The Cathedral (Huysmans)/Chapter IX
This discussion had been of use to Durtal; it took him out of the generalities over which he had persistently mused since his arrival at Chartres. The Abbé had, in fact, shown him his bearings, and pointed out a navigable channel leading to a definite end, a haven familiar to all. The monastery which had lingered in Durtal's fancy as a mere confused picture, apart from time, without place or date, deriving nothing from his memories of La Trappe but the sense of discipline, and on to which he had at once engrafted the fancy of an abbey of a more literary and artistic stamp, governed by a conciliatory rule, in a milder atmosphere—that ideal retreat, half borrowed from reality and half the fabric of a dream—was taking shape. By speaking of an Order that existed, mentioning it by name and actually specifying a House under its rule, the Abbé had given Durtal substantial food instead of the argumentative wordiness of a mania; he had afforded him something better to chew than the empty air on which he had fed so long.
The state of uncertainty and indecision he had been living in was at end; his choice now lay between remaining at Chartres or retiring to Solesmes; and at once, without delay, he set to work to read and reconsider the works of Saint Benedict.
This rule, summed up more particularly in a series of paternal injunctions and affectionate advice, was a marvel of gentleness and tactfulness. Every craving of the soul was described, every misery of the body foreseen. It knew so precisely how to ask much and yet not to exact too much, that it had yielded without breaking, satisfied the movements of different ages, and remained, in the nineteenth century what it had been in mediæval times.
Then how merciful, how wise it was when addressing itself to the feeble and infirm. "The sick shall be served as though they were Christ in person," says Saint Benedict; and his anxiety for his sons, his urgent recommendations to the Superiors to love and visit the younger brethren, to neglect nothing that may assuage their ills, reveals a maternal care that is truly touching on the patriarch's part.
"Yes, yes," muttered Durtal, "but there are in this rule other articles which seem less acceptable to miscreants of my stamp. This, for instance: 'No man shall dare to give or to receive anything without the Abbot's permission, or to have or hold anything as his own—absolutely nothing, neither book, nor tablets, nor pointer—in a word, nothing whatever, inasmuch as they are not allowed to call even their body or their will their own.'
"This is a terrible sentence of abnegation and obedience," he sighed, "only, is this law, which is binding on the Fathers and the Serving Brothers, equally strict for the Oblates, the ægrotant members of the Benedictine army, who are not mentioned in the text? This remains to be seen. It will be well too to ascertain how far it is applied, for the rule is on the whole so skilful, so elastic, so broad that it can be made at option very austere or very mild.
"With the Trappists the ordinances are so closely drawn that they are stifling; with the Benedictines, on the contrary, they would be light and airy enough to allow the soul to breathe easily. One Fraternity clings scrupulously to the letter; the other, on the contrary, draws inspiration from the Spirit of the Saint.
"Before goading myself along this road I must consult the Abbé Plomb," was Durtal's conclusion. He went to call on the priest; but he was absent for some days.
As a precaution against indolence, a measure of spiritual discipline, he threw himself on the cathedral once more, and tried, now that he was less overpowered by speculation, to read its meaning.
The stone text which he was bent on understanding was puzzling, if not difficult to decipher, in consequence of the interpolated passages, repetitions, and parts eliminated or abridged; in fact, to say the truth, as the result of a certain incoherence, accounted for no doubt by the circumstance that the work had been carried on, altered or extended by successive artists during a lapse of two hundred years.
The image-makers of the thirteenth century had not always taken into account the ideas expressed by their precursors; they had repeated them, expressing them from their own point of view in their personal tongue; thus, for instance, they had introduced a second version of the signs of the seasons and of the zodiac. The sculptors of the twelfth century had made a calendar in stone on the western front; those of the thirteenth did the same in the right-hand doorway of the north porch, justifying this reduplication of the subject on the same church by the fact that the zodiac and the seasons may in symbolism have several interpretations.
According to Tertullian the death and new birth of the circling years afforded an image of the Resurrection at the end of the world. According to others the Sun, surrounded by the twelve Signs, was emblematic of the Sun of Justice surrounded by his twelve Apostles. The Abbé Bulteau sees in these stony calendars a rendering of the passage in which St. Paul declares to the Hebrews that "Jesus is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever," while the Abbé Clerval gives this simple interpretation: that all times belong to Christ, and are bound to glorify Him.
"But this is a mere detail," said Durtal to himself. "In the whole structure of the cathedral itself we can trace two-fold purposes.
"The architectural mass of Notre Dame de Chartres as a whole may be divided, externally, into three great parts, as indicated by the three grand porches. The western or royal portal, which is the ceremonial entrance to the sanctuary, between the two towers; the north porch on the side next the bishop's palace, beyond the new spire; the south porch, flanked by the old spire.
"Now, the subjects represented on the royal front and in the south porch are identical. Each glorifies the Triumph of the Incarnate Word, with this difference: that on the south porch Our Lord is not exalted alone as He is on the west front, but in the person also of the Elect and of His Saints. If to these two subjects, which may be considered as one—the Saviour glorified in Himself and in His Saints—we add the praises of the Virgin set forth in the north front we find this result: a poem in praise of the Mother and the Son as declaring the final cause of the Church itself.
