The Cathedrals of Southern France. M. F. Mansfield
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admit that the æsthetic aspect of the church edifice has always been the superlative art expression of its era, race, and locality.
PART II South of the Loire
I
INTRODUCTORY
The region immediately to the southward of the Loire valley is generally accounted the most fertile, abundant, and prosperous section of France. Certainly the food, drink, and shelter of all classes appear to be arranged on a more liberal scale than elsewhere; and this, be it understood, is a very good indication of the prosperity of a country.
Touraine, with its luxurious sentiment of châteaux, counts, and bishops, is manifestly of the north, as also is the border province of Maine and Anjou, which marks the progress and development of church-building from the manifest Romanesque types of the south to the arched vaults of the northern variety.
Immediately to the southward—if one journeys but a few leagues—in Poitou, Saintonge, and Angoumois, or in the east, in Berri, Marche, and Limousin, one comes upon a very different sentiment indeed. There is an abundance for all, but without the opulence of Burgundy or the splendour of Touraine.
Of the three regions dealt with in this section, Poitou is the most prosperous, Auvergne the most picturesque—though the Cevennes are stern and sterile—and Limousin the least appealing.
Limousin and, in some measure, Berri and Marche are purely pastoral; and, though greatly diversified as to topography, lack, in abundance, architectural monuments of the first rank.
Poitou, in the west, borders upon the ocean and is to a great extent wild, rugged, and romantic. The forest region of the Bocage has ever been a theme for poets and painters. In the extreme west of the province is the Vendée, now the department of the same name. The struggles of its inhabitants on behalf of the monarchical cause, in the early years of the Revolution, is a lurid page of blood-red history that recalls one of the most gallant struggles in the life of the monarchy.
The people here were hardy and vigorous—a race of landlords who lived largely upon their own estates but still retained an attachment for the feudatories round about, a feeling which was unknown elsewhere in France.
Poitiers, on the river Clain, a tributary of the Vienne, is the chief city of Poitou. Its eight magnificent churches are greater, in the number and extent of their charms, than any similar octette elsewhere.
The valley of the Charente waters a considerable region to the southward of Poitiers. "Le bon Roi" Henri IV. called the stream the most charming in all his kingdom. The chief cities on its banks are La Rochelle, the Huguenot stronghold; Rochefort, famed in worldly fashion for its cheeses; and Angoulême, famed for its "Duchesse," who was also worldly, and more particularly for its great domed cathedral of St. Pierre.
With Auvergne one comes upon a topographical aspect quite different from anything seen elsewhere.
Most things of this world are but comparative, and so with Auvergne. It is picturesque, certainly. Le Puy has indeed been called "by one who knows," "the most picturesque place in the world." Clermont-Ferrand is almost equally attractive as to situation; while Puy de Dôme, Riom, and St. Nectaire form a trio of naturally picturesque topographical features which it would be hard to equal within so small a radius elsewhere.
The country round about is volcanic, and the face of the landscape shows it plainly. Clermont-Ferrand, the capital, was a populous city in Roman times, and was the centre from which the spirit of the Church survived and went forth anew after five consecutive centuries of devastation and bloodshed of Vandals, Visigoths, Franks, Saracens, Carlovingians and Capetians.
Puy de Dôme, near Clermont-Ferrand, is a massive rocky mount which rises nearly five thousand feet above the sea-level, and presents one of those uncommon and curious sights which one can hardly realize until he comes immediately beneath their spell.
Throughout this region are many broken volcanic craters and lava streams. At Mont Doré-le-Bains are a few remains of a Roman thermal establishment; an indication that these early settlers found—if they did not seek—these warm springs of a unique quality, famous yet throughout the world.
An alleged "Druid's altar," more probably merely a dolmen, is situated near St. Nectaire, a small watering-place which is also possessed of an impressively simple, though massive, Romanesque church.
At Issiore is the Eglise de St. Pol, a large and important church, built in the eleventh century, in the Romanesque manner. Another most interesting great church is La Chaise Dieu near Le Puy, a remarkable construction of the fourteenth century. It was originally the monastery of the Casa Dei. It has been popularly supposed heretofore that its floor was on a level with the summit of Puy de Dôme, hence its appropriate nomenclature; latterly the assertion has been refuted, as it may be by any one who takes the trouble to compare the respective elevations in figures. This imposing church ranks, however, unreservedly among the greatest of the mediæval monastic establishments of France.
The powerful feudal system of the Middle Ages, which extended from the Atlantic and German Oceans nearly to the Neapolitan and Spanish borders—afterward carried still farther into Naples and Britain—finds its most important and striking monument of central France in the Château of Polignac, only a few miles from Le Puy. This to-day is but a ruin, but it rises boldly from a depressed valley, and suggests in every way—ruin though it be—the mediæval stronghold that it once was.
Originally it was the seat of the distinguished family whose name it bears. The Revolution practically destroyed it, but such as is left shows completely the great extent of its functions both as a fortress and a palace.
These elements were made necessary by long ages of warfare and discord—local in many cases, but none the less bloodthirsty for that—and while such institutions naturally promulgated the growth of Feudalism which left these massive and generous memorials, it is hard to see, even to-day, how else the end might have been obtained.
Auvergne, according to Fergusson, who in his fact has seldom been found wanting, "has one of the most beautiful and numerous of the 'round-Gothic' styles in France … classed among the perfected styles of Europe."
Immediately to the southward of Le Puy is that marvellous country known as the Cevennes. It has been commonly called sterile, bare, unproductive, and much that is less charitable as criticism.
It is not very productive, to be sure, but a native of the land once delivered himself of this remark: "Le mûrier a été pendant longtemps l'arbre d'or du Cevenol." This is prima-facie evidence that the first statement was a libel.
In the latter years of the eighteenth century the Protestants of the Cevennes were a large and powerful body of dissenters.
A curious work in English, written by a native of Languedoc in 1703, states "that they were at least ten to one Papist. And 'twas observed, in many Places, the Priest said mass only for his Clerk, Himself, and the Walls."
These people were not only valiant but industrious, and at that time held the most considerable trade in wool of all France.
To quote again this eighteenth-century Languedocian, who aspired to be a writer of English, we learn:
"God vouchsafed to Illuminate this People with the Truths of the Gospel, several Ages before the Reformation. … The Waldenses and Albigenses fled into the Mountains to escape the violence of the Crusades against them. … Cruel persecution did not so wholly extinguish the Sacred Light in the Cevennes, but that some parts of it were preserved among its Ashes."
As early as 1683 the Protestants in many parts of southern