Chapter VIII: Gothic in the Midi (2)

The nave is of enormous span like that of Bordeaux Cathedral. It once had side aisles, but the entire width of the edifice was thrown into one hall when the church was remodeled in 1211. Simon de Montfort (whom Mistral, as a patriotic son of the Midi, refuses even to name in his verses) was besieging the city while the Angevin vaults of its cathedral were building, and Count Raymond VI of Toulouse ordered that the works should continue, war or no war.

The choir of Toulouse Cathedral belongs to the same current of northern Gothic that produced Clermont, Limoges, and Narbonne. Begun in 1275, it was inspired directly by Narbonne Cathedral, whose foundation stone was laid in 1273. The plan is of the north, but the feeling is meridional. After the death of the wealthy Bishop Bernard de Lille, the founder, the chapter had not sufficient funds to continue building on the same ambitious scale. Only in the XV century was the triforium level reached, and it was not until the XVII century that the masonry roof was added. Even then it was so skimped that the exterior aspect of the choir is deplorable. At St. Étienne there seemed to be a fatality against symmetry. When all hope was given up of replacing the Romanesque nave by one of the same character as the choir, it was decided to make its entrance more important; but instead of setting the new Flamboyant portal in the center of the west façade, it was placed to one side. The window dedicated to two sons of the Midi, St. Roch and St. Sebastian, is attributed to Arnaud de Moles who made the celebrated Creation, prophets, and sibyls of Auch Cathedral. Some of the grisaille in St. Étienne came from the Jacobins.

There are few church interiors in Europe more stately and unique than that of the brick abbatial in Toulouse, called the Jacobins', a name given the Dominicans because their Paris convent was in the rue St. Jacques. The house of wisdom is founded on seven pillars, Scripture tells us.[225] So the Friars Preachers planted directly down the center of their lofty hall church seven columnar piers that soar to an enormous height. The easternmost one is set in the middle of the apse and on it fall some fourteen ribs. The vault arches of white stone against the red brick infilling are of striking effect. No mediæval pillars--save those of the late-Gothic church of St. Nicolas-du-Port near Nancy--are higher than the seven giants of Toulouse. In the desecration of the edifice after the Revolution, its pavement was covered with soil, for the stabling of horses, but within the last ten years excavations have exposed the true bases of the piers.

The Jacobins' church was founded in 1229 by a rich citizen and his wife, who had vowed to devote a large portion of their fortune to God's service, should their only daughter recover from a desperate illness. The edifice, constructed with an audacious massiveness, as if for eternity, has been allowed to fall into general decay, and now appears more desolate than would a ruin of stone. Like alien images, gargoyles protrude forlornly from the red brick walls, so inconsistent is brick with the true Gothic spirit. The Midi was too wedded to classic traditions to excel in the national art, which it never took completely to its heart. There is little of the ogival style about these narrow loophole windows, these diagonals unbraced by flying buttresses. Gothic in the south has an accidental aspect.

(_XIII Century_)]

To the greatest of Dominican churches the Avignon pope, Urban V, who covered the Midi with his monuments, gave the body of St. Thomas Aquinas, greatest of Dominican doctors. It was saved when the Jacobins were sacked in 1562, and is now in St. Sernin, whose collection of authentic relics is the richest in France--and some say in Europe.

Toulouse also had a Franciscan brick church, whose wall bordered on the city ramparts, so that passages of defense were thrown from buttress to buttress. That church of the Cordeliers (rich with memories of St. Anthony of Padua) was burned in 1870, and its lovely XV-century cloister now forms part of the Museum that is housed in the former convent of the Augustinians. The graceful octagonal brick tower of the Cordeliers,[226] saved from the wreckage, was modeled on that of the Jacobins', just as the Jacobins' tower, in lessening stories, was designed probably by the architect who made the top stories of St. Sernin's beacon. Artists have preferred the Jacobins' belfry to its prototype.

The paucity of stone in the province caused the creation of a school of brick architecture of which Toulouse was the center. One may prefer a stone architecture, but one cannot deny the lovely tones of brown and crimson madder acquired in time by these brick monuments of the Midi that seem created especially for resistance and long duration.

Not the cathedral of Toulouse, but its monastic brick church of St. Sernin, is the supreme religious monument of the city and the grandest Romanesque edifice in France. Its date has been discussed by MM. de Lasteyrie, Corroyer, Saint-Paul, and Jules de Lahondès. In the last quarter of the XI century the monks began the choir of the present church, which combined the characteristics of the Romanesque schools of Burgundy and Auvergne. Those influences had passed south by way of Conques, where the abbatial of Ste. Foi had been rebuilt a generation before St. Sernin. In 1083 Cluny monks replaced at St. Sernin the canons regular, and where Cluny reformed, building activities usually followed.

While the Toulouse monastery church was rising, its selfsame plan appeared in the northeast corner of Spain in the cathedral of Santiago Compostela, begun in 1082, too direct a copy to have been done by any but St. Sernin's own architect or his favorite pupil. In Spain the works went faster, so that Santiago Cathedral was completed long before the abbatial at Toulouse, and, being constructed in stone, its interior has not been marred by centuries of whitewashing.

"The entry of Urban II into Toulouse" is pictured by Benjamin Constant in the Museum. In 1096, on his journey through France, preaching the First Crusade, he blessed the unfinished choir and transept of St. Sernin. The aisles around the transept form the most imposing part of the church. As the XI century closed, the transept was continued and the nave begun under the direction of a monk-builder, St. Raymond Gaynard, a man of wealth before entering the cloister. He conceived the masterly plan of five aisles. The side aisles were covered by a quarter-barrel vaulting that serves the purpose of a continuous flying buttress. Perhaps it was when the original architect of St. Sernin had proceeded to Santiago Compostela that St. Raymond became master-of-works at Toulouse. In 1119, a year after his death, another pontiff, Calixtus II, blessed St. Sernin.