"By studying the variations between the south and west fronts we perceive that, though in both Jesus is shown in the same act of blessing the earth, and though both are almost exclusively restricted to illustrating the Gospel, leaving the scenes of the Old Testament to the arches on the north, they differ greatly from each other, and are no less unlike the portals of all other cathedrals.
"In total disagreement with the mystic rituals observed almost everywhere else—at Notre Dame de Paris, at Bourges, at Amiens, to name but three churches—the Last Judgment, which is seen on the main entrance of those basilicas, is at Chartres relegated to the south porch.
"And in the same way the Tree of Jesse, which at Amiens and Reims and the cathedral at Rouen, is displayed on the royal porch, is at Chartres on the north side of the building; and many more similar changes might be noted," said Durtal to himself. "But, which is yet more strange, the parallel so commonly to be observed between the subjects treated on the inner and outer surface of the same wall, in sculptured stone without and painted glass within, does not constantly exist at Chartres. This, for instance, is the case with regard to the genealogical Tree of Christ, which is seen inside in glass on the upper wall of the west front, and is carved outside on the north porch. At the same time, when the subjects do not entirely coincide on the front and back of the page, they are often complementary, or carry out the same idea. Thus the Last Judgment, which is not to be found on the outside of the north front, blazes out, within, from the great rose window above on the same side. This, then, is not cumulative but appropriate development—history begun in one dialect and finished in another.
"In short, it is the ruling idea of the poem which governs all these differences and harmonies; which comes out like a refrain after each of these three strophes in stone; the idea that this church belongs to Our Mother. The cathedral is faithful to its name, loyal to its dedication. The Virgin is Lady over all. She fills the whole interior, and appears outside even on the western and southern portals, which are not especially Hers, above a door, on a capital, high in air on a pediment. The angelic salutation of art has been repeated without intermission by the painters and sculptors of every age. The cathedral of Chartres is truly the Virgin's fief.
"And on the whole," thought Durtal, "in spite of the discrepancies in some of its texts, the cathedral is legible.
"It contains a rendering of the Old and New Testaments; it also engrafts on the sacred Scriptures the Apocryphal traditions relating to the Virgin and St. Joseph, the lives of the saints preserved in the Golden Legend of Jacopo da Voragine and the special biographies of the aspiring recluses of the diocese of Chartres. It is a vast encyclopædia of mediæval learning as concerning God, the Virgin, and the Elect.
"Didron is almost justified in saying that it is a compendium of those great encyclopædias composed in the thirteenth century; only the theory that he bases on this truthful observation wanders off and becomes faulty as soon as he tries to work it out.
"He concludes, in fact, by conceiving of this cathedral as no more than a rendering of the Speculum Universale, the Mirror of the World of Vincent of Beauvais; above all, like that work, as an epitome of practical life and a record of the human race throughout the ages. In point of fact," said Durtal to himself, as he took the Christian Iconography of that writer down from the shelf, "in point of fact, according to him, our stone pages ought to follow in such succession that, beginning with the opening chapter on the north, they would end with the paragraphs on the south. Then we should find the narrative in the following order: First of all the genesis, the Biblical cosmogony, the creation of man and woman and Eden; and then, after the expulsion of the first pair, the tale of man's redemption by suffering.
"'Whereby,' says he, 'the sculptor took occasion to teach the hinds of La Beauce how to work with their hands and their head. Here, to the right of Adam's Fall, he carves under the eyes and for the perpetual edification of all men, a calendar of stone with all the labours of the field, and then a catechism of industry, showing the works done in the town; finally, for the labours of the mind, a manual of the liberal arts."
"Then, thus instructed, man lives on from generation to generation, until the end of the world, set forth in the images on the south side.
"This treasury of sculpture would thus include a compendium of the history of nature and of science, a glossary of morality and art, a biography of humanity, a panorama of the whole world. Thus it would very really represent the Mirror of the World, and be an edition in stone of Vincent of Beauvais' book.
"There is only one difficulty. The Dominican's Speculum Universale dates from many years later than the erection of this cathedral; also, in developing his theory, Didron does not take into account the perspective and relations of the statuary. He assigns equal importance to a small figure half hidden in the moulding of an arch and to the large statues in the foreground supporting the picture in relief of Our Lord and His Mother. Indeed, it might be said that these are the very figures he overlooks; and, in the same way, he takes no account of the western doors, which he could not force into his scheme.
"This archæologist's ideas, in fact, cannot be maintained. He subordinates leading features to accessory details, and ends in a kind of rationalism entirely opposed to the mysticism of the period. He investigates the Middle Ages by levelling down the divine idea to the lowest earthly meaning, and referring to man what is intended to apply to God. The prayer of sculpture, chanted by the ages of faith, becomes, in the introduction to his work, nothing more than an encyclopædia of industrial and moral teaching.
"Let us look closer at all this," Durtal went on, and he went out to smoke a cigarette on the Place. "That royal doorway," thought he, as he walked on, "is the entrance to the great front by which kings were admitted. It is likewise the first chapter of the book, and it sums up the whole of the building.
"But certainly these conclusions forestalling the premisses are very strange; this recapitulation, placed at the very beginning of the work, when it ought, in fact, to be placed at the end, in the apse!
"And yet," he reflected, "putting this aside, the façade thus worked out fills the position in this basilica which the second of the Sapiential Books holds in the Bible. It answers to the Book of Psalms, which is in a certain sense an epitome of all the Books of the Old Testament, and consequently, at the same time, a prophetic memento of the whole of revealed religion.
