Part 8

_Sunday, July 20._--I gave up the attempt to go to Bishop Luscombe's Chapel, as there was no communion. Heard High Mass at La Madeleine. The music very good, and the dresses splendid; not more than an hour. At two o'clock went to Vespers there: there was chanting of Psalms, an hour, and then a long sermon, more than an hour, on the virtues of S. Vincent de Paul. The preacher used a great deal of action, and gave me the idea of having very much got up his discourse, which was confirmed by seeing him in the evening at Notre Dame des Victoires, where we heard the commencement of the same sermon, but did not stop. The subject of it seems to have been a very great and good man; the sermon was a sort of abstract, I believe, of the Saint's life by the Bishop of Rodez. There was a passionate address to the Saint in the middle, with eyes uplifted to heaven. A great many people, chiefly women; many ladies,--but I do not think it was a favourite preacher. We gave up the conférence of S. Francis Xavier at S. Sulpice, having so much to do to-morrow, though much to our regret; but late hours and great exertions here have tried us both, and we shall be very glad of a change.

We walked through the Tuileries just before dark; a great multitude of citizens.

_Monday, July 21._--We were occupied all the morning in packing up and calling on MM. D'Alzon, Bonnetty, and Noirlieu--the latter out. We left Paris a quarter past six, on a very fine pleasant evening. Having the two first places in the malle poste, we enjoyed the drive very much as long as it was light--we reached Reims in eleven hours, a quarter after five, without much fatigue. I slept at intervals, and when I awoke admired the brilliant moonlight, Venus, and Jupiter, through one or two forests, or at least woods, which we passed. The road generally very flat, with these exceptions. Our companion was a gentlemanly Frenchman, with whom I had much conversation. He seemed to be much attached to the present Royal Family, whom he spoke of as acquainted with them, and maintained that the King was a religious man--that he heard Mass daily; the Queen was a model of piety. He thought their dynasty would stand; and not the least, because they would never submit to be exiles; they would either keep the throne, or die for it. The great mistake of Charles X. was quitting France; if you go away everyone is against you; if you stay, a party is sure to rally round you. He seemed to think the issue might have been different had Charles X. remained. But there was no chance of a restoration now; the great mass of the country was satisfied. He spoke well of the Duc de Nemours, still more highly of the Duc d'Orléans, and said the Comte de Paris was a very promising boy. He regretted the want of an _hereditary_ peerage in France, and the little independence that body possessed in consequence. I remarked the smallness of fortunes: that 60,000 francs a year were thought a good fortune for a peer. He said not fifty peers of France possessed that; many could not keep their carriage. Spoke of the clergy as not high enough in point of acquirements--he did not say their discipline or piety was defective, but that they were not a match in information, ability, and powers of mind, for those opposed to them. Wished the higher classes would send their sons into orders,--a Royal Prince, for instance, would be a good example. The tax on land in France is nearly one-fifth of the _produce_; very heavy; 200_l._ a year in land a deputy's qualification. Soon after getting to our inn, which was right opposite the west front of the Cathedral, we attended a Low Mass, and at eight o'clock a chanted Mass: it was a Mass for the dead. The outside of Reims is all that can be conceived of beauty, grandeur, unity of conception, delicacy and boldness of execution; and this, though the one great design of the architect has not been completed, for the four towers of the transepts have had no spires since the great fire of 1491; and the western towers are also without theirs, and so end incompletely, the eye positively requiring them. The design of these towers is very singular; and the skill with which a strength sufficient to support spires 400 feet high is veiled, so as to make the towers appear quite pierced and open, seems to me one of the greatest marvels of architecture. The prototype exists in the four towers of Laon, which have the same design in embryo; but this is so enriched, expanded, and beautified by the architect of Reims, as to become his own work in point of originality, and certainly in grace and boldness not to be surpassed. The superiority of the western front, even over that of Amiens, is very marked--indeed, I think it perfect; and the whole of the rest of the outside of the church reaches nearly the same degree. No words can convey any notion of it. The north-west tower was half covered with scaffolding; for here, as every where, great reparations are going on. To the interior I do not give _quite_ so much praise, though it is still of exceeding grandeur, simplicity, and beauty: perhaps, were _all_ its windows like those of the clerestory, the effect might equal or surpass that of Chartres. The west end is, I think, the finest which I know, bearing in mind Amiens and St. Ouen; in addition to a rose window of exceeding brilliancy, and colouring inexpressible, which, forty feet in diameter, crowns the top, there is a smaller one over the doorway, answering to the deep recess of that matchless portal outside. This is a feature of great beauty, though the glass is far from equalling that of the upper rose. There is happily no organ here, but at the end of the north transept, where it has not quite so much to spoil. The transept is inferior to the rest of the church in style. It was restored after the great fire in 1491; and this part of the church, with the whole of the choir and arrangements of the eastern chapels, struck me as decidedly inferior to Amiens. There is not, indeed, generally the same impression of vastness and wondrous height produced on the mind. The pillars are cylinders with four columns at the corners, like Amiens, very simple and severe; but the strength is not quite enough veiled. We went all round the galleries inside and outside, up the centre belfry, which rises ninety-two steps over the top of the vaulting, with an interval of about ten feet besides. It is a forest of wood, and had once a spire of wood, which since the fire has not been restored; this and the six towers have been covered 'provisoirement en ardoises,' as the guide told us, 'mais ce provisoirement a duré long temps;' indeed, from 1491 to our time, without much chance of being improved. We went up the great towers, and could hardly admire enough the delicacy and boldness of the four corner turrets in open work. The present towers are 240 or 250 feet high; they would, I think, equal or surpass Strasburg and Antwerp, had they spires. The immense quantity of sculpture all over this exterior cannot be conceived, nor the ingenuity with which it is made to serve for decoration. A day is far too short a time to carry off the impression of it. The mind is fatigued and exhausted during many a visit, and is not at ease till it has sufficiently mastered the whole, in order to fix itself for admiration and contemplation on some particular part. It would be a week's good work to see it, and it should be visited once a year by all those who talk of the darkness of the Middle Ages, and the greatness of the nineteenth century, which is sorely taxed to keep in repair what they constructed, and has not sufficient piety to restore a part where the architect's design has been left incomplete. Such parts remain, like the window of Aladdin's palace, to show that a materialising philosophy, with all its improved physical powers, remains at immeasurable distance behind the efforts of faith and piety. M. Cousin should be sent to study truth on his knees in Notre Dame of Amiens, or of Reims.