From 1120 to 1140 was made the south portal, which constitutes, with Moissac's[227] portal and cloister, the chief works extant of the Languedoc school of sculpture. That school needs a competent biographer who will do for it what M. Paul Vitry has done for the Region-of-the-Loire school, and MM. de Vasselot and Koechlin for the imagery of southern Champagne.[228] The high-water mark of the regions' sculpture was attained in the Annunciation group at Moissac, whose ethereal elongated figures in clinging draperies rouse the imagination. The monks of Moissac, being Cluniac and not Cistercian, found imagery profitable to their souls. What were Bernard's thoughts as he gazed at their haunting rendering of the Incarnation?

Puritan Bernard thundered against the bizarre grotesques carved in cloisters. Up to 1140 they were popular, since the untrained stonecutters found it easier to make a caricature than an image true to nature. The invasions of the Barbarians had wiped out the sculptor's art, and the men of the XI century had to rediscover it. While St. Bernard sojourned in Toulouse he lived in St. Sernin's monastery, a Cluniac house, and it is probable that he paused with the monks at Moissac on the memorable journey he made into Languedoc to combat the fast-spreading dualist heresy of the Catharists. He was accompanied by Bishop Geoffrey de Lèves of Chartres, the builder of the most beautiful tower in the world. Surely those enlightened men mused with spiritual benefit before the _Ecce ancilla Domini_ at Moissac? But one very much doubts if Bernard could have approved of four hundred carven capitals in the abbatial at Toulouse.

Slowly the making of St. Sernin's nave advanced. At first it was built story by story, but later the more usual procedure of bay by bay was adopted. In 1217, from the roof of St. Sernin, the stone was thrown that killed Simon de Montfort, who was besieging Toulouse. To the end of time a character such as his will rouse both enthusiasm and detestation. His personal morals were exemplary, his own troops adored him. The leading men of Christendom regarded him as an instrument of Heaven and right progress. The Midi execrated him, and does to this day, even as Ireland execrates Cromwell, whom good Puritans consider a hero, for the religious psychology of those two born leaders was curiously alike. With God's name on their lips their troops felt righteous in butchering.

With the death of Simon de Montfort the Albigensian wars changed in character. Simon's son, Amaury de Montfort, was incapable of retaining the principality won by his father's sword, so he sensibly passed over his claims to the king of France. The struggle henceforth was purely political. Blanche of Castile's wise head solved the Midi tangle when she married her son Alphonse of Poitiers to the heiress of the Count of Toulouse, with the understanding that, should the young people die childless, Languedoc fell to the French Crown. Alphonse gave the Midi, says Molinier, the first intelligent administration it had received since the better times of the Roman Empire. When he and his wife died, returning from St. Louis' fatal crusade of 1270, the great southern land became a part of France.

The Albigensian wars--for with reluctance one calls those years of bitter strife a crusade--delayed the completion of St. Sernin, whose main façade is gaunt and bare, and whose westernmost windows lack stone casements. When the Midi came under French rule the monks attained sufficient prosperity to erect the octagonal tower in five stories--each of lesser dimensions than the one below it. The upper stories used the miter arch so suited to brick. M. Enlart has called attention to the affinity of the _clochers Toulousans_ and the Lombard steeples. At present the underpinning of the tower obstructs the transept-crossing, but propping is better than demolition, which is what M. Viollet-le-Duc proposed in his blind enthusiasm for unity of style. The townspeople indignantly protested and the supreme beacon of this patroness city of art was saved.

A proud boast of Toulouse is that the first Dominican monastery was established there, and by Dominic himself, the saint whom Dante called "the messenger and familiar of Christ."[229] The Friars Preachers, like the Franciscans (who, because of a new appreciation of their founder's character, are found sympathetic by many who still call a Dominican a "bloody sort of monk"), were agents for the quickening of the religious fervor of the XIII century. Both Orders were protests against abuses such as luxury, love of gold, and selfish privilege, which feudalism had helped to foster in the clergy.

Dominic de Guzman was a Castilian gentleman, a trained scholar, a man whose luminous face won instant affection and respect. In the first years of the XIII century he came north with the bishop of Osma on a diplomatic mission relating to a royal marriage. As those two good men journeyed through Languedoc amid the fearful havoc wrought by heresy, the vocation of the younger priest took shape. Returning from Italy in 1206, he and the bishop of Osma laid aside pomp and comforts to evangelize according to primitive Christianity. Only too clear was it to them that heresy was fed by the unworthy priesthood of the Midi that had lost the people's esteem. Two generations earlier St. Bernard had lamented over the same evil. Innocent III rebuked the worldling prelate of Bordeaux, and asked the bishop of Narbonne if he had a purse in place of a heart. After ten years' heroic missionizing both before and during the Albigensian Crusade, Dominic won papal sanction for his new Order in 1216. He was then a man of forty-seven. When he died, at Bologna in 1221, he left flourishing houses all over Christendom.

The function of his Friars was to teach again Christian doctrine in its purity; hence it was only natural, when the Inquisition[230] was founded, after the death of Dominic, that it should be intrusted to such trained theologians. They were to be a kind of jury to ascertain whether a case was heretical; if it was so decided, then the civic authorities stepped in and took action, since heresy was a state offense.

