How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 12

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Notre Dame of Paris. View from the South_]

Notre Dame of Paris used the s.e.xpart.i.te system which calls for alternating ground supports. Either the uniform piers here were laid before a s.e.xpart.i.te vault was thought of, or else the architect preferred them for aesthetic reasons, and in this case he certainly was right. Double aisles about both nave and choir differentiate the interior of Notre Dame of Paris from that of the average cathedral. The far-stretching aisles of this church compose vistas of unsurpa.s.sed picturesqueness and variety of perspective. Some have said that the central nave is not sufficiently wide for such a stretch of lateral aisles, and have found a certain monotony in the clearstory, tribune, and pier arcade being of equal height. Originally, beneath the clearstory were small circular ungla.s.sed apertures giving on the rafters over the tribune. Those oculi were done away with during the XIII century, when the clearstory windows were lengthened for the better lighting of the church. During his able restoration of Notre Dame, M.

Viollet-le-Duc found hidden under the pavement some of the discarded window frames, and he took the liberty (which many regret) of replacing a few in the bays near the transept, thus marring the uniformity of the interior.

Despite the enlargement of the upper windows and the changes made to give more light to the tribunes, none can deny that, in gloomy weather, Notre Dame can be somber and even cavernous. Yet who, of its devotees, would have it different? Supreme cathedral it is for that supremest of hymns, the _Dies Irae_--sound and sense and vision welded. To exchange its severe majesty for an expanse of brilliant gla.s.s--save Suger's gla.s.s--is unthinkable. In Notre Dame you comprehend the spectacular repentances of the Middle Ages. Here, when pestilence stalked the city or the enemy was at the gate, have echoed the _Miserere_ and the _Libera nos, Domine_.[72]

There is an individuality in the cathedral of Paris that overrides every criticism. Perpetually does the wors.h.i.+per find in it new aspects, in the dim, low aisles full of mystery, in the gleam of transept windows as seen through the tribune arches while one listens, perhaps, to a lenten friar preacher discoursing of sin, justice, and the judgment to come; here on the very spot where Dominic himself taught the same sobering lessons; here where, six hundred years later, his son, Lacordaire, held the manhood of Paris spellbound. Or, again, one gazes down the length of the church, with its incomparable perspective, while around one rise the voices of strong men fresh from the battle of Verdun, fresh from their firm "They shall not pa.s.s," and their _Magnificat_ of thanksgiving to Notre Dame swells in a volume of sound like the eternal sea. The crusaders of St. Louis' time prayed, too, for strength in Notre Dame of Paris.[73]

The curve of the sanctuary as seen from the west end of the nave is one of the splendors of the monument, and no chevet ever built surpa.s.sed it.

The cause of the magic is practical--a structural problem solved, as is the case with the best aspects of Gothic art. At that eastern curve extra piers were inserted between the double aisles in order to obviate the difficulty of vaulting such irregular trapeze-shaped sections.

The enthusiast maintains that the exterior of Notre Dame surpa.s.ses that of all other cathedrals. Certainly better transept facades were never made nor was apse more romantic than that of the chief church of Paris, as it rises in three grandiose steps, with flying b.u.t.tresses of wide span leaping with an audacity that fairly catches the breath; and again the success is a case of sound science solving a problem.

The west facade is an accepted cla.s.sic, "an architectural glory of France," irreproachable. Once the intelligence has grasped its pre-eminence, allegiance to it will never waver. The frontispieces of Rheims and of Rouen are richer and may appeal more to the imagination.

It is possible that the severe dignity of Paris may even chill at first.

But what clarity of plan! Four strong b.u.t.tresses accentuate the big square parallelogram. Excess of ornamentation has been avoided in order that the whole may stand forth. Lest the two towers might appear to rise abruptly from the ma.s.sive, some master hand made there the graceful open colonnade.[74]

The facade of Notre Dame is true to its epoch in its appeal to the intellect rather than to the emotions. It was built in the golden age of scholasticism, when religion and philosophy went hand in hand, when the teachers in the schools of Paris, the _cite lettre_, the _oeil du monde_, thought that Faith and Reason could give mutual aid one to the other, that the truths of Revelations could coincide with the natural judgment.