In the midst of seeing the cathedral we walked to St. Remi, a mile, taking the ramparts. They offer a good view of the cathedral, and one of the country round, like Wiltshire, but backed by fine hills to the south; but in this open country, and along all that line of hills, the famous vine of champagne flourishes. St. Remi is an immense church, 350 feet long, besides the Lady Chapel: Norman, with pointed arches; the choir with its stained windows very good; seven in the apse. The tomb of St. Remi was under repair; it is between the high altar and the east end; so the statues of the twelve peers were ranged six on one side and six on the other side of the great altar _pro tempore_. This church is a very grand and fine one, and, except in the presence of the cathedral, would take a day to see. Its west front has been strangely tampered with, but reminds one still, especially the turrets, of St. Georges de Boscherville; but this is greatly the more spacious church of the two.

We spent all the day in going about, passing through the internal galleries of the cathedral; the curve in the nave is very perceptible. The roof was poorly painted for the sacre of Charles X. with white fleurs de lis on a blue ground; it is very massive in its vaulting, the pitch, perhaps, not perfectly agreeable to the eye.

We had a letter from M. D'Alzon to the Archbishop, but he had left Reims a day or two before; we had another from M. Gaduel to the Supérieur of the Séminaire, which _M._ took in the afternoon. About 8 o'clock we both went there, and had some talk with him and the professors, one of whom, M. Lassaigne, gave us a translation of Gioberti against Cousin, and recommended me Le Prêtre Juge et Medicin dans le Tribunal de la Penitence, which I got. I gathered from their discourse that confession is the great chain which holds together the whole Christian life; it is practised weekly by the pupils: communion is entirely free. A great many priests of the neighbourhood confess still to the supérieur (M. Aubry), their old teacher: forty he said. I asked them if they could conceive a Christian life maintained without confession: they said, hardly; that it was involved in our Lord's words, "whose sins ye do retain," &c., which power could only be exercised upon each individual case, after knowledge of the facts, such as of course can only be obtained by auricular confession. I alleged to the Supérieur the strong expressions often used to the Virgin Mary, instancing "les satisfactions infinies du Fils de Dieu et de sa Mère:" he condemned them and _this_. I spoke of St. Bonaventure's Psalter; he did not seem acquainted with it, and regretted that I did not stay till the morrow, when he would have gone over it with me, and weighed the words. But at last he said, St. Bonaventure is not the Church, though he is a saint and doctor of it. They were very kind and cordial, and I should have liked to see more of them.