The best minds of that day held the theory that the decline of religion was a menace to law and order. The violent repression of heresy to prevent the dissolution of society seemed then as necessary as the repression of anarchy seems to-day. It had not always been so. "Slay error, but always love the man who errs," was St. Augustine's maxim. St. Ambrose and St. Hilary reprobated physical violence toward heretics. Gregory VII had protested against the "impious cruelty" which had burned a man of Cambrai for heresy. "Heretics are to be taken by force of arguments, not by force of arms," said the vehement St. Bernard himself on one occasion. Gradually a different outlook had taken possession of men's minds, a change of view that was to cost the Church dear. Crusades against the infidel were on every side, in the Orient, in the Balkans, in Spain. When heresy took on so alien and perverse an aspect as the Catharist errors, which were at root the negation of Christian standards and a veritable antisocial menace, it needed but an incident to start a crusade against heretics in France.

It should not be forgotten that had the Albigensians won the victory, the south of France would have been placed outside the pale of western civilization as effectively as was southern Spain under Moslem rule. Had the Midi wars been conducted by civil authority many a partisan of to-day would not hold them up as exceptional horrors, but, since all the thinking of the Middle Ages was expressed in religious form, unfortunately the term "crusade" was used for the embittered struggle in the south.

THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE[231]

La vérité n'est point a nous, nous n'en sommes que les témoins, les
défenseurs, et les dépositaires.--MASSILLON.

So interwoven is the architectural story of Languedoc with the Albigensian Crusade that to find the underlying significance of the southern monuments it is needful to comprehend the trend of thought of the Midi people. We have the unbroken testimony of five hundred years as to what were the tenets of Catharism, the final form taken by the Manichean heresy. They held that two principles, one good and one evil, ruled the universe. In the third century Manes in Persia had woven a curious tissue of beliefs, largely Zoroastrian with a tinge of Buddhism, and had coated it all with a thin veneer of Christianity of the gnostic type. The dualist idea and a complete rejection of the Old Testament were leading Manichean doctrines. Manes was put to death in Persia, but his teachings lingered on in the Orient, and after seven centuries crept into Europe by way of the Slav countries of the Balkans. Without a doubt, the intercourse of Europe with the Orient, through the crusades, fostered the gnostic superstitions. The dualist heresy cropped out in the north of France, but after the XII century was confined more or less to Languedoc, where the Visigoths' Arian beliefs had prepared the soil. From the XI to the XIII century these neo-Manicheans were called Catharists. The local name Albigensian came into usage because in the region round Albi, though not especially in that city itself, the new ideas flourished. Toulouse was the heretic's stronghold.

It has always seemed illogical that many Protestants who revere the Bible should be sympathetic toward the Midi heretics who reprobated the Jehovah of the Old Testament as a vindictive assassin, the creator of this the visible world, which is Hell. Life is a nightmare, they taught, and suicide a virtue. Moses was sorcerer and thief (and the Ten Commandments?). John the Baptist was a strong incarnation of the Devil sent to combat the coming Christ. Baptism by water was reprehensible. On this muddle of the Old Law was grafted some neo-Christian spiritism. Christ was the God of good who created the invisible world of spirits. He was a phantom being who never really lived on earth or suffered or died. The Albigensian denied His human nature. Man's body, living or dead, was Satan's (Jehovah's) creation and to be annihilated; respectful burial of the dead was frowned on; marriage was sinful, since to engender was to capture souls and imprison them in the material world or Hell. Libertinage was preferable to marriage, since it did not pose as virtuous. We find in an official recantation of his Albigensian beliefs by a Midi lord that he promises to accept the Church's tenet that marriage is not sinful, as was taught by his sect.

The Albigensian heresy was an anti-social peril. It is sophistry to say, as has Molinier, that we do not know what they taught, or to call their movement a step in freeing the human mind, as do certain modern rationalists. They had two moralities, one for the people, or Hearers, and a stricter code for the elect, or the Perfect. If a Perfect relapsed, he had, after death, to pass through another existence, or Hell, in another body.

This current of anti-Christian thought, flowing in from the East, brought with it the over-rigid asceticism of the Orient, but in the Midi few lived up to ascetic practices. There were minor divergencies in the tenets according to the different regions, but always, East or West, the heretics were one in their detestation of the Jehovah of the Old Testament, and of the Church and her sacraments, especially that of Holy Eucharist. The Church was held to be a prolongation of the abhorred synagogue, and, like it, an incarnation of Satan.

No one can deny the crying need of reform in the Midi church. But the Albigensians damned one half of the Creator's work--the visible world--and the perfection which they preached was race suicide. When, more recently, Mormonism struck at the root of the social fabric, the United States government took immediate action. Had the Mormons resisted, had they, for instance, murdered an ambassador from Washington and war resulted, would we not think that the use of force by the Federal government was legitimate?

From 1100 to 1208 Rome had sent one peaceful ambassador after another into Languedoc. St. Bernard, who was loved all over Europe, was stoned in the Midi streets. The Albigenses were aggressive wherever they outnumbered the orthodox, and as most of the Midi lords held the new tenets, it was the believer who was persecuted in Languedoc. Churches were attacked and bishops flung into prison. Because the Count of Béziers accepted a local council which had censured the heretics, he was murdered by the people of Béziers in the very church and on the very day where they themselves, forty years later, were massacred by the northerners. "On all sides is the image of death," wrote the visiting bishop of Tournai, in 1182, "villages are in ashes, churches in ruin, and the inhabitants living like beasts." Long before the crusaders arrived in Languedoc life there was a bloody feud, and like ravening wolves the heretic lords warred one on another; their repeated divorces were a flaunted scandal.