Scholasticism has been belittled by the modern sophists from the time of the XVIII-century Encyclopaedist to the XIX-century superman. Yet scholasticism was an important factor in the formation of the French intellect, which, in its virile youth, it put through a course of useful mental gymnastics. Precisely the race, whose ancestors sharpened their wits in the _Sic-et-Non_ debates of the mediaeval schools of Paris, is to-day pre-eminent in precision of language and freedom from fogginess of thought. Easy enough for the modern mind to ridicule the quarrel of generations over nominalism and realism, pursued with the personal heat of a modern political campaign.[75] Certainly the abuse of the scholastic system led to hair-splitting disputes, for the deductive method, when carried to excess, ends in thin subtlety. But why judge a system by its extremes? Because XIV-century architecture grew rigid with set formulas and the abuse of its own laws, does that discredit the virile period to which it succeeded?

The bishops who built Notre Dame were notable scholastics. The generations who built cathedrals were impregnated with the certainty that what was Christian was rational. Scholasticism produced St. Thomas Aquinas, whose philosophy has outlived a dozen systems, whose _Summa_ was placed on the a.s.sembly table of the Council of Trent, the sole companion of the Scriptures, Aquinas, whose sanity of ethics and doctrine was held up by Leo XIII as the best guide amid current errors.

With Aquinas, who taught the inextricable union of Faith and Reason, Christian philosophy reached its zenith.[76] Too long has it been the fas.h.i.+on to look on orthodoxy as a sign of mental inferiority. Professors still dismiss the _Summa_ with a scathing line. They have never opened its pages, perhaps, but second-hand knowledge to vast regions of human thought is no impediment to a chair in the modern university.

"Abstractions as repulsive as they are frivolous," is the dictum of a group of present-day French scholars who seem to think that to belittle things mediaeval is proof of patriotism.

We have looked on at the rehabilitation of certain mediaeval saints. It was not so long ago that the poor man of a.s.sisi was patronized as an ignorant fanatic. The appeal of St. Francis is to the emotions, while that of St. Thomas Aquinas is to the intellect, so, perhaps, it is expecting too much to hope that some day the average man may appreciate this thinker who set sane boundaries round the human mind. Too long have the prime sanities of reason been flouted by hazy abstract thinking in the void; too long has man shut his eyes to the fact that a crime of the intellect is of more consequence to mankind than a crime against the civil law; too long has applause been given to philosophers who obliterated the distinctions between right and wrong--like Hegel, teaching the ident.i.ty of Being and non-Being--so that the very soul of the peoples grew perverted and appalling cataclysms threatened civilization.

What the older centuries thought of Aquinas, the painter as well as the poet tells us. In the Louvre hangs Benozzo Gozzoli's picture of the _doctor angelicus_ sitting in luminous repose amid pope, doctors, saints, and the sages of antiquity, and the inscription runs: "_Vere hic est lumen ecclesiae_." And in Milan hangs Piero della Francesca's profound study of the saint. "I place Plato high," wrote a sound French thinker, "but as I see Aquinas he is as superior to Plato, and even more, than is our knowledge of the physical world to that of the Greeks.... He embraces St. Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato."

Often has it been said that a Gothic cathedral is the _Summa_ translated into stone, logical, ordered, interlinked, leaving nothing to chance, a sound skeleton on a sound base, so securely balanced that great windows could be opened on the sky, like flashes of intuitive genius lifting the soul to the infinite. Many were the points by which St. Thomas touched Gothic art in its heyday. He was a student in Cologne when its mighty cathedral was begun. He was in Paris during the years when the transept of Notre Dame was building, and the Sainte-Chapelle and St. Denis'

abbatial. By blood he was related to St. Louis, and often was his guest at table, where talk must have turned on that keen interest of the hour--the making of Gothic churches.[77] He was to die (1274) in Cistercian Fossanuova, the first Gothic monument of Italy. And his great work, like many a cathedral, was left unfinished.