_Wednesday, July 23._--At 5 o'clock the bell of the cathedral sounded long and loud over our heads, leaving no excuse for those who chose to slumber on. I got up, and found two places by the diligence for Laon. M. was in a great hurry, so I exercised a piece of self-denial and woke him, and we hurried off. It was, indeed, with great regret I departed from under the shadow of that noble church, feeling that I left so much of its beauty undiscerned, or rather so few of its forms impressed on the mind. We were four hours and a half reaching Laon, from 6 to 10½, in the intérieur; two fat women and a child made it latterly very uncomfortable. The country flat for some way, then hills and fine prospects. But the position of Laon is very remarkable indeed, a triangular hill rising out of a great plain: in short, another Enna, though not so lofty. The resemblance is very marked indeed, and presented itself to me again and again. Near to one corner of the triangle rises the cathedral, with its four lofty towers, two at the west end, and one at each end of the transept; there are the beginnings of two others, and all six were intended to have had spires as lofty as themselves; the south-west had one, which was taken down. Their present height is, the S.W. 220 feet each, (French,) the N. and S. 235. They are very striking, but want their crown of spires, and are in the most splendid situation for such a building which I ever saw. The view is accordingly very extensive, to the north flat, but to the south terminated by fine hills. We viewed these towers in a great number of positions, on the promenades, and from another corner of the triangle, to the south. The church within is very stately; early English, 400 feet long, and quite uniform in style, or at least with only here and there a decorated window, as in the S. transept. The curve of the roof is very beautiful; after Reims it struck us as low, though at least 80 feet high. The west front is fine, though the portals require more work to conceal their vast depth. I could not but greatly admire the skill of the architect of Reims, who had evidently studied and adopted the towers and western front of this church, which is said in its time (1130) to have been the finest in France, and yet has produced a work incomparably more beautiful, and quite original. Laon has a double triforium, making four stages in its interior.

We walked about here a great deal. The situation is one of the finest I have ever seen; it inspires a sort of elevation in the mind. Beyond the church a caserne is building, and a fort already made--a bad exchange for the tower of Louis d'Outremer. The church of St. Martin is very disappointing inside, being very low. As the diligence was full for the night, we hired a cab, to take us to St. Quentin. It took us from 5½ to 11½, stopping half an hour at La Fère. Road generally flat, and very bad indeed, having no pavé to La Fère. We saw a village church or two, Norman in style. Our conveyance was one of the most uncomfortable I ever experienced; besides that we were overwhelmed with bags and coats. Our driver served at eighteen in one of Napoleon's battles, and had carried off a token in a sabre cut on the cheek; it was the battle of Fleury, where, he said, "L'Empereur était trahi." So the French guide-book says of the battle of Crecy: "Les Français perdirent 30,000 par la faute du Comte d'Alençon."

_Thursday, July 24._--We are at l'Hôtel du Cygne: comfortable enough. The church is of first-rate beauty; the nave, from its great height and purity of style, even more striking than that of Reims _inside_; and so the transept: but the choir and many parts of the church have swerved from the perpendicular, and are braced with iron,--a sad drawback. The architect has raised his central building, with extreme boldness, to an enormous height; but he has not thrown strength and breadth enough into his aisles to resist the pressure. The windows throughout of geometric tracery, remarkably beautiful; and the pillars of the nave spring from the ground to the roof without capital at the lower arches, and are of great beauty, an advance certainly on Reims, and in one respect on Amiens, in that they are not merely cylinders, with columns at the four corners, but have two colonnettes introduced again between these, which produces an effect of great lightness. Beautiful end of north transept, a decorated window below, an open triforium of eight lights, and a vast decorated window terminating in a great rosace above--stained glass. The apse of seven windows, with most brilliant stained glass, beginning from a second transept of great beauty, making a double cross, the southern part flamboyant. I think the nave of this church, and the apse and arrangements of its chapels might be profitably studied as an almost perfect specimen; it may compete with Amiens and St. Ouen, and undoubtedly surpasses Reims. Height, 128 English feet; vaulting of roof very beautiful. We went in at 11 o'clock, and found preparations for a funeral of some importance: presently all the choir was filled with well dressed persons; and the body being deposited under a catafalque, surrounded with burning tapers, in the centre of the nave and transept, mass was chanted. The black velvet chasuble, and the copes and other robes to match, like all the dresses of the Roman clergy, are very handsome. We went into the upper part of the choir, but I could not avoid noticing with what indifference most of the attendants on the funeral treated the holiest rite of the Church; they were, no doubt, unbelievers; and some ragged boys close beside me were a serious annoyance, incessantly spitting, laughing, and talking. The west end of this church has been barbarized in the style of 1681, most ugly to behold; it seems to have been intended to have two towers, but no part of them at present exists. We went through the roof of the church, and caught a view from the strange-looking steeple which rises over the croisée. The country round is not remarkable--flat, and in parts wooded. Rest of the day spent in writing. Found some common prints of details in the life of the Holy Family which pleased us.