The Albigensian Crusade is no isolated page in the annals of the Midi. Read of the anarchy in the south, previous to 1208, and then pass from the XIII century to the gigantic duel between France and England in the Hundred Years' War. You will feel no sense of dislocation. The crusade methods were hideous, but not exceptional. In the later debacle, Froissart relates as a matter of course the pleasant little jaunt of the Black Prince, _fleur de toute chevalerie_, into Languedoc, in 1355,[232] when he burned some seven thousand houses in the faubourgs of Toulouse, when Carcassonne was twice sacked and burned, Narbonne wrecked, treasure seized, and all ages and sexes butchered "till a line of fire and blood stretched from Toulouse to the sea." And the Black Prince was succeeded by avowed freebooters who gnawed France to the bone, the Grandes Compagnies who, as said the harassed pontiff at Avignon, _mettaient tout la Crestienté à combustion_. It was in the dire times of the XIV century that the Midi churches fortified themselves.

War slackens architectural work in any period. A radical decay of builders' energy in the Midi was not the result of the Albigensian Crusade, since Languedoc erected its chief Gothic churches between those wars and the Hundred Years' War, a period, moreover, that was controlled by the newly functioning Inquisition. To generations torn by anarchy, the methods of that tribunal, hateful though they appear to us, were an advance in jurisprudence. Every leader of the day accepted them as a progress. The civil courts were not to be able, for centuries to come, to offer even such guaranty for justice. No balanced mind can read the lives of such chief inquisitors as, for instance, St. Raymond of Penafort,[233] and fail to comprehend that past history is not to be read in the light of modern prejudices.

Rome had carried on a hundred years' diplomatic negotiation with the Midi heretics. Finally, in 1208, the pope's legate was murdered by a henchman of the Count of Toulouse and hostilities were precipitated. Innocent III proclaimed a crusade. Later he regretted its excesses just as he had cause to deplore the divergence of the Fourth Crusade to filibustering purposes, but he was too entirely a man of his own epoch to regret the Albigensian Crusade itself. By 1209 the northern barons had invaded Languedoc and many a building-bishop was in their ranks.

The spirit of crusading was at first strong enough to prevent their attacking the rich trading city of Montpellier which lay in their path but which was singularly free of heresy. Yet their very next step was a sacrilege. The orthodox population of Béziers, when called on to deliver up their heretic citizens, answered they would sooner see themselves sunk in the deep sea. It would seem that from the first hour many Catholics of the Midi looked on the crusade as a war of conquest on the part of the barons of the north. Between north and south was deep-rooted antipathy. The more cultivated but more corrupted Midi scorned the rougher peoples beyond their confines, who in their turn despised the southerners. Inevitable was it that a clash between those opposite civilizations should acquire the character of racial hate.

Simon de Montfort, chosen leader of the crusaders after the sack of Béziers, soon overran the heretical region, whereupon many barons of the north, deeming that the ethical purpose of the Midi excursion was accomplished, returned to their homes. Henceforth the racial and political aspects of the struggle were accentuated. Cruelty and perfidy marked both sides. The Midi lords boasted that no crusader escaped them with eyes, fists, or feet, and they cut into little pieces the nephew of Albéric de Humbert, archbishop-builder of Rheims Cathedral. In retaliation Simon de Montfort cut off heretics' ears and noses.

By 1212 word was sent to Innocent III that hate and cupidity, as much as zeal for the Faith, actuated the invaders, whereupon the pope roundly ordered them to pass into Spain to fight Islam. It was too late to stem the tide. In 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, in which every power in Christendom, lay and ecclesiastic, had a voice, Simon de Montfort's retention of his Midi conquests was sanctioned. Simon's death, in 1218, led young Raymond VII of Toulouse to rise in arms and the wars that followed were frankly political. In 1229 peace was signed under the portal of Paris Cathedral and the only daughter of Raymond VII affianced to the brother of the king of France.

ALBI CATHEDRAL[234]

Laissons-nous aller de bonne foi aux choses qui nous prennent par
les entrailles et ne cherchons point de raisonnements pour nous
empêcher d'avoir du plaisir.--MOLIÈRE.

The city which gave its name to the terrible episode of the XIII century lies forty miles east of Toulouse. The local saying is, "Who has not seen the cathedral of Albi and the tower of Rodez has seen nothing." Albi Cathedral yields to none in its gaunt majesty. It stands apart in one's visions of travel, as unique a memorial of past history as the Mount of the Archangel off the coast of Normandy, as Vézelay looking out over the soft valleys of Burgundy, as Le Puy on its basaltic pinnacles. Never was a monument more absolutely itself.

Unfrequented Albi was once in the stir of life, and over its stone bridge, built nine centuries ago, have passed the notable folk of the Middle Ages[235] as they wended their way to Santiago Compostela, whither all the world was going in those days. Time-scarred houses border the reddish Tarn; dark, decayed streets climb the hill. At a curve of the river, bastions and ramparts rise in terraces to a fortified episcopal palace and--crowning all--the enormous bulk of the cathedral. Its long, stark wall strikes the sky in a formidable straight line. The west façade is a massive donjon, four hundred feet above the Tarn. No welcoming west portals here, no extended transept arms of sacrificial mercy, no soaring buttress, no leaping pinnacles. Not the lore of Christ, "Do as you would be done by," seems to have inspired Albi, but the Hebraic spirit of breaking one's enemies' bones, as if the Jehovah of the Old Testament, outraged by Albigensian blasphemies, here asserted himself in a temple that would forever be a looming menace for heretics.

Albi's forbidding structure rose between those two harsh epochs--the Albigensian Crusade and the Hundred Years' War. Its aggressive mass was planned by a most aggressive churchman, Bernard, Cardinal de Castanets, the city's learned bishop detested of the people as their uncompromising feudal master, as well as a spiritual chief so harsh in his inquisitorial functions that a pontifical commission was appointed, in 1306, to repair his excesses. In 1282 Bernard de Castanets laid the first stone of Albi Cathedral and for twenty years he and the chapter contributed a twentieth of their revenues. The church was finished by the sixty-fifth bishop, Guillaume de la Voulte, in the last years of the XIV century.

