besieging and pillaging a town four and five times, argued that the town itself must be worth the trouble, and the "lords" of Paris speedily began to look to its safety. Weak, foolish Charles the Fat could devise no better plan than the cowardly one of bribing the invaders to retreat; but Eudes, Count of Paris, knew that this would only be an inducement to them to come again, and determined once and for all to rid his city, at least, of this scourge. This he did with such effect that the crown of France was given to him and the inefficient Charles deposed. It was his nephew, Hugh the Great, who ruled at Paris in Rolf's day, and waged constant war with Neustria and Charles the Simple, the last of the Carlovingian kings, on the hill-crest at Laon. Then, at the end of the tenth century, began the feudal monarchy under the Capetian dynasty. The first of the line was the eldest son of Hugh the Great, and the connections which he brought with him promised well for the prestige of his new kingdom. On the one side, he was brother-in-law to the Norman Duke, Richard the Fearless; on the other, his own brother Odo was Duke of Burgundy; in his own right he was lord of Picardy, of Maine, of Chartres, of Tours, of Blois, and of Orleans; and his bond with the Church was further strengthened by the fact that he held the lay abbacies of Saint Martin, near Tours, and Saint Denis, near Paris. Thus the kingdom with which Hugh Capet began his reign was a fairly compact strip of land, having as boundaries Flanders to the north, Aquitaine to the south, Champagne to the east, and Normandy to the west. Of this kingdom Paris was nearly the actual geographical centre, and soon became the political centre also.

The early importance of Paris in the tenth century is very different to that of London. Paris at this time was a military position of growing importance, both from its central situation and its place on the island in the Seine. London on her Thames had an almost similar position, but she derived her power not merely from her Teutonic conquerors, but also from her early connection with Roman and Celtic Britain; while as a military stronghold she was no less to be desired.

The eastern point of the city, where the only bridge then existed, traversing the Seine in the exact place where now stands the Pont Notre Dame, a point where the roads through the province converged, was already a place sacred to the Gauls. Here were performed rites and sacrifices to their mysterious divinities in an underground church which existed in the third century. Probably the tradition of dark deeds of persecution of the early Christians, human sacrifices, and missionaries suffering death in the cages of lions which were kept for the purpose of exhibitions, prevented the Parisian boatmen, when they heard of the wonderful tidings of Galilee, from using this Gaulish building, so full of terrible reminiscences, as their first church. The site of the Temple of Jupiter was chosen for the establishment of a church which should stamp out the heathen religion, crush with its heel the serpent's head and build upon its ruins a temple of the Holy Cross. About 375, on the site of the Temple of Jupiter, was built a church dedicated to Saint Etienne, which may be considered as the first Cathedral of Paris.

To the splendour of this early basilica, built by Childebert in the early Latin style, with its marble columns, some of which are now in the Musee de Cluny, the monk Fortunatus bears witness, and his description of the edifice is thus given in M. Hoffbauer's book on Paris: "Le vaisseau de cette eglise repose sur des colonnes de marbre, et le soin avec lequel on l'entretient en augment la beaute. Le premier il fut eclaire de fenetres ornees de verres transparents par lesquels on recoit la lumiere. On dirait que la main d'un ouvrier habile a emprisonne le jour dans le sanctuaire. Les feux tremblants de l'aurore naissante semblant se jouer jusque dans les lambris, et le temple est eclaire par la charte du jour meme, quand le soliel ne se montre pas. Le roi Childebert, anime d'un zele particulier pour cette eglise destinee a son peuple, l'a dotee de richesses qui ne doivent jaimais s'epuiser; toujours pa.s.sione pour les interets de la religion, il s'est empresse d'augmenter ses ressources. Nouveau Melchisedech, notre roi est en meme temps un pontife qui remplit exactement ses devoirs de fidele comme ses devoirs de pasteur. Bien qu'occupe dans le palais qu'il habite du soin de rendre la justice, son plus grand desir est d'imiter l'example des saints eveques. Il quitte la premiere charge pour en remplir une autre avec plus d'honneur, et le souvenir de ses grandes actions lui a.s.sure l'immortalite."

By the twelfth century the basilica has disappeared, and its place has been taken, not by a single church, but by two churches side by side--Sainte Marie on the north, Saint Etienne on the south. At the beginning of the century Saint Etienne was the more important of the two, having escaped plunder at the hands of the Normans, who wrought considerable destruction in the sister church; but a twelfth-century archdeacon, Etienne de Garlande, took upon himself the task of restoring Sainte Marie, which became known as the _nova ecclesia_, and formed the foundation of the great basilica planned by Maurice de Sully.