Never was aspiration toward the infinite more pa.s.sionate than in that scholastic disputing, commune-winning, cathedral-building, crusading age. The absorbing interest for old and young, for bishop and layman, for king and poor student, was to know G.o.d, to know their own souls, to learn how to make life more worthy of G.o.d. "In the entire length of France," wrote the archbishop of Sens to the pope, in 1140, "in towns and even in villages, in the schools and outside them, all, even simple people and children, are disputing on the Holy Trinity." Paris became the center of the seething new interest in theology and philosophy. In 1109 Guillaume de Champeaux opened a school of logic on the slopes of St. Genevieve's hill (where to this day reigns Paris University), and soon all Christendom frequented it.[78] His pupil, and later his opponent, was Abelard, brilliant, restless knight-errant of dialectics, whom the modern orthodox student finds to be a forerunner of the new method of biblical criticism rather than a rationalist.

In the abbey of St. Victor, whose free cla.s.ses were founded by Guillaume de Champeaux when harried by Abelard, there gathered a group of mystic scholars and poets: Hugues de St. Victor, the Augustine of his day (d.

1141), whose work on the sacraments was an interlinked system of theology. Lucid in intellect, tender in sentiment, was this friend of St. Bernard, whom Dante places in Paradise with St. Anselm and St.

Bonaventure (_Par._, xii: 30); and Hugues' disciple, Richard de St.

Victor (d. 1173), ranked in Paradise as the companion of the Venerable Bede and St. Isidore of Seville, "Richard, who in contemplation was more than man" (_Par._, x: 132); and Adam de St. Victor, one of the best poets of the XII century, whose sequences and rimed proses fill the liturgy. Another pupil of the learned Hugues was Pierre Lombard, who died bishop of Paris in 1160; his _Book of Sentences_ became a textbook in European universities for centuries to come.

From the cathedral school and the mount of St. Genevieve and St.

Victor's cloister[79] evolved the University of Paris, "elder daughter of France," whose t.i.tle first appears in 1215, the oldest university in Europe with that of Bologna--one the high priestess of theology, the other the leader in canon and civil law. In the XII-century schools of Paris, John of Salisbury met Thomas Becket and Nicholas Breakspear (the English pope, Adrian IV), and there the future Innocent III became the friend of Stephen Langton.

By the XIII century over thirty thousand students thronged the colleges in Paris. Aquinas taught in the Dominicans' branch of the university, in which same convent, called the Jacobins, lived the reader of Louis IX, Vincent de Beauvais, whose four _Mirrors_ were depicted in the imagery of the great cathedrals. No age was ever more enamored of encyclopaedias.

To overcla.s.sify was a characteristic of the times which even the great Aquinas could not escape. They say that over five hundred monks, under the guidance of the Dominican cardinal, Hugues de Saint-Cher, were busy in the rue St. Jacques preparing the first concordance of Scriptures.

The entire Bible was translated into French in the XIII century. In the Franciscans' branch of the University St. Bonaventure taught. The king's chaplain, Robert de Sorbon, founded a house where poor students could live in common. Canterbury's archbishop, St. Edmund Rich, was a pupil in Paris, then a teacher. Roger Bacon, first to grasp the importance of experimental science, studied there, and so did Robert Grosseteste, builder of Lincoln Cathedral, whom Bacon said excelled all other masters in his range of useful knowledge.