To approach the cathedral at its apse end is not so picturesque as from the river side, but it is formidable enough. The prodigious apse rises abruptly, imperiously, from the town square. One fairly shivers beneath its Tolosan brick walls, overtowering and overpowering, broken merely by a few narrow windows--surely the narrowest ever made in a Gothic church--and by uniform bastion-tower buttresses. Gargoyles, of as alien an aspect as those of the Jacobins' at Toulouse, crane their gaunt necks from the upper walls, as if asking what manner of Gothic this is.

Albi Cathedral is the meridional interpretation of the national art. The traditions of Rome held tenaciously in southern France, where builders disliked to show the machinery by which their edifices stood. The buttresses at Albi are in larger part hidden within the church under the guise of walls between the side chapels. The flying buttress is uncommon in the Midi. Like Rome again, with her preference for an unencumbered floor space, Albi's immense interior is unbroken by aisles. The vault's diagonals spring over a width of sixty feet--a span unrivaled by any in the north. Albi Cathedral is a vast hall three hundred feet long, one hundred feet high, not high enough for its length, perhaps, but few will regret having the marvelous frescoed ceiling, "the missal of St. Cecilia," brought nearer to the eye.

The tutelary of this fortress-church is the gentle patroness of music. Half the fascination of Albi comes from its convincing inconsistencies. It would seem that not Cécile--doubly feminine and gracious under her French name--but Michael Archangel with a brandished sword, should guard this rugged pile. As if the good people of Albi felt the incongruity, they added, long after Bishop de Castanets' day, a southern portal preceded by a porch, the baldaquin, with all its elaborate Flamboyant tracery executed in a creamy-white marble in which surely Cécile, saint though she was, must have felt a personal satisfaction. An architect of genius set that marble porch of Albi against its red time-dulled walls, 'alabaster on corall'; one takes liberties with Chaucer's rime:

And southward in a portal on the wall
Of alabaster white on red corall
An oratorie riche for to see,
In honor of the Roman Cicily.

To ascend to the marble baldaquin one passes under a fortified sculptured gateway, erected by the Dominican bishop of Albi, Dominique de Florence (1392-1410). The marble portal and porch were executed under Bishop Louis I d'Amboise (1472-1502) and his successor, Louis II d'Amboise (1502-11) his nephew, belonging to an enlightened family all of whose members excelled in affairs, war, letters, and art, leaving their memorials at Chaumont on the Loire, their feudal seat, at Cluny, Paris, Clermont, Gaillon, and Rouen.

Louis I d'Amboise also adorned the interior of his cathedral by the sumptuous screen of white stone that surrounds the choir, leaving a passageway between it and the side chapels. The rood-loft, or _jubé_ (so called because from its balcony the clerk chanted _Jube Domine dicere_ before the gospel), is sculptured with the ermine of Anne of Brittany and the lilies of France, being made about 1499, when Anne wedded Louis XII. Bishop Louis at Albi was brother of the king's prime minister, Cardinal Georges d'Amboise.

Originally the choir screen of Albi was painted in colors. While the accessories indicate that the Italian Renaissance was obtaining headway in France, the images derive from the short, overdraped Franco-Flamand figures of Dijon. Perhaps the stonecutters who made Albi's choir wall came direct from Cluny, where a late-Gothic chapel, on which had worked Abbot Jacques d'Amboise, was adorned with prophets and apostles, each with his suitable text. On the inner wall of Albi's choir screen are sculptured homely but charming little angels, and the twelve apostles holding scrolls inscribed with phrases of the _Crédo_. Old Testament personages, who only heralded the Messiah, were not admitted to the _sanctum sanctorum_; the vestibule was their proper place. Prosper Mérimée called Albi's screen "a splendid folly before which one is ashamed to be wise." Inside and out it is exuberant with sculpture, though its extravagant caprices do not stifle a very real religious feeling in the images. Such a profusion of delicate ornament led the modern critic to suspect that the choir wall was modeled in cement, not chiseled in stone, but when a Sorbonne geologist analyzed the substance it was found to be a fine-grained white stone that grows harder with time.

Everywhere in St. Cecilia's cathedral is fragile loveliness set side by side, as an afterthought, with stern forcefulness. Bishop Louis II d'Amboise brought from Italy a group of artists to paint the panels of Albi's cyclopean vaulting, and the work accomplished by those men of northern Italy, from 1509 to 1512, remains the most splendid color decoration of the Middle Ages in France. Michael Angelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling in those same years. Languedoc produced another superb array of color, the windows of Auch Cathedral,[236] and we must not forget that the greatest of all Renaissance glassworkers, the friar who filled Arezzo with glory, was a Midi Frenchman.

Amid Albi's arabesques the artists from Bologna and Modena inscribed their names, and some young lovers wrote "Antonia, mia bella," and "Lucrezia Cantora, bolognesa." The frescoes give the genealogy of Christ. They recall Perugino, Francia, and Pintoriccio. Never was blue background more marvelous--a strong rare hue neither indigo nor Prussian nor peacock, but a blending of them all in a cerulean depth of color--an art as entirely lost to posterity as the blue background of Suger's windows. Chemical analysis has busied itself with Albi's frescoes, too; but though the blue color of the vault panels was found to be obtained from the precipitation of salts of copper by carbonate of potassium, how to produce a similar hue to-day remains unsolved. Over the blue background wind lovely arabesques, and the saints portrayed are stately Italians of the Renaissance. The diagonals and transverse arches are colored in old-gold. On the western wall of the church a XV-century fresco was painted directly on the bricks, a Last Judgment copied from popular woodcuts of the day, with the punishments of the seven deadly sins pitilessly set forth. The painting was ruthlessly cut into when a chapel was introduced under the western tower. The side chapels of Ste. Cécile are illuminated in gold and color like a Book of Hours. Never was there a church of such contrasts: within--a shrine of warm, polished, over-splendid beauty, and without--the most rugged feudal challenge of the Middle Ages.