"The western side of the cathedral is similar; only, it is a compendium not of the older but of the newer Scriptures; an epitome of the Gospels, an abridgment of the books of St. John and the synoptical Gospels.
"In building this, the twelfth century did more. It added more details to this glorification of Christ, following Him from before His birth, through the Bible story, till after His Death and to His Apotheosis as described in the Apocalypse; it completed the Scriptures by the Apocryphal writings, telling the tale of Saint Joachim and Saint Anna, recording many episodes of the marriage of the Virgin and Joseph derived from the Gospel of the Nativity of the Virgin and pseudo-Gospel of St. James the Less.
"But, indeed, in every early sanctuary such use was made of these legends, and no church is really intelligible when they are ignored.
"Nor is there anything to surprise us in this mixture of the authentic Gospels and mere fables. When the Church refused to recognize by canonical authority the divine origin of the Gospels of the Childhood, of the Nativity, the writings of St. Thomas the Israelite, of Nicodemus, of St. James the Less, and the History of Joseph, it had no intention of rejecting them altogether, and consigning them to the limbo of inventions and lies. In spite of certain anecdotes which are, to say the least of it, ridiculous, there may be found in these texts some accurate details and authentic narratives which the Evangelists, cautiously reticent, did not think proper to record. The Middle Ages by no means lent themselves to heresy when they ascribed to these purely human Scriptures the value of probable legend and the interest of pious reminiscence.
"As a whole," thought Durtal, who was now standing in front of the doors between the two towers, the royal western front, "as a whole, this vast palimpsest, with its 719 figures, is easy to decipher if we avail ourselves of the key applied by the Abbé Bulteau in his monograph on this cathedral.
"Starting from the new belfry and working across the western front to the old belfry, we follow the history of Christ embodied in nearly two hundred statues lost in the capitals. It starts with Christ's ancestors, beginning with the story of Anna and Joachim, and giving the legend in minute images. Out of deference perhaps to the Inspired Books, this history creeps along the wall, making itself small so as to be inconspicuous, and narrates, as if in secret, by artless mimicry, poor Joachim's despair when a scribe of the Temple named Reuben reproves him for being childless, and rejects his offerings in the name of the Lord who has not blessed him; then Joachim, in sorrow, separates from his wife and goes away to bewail the curse that has lighted on him, till an angel appears to him and comforts him, and bids him return to his wife, who shall bear a daughter of his begetting.
"Then we see Anna, weeping alone over her barrenness and her widowhood; and the angel comes to her and bids her go forth to meet her husband, and she finds him at the golden gate. And they fall on each other's neck and go home together. And Anna brings forth Mary, whom they dedicate to the Lord.
"Years then pass, till the time comes when the Virgin is to be betrothed. The High Priest bids all of the children of the House of David who are of age, and not yet married, to come to the altar with a rod in their hand; and to discern which of these shall be chosen to marry the Virgin, Abiathar, the High Priest, inquires of the Most High, who repeats the prophecy of Isaiah which declares that a flower shall come out of Jesse on which the Holy Spirit shall rest.
"And immediately the rod blossoms of one of those present, Joseph the Carpenter, and a dove descends from heaven to settle on it.
"So Mary is given to Joseph, and the marriage takes place; Messiah is born, and Herod massacres the Innocents; and there the gospel of the Nativity ends, and the story is taken up by the Holy Scriptures, which follow the Life of Jesus to the hour of His last appearance on earth after His death.
"These scenes, set forth in small simple imagery, serve as a border at the bottom of the vast presentment which extends from tower to tower over all three doors.
"Here the scenes are placed which are intended to attract the crowd by plainer and more visible images; here we see the general theme of this portal in all its splendour, recapitulating the Gospels and achieving the purpose of the Church itself.
"On the left we see the Ascension of Our Lord, soaring triumphant on clouds rendered by a waving scroll held on each side, in the Byzantine manner, by two angels; while below, the Apostles with uplifted faces, gaze at this ascension pointed out to them by other angels who have descended and hover over them, their fingers extended towards the sky.
"The hollow moulding of the arch is filled up with a calendar and zodiac of stone.
"The right-hand side shows the Assumption of Our Lady, seated on a throne, sceptre in hand, and holding the Infant, who blesses the world. Beneath are the episodes of Her life: the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the homage of the shepherds, and the presentation of Jesus to the High Priest; and the bend of the arch, rising to a point like a mitre above the Mother, has the mouldings enriched with two lines of figures, one of archangels bearing censers, with wings closely imbricated as if with tiles, the other of personifications of the seven liberal arts, each represented by two figures—one allegorical, and the other the presentment of the inventor, or of the paragon of that art in antiquity. This is the same scheme of expression as we see in the cathedral at Laon; the paraphrase in sculpture of scholastic theology, and a rendering in images of the text of Albertus Magnus, who, after rehearsing the perfections of the Virgin, declares that She possessed a perfect knowledge of the seven arts: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music—all the lore of the Middle Ages.
"Finally, in the middle, the great doorway illustrates the subject round which the storied carving of the other doors all centres: the Glorification of Our Lord, as Saint John beheld it at Patmos; the Apocalypse, the last book of the Bible, spread open on the forefront of the basilica, above the grand entrance to the church.