The smelting pot of modern society those fecund formative years of the XII and XIII centuries have been called. A life-time's study it would be to draw adequately the picture of the one city of Paris then, when Philippe-Auguste and his grandson, St. Louis, were busy raising their Louvre and their Cite palaces, their Notre Dame, and their Sainte-Chapelle, busy cleaning the city streets and the city laws; when one scholarly bishop succeeded another as slowly rose the capital's cathedral, when lovely Latin hymns poured from St. Victor's abbey, while in the street the students sang the new lays of trouvere and troubadour, telling of "love that is a thing so high," of Roland and the _gestes_ of paladins, of the Celtic heroes, Tristan, Lancelot, and Percival; when all the newly awakened intellectual and art life was astir welding old blood and new, making Frenchmen, at last, of Celt and Latin and Frank, making a kind of commonwealth of the nations that met in universities whose common speech still was Latin.[80]

That there were black shadows in the picture, none deny. There were pillages and ma.s.sacres. It was an agitated day full of tumults and heresies and terrible reprisals. One has only to read the censures of St. Bernard and of Innocent III to learn of the cupidity and the l.u.s.t.

Joinville has told of a sink of corruption lying within a stone's throw of the saint-king's crusading camp. But, above all the lawlessness, the men of those ages of faith aspired. Their acts might fall short; their principles remained sound. "No easy-going doctrines, then, to legitimize vice," says Ozanam. Man knew how to beat his breast in humble repentance. He lifted his eyes toward an ideal so far above himself that it was given his human weakness to build cathedrals such as Notre Dame of the capital. Not so does he build when as superman he sits on a self-raised altar.

The virtuous bishop, who had most to do with the erection of the cathedral of Paris, had been a student and later a teacher of scholasticism. Maurice de Sully was born of simple parentage in the village of Sully-sur-Loire, and he came as a poor scholar to the great city. His abilities and the integrity of his conduct won him recognition, and after teaching belles-lettres, he was elected to the see of Paris as the seventy-second successor of St. Denis. From 1160 to 1196 he directed his diocese, a true shepherd whose special care was the training of young priests. Crowds flocked to his sermons, wrote a contemporary. He took an active part on the side of Thomas Becket during the English archbishop's struggle with Henry II, and it was he who consecrated as bishop of Chartres Becket's friend, the intellectual John of Salisbury. To Bishop Maurice, who had baptized him, Philippe-Auguste left the care of the Royal Treasury when he went on the Third Crusade.

So wisely did this churchman administer his revenues that he was able to build hospitals and abbeys, as well as erect, in larger part by his personal donations, his own cathedral.

The first stone of Notre Dame was laid in 1163, and tradition says that Alexander III officiated in the same month that he dedicated for the Benedictines the new choir of St. Germain-des-Pres; the exiled pontiff resided in France for four years. Though the name of the architect of Notre Dame has not survived, his design was adhered to during a century and a half. A transept was not in his plan; however, a short one was inserted before the nave was laid down. That nave was nearly finished when Bishop Maurice de Sully died, in 1196, leaving large sums, in his testament, for the completion of his beloved church. The two westernmost bays of the nave are not of the bishop-founder's time.

Notre Dame, because of interruptions in its construction, presents an irregular alignment, and it is easy to perceive, as one gazes along its vaulting, that its choir slopes toward the north. Archaeologists have given up the poetic explanation that the slanting choir was symbolic of the droop of Christ's head on the cross. Nor can the symbol seeker now call the Porte Rouge (an extra door in the north wall of the choir) a souvenir of the spear wound of the Saviour, since if made with such intention it would have been placed below the extended arms of the transept.

Three campaigns of work built Notre Dame, and each time that the work was resumed the axis deviated slightly. First rose the choir and a short transept. Then was done the nave, save its westernmost bays. And finally, at the beginning of the XIII century, they undertook the west facade and the two bays behind it. The carving on the pier's capitals shows the gradual advance in sculpture: in the choir they cut the large leaves of water plants which were the first nature models copied when the conventional Byzantine models were discarded. Then, in the nave, the foliage grew richer, and oak and vine and curled-up ferns appeared.

Capital by capital should be studied, for their sculpture is masterly.

The capitals of the nave's triforium are said to mark the culmination of Gothic art in foliate design. While unity was kept throughout the entire arcade, there was unceasing variation in details.