CARCASSONNE[237]

It is the first sharp vision of an unknown town, the first
immediate vision of a range of hills, that remains forever, and is
fruitful of joy within the mind ... that is perhaps the chief of
the fruits of travel.--HILAIRE BELLOC.

The Cité of Carcassonne was long one of the most formidable fortresses of Europe, covering the route from ocean to sea and guarding a pass into Spain. These Pyrenean provinces of France gave Joffre and Foch to the World War. The lower walls of the Cité were of Rome's building; above came the Visigothic defenses; then St. Louis extended the fortifications and his son completed them.

Within its double belt of walls and half a hundred towers is the precious little church of St. Nazaire, once of cathedral rank. Its western front was never opened by a portal because it stood near what were long the outer ramparts. The Romanesque nave is small and dark, without triforium or clearstory, and with high aisles that buttress the tunnel vault of the principal span, whose transverse ribs are slightly pointed. Piers and columns alternate. The materials to build this early church were blessed by Urban II in 1096 in the same month that he dedicated the new choir of St. Sernin at Toulouse. St. Nazaire was an entirely Romanesque church when Simon de Montfort ruled the Cité for ten years. In this church St. Dominic married Amaury de Montfort to a princess of Dauphiny. St. Dominic had held a public controversy of eight days with the heretics of Carcassonne in 1205, before the coming of the northern barons, and in St. Nazaire he preached the Lent of 1213. Simon de Montfort was buried temporarily in St. Nazaire, and there exists in a nave chapel a sculptured stone which some have thought to be part of his sepulcher, but which is more probably from the tomb of a brother of Count Raymond of Toulouse, who, having sympathized with the northern barons, was slain in consequence. The curious stone shows the engines of war described in the _Chanson de la Croisade_, and the costumes of that period.

Under Bishop Radulph (1255-66), who built the Gothic chapel beside the south arm of the transept, permission was obtained to replace the ancient transept and choir by a new one. Bishop Radulph won forgiveness for those citizens of Carcassonne who were expelled from the fortress in 1262, because they had conspired against the crown with one of the Trencavel dynasty, their old rulers, and the builders of the Cité's château. Louis IX, who governed Carcassonne through a seneschal, allowed the exiles to start the present town of Carcassonne beyond the river, in the plain below the citadel.

The erection of the Gothic half of St. Nazaire took place under Bishop Pierre de Roquefort (d. 1321) during the first twenty years of the XIV century. To him we owe the radiant glass lantern which is St. Nazaire's transept and choir, a structure that is really a big transept with seven chapels, equally high, along its eastern wall, the central of which chapels, and the longest, serving as choir. The windows in the chapels rise to the roof, and are filled with clear and brilliant glass ranked with the best of the XIV century; those in the first two chapels excel the others. Two windows show the arms of Pierre de Roquefort. St. Nazaire was one of the last to use the legend-medallion type of window; henceforth, in each panel, a single figure was placed in an architectural setting.

The seven eastern chapels of the transept open one on the other above a low dividing wall, and standing out from those walls, so that a narrow passage is made between them and the transept, are detached piers that rise powerfully from pavement to vault-springing. Above their capitals the molds die away in the column--a very early use of a Flamboyant characteristic. The two pillars flanking the entrance to the choir are decorated, midway up, with statues under canopies sculptured by northern artists before 1320.

Archæologists declare that the Gothic part of the Cité's ancient cathedral are the perfection of XIV-century construction, elastic in every part, each part fulfilling its own separate function. The ogival principle could not be carried farther. It is thought that some architect of the north made the plan, which local masons executed. The only Midi trait is the flat, tiled roof.

Modern restoration has overhauled the citadel of Carcassonne too radically. Imperiously set though it is, does it grip the imagination as entirely as Aigues-Mortes, lying flat on marsh lands, its time-stained walls untouched? Often in France one echoes Pius IX's response to Baron de Crozé, who proposed the restoration of the Coliseum: "Dear Son, I have read your memoir and I thank you for it; but do you not know that there are two sorts of vandalism, one which consists in destroying, the other in restoring? Never has the Coliseum been so beautiful as in its moving contrast of past splendor and magnificent present decay. To restore it is to annihilate the work of centuries, to recompose an ordinary pastiche with no _éclat_."

Not that Carcassonne, as redressed by M. Viollet-le-Duc, is deficient in _éclat_; it has too much of it. It is a vision of a feudal fortress too carefully prepared, too deliberately made ready for the tourist.

In the lower town are the typically meridional churches of St. Michel, the actual cathedral of Carcassonne, and St. Vincent whose aisleless hall is the widest in the Midi--a span of sixty-eight feet. Even when using diagonals, the south kept true to its favorite Romanesque traditions. Neither church has a triforium, the apse windows are long and narrow, over the entrance of each chapel is an eight-lobed rose, and the buttresses are disguised as walls between the side chapels. The tracery is Rayonnant. St. Vincent was built after the Black Prince burned Carcassonne in 1355. At its sculptured portal was placed a statue of the newly canonized saint-king, Louis IX, under whom this modern Carcassonne was founded.