_Friday, July 25._--At 6 o'clock we started by the diligence to Amiens by Peronne--had the coupé with an English woman, who got in a few miles on the road. The country not remarkable--some hills and a fertile succession of corn-fields. Reached Peronne a little before nine, and breakfasted there. Several fortifications and drawbridges both entering and going, but they did not seem kept up with much care. The Church, de la Renaissance, not remarkable. The rest of the road to Amiens a fine broad country, with occasional hills, of average beauty. No view of Amiens cathedral but from the last hill, a few miles off, and then it looked small, I suppose from the vastness of the plain in which it stands. We did not reach Amiens, a distance of only 82 kiloms. from St. Quentin, till after three o'clock. At the last stage some young seminarists got out of the rotonde, and were met by their mother and sisters, as it seemed: they were apparently peasants, very humbly clad, and of the most ordinary demeanour. I saw what education had done for the young men (who had not received the tonsure): even the retired life and poor salary of a country curé would be a great elevation in the scale of society to them. I would not mention this invidiously, but the lot of the French Curé de Campagne has sometimes appeared to me so painful, that it was a relief to see its bright side even in a material point of view.

I went to my old quarters at the Hôtel de France, and we were shown into the same room I had occupied two years before. We got a light dinner and set off to the cathedral. The first sight of its west front was almost painful after that of Reims, there being certainly a confusion and want of harmony in its parts; while the southern tower being left twenty feet lower than the northern combines to spoil the effect. But I was no sooner in the interior than a full sense of its prodigious superiority to every other building we had seen established itself on my mind; and the impression my first visit two years ago made was more than repeated. Only St. Ouen may enter at all into competition; but the vast proportions of Amiens, combined with the great purity of its style, more than counterbalance the, if any, superior grace and lightness of the other. In the evening we walked out to the west, in the hope of catching a good view of the cathedral, but we could not find the right place. Amiens has nothing else remarkable which fell under our observation.

_Saturday, July 26._--After breakfast we went to the cathedral, and passed over all the galleries inside and outside, and the roofs. The best external view from the building itself is on the north tower; the arcs boutants of the choir and the whole arrangement are much more striking than those of the nave. The guide, a very intelligent man, assured us there was no danger apprehended within or without to any part of the building. As far as M. and I could judge, we thought it would last as easily for the next 500 years as it had gone through the last. The view through the eight compartments of the upper chamber of the central clocher is pretty; it seems to fit into so many frames the city and the vast plain in which it stands. We saw the towers of Corbie. In the inside I noticed four particulars of its great superiority, over and above the unequalled proportions of the whole.

1st, The triforium and its windows, especially of the choir; these windows commence on the east side of the transept. In the rest there are arches, which have been filled up with masonry from the beginning. I think this triforium superior to that of St. Ouen, chiefly from the geometric character of its forms; whereas those of St. Ouen approach to the perpendicular. Each bay has six divisions, save the five of the apse, which have four.

2nd, The windows of the clerestory, all of pure geometric tracery. I measured one on the south side of the nave, nineteen feet three inches wide, clear light.

3rd, The north transept end. A rosace above, of most brilliant glass, thirty-six feet in diameter; open gallery of fifteen divisions.

4th, The whole arrangement of the aisles round the choir. There are open chapels north and south, extending the whole four bays of the choir, which give great lightness to it; while the seven arches of the apse correspond to as many chapels. The Lady Chapel is beautiful, though not so much developed as that of St. Ouen.

By the advice of the guide we went down to the river, immediately to the north of the cathedral; from the other side of which, by a little tree in front of a house painted green, is, perhaps, the best external view of the whole mass from east to west. Even here, however, almost all the windows of the aisles are covered by houses; on another branch of the river, a little further north, rather more of these is discovered. The near view from the extreme corner of the bishop's garden is good; and the corresponding one to the south-east, as far back as the street will allow, rather better. This gives the beauty of the east end. But no complete view of this wonderful building outside can be obtained, from the closeness of the houses; and that which would be the grandest ornament of the finest city in the world cannot even be seen in its full proportions.

The vaulting of Amiens is 140 feet (English) high; the ridge of the roof outside reaches to nigh 200. Its internal and external galleries must be traversed before the spectator can estimate the enormous pile of masonry which that fabric contains. It can only be matched, I think, by Milan. Amiens is only 442 feet in length, including the Lady Chapel. In this also the French architects have shown great skill, for an excess in this respect would have diminished the great effect produced by their stupendous height. York or Canterbury would be dwarfed beside Amiens, though the former exceeds it by 82 feet, and the latter by 88 feet in length. But the height of the vaulting of Canterbury nave is 80 feet, of York 99, of Amiens 140. It is a sad result of a visit to the French cathedrals, that the Englishman must be content to recognise ever after the immense inferiority of his own in the one characteristic feature of Christian architecture, elevation. A noble race of men they must have been, and not of the tiger-monkey kind, who had hearts to conceive and hands to execute such works as these. Overflowing with inward life must the Church have been, who could impress such a character on her sons. Here, indeed, may the Churchman feel, "He built His sanctuary like high palaces; like the earth which He hath established for ever." Those were the ages of faith, hope, and love; it would be well if the life which glowed in those mediæval bosoms manifested itself by works in ours.