When Bishop Maurice de Sully, the peasant, died, he was succeeded by Bishop Eudes de Sully, the feudal baron, descended from the reigning counts of Champagne, from Louis VII and Alienor of Aquitaine, and in whose veins ran the blood of William the Conqueror through his daughter Adela. The ability to build was his by inheritance. He began the west facade, and probably at his death all three of the portals were in place. To him we owe that fairest of sculptured entrances, the Virgin's door, under the northwest tower, called "the most beautiful page of stone that the Middle Ages have left us." _Visibile palare_ are Dante's words for such art as this. In the carved tympanum, "Gothic art reached the simple perfection of Phidias." The draperies flow easily; only in the abrupt turning up of the edges of the robes lingers an archaic touch. Below are represented kings and prophets, the ancestors of Mary.

Above them is a moving version of the a.s.sumption; and in the upper triangle is the Coronation of the Queen of Heaven by her Divine Son--she, the mortal, turned toward Him, the divinity, with a gesture of adoration. The Christ is the Nazarene, a n.o.ble Oriental.

No haziness then in their knowledge that the patroness in whose care they placed their cathedrals was a fellow creature. To the common sense of the Middle Ages, it would have seemed a muddle-headed way of thinking to have called Jesus, G.o.d, and at the same time to have refused homage to His Mother, the one whom G.o.d chose to honor above all mortals, "she who didst so enn.o.ble human nature that its own Maker scorned not to become its making."[81] It was only logical, they thought, that the best advocate with the son should be the mother. "All of us who fear the wrath of the Judge, fly to the Judge's mother," wrote Abelard. "_Que Dieu nous l'octroie par la priere de sa douce mere_," wrote the crusader Joinville. So, without worrying over future carpers who might murmur "Mariolatry," the Middle Ages chanted "_Laus Deo et Beatae Mariae laudum_." And the cathedral of Paris dared to dedicate four of its six doors to the Queen of Heaven.

The door under the southwest tower commemorates St. Anne, the Blessed Virgin's mother. It is a composite work, carved in Bishop Maurice's time, between 1160 and 1170, but not set up here till Bishop Eudes de Sully had undertaken the facade; in its tympanum are representations both of Louis VII and of Maurice de Sully. St. Anne's door was a link between the still archaic western doors of Chartres and the clearly enunciated Gothic portal under the northwest tower of Paris Cathedral.

In the mult.i.tudinous folds of the draperies is Byzantine feeling, and sacerdotal is the Madonna who gravely presents her son to be adored. By the middle of the XIII century, the Madonna had become a natural mother, and so she is sculptured at the north entrance to Notre Dame's transept.

Bishop Eudes de Sully, like his predecessor, had many a link with scholasticism and with other bishop-builders. He had been fellow student in Paris with the future Innocent III, and that expert in men when pope called on his aid to find capable occupants for the French sees. Eudes' own brother Henry was the archbishop of Bourges who initiated the new cathedral there; and when his brother died, Eudes a.s.sisted in placing in his see the saintly Guillaume, who built the chevet of Bourges. Through Eudes de Sully, the bishop-builder of Rheims Cathedral, Alberic de Humbert, was elected, and he also helped to elect Bishop Herve, who began the cathedral of Troyes. Able men ever found a protector in the capable bishop of Paris, whose strict sense of duty was incorruptible. When Philippe-Auguste, his near kinsman, broke the marriage law, Bishop Eudes went into exile rather than sanction the scandal. To him Innocent III sent St. Jean de Matha, that the prelate might draw up a Rule for the new Order of Trinitarians, established to redeem captives from Islam. It was Eudes de Sully who founded, in 1204, the abbey of Port Royal, a name to become of note in French letters.