This church, begun in 1163, was to unite Saint Etienne and Sainte Marie; the foundation stone was laid by Pope Alexander III., and in 1218 the remains of the old church of Saint Etienne were destroyed to make way for the south aisle of Notre Dame. The work went on into the thirteenth century; the great west portal was probably finished about 1223, and those of the transepts some forty years later.

"There are absolutely only these two churches (Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle) left standing in the island of the city, and there is nothing in the history of Paris which more clearly exhibits the modern disposition to make a _tabula rasa_ of the past." In the Middle Ages the great Cathedral of Paris--"cathedral" since the twelfth century--stood in its island of La Cite amidst a perfect cl.u.s.ter of lesser churches, of which only the chapel of Saint Louis remains. Mr. Hamerton, whose words are quoted above, gives quite a considerable list of them in his "Paris in Old and Present Times," Sainte Genevieve, Saint Jean le Rond, Saint Denis du Pas, and its brother church of La Chartre--these are but a few of their names, and yet these names are all that now remain of churches where mediaeval knights and burghers and artificers wors.h.i.+pped, and into whose building mediaeval architects, unknown and forgotten, put their best work and their highest service; even their sites are, in most cases, undiscoverable amongst the great ma.s.s of buildings, and bright wide streets, and green gardens of Paris as we know it. Some of these churches, like Saint Aignan and Saint Germain-le-Vieux, have left a few isolated columns and stones, but to find these, as one writer observes, "il faudrait penetrer dans les maisons et se livrer a des recherches."

Another, the old Madeleine, has suffered an even worse fate, its last remaining chapel being now transformed into a wine-shop at the corner of the Rue des Marmousets; a private house now stands upon the site of Saint-Pierre aux Bufs, built, says an inscription on the facade, in the middle of the twelfth century, and demolished as late as 1837; and as for Saint Michel du Palais, within whose walls Archibishop Maurice de Sully baptised Philip Augustus in 1165, nothing remains to the memory of the Archangel but the bridge over the Seine. "'There is my bridge still,' Saint Michael may think, 'but as for my church I seek for it in vain.'" These vanished churches are too many all to be numbered here, since in La Cite alone there were, up to the eighteenth century, no less than seventeen of them, and outside the walls of the city there were many more.

[Ill.u.s.tration: NoTRE DAME, PARIS]

Happily Notre Dame has better withstood the attacks of time and all the accidents of fire, plunder, and desecration. Five years or so after the completion of the western facade a fire broke out, and in the restoration the double-arched b.u.t.tresses of the former apse disappeared, and the windows were enlarged in accordance with the growing love of light which was being manifested in other cathedrals all through France.

In more modern times--towards the middle of the eighteenth century--the extraordinary taste of the late Renaissance period ordered the removal of all the stained gla.s.s both of nave and choir--leaving, however, the western rose window and the two in the transepts--and this is, of course, a loss that can never be repaired, although the restorations of Viollet-le-Duc have probably, as Mr. Hamerton says, gone some way towards bringing back the original effect of light in the interior of the church. The exterior of the nave likewise suffered not a little from the doubtless well-meaning zeal of an unarchitectural age, which had literally stripped it bare of all ornament: "One after another the architects had suppressed the advancing parts of the b.u.t.tresses between the chapels, the gables, the friezes, the bal.u.s.trades--in one word, the entire ornamentation of these same chapels, the pinnacles which decorated the tops of the b.u.t.tresses, with the statues which accompanied them and their flowering spires, the picturesque gargoyles which rendered the services of throwing the rain-water to a distance from the walls."