"Jesus is seated, on His head the cruciform nimbus, robed in the linen talaris and draped in a mantle which hangs in a fall of close pleats; His bare feet rest on a stool, emblematical of the earth, according to Isaiah. With one hand He blesses the world; in the other He holds the Book with the seven Seals. About him, in the oval glory or Vesica, we see the Tetramorph—the four evangelical emblems with closely fretted wings: the winged cherub, the lion, the eagle, and the ox, figuring St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. John, and St. Luke. Above are the twelve Apostles holding scrolls and books.
"And to complete the Apocalyptic vision, in the hollow mouldings of the arch are the twelve Angels and four and twenty Elders described by St. John, in white raiment and crowned with gold, playing on musical instruments, and singing in the perpetual adoration which some few souls, dwelling isolated in the midst of the indifference of this age, still carry on. They magnify the glory of the Most High, throwing themselves on their faces when the Evangelical Beasts, responding to the fervent and solemn prayers that go up from the earth, utter, in a voice that resounds above the roar of thunder, the word which in its four letters, its two syllables, sums up every duty of man to God—the humble, loving, obedient Amen.
"The text has been very closely followed by the image-maker, excepting with regard to the Beasts, for one detail is omitted; they are not represented with the eyes of which the prophet tells us they were 'full within.'
"Thus, regarding this whole front as a triptych, we find that in the left doorway we have the Ascension framed in the signs of the zodiac; in the middle, the triumph of Jesus as described by the Seer; on the right, the triumph of Mary, surrounded by certain of Her attributes. The whole constitutes the scheme to be carried out by the architect: the Glorification of the Incarnate Word.
"In fact, as the Abbé Clerval says in his important work on the cathedral of Chartres, 'we have the scenes of His life which prepared the way for His glory; we have this actual entrance into glory; and then His eternal glorification by the Angels, the Saints, and the Blessed Virgin.'
"From the point of view of artistic execution the work in the grand subject is crisp and splendid; the smaller figures are obscure and mutilated. The panel representing the Virgin Mary has suffered severely, and both it and that representing the Ascension are strangely rough and barbarous, quite inferior to the central tympanum, which contains the most living, the most haunting, of many figures of Christ.
"Nowhere, indeed, in mediæval sculpture does the Redeemer appear as more saddened or more pitiful, or under a more solemn aspect. Seen in profile, His hair flowing over His shoulders, smooth in front and divided down the middle, with a nose slightly turned up and a heavy mouth under a thick moustache, with a short, curling beard and a long neck, He suggests not so much a Byzantine Christ, such as the artists of that time were wont to paint and carve, but a pre-Raphaelite Christ designed by a Fleming, or even derived from the Dutch, showing indeed that slightly earthy taint which reappeared at a later time with a less pure type of head, at the end of the fifteenth century, in the picture by Cornelis Van Oostzaanen, in the gallery at Cassel.
"He rises enthroned, almost sorrowful in His triumph, unamazed as He blesses, with pathetic resignation, the generations of sinners who for seven centuries have gazed up at Him with inquisitive, unloving eyes as they cross the square; and all turn their back on Him, caring little enough for this Saviour unlike the head familiar to them, recognizing Him only with sheep-like features and a pleasing expression; such, in short, as the foppish image at the cathedral at Amiens before which the lovers of a softer type go into ecstasies.
"Above this Christ are the three windows invisible from outside, and over them again the huge dead rose window, looking like a blind eye, and lighting up, like the windows, only when seen from within, when they glow with clear flame and pale sapphires set in stone; then, higher yet, above the rose, is the gallery of French kings, under the great triangular gable between the towers.
"And the two belfries fling up their spires; the old one carved in soft limestone, imbricated with scales, rising in one bold flight to end in a point, and send up a vapour of prayer among the clouds; the new one, pierced like lace, chiselled like a jewel, wreathed with foliage and crockets of vine, rises with coquettish dalliance, trying to make up for lack of the inspired flight and humble entreaty of its senior by babbling prayer and ingratiating smiles; to persuade the Father by childlike lisping.
"But to return to the west portal," Durtal went on, "in spite of the importance of its grand decoration, displaying the Eternal Triumph of the Word, the interest of artists is irresistibly attracted to the ground storey of the building, where nineteen colossal stone statues stand in the space that extends from tower to tower; part against the wall, and part in the recesses of the door-bays.
"The finest sculpture in the world is certainly that we find here. There are seven kings, seven saints or prophets, and five queens. There were originally twenty-four of these statues, but five have disappeared and left no trace.
"They all wear glories excepting the three first, nearest to the new belfry, and all stand under canopies of pierced work, representing roofs or tabernacles, palaces, bridges—a whole town in little, Sion for children, a dwarfed New Jerusalem.
"They all are standing, each on a column with a guilloche pattern; on plinths carved over with lozenges, diamond points, fir-cone scales, with chain patterns, fretwork, billets, chequers like a chess-board of which the alternate squares are hollowed out; and paved with a sort of mosaic, inlaid patterns which, like the borders of the church windows, suggest a reminiscence of Mussulman goldsmith's work, and show the origin of the style brought from the East by the Crusaders.