The bishop of Paris from 1208 to 1219 was Pierre de Nemours, one of four brothers who were bishop-builders, at Paris, at Noyon, at Chalons, and at Meaux. He died a crusader under the walls of Damietta. Scarcely a cathedral but has its crusade memory. The facade of Notre Dame had almost reached the crowning open arcade when the scholarly Guillaume de Seignelay was transferred to the see of Paris from Auxerre where he had begun the Gothic cathedral. The _galerie des rois_, whose date is about 1223, was no doubt his work. Such galleries are found only in cathedrals in the royal domain, and it is just as likely that they honor the kings of France as the kings of Judea as some maintain. The majority of the larger statues of Paris Cathedral are rest.i.tutions. Viollet-le-Duc had an English sculptor, George Frampton, make the gargoyles and grotesques of Notre Dame, since the Revolution wrecked most of the exterior sculpture.

Still another noted scholastic, Guillaume d'Auvergne (1228-29), was to rule the see of Paris while its chief church was building. He finished the northwest tower, which differed slightly in size and details from that to the south; across the face of the former are ten statues, whereas nine only are set before its companion tower. Perhaps a change of architects caused the disparity, or it may be that when the houses were cleared away for the erection of the north tower, more s.p.a.ce was available. Bishop Guillaume d'Auvergne's writings show him to have been one of the most original thinkers in the XIII century, a theologian, a philosopher, a mathematician, and one versed in Arab and in Greek literature. He became for St. Louis a kind of prime minister in ecclesiastical business, and, like the king, he founded hospitals and houses of charity. There is a charming page in Joinville's reminiscences concerning this able man. A priest expressed his doubts to him on the Eucharist. Bishop Guillaume asked if he tried to resist the temptations, and he replied that he did so with all his force. "Now I," said the good bishop, "have not a single doubt about the Real Presence. I am like the fortress of Montleheri, safe in the heart of France, far from the danger line; but you, who fight unceasingly, are like the king's fortress of Roch.e.l.le in Poitou, on the frontier. Now, of us two, whom will the king most honor for guarding his fortresses?"

Peasant and prince, crusader and scholar, humanist and mathematician, men of exemplary lives, born rulers and guides, such were the builders of Notre Dame of Paris, and their ability and sincerity live eternally in their work.[82] They gave free wing to the soul in raising their great church, while they cheerfully accepted the human law of working within limits. No cathedral in France shows more clearly the relation between builders and building, more clearly vindicates the ideals of its age. The partisan historian may cite his instances to prove that the religion of that age was superst.i.tious. While Notre Dame stands, such charges are refuted. It is a historical doc.u.ment as potent for the vindication of the truth as the _Divina Commedia_ itself.

When Bishop Guillaume d'Auvergne had finished the towers of Notre Dame he caused to be made the open arcade from which they emerge, as from a royal peristyle. About the same time side chapels were inserted between the b.u.t.tresses, and the line of small rose windows, which had hitherto marked the triforium story, was done away with, in order that the clearstory windows might be lengthened. Only step by step were the builders learning that they might open the entire s.p.a.ce between the active members of a Gothic structure; the upper windows of Chartres had pa.s.sed on the lesson to Paris.

The plan of the first architect was adhered to throughout, and since the later masters-of-works were likewise natives of the Ile-de-France and innate in them a cla.s.sic restraint and a hardy daring (the hall-mark of the best Parisian art to this day), the cathedral of Paris was h.o.m.ogeneous. Midway in the XIII century Jean de Ch.e.l.les, a precursor of Rayonnant Gothic, lengthened the transept arms by a bay and finished them with admirable facades. His name, and the date 1257, are cut on the foundation stone of the south facade. The sculpture of that southern entrance honors St. Stephen, since on the site had once stood a church dedicated to the first martyr; the tympanum of the door is another _chef-d'oeuvre_ of Notre Dame. Jean de Ch.e.l.les was the first to use perforated gables. It is thought that on the north facade worked Pierre de Montereau, the architect of St. Denis. As the XIII century merged in the XIV Pierre de Ch.e.l.les, probably a son of Jean, directed the making of the apse chapels and the superb flying b.u.t.tresses which leap unhesitatingly over chapels and aisle and tribune gallery. He added the big tribune windows with gables.