NARBONNE CATHEDRAL[238]

Que chaque homme console un homme,
Fasse un bien, donne une pitié,
Ne t'occupe pas de la somme:
Ce pain sera multiplié.
--JEAN AICARD (born in the Midi, 1848).

At Narbonne one is at the very heart of the Midi. It is an ancient mother city of Europe, a capital of Celtic Gaul. Surpassed by nothing in the Roman world, Narbonne kept its pre-eminence under both pagan and Christian Rome. It became the seat of the Visigothic royal line, and of their Moorish conquerors. Charlemagne made it a fortified outpost, and during the Middle Ages it was the richest of trading centers, a third of whose population was Jewish. In 1311, the same covetous king who abolished the Templars banished the Jews, to whom Charlemagne had given the freedom of this town for their support of his cause against Islam. To-day one walks its dust-white streets with a strange sensation of loneliness. Narbonne is a dead city.

When in the latter part of the XIII century the great Gothic cathedral of St. Just was begun, there seemed no reason why so flourishing a trading center could not succeed in the enterprise. Unlike Beauvais, where the chief church was from its inception out of all proportion to the population, Narbonne could easily have erected a nave to complete its mighty choir. In 1272 was laid the first stone of St. Just Cathedral.[239] Then there occurred here what happens to all rivers that communicate with the sea by means of lagoons: gradually the salt lakes silt up till they become marshes through which the river winds tortuously till suddenly it breaks a new path to the sea. In 1320 occurred this catastrophe for Narbonne. The Roman dike gave way and the river Aude left its ancient bed, quitting Narbonne to flow toward Courson, where it still is. The stagnant waters bred disease, and the metropolis, greeted by Sidonius Apollinaris for its salubrity, _Salve Narbo, potens salubritate_, became a pestilential site. Narbonne sank into silent decay. Over the shrunken city stands the ghostly fragment of the great cathedral, surpassed in height only by Beauvais and Amiens.

St. Just was begun in 1272, and three years later the cathedral of Toulouse was started on a plan and with profiles so closely resembling Narbonne's chief church that one master may have designed both. Both derive immediately from those northern Gothic churches translated with a meridional accent, the cathedrals of Clermont, whose choir was finished in 1265, and of Limoges, begun in 1273.

The Midi shows in Narbonne Cathedral in the simplified triforium which is framed by wall spaces, as are the clearstory windows, in the extremely high pier arcades, and in the stout buttresses that are disguised as dividing walls between the side chapels. The capitals are mere uncarved bands, and over them certain molds die away in the pier. M. Anthyme Saint-Paul's theory was that even in the XIII century began the evolution which was to end in Flamboyant Gothic. He pointed out, in Narbonne's chapels, windows with Rayonnant tracery side by side with flamelike undulations. M. Enlart thinks we cannot be sure that they were done at the same time. An unusual and graceful aspect was achieved in the choir's northern aisle by the setting of piers beyond the dividing walls of the chapels, making a kind of double aisle like that in the transept of St. Nazaire at Carcassonne.

An architect named Henri is cited as master-of-works at Gerona Cathedral whose chevet, begun after 1312, resembles that of St. Just. Henri was a name uncommon in the Midi. It is thought that he was the original architect of Narbonne. His successor at Gerona, Jacques de Favari or Favers, a name of the central plateau of France, is known to have directed the works of Narbonne's chief church. Catalonia, Aragon, and Languedoc were allied in architecture as in tongue. Poblet in Catalonia is directly the daughter of the abbey at Fontfroide, six miles from Narbonne.[240] The Gothic influence of Narbonne spread to the isles in the Mediterranean, to southern Italy and Cyprus.

Archbishop Maurin began Narbonne Cathedral after the tragic crusade of St. Louis in 1270. He had vowed that if ever again he saw the fair land of France he would offer thanksgiving by rebuilding his church. The corner stone and relics were sent by Pope Clement IV, originally a lawyer at St. Gilles, and then archbishop of Narbonne, whose crumbling cathedral of Charlemagne's time he had purposed to replace by a Gothic one, when his translation to the papacy intervened.

The apse chapels were built first. The main parts of the choir are the work of Archbishop Gilles Aycelin de Montaigu, (1292-1311), a noble of Auvergne, brother of the bishop who was building Clermont Cathedral and who had himself been a canon at Clermont. He also began the cloister, and to his own residence added a donjon tower. It is thought that the episcopal palace at Narbonne served as prototype for the palace of the popes at Avignon. In modern times, between its ancient towers a town hall has been constructed. In 1311 Gilles Aycelin was transferred to the see of Rouen, and Rouen's archbishop, Bernard de Farges (d. 1341), a nephew of the pope who built the choir of Bordeaux Cathedral, took his place at Narbonne, where he completed the giant choir. Services were held in it in 1320.

The truncated western end of the cathedral is a depressing sight. Work stopped after the completion of the east wall of the transept, whose window apertures had later to be filled in; by the XV century all hope of completing the church was abandoned, and two west towers were raised. In the XVIII century the plan to build a nave was revived and part of the city ramparts were thrown down to allow for its extension. One bay of the proposed structure was begun in bastard Gothic, and then the enterprise collapsed. The present entrance is through a door contrived in one of the apse chapels. The exterior of that apse was fortified. From one turreted buttress pile to the other was maneuvered a crenelated gallery, and originally the passage communicated with the bishop's palace.