"We may take it for granted," Mr. Lonergan says in his "Historic Churches of Paris," "that those who dedicated the church to the Virgin were not influenced alone by the fact that a previous temple in her honour had stood on the banks of the river, but by the impetus given to what Protestants call her 'wors.h.i.+p' and Catholics her 'cult' or devotion in the twelfth century." From the earliest times there existed, especially among sailors and fishermen, the feeling of devotion to the Virgin Mary. They prayed to her who held the Divine Infant on her knees to intercede for the lives of men who sailed across the waters on dark and starless nights. This wors.h.i.+p of the Virgin steadily grew all over France, and the founders of the great monastic orders--Saint Augustin, Saint Benedict, and Saint Francis, and the famous Saint Bernard of Clairvaulx--are all included by Dante as paying special devotion to the Virgin; and history has furnished us with many other names, amongst which are those of Hildebert, the bishop of Le Mans, Yves and Pierre, bishops of Chartres, and the scholar of St. Denis, Pierre Abelard. At no time was this more noticeable than in the centuries following the completion of Notre Dame. In consequence of this great growth of Mary-wors.h.i.+p, the Virgin came to be regarded as the protectress of the people--as, indeed, she is to this day--and the Church of Notre Dame began to be the people's church, a kind of centre, civil as well as ecclesiastical, of the city life. For instance, Notre Dame in Paris became not only the house of wors.h.i.+p and prayer, but "the house both of G.o.d and man," and this through no irreverent feeling. The _parvis_ or garden in front of the Cathedral became a gathering-ground for the townsfolk--a remnant of this feeling, it would seem, still exists in the markets which in lesser towns are nearly always held round the church--fairs took place there, the buyers bringing their purchases to be blessed by the priest as they pa.s.sed the church steps; and the various festivals of the Church gave rise to secular feasts and sports of all kinds, as well as to the performance of the miracle plays which were attended by the people with such simple wonder and reverence, and which in England laid the foundation of the secular comedies.

The monks of Saint Germain originally came from Autun, and at first acknowledged the rule of Saint Basil, which was afterwards exchanged for that of Saint Benedict. After its restoration in the eleventh century the foundations became very powerful, and round its walls grew up the _bourg_ of Saint Germain; later it became the Faubourg of that name, the "intellectual quarter" of Paris, the haunt of all the most brilliant spirits of the day; whose streets were trodden by great men, and marked by the footsteps of genius.

The Abbey Church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres likewise owes its existence to the Merovingian Childebert. In the sixth century Childebert went on an expedition against the Visigoths in Spain, and returned triumphant with a number of sainted relics, among them the tunic of Saint Vincent and a magnificent gold cross; and in honour of these trophies and for their safe keeping he built in the fields outside Paris a monastery, which was consecrated by Saint Germain, so the legend says, the very day of its royal founder's death. The abbey was originally dedicated, in memory of the relics which it guarded, to Saint Vincent and the Holy Cross; but after the death of its first abbot, Saint Germain, in 576, it became known by his name. Before the building of the Abbey of Saint Denis, Saint-Germain-des-Pres was the burial place of the royal house, and a long line of Childeberts, Chilperics, and Chlothars lie at rest beneath its stones. It was pillaged and burnt by the Normans no less than five times, and therefore, when the Abbot Morard set about rebuilding it in the eleventh century, very little was left of Childebert's old foundation. Part of Morard's work may still be seen in the present nave of the church; the choir and apse were built later, and date from the second half of the twelfth century, the church being finally consecrated by Pope Alexander III. in 1163.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. GERMAIN DES PReS, PARIS]

The wealth of the monastery even so late as the eighteenth century may be gauged by the indignation of Arthur Young, who in his travels through France in 1786-7 of course visited the capital and its many churches, but looked upon everything with the eye of an agriculturist, and only saw in the rich meadows of the Benedictines so much wasted material for a prosperous farm. "It is the richest abbey in France; the abbot has 300,000 liv. a year. I lose my patience at seeing such revenues thus bestowed, consistent with the spirit of the tenth century, but not with that of the eighteenth. What a n.o.ble farm would a fourth of this income establis.h.!.+ What turnips, what cabbages, what potatoes, what clover, what sheep, what wool! Are not these things better than a fat ecclesiastic?"

Like Saint-Germain-des-Pres, the Sainte Chapelle originated in a sanctuary where precious relics might be safely deposited, though its foundation does not date back to the early zeal of the fresh-converted Merovingian kings, but only to the crusades of Louis the Saint, who brought from the East the Crown of Thorns and some fragments of the True Cross. Legend describes the king as walking bare-foot through the streets of Sens and Paris, displaying his treasure-trove to an adoring mult.i.tude; but it soon became necessary to place the relics in sanctuary, and accordingly, in 1245, the celebrated architect, Pierre de Montereau, began to work out his plans under the direction of the king, and completed his chapel three years later. Its form was a curious one, consisting of two stages; the upper one, dedicated to the Sainte Couronne and the Sainte Croix, was reserved for the king and his court; the lower, bearing the name of the Virgin, was given over to servants, retainers, and the general mult.i.tude.