The cla.s.sic restraint which is the leading quality of Notre Dame was never poverty. Sculpture was lavish where it should be. At the portals the Scriptures were set forth in detail and saints were held up for the edification of the people. The signs of the zodiac were carved, as well as the personification of the seasons and the months. Pinnacle and parapet were weighted with winged beast or demon, and the useful water spouts, or gargoyles, were chiseled as crabbed images. However, one should always remember, in climbing the towers of Notre Dame, that most of the present stone monsters are modern, and it is one of the weaknesses of the restorer to overemphasize the grotesque in the art of the Middle Ages.

A strange world of fabulous creatures dwell on the roof of Our Lady's church--conceptions that are half terrible and half fantastic, imaginations that are survivals of the old pagan superst.i.tions which Christianity could not wholly extirpate. The XII and XIII centuries were not so far removed in time from the invasions of the northern Barbarians, and the Church made concessions to primitive inheritances.

Artists were allowed to carve on roof or pinnacle the chimeras and vampires which through long centuries had haunted the imagination of their ancestors, provided that they expounded the truths of Christian doctrine in such princ.i.p.al places as portals, facades, and choir screens. Might not a mocking grotesque beside an angel be taken as emblem of the external antagonism of the animal and the spirit in man?

The choir screen of Notre Dame of Paris is sculptured with the apparitions of the risen Lord, from Easter Day to the Ascension. "If Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain."[83]

The cathedral of Paris during the first centuries of its existence was the setting of many national scenes. Here the kings of France deposited their crown and renewed their vow to be just fathers of their people.

Before its altar their newborn heir was blessed. In 1182 the main altar of Notre Dame was consecrated, and three years later the patriarch of Jerusalem preached from it the Third Crusade. On the eve of both his crusades St. Louis prayed here, and in 1270, when his remains were brought back from Tunis, they rested in Notre Dame for a solemn night of chanted mourning.

In Notre Dame the Duke of Bedford had his nephew, Henry VI of England, crowned as king of France. Factional hate and a foreign enemy in control caused a _Te Deum_ of rejoicing to be sung in this, the most national of French cathedrals, when the news came that Jeanne the Maid had been taken prisoner before Compiegne, in 1429, but solemn reparation was made in 1456, when, in the presence of Jeanne's mother and brothers, the bishop of Paris (a Norman, and brother of the poet Alain Chartier) opened in Notre Dame the inquest that was to lead to the Rehabilitation of the heroine of Orleans.

To the hidden places over the vaults of Notre Dame fled the ill.u.s.trious chancellor of Paris University, Gerson, to whom during two centuries was attributed the _Imitation of Christ_. In 1407 he had reprobated the murder of the Duke of Orleans (builder of Pierrefonds) by the Duke of Burgundy (of the regal Dijon tomb), and the mob rose and sacked his house. It is said that for months Gerson lay concealed in Notre Dame, alone with his books, and given over to prayer and meditation.

The present stained gla.s.s in Notre Dame is modern, save for the north, south, and west rose windows, the trilogy of light usually found in big cathedrals. The roses of the transept belong to the Paris school which led in the art of gla.s.smaking during the second half of the XIII century. So large were the s.p.a.ces then to be filled that the scrupulous patience of the St. Denis craftsmen was no longer possible. Backgrounds had to be made quickly by bold, simple trellis designs, and as the most frequent background was a red trellis on a blue field, and the juxtaposition of red and blue makes violet, in too many of the windows of that period prevails a melancholy purplish hue. Originally the choir of Notre Dame boasted some gla.s.s given by Abbot Suger himself to the preceding Romanesque cathedral. In the XVIII century, those over-confident _gens de got_, the cathedral canons, whose taste admitted only the neo-cla.s.sic, subst.i.tuted uncolored gla.s.s for the ancient windows. They say that when the workmen were removing Suger's priceless gla.s.s, they were dumfounded by its deep, ineffable blue.[84]

Many a treasure of Notre Dame was destroyed by the Revolution, and the church itself was put up for sale and escaped demolition by merest chance. It served as Temple of Reason, as warehouse, as fete hall.