"The three first statues in the recess to the left, nearest the new spire, do not stand on any pattern borrowed from the heathen; they are trampling on indescribable monsters. One, a king whose head having been lost, has been fitted with the head of a queen, treads on a man entangled by serpents; another king stands on a woman who holds a reptile by the tail with one hand, and with the other strokes the plait of her own hair; the third, a queen, her head crowned with a plain gold fillet and her shape that of a woman with child, while her face is smiling but commonplace, has at her feet two dragons, a monkey, a toad, a dog, and a snake with an ape's head. What is the meaning of these enigmas? No one knows—no more, indeed, than we know the names of the sixteen other statues placed along the porch.
"Some believe that they represent the ancestry of the Messiah, but this assertion has no evidence to support it; others find here a mixed assemblage of the heroes of the Old Testament and the benefactors to the Church, but this hypothesis is no less illusory. The truth is that, though all these personages have had sceptres in their hands, scrolls, ribands, and breviaries, not one of them displays the attributes which would serve to identify them in accordance with the religious symbolism of the Middle Ages. At most might we venture to give the name of Daniel to a headless figure because a formless dragon writhes under his feet, emblematical of the Devil conquered by the prophet at Babylon.
"The most striking and the strangest of these figures are the queens.
"The first, the royal virago with the prominent stomach, is ordinary enough; the last, opposite to this princess at the furthest end of the front near the old tower, has lost half her face, and the remaining portion is not attractive; but the three others, standing in the principal doorway, are matchless.
"The first, tall, slender, and very straight, wears a crown on her brow, a veil, hair banded on each side of a middle parting, and falling in plaits on her shoulders; her nose turns up a little, is somewhat common; her lips firm and judicious; her chin square. The face is not very young. The body is swathed, and rigid, in a large cloak with wide sleeves, and the richly-jewelled sheath of a gown that betrays no feminine outline of figure. She is upright, sexless, shapeless; her waist slight and bound with a girdle of cord, like a Franciscan Sister. She stands looking, with her head slightly bent, attentive to one knows not what, seeing nothing. Has she attained to the perfect negation of all things? Is she living the life of Union with God beyond the worlds, where time is no more? It might be thought so, since it is noteworthy that, in spite of her royal insignia and the magnificence of her costume, she has the self-centred look, the austere demeanour of a nun. She seems more of the cloister than of the Court. Then we wonder who can have placed her on guard by this door, and why, faithful to a charge known to none but herself, she watches, day and night, with her far-away gaze across the square, waiting motionless for some one who for seven hundred years has failed to come.
"She might be an embodiment of Advent, stooping a little to listen to the woeful supplications of man as they rise from earth; in that case, she must be an Old Testament queen, dead long before the birth of the Messiah she perhaps may have prophesied.
"As she holds a book, the Abbé Bulteau thinks it may be a full-length statue of Saint Radegonde. But other princesses have been canonized, and, like her, hold books. At the same time, the monastic aspect of this queen, her emaciated figure, her eye vaguely fixed on the region of internal dreams, would well befit Clotaire's wife, who retired to a cloister.
"But for what can she be watching? The dreaded arrival of the king bent on tearing her from her Abbey at Poitiers to replace her on the throne? For lack of any information every conjecture must be futile.
"The second statue again represents a king's wife holding a book. She is younger; she wears neither cloak nor veil; her bosom is full and closely fitted in a clinging dress, tightly drawn over the bust like wet linen; a bodice resembling the Carlovingian rokette, fastened on one side. Her hair lies flat in two bands on her forehead, covering her ears and falling in long tresses plaited with ribbon, and ending in loose tufts.
"Her face is wilful and alert, and rather haughty. She is looking out of herself; her beauty is of a more human type, and she knows it. Saint Clotilde, is the Abbé Bulteau's guess.
"It is very certain that this Elect lady was not always a pattern of amiability—not what could be called easy to get on with. Before being reproved and chastened we see her in history, as vindictive, unrelenting to pity, eager for retaliation. She would be Clotilde before her repentance—the Queen, before she became a saint.
"But is it really she? The name was given her because a statue of the same period and very like this, which was formerly at Notre Dame de Corbeil, was dubbed with this name. It was, however, subsequently admitted that it represented the Queen of Sheba. Are we then in the presence of that sovereign? And why, if her name is not in the Book of Life, has she a glory?
"It is highly probable that she is neither the wife of Clovis, nor Solomon's friend—this strange princess who stands before us, at once so earthly and yet more spectral than her sisters; for time has marred her features, injured her skin, dotted her chin with hail-specks, vulgarized her mouth, injured her nose, making it look like the ace of clubs, and put the stamp of death on that living countenance.
"As to the third, she is tall and slender, a fragile spindle, a slim, sylph-like creature, suggesting a taper with the lower portion patterned, embossed, brocaded in the wax itself; she stands magnificently arrayed in a stiff-pleated robe channelled lengthwise, like a stick of celery. The bodice is richly trimmed and stitched; below her waist hangs a cord with loose jewelled knots; on her head is a crown. Both arms are broken; one hand rested on her bosom; in the other she held a sceptre, of which a small portion remains.
"This queen is smiling, artless, and engaging—quite charming. She looks down on all comers with wide open eyes under high-arched brows. Never, at any period, has a more expressive face been formed by the genius of man; it is a masterpiece of childlike grace and saintly innocence.
"Here, amid the pensive architecture of the twelfth century, one of a crowd of devout statues, symbolical to some extent of simple love in an age when men were in perpetual dread of everlasting hell, she seems to stand at the Gate of the Lord as the exorable image of forgiveness. To the terrified souls of habitual sinners who after perseverance in guilt no longer dare cross the threshold of the Sanctuary, she stands kindly reproving such reticence, conquering regrets and soothing terrors by her familiar smile.
