works of art, magnificent stained glass of the 13th century. Beneath the choir there is a crypt of Romanesque construction, where traces of the Roman fosses are to be found; the two lateral portals are also survivals of a Romanesque church. The Jardin de l’Archevêché, a pleasant terrace-garden, adjoins the choir of the cathedral. Bourges has many fine old houses. The hôtel Lallemant and the hôtel Cujas (now occupied by the museum) are of the Renaissance period. The hôtel de Jacques Cœur, named after the treasurer of Charles VII. and now used as the law-court, is of still greater interest, though it has been doubted whether Jacques Cœur himself inhabited it. The mansion is in the Renaissance style, but two towers of the Roman fortifications were utilized in the construction of the south-western façade (see House, Plate II. figs. 7 and 8). Its wings surround a courtyard into which three staircase turrets project; one of these leads to a chapel, the ceiling of which is decorated by fine frescoes.
Bourges is the seat of an archbishopric, a court of appeal, a court of assizes and a prefect; and is the headquarters of the VIII. army corps. It has tribunals of first instance and of commerce, a board of trade-arbitrators, and a chamber of commerce, and a branch of the Bank of France. Its educational institutions include an ecclesiastical seminary, a lycée for boys, and a college for girls, training colleges, and a school of industrial art. The industrial activity of Bourges depends primarily on its gunpowder and ammunition factories, its cannon-foundry and gun-carriage works. These all belong to the government, and, together with huge magazines, a school of pyrotechnics, and an artillery school, lie in the east of the town. The suburb of Mazières has large iron and engineering works, and there are manufactories of anvils, edge-tools, biscuits, woollen goods, oil-cloth, boots and shoes, fertilizers, brick and tile works, breweries, distilleries, tanneries, saw-mills and dye-works. The town has a port on the canal of Berry, and does a considerable trade in grain, wine, vegetables, hemp and fruit.
Bourges occupies the site of the Gallic town of Avaricum, capital of the Bituriges, mentioned by Caesar as one of the most important of all Gaul. In 52 B.C., during the war with Vercingetorix, it was completely destroyed by the Roman conqueror, but under Augustus it rose again into importance, and was made the capital of Aquitania Prima. About A.D. 250 it became the seat of a bishop, the first occupant of the see being Ursinus. Captured by the Visigoths about 475, it continued in their possession till about 507. In the middle ages it was the capital of Berry. During the English occupation of France in the 15th century it became the residence of Charles VII., who thus acquired the popular title of “king of Bourges.” In 1463 a university was founded in the city by Louis XI., which continued for centuries to be one of the most famous in France, especially in the department of jurisprudence. On many occasions Bourges was the seat of ecclesiastical councils—the most important being the council of 1438, in which the Pragmatic Sanction of the Gallican church was established, and that of 1528, in which the Lutheran doctrines were condemned.
BOURGET, PAUL CHARLES JOSEPH (1852– ), French
novelist and critic, was born at Amiens on the 2nd of September
1852. His father, a professor of mathematics, was afterwards
appointed to a post in the college at Clermont-Ferrand. Here
Bourget received his early education. He afterwards studied
at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and at the École des Hautes Études.
In 1872–1873 he produced a volume of verse, Au bord de la mer,
which was followed by others, the last, Les Aveux, appearing in
1882. Meanwhile he was making a name in literary journalism,
and in 1883 he published Essais de psychologic contemporaine,
studies of eminent writers first printed in the Nouvelle Revue,
and now brought together. In 1884 Bourget paid a long visit
to England, and there wrote his first published story (L’Irréparable).
Cruelle Énigme followed in 1885; and André Cornelis
(1886) and Mensonges (1887) were received with much favour.
Le Disciple (1889) showed the novelist in a graver attitude; while
in 1891 Sensations d’Italie, notes of a tour in that country,
revealed a fresh phase of his powers. In the same year appeared
the novel Cœur de femme, and Nouveaux Pastels, types of the
characters of men, the sequel to a similar gallery of female types
(Pastels, 1890). His later novels include La Terre promise (1892);
Cosmopolis (1892), a psychological novel, with Rome as a background;
Une Idylle tragique (1896); La Duchesse bleue (1897);
Le Fantôme (1901); Les Deux Sœurs (1905); and some volumes of
shorter stories—Complications sentimentales (1896), the powerful
Drames de famille (1898), Un Homme fort (1900), L’Étape (1902),
a study of the inability of a family raised too rapidly from the
peasant class to adapt itself to new conditions. This powerful
study of contemporary manners was followed by Un Divorce (1904),
a defence of the Roman Catholic position that divorce is
a violation of natural laws, any breach of which inevitably
entails disaster. Études et portraits, first published in 1888,
contains impressions of Bourget’s stay in England and Ireland,
especially reminiscences of the months which he spent at Oxford;
and Outre-Mer (1895), a book in two volumes, is his critical
journal of a visit to the United States in 1893. He was admitted
to the Academy in 1894, and in 1895 was promoted to be an
officer of the Legion of Honour, having received the decoration
of the order ten years before.
As a writer of verse Bourget was merely trying his wings, and his poems, which were collected in two volumes(1885–1887), are chiefly interesting for the light which they throw upon his mature method and the later products of his art. It was in criticism that his genius first found its true bent. The habit of close scientific analysis which he derived from his father, the sense of style produced by a fine ear and moulded by a classical education, the innate appreciation of art in all its forms, the taste for seeing men and cities, the keen interest in the oldest not less than the newest civilizations, and the large tolerance not to be learned on the boulevard—all these combined to provide him with a most uncommon equipment for the critic’s task. It is not surprising that the Sensations d’ltalie (1891), and the various psychological studies, are in their different ways scarcely surpassed throughout the whole range of literature. Bourget’s reputation as a novelist has long been assured. Deeply impressed by the singular art of Henry Beyle (Stendhal), he struck out on a new course at a moment when the realist school reigned without challenge in French fiction. His idealism, moreover, had a character of its own. It was constructed on a scientific basis, and aimed at an exactness, different from, yet comparable to, that of the writers who were depicting with an astonishing faithfulness the environment and the actions of a person or a society. With Bourget observation was mainly directed to the secret springs of human character. At first his purpose seemed to be purely artistic, but when Le Disciple appeared, in 1889, the preface to that remarkable story revealed in him an unsuspected fund of moral enthusiasm. Since then he has varied between his earlier and his later manner, but his work in general has been more seriously conceived. From first to last he has painted with a most delicate brush the intricate emotions of women, whether wronged, erring or actually vicious; and he has described not less happily the ideas, the passions and the failures of those young men of France to whom he makes special appeal.
Bourget has been charged with pessimism, and with undue delineation of one social class. The first charge can hardly be sustained. The lights in his books are usually low; there is a certain lack of gaiety, and the characters move in a world of disenchantment. But there is no despair in his own outlook upon human destiny as a whole. As regards the other indictment, the early stories sometimes dwell to excess on the mere framework of opulence; but the pathology of moral irresolution, of complicated affairs of the heart, of the ironies of friendship, in which the writer revels, can be more appropriately studied in a cultured and leisured society than amid the simpler surroundings of humbler men and women. The style of all Bourget’s writings is singularly graceful. His knowledge of the literature of other lands gives it a greater flexibility and a finer allusiveness than most of his contemporaries can achieve. The precision by which it is not less distinguished, though responsible for a certain over-refinement, and for some dull pages of the novels, is an