Although sadly needing a nave, Narbonne's choir is a proud and noble vessel. Critics have called it a work of mechanical skill more than of imagination. Its science is beyond cavil, each thrust being exactly counterbutted. Profiles, however are angular and there is a painful lack of sculpture. If, technically, Narbonne's chief church is somewhat hard and dry, it has retained sufficient of the emotional quality of Gothic, what has been called its _sursum corda_, to belong to the grand tradition of the national art. Moreover, one can kneel reverentially on the very steps of the altar instead of being kept at a stately distance. In the clearstory are the loveliest XIV-century windows in France, like rare-toned etchings or delicate spider-web, time-stained lace. As there is color in them, it is inexact to call such windows grisaille, but the subdued note of grisaille glass predominates.

Between Narbonne and Spain lies Perpignan's XIV-century[241] cathedral, and Elne's cloister, called a work of supreme elegance by the critical Prosper Merimée, and to the east at Béziers is a fortified cathedral with massive towers, begun in 1215 and building through the XIV century; it has good stained glass of this latter period.

One's interest in Béziers centers in the terrible massacre of 1209, the opening act of the Albigensian Crusade. Not that the mere sacking of a city would have roused such horror. In the course of its history eight massacres had occurred in Béziers. It was a day when such acts were the accepted methods of warfare and the northern leaders had discussed whether it were not good tactics to start their campaign by terrorization. It was the slaughtering of the citizens in the churches to which they had fled for sanctuary that violated the general standards.

Witnesses of the sacking of Béziers say that while the chiefs of the besieging army were considering how to spare those in the city who were not Albigensian, an assault was started through the skirmish of lawless hangers-on of the crusading army and a few townspeople. In the confusion that followed, the northern knights rushed to arms and the city was captured. A XX-century wrecking of the Louvain-Dinant-Termonde type followed, and some twenty thousand perished.

Modern scholars doubt that the famous _Tuez-les-tous_ remark, attributed to Abbot Arnaud of Cîteaux, who died archbishop of Narbonne, was ever uttered. He is accused of saying, "Kill them all, God will know his own," when asked how the orthodox were to be told from the heretics. No contemporary chronicle mentions it and Albigensian historians would certainly have flung such words at the crusaders; equally would an ardent admirer of Simon de Montfort, who wrote his _Gestes_, have lauded the sentiment, if one is to judge by other happenings he thought praiseworthy. Neither enemy nor friend mentions the _Tuez-les-tous_ phrase. It first occurs in the history of a German monk at Bonn, long after the Midi crusade, and the pages of that chronicler are so filled with discredited assertions that little he says should be taken seriously.

MONTPELLIER AND MAGUELONNE[242]

The tocsin sounded its lamentable notes of alarm over all the land
of France. Fire? No. _War._ The voice of the bells long condemned
to silence by the authorities suddenly rang out everywhere. From
the high belfries spread the warning, and no one worried now to
refuse to God, to the Inexplicable, the right of speech. From God's
house alone came to France, waiting in tense agony, the
announcement of the most terrible catastrophe that ever fell like
an avalanche on humanity. Sunrise to sunset from east to west, from
north to south rang out the coming of War, the world's
misery.--JEAN AICARD, on how the World War opened in the Midi.[243]

In Montpellier is a stately terrace called the Peyrou, built in the artificial, distinguished style of Louis XIV, from which one looks out on a most lovely landscape of Midi fertility.[244] Here Mistral in 1878 read his vibrant ode to the Latin race, _la race lumineuse, la race apostolique_, and a generation later the people gathered here to listen to the belfries far and near ring out over that peaceful Claude Lorraine scene the hour of unity in battle array, for all Frenchmen--Latin and Celt and Frank. No longer a Midi and a North. The time was past for race hate or conquest to pose as a crusade. The time had come to end the silencing of Christian steeples under the guise of freedom. As one man, Midi and North sprang up in answer to the tocsin of August, 1914.

What to-day is the cathedral of Montpellier was built from 1364 to 1367 as a monastery church, so that it hardly falls within our scope. But if architecturally the city of Montpellier is of lesser importance, it has been for long centuries the intellectual stronghold of the Midi, and we know that cathedrals are built with more than stones. Montpellier's school of medicine was famous in the XII century. The city was free of Albigensian taint; no trading town was more flourishing during the XIII century. At the hour that the northern barons invaded the Midi, the heiress of Montpellier, whom the king of Aragon married for her dowry and immediately deserted, gave birth to one who was to build more churches than any monarch in Christendom. Twelve candles were set up in the chief church of Montpellier, each with the name of an apostle, and when the candle called James burned the longest the child was named Jaime. An inscription on the Tour du Pin, a vestige of the city ramparts that originally had twenty-five such towers, records the birth of Jaime el Conquistador, the scourge of Islam, the conqueror of Valencia and the Balearic Islands, and the builder of six thousand churches. His father was one of the victors of Las Navas de Tolosa, in 1212, where a vital blow was struck at Moorish domination in Spain; yet he was killed in the very next year in Languedoc, fighting on the heretic side.

Peter of Aragon looked on the Albigensian Crusade as a northern war of conquest, and if outsiders were to win new lands why had he not the same right. Jaime's mother fled to Rome, the sole court of arbitration then in Europe, and when she died there, she left her son the ward of Innocent III.[245] The pope compelled Simon de Montfort, who held the child as hostage, to return him to his Spanish subjects. Jaime's tutor was that Languedoc knight, St. Peter Nolasco (d. 1258), who founded the Order of Mercy to redeem captives from Moslem prisons, but no saint-tutor or saint-neighbor could tame this fierce young eagle, the scion of the French Midi and the Spanish Pyrenees. From the time he buckled on his sword as a boy, to his death in 1276, the weapon never left his side. He cut off the ear of the bishop of Gerona who had rebuked his free living, for Jaime's domestic relations were on a par with those of the Languedoc lords and of his Mahommedan neighbors.