"She is the elder sister of the prodigal son, of whom St. Luke indeed makes no mention, but who, if she ever existed, would have pleaded for the absent wanderer, and have insisted with her father on the killing of the fatted calf when the son returned.
"Chartres, to be sure, does not see her in this indulgent aspect; local tradition names her Berthe of the broad foot; but while there is no argument to support this hypothesis, it is in fact quite absurd, as the statue is graced with a nimbus. This mark of holiness would not have been given to Charlemagne's mother, whose name is not on the list of the saints of the Church Triumphant.
"According to the notions of those archæologists who believe that the sculptured dignitaries of this porch represent the ancestry of Christ, she must be a queen of the Old Testament. But which? As Hello very truly remarks, tears abound in the Scriptures, but laughter is so rare that Sarah's, when she could not help mocking at the angel who announced that she should bear a son in her old age, has remained on record. So it is in vain that we inquire to what personage of the ancient books this queen's innocent joy may be ascribed.
"The truth is that she must remain a perennial mystery; she is an angelic, limpid creature, who has attained, no doubt, to the purest joy in the Lord; and withal so attractive, so helpful, that she leaves in us an impression of a healing gesture, the illusion of a blessing made visible to all who crave it. Her right arm indeed is broken at the wrist, and her hand is gone; but we can fancy it there still when we look for it; as a shade, a reflection; it is very plainly seen in the slight fulness of the bosom, as though it were the palm; in the folds of the bodice, which distinctly show the four taper fingers and raised thumb to make the sign of the cross over us.
"How exquisite a forerunner of the Blessed Mother is this royal guardian of the threshold, this sovereign, inviting wanderers to come back to the Church, to enter the door over which She keeps watch, and which is itself one of the symbols of Her Son!" exclaimed Durtal, as he glanced at the opposite figures—such different women! one a nun rather than a queen, her head a little bowed; another, every inch a queen, holding hers aloft; the third saucy, though saintly, her neck neither bent nor assertive, holding herself in a natural attitude, and moderating the august mien of a sovereign by the humble, smiling expression of a saint.
"And perhaps," said he to himself, "we may see in the first an image of the contemplative life, and in the second the embodied idea of the active life; while the third, like Ruth in the Scriptures, symbolizes both!"
As to the other statues—prophets wearing the Jewish cap with ears, and kings holding missals or sceptres, they too are impossible to identify. One in the middle arch, divided from the so-called Berthe by a king, was more especially interesting to Durtal because it was like Verlaine. The statue had indeed thicker hair, but just as strange a head, a skull with curious bumps, a flattish face, a curling beard, and the same common but kindly look.
Tradition gives this statue the name of St. Jude, and this resemblance is suggestive between the saint whom Christians most neglected, and who for several centuries found so few devotees that suddenly, one day, on the theory that he, less than the others, would have exhausted his credit with God, people took to imploring him for desperate cases, lost souls, and the poet so utterly ignored or so stupidly condemned by the very Catholics to whom he has given the only mystical verses produced since the Middle Ages.
"They were ill-starred, one as a saint and the other as a poet," Durtal concluded, as he drew back to get a better view of the front.
It was indeed incredible, with the chasing of silvery flowers wrought on the panes by frost; with its church-drapery, its lace rochets, its fine pierced work, as light as gossamer, running up to the level of the second storey, and forming a fretted frame for the great stone-carvings of the porch. And above that it rose in hermit-like sobriety, unadorned, Cyclopean, with the colossal eye of its dull rose-window between the two towers, one full of windows and richly wrought like the doorway, the other as bare as the façade above the porch.
But after all, what absorbed and possessed Durtal's mind was still those statues of queens.
He finally thought no more of the rest, listened to nothing but the divine eloquence of their lean slenderness, regarding them only under the semblance of tall flower-stems deep in carved stone tubes and expanding into faces of ingenuous fragrance, of innocent perfume, while Christ, touched and saddened, blessing the world, seemed to bend from His throne above them to inhale the delicate aroma that rose from these up-soaring chalices full of soul. Durtal was wondering—what potent necromancer could evoke the spirits of these royal doorkeepers, compel them to speak, and enable us to overhear the colloquy they perhaps hold when in the evening they seem to withdraw behind the curtain of shadow?
What have they to say to each other—they who have seen Saint Bernard, Saint Louis, Saint Ferdinand, Saint Fulbert, Saint Yves, Blanche of Castille—so many of the Elect walking past on their way into the starry gloom of the nave? Did they cause the death of their companions, the five other statues that have vanished for ever from the little assembly? Do they listen, through the closed doors, to the wailing breath of heart-broken psalms, and the roaring tide of the organ? Can they hear the inane exclamations of the tourists who laugh to see them so stiff and so lengthy? Do they, as many saints have done, smell the fetor of sin, the foul reek of evil in the souls that pass by them? Why, then, who would dare to look at them?
And still Durtal looked at them, for he could not tear himself away; they held him fast by the undying fascination of their mystery; in short, he concluded, they are supra-terrestrial under the semblance of humanity. They have no bodies; it is the soul alone that dwells in the wrought sheath of their raiment; they are in perfect harmony with the cathedral, which, divesting itself of its stones, soars in ecstatic flight above the earth.
The crowning achievement of mystical architecture and statuary are here, at Chartres; the most rapturous, the most superhuman art which ever flourished in the flat plains of La Beauce.
And now, having contemplated the whole effect of this façade, he went close to it again to examine its minutest accessories and details, to study more closely the robes of these sovereigns; then he observed that no two were alike in their drapery. Some flowed without any broken folds, in ridge and furrow like the fall of rippling water; others hung closely gathered in parallel flutings like the ribs on stems of angelica, and the stern material lent itself to the needs of the dressers, was soft in the figured crape and fustian and fine linen, heavy in the brocade and gold tissue. Every texture was distinct; the necklaces were chased bead by bead; the knots of the girdles might be untied, so naturally were the strands entwined; the bracelets and crowns were pierced and hammered and adorned with gems, each in its setting, as if by practised goldsmiths.
And in many cases the pedestal, the statue, and the canopy were all carved out of one block, in one piece. What were the men who executed such work?
It is probable that they lived in convents, for art was not at that time cultivated or practised but in the precincts of God. And just then they were in their glory in the Ile de France, the Orleans country, the provinces of Maine, Anjou, and Berry, for we find statues of this type in all; still, it must be said that they are not equal to these at Chartres.
At Bourges, for instance, analogous prophets and very similar queens stand meditative in, one of the extraordinary side bays where the Arab trefoil is so conspicuous. At Angers the statues are weather-beaten, almost ruined, but it can be seen that they were less stately, merely human; they are no longer chastely slender, fit for Heaven, but earthly queens. At Le Mans, where they are in better preservation, they vainly strive to soar above their narrow weed; they lack spring, they are nerveless, feeble, almost common.
Nowhere do we find a soul clothed in stone as at Chartres; and if at Le Mans we study the front, of which the scheme is the same as at Chartres, with Christ enthroned and benedictory between the winged beasts of the Tetramorph, what a descent we note in the divine ideal! Everything is pinched and airless. The Christ, too roughly wrought, looks savage. The pupils only of the supreme masters of Chartres evidently adorned these portals.
Was there a guild, a brotherhood of these image-makers, devoted to the holy work, who went from place to place to be employed by monks as helpers of the masons and labourers, builders for God? Did they first come from the Benedictine Abbey of Tiron founded at Chartres near the market, by that Abbot Saint Bernard whose name figures on the list of benefactors to the church, in the necrology of the cathedral? None may know. They worked humbly, anonymously.
And what souls these artists had! For this we know: they laboured only in a state of grace. To raise this glorious temple, purity was required even of the workmen.
This would seem incredible if it were not proved by authentic documents and undoubted evidence.
We possess letters of the period preserved in the Benedictine annals, a letter from an Abbot of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dive, found by Monsieur Léopold Delisle, in MS. 929 of the French collection in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and a Latin volume of the Miracles of Our Lady, discovered in the Vatican Library, and translated into French by Jehan le Marchant, a poet of the thirteenth century. And these all relate the way in which the Sanctuary dedicated to the Virgin was rebuilt after destruction by fire.
What then occurred was indeed sublime. This was a crusade, if ever there was one. It was here no question of snatching the Holy Sepulchre from the power of the infidels, of meeting armies on the field of battle, and fighting with men; the Lord Himself was to be attacked in His entrenchments, Heaven was besieged, and conquered by love and repentance! And Heaven confessed itself beaten; the angels smiled and yielded; God capitulated, and in the gladness of defeat He threw open the treasury of His grace to be plundered of men.
Then, under the guidance of the Spirit, came a battle in every workshop with brute matter, the struggle of a nation vowing, cost what it might, to save a Virgin, homeless now as on the day when Her Son was born.
The manger of Bethlehem was a mere heap of cinders. Mary would be left to wander, lashed by bitter winds, across the icy plains of La Beauce. Should the same tale be repeated, twelve hundred years later, of pitiless households, inhospitable inns, and crowded rooms?
Madonna was loved then in France—loved as a natural parent, a real mother. On hearing that she was turned adrift by fire, seeking woefully for a home, everyone grieved and wept; and that, not only in the country about Chartres; in the Orleans country, in Normandy, Brittany, the Ile de France, in the far north, whole populations stopped their regular work, left their homes to fly to Her help, the rich giving money and jewels, and helping the poor to drag their barrows and carry corn and oil, wine, wood and lime, everything that could serve to feed labouring men or help in building a church.
It was a constant stream of immigration, the spontaneous exodus of a people. Every road was crowded with pilgrims, all, men and women alike, dragging whole trees, pushing loads of sawn beams, and cartfuls of the moaning sick and aged forming the sacred phalanx, the veterans of suffering, the unconquerable legions of sorrow, all to help in the siege of the heavenly Jerusalem, forming the outer guard to support the attack by the reinforcement of prayer.
Nothing—neither sloughs, nor bogs, nor pathless forests, nor fordless rivers, could check the advancing tide of the marching throng; and one morning, from every point of the compass, lo! they took possession of Chartres.
The investment began; while the sick opened the first parallels of prayer, the sound pitched the tents; the camp extended for leagues on all sides; tapers were kept burning on the carts, and at night La Beauce was a champaign of stars.
What still seems incredible, and is nevertheless attested by every chronicle of the time, is that this horde of old folks and children, of women and men, were at once amenable to discipline; and yet they belonged to every class of society, for there were among them knights and ladies of high degree; but divine love was so powerful that it annihilated distinctions and abolished caste; the nobles harnessed themselves with the villeins to drag the trucks, piously fulfilling their task as beasts of burthen; patrician dames helped the peasant women to stir the mortar, and to cook the food; all lived together in an undreamed surrender of prejudice; all were alike ready to be mere labourers, machines, loins and arms, and to toil without a murmur under the orders of the architects who had come out of the cloister to direct the work.
Nothing was ever more simply or more efficiently organized; the convent cellarers, forming a sort of commissariat for this army, superintended the distribution of food, and saw to the sanitation of the huts and the health of the camp. Men and women were no more than docile instruments in the hands of the chiefs they themselves had chosen, and who in their turn obeyed gangs of monks. These again were under the orders of the wonderful man, the nameless genius, who, after conceiving the plan of this cathedral, directed the whole work.
To achieve such results the spirit of the multitude must really have been admirable, for the humble and laborious work of plasterers and barrow-men was accepted by all, noble or base-born, as an act of mortification and penance, and at the same time as an honour; and no man was so audacious as to lay hand on the materials belonging to the Virgin till he had made peace with his enemies and confessed his sins. Those who were reluctant to repair the ill they had done, or to frequent the Sacraments, were dismissed from the traces, rejected as reprobates by their comrades, and even by their own families.
At daybreak every morning the work decided on by the foremen was begun. Some dug the foundations, cleared away the ruins, carried off the rubbish; others, going in parties to the quarries of Berchère-l'Evêque, at about five miles from Chartres, cut out enormous blocks of stone, so heavy that in some cases a thousand workmen were not many enough to hoist them from their bed to the top of the hill where the church was presently to rise.
And when these silent toilers paused, exhausted and broken, the sound went up of prayers and psalms; some would groan over their sins, imploring Our Lady's mercy, beating their breast and sobbing in the arms of priests who bade them be comforted.
On Sundays long processions formed with banners at their head, and the shout of canticles filled the streets that blazed from afar with tapers; the canonical services were attended by a whole people on their knees; relics were carried with much pomp to visit the sick.
And all the time the walls of the Celestial City were being shaken by battering-rams of supplication, catapults of prayer; the living forces of the whole army combining to make a breach and take the place by storm.
Then it was that Jesus surrendered at discretion, conquered by so much humility and so much love; He placed His powers in His Mother's hands, and miracles began to abound.
All the tribe of the sick and crippled are on their feet; the blind see, the dropsical dry up, the lame walk, the weak-hearted run.
The tale of these miracles, which were repeated day after day, sometimes being produced even before the pilgrim had reached Chartres, has been preserved in the Latin manuscript in the Vatican.
The natives of Château Landon are dragging a cart-load of wheat. On reaching Chantereine they discover that the food they had taken for the journey is all gone, and they beg for bread from some unhappy creatures who are themselves in the greatest want. The Virgin intercedes for them and the bread of the poor is multiplied. Again, some men set out from the Gâtinais with a load of stone. Ready to drop, they pause near Le Puiset, and some villagers coming out to meet them, invite them to rest while they themselves take a turn at the load; but this they refuse. Then the natives of Le Puiset offer them a cask of wine, and pour it into a barrel hoisted on to the truck. This the pilgrims accept, and, feeling less weary, they go on their way. But they are called back to see that the empty vat has refilled itself with excellent wine. Of this all drink, and it heals the sick.
Again, a man of Corbeville-sur-Eure employed in loading a cart with timber has three fingers chopped across by an axe and shrieks in agony. His comrades advise him to have the fingers completely severed, as they hold only by a strip of flesh, but the priest who is conducting them to Chartres disapproves. They all pray to Mary, and the wound vanishes, the hand is whole as before.
Some men of Brittany have lost their way at night in the open country, and are suddenly guided aright by flames of fire; it is the Virgin in person descending that Saturday after Complines into Her church when it is almost finished, and filling it with dazzling glory.
And there are pages and pages of such incidents.
"Ah, it is easy to understand," thought Durtal, "why this Sanctuary is so full of Her. Her gratitude for the love of our forefathers is still felt here—even now She is fain not to seem too much disgusted, not to look too closely.
"Well, well! we build sanctuaries in another way nowadays. When I think of the Sacred Heart in Paris, that gloomy, ponderous erection raised by men who have written their names in red on every stone! How can God consent to dwell in a church of which the walls are blocks of vanity joined by a cement of pride; walls where you may read the names of well-known tradesmen exhibited in a good place, as if they were an advertisement? It would have been so easy to build a less magnificent and less hideous church, and not to lodge the Redeemer in a monument of sin! Think of the throng of good souls who so long ago dragged their load of stones, praying as they went! It would never have occurred to them to turn their love to account and make it serve their craving for display, their hunger for lucre."
An arm was laid on his, and Durtal recognized the Abbé Gévresin, who had come up while he stood dreaming in front of the cathedral.
"I am going on at once, they are waiting for me," said the priest. "I only took advantage of our meeting to tell you that I had a letter this morning from the Abbé Plomb."
"Indeed! And where is he?"
"At Solesmes; but he comes home the day after to-morrow. Our friend seems greatly taken with the Benedictine life."
And the Abbé smiled, while Durtal, a little startled, watched him turn the corner by the new belfry.