For in such towns three quite different kinds of men meet. First there
are the old plain-men, who despise the highlanders and think
themselves much grander and more civilized; these are the burgesses.
Then there are the peasants and wood-cutters, who come in from the
hill-country to market, and who are suspicious of the plain-men and
yet proud to depend upon a real town with a bishop and paved streets.
Lastly, there are the travellers, who come there to enjoy the
mountains and to make the city a base for their excursions, and these
love the hill-men and think they understand them, and they despise the
plain-men for being so middle-class as to lord it over the hill-men:
but in truth this third class, being outsiders, are equally hated and
despised by both the others, and there is a combination against them
and they are exploited.
And there are many other things in which Epinal is wonderful, but in
nothing is it more wonderful than in its great church.
I suppose that the high Dukes of Burgundy and Lorraine and the rich
men from Flanders and the House of Luxemburg and the rest, going to
Rome, the centre of the world, had often to pass up this valley of the
Moselle, which (as I have said) is a road leading to Rome, and would
halt at fipinal and would at times give money for its church; with
this result, that the church belongs to every imaginable period and is
built anyhow, in twenty styles, but stands as a whole a most enduring
record of past forms and of what has pleased the changing mind when it
has attempted to worship in stone.
Thus the transept is simply an old square barn of rough stone, older,
I suppose, than Charlemagne and without any ornament. In its lower
courses I thought I even saw the Roman brick. It had once two towers,
northern and southern; the southern is ruined and has a wooden roof,
the northern remains and is just a pinnacle or minaret too narrow for
bells.
Then the apse is pure and beautiful Gothic of the fourteenth century,
with very tall and fluted windows like single prayers. The ambulatory
is perfectly modern, Gothic also, and in the manner that Viollet le
Duc in France and Pugin in England have introduced to bring us back to
our origins and to remind us of the place whence all we Europeans
came. Again, this apse and ambulatory are not perpendicular to the
transept, but set askew, a thing known in small churches and said to
be a symbol, but surely very rare in large ones. The western door is
purely Romanesque, and has Byzantine ornaments and a great deep round
door. To match it there is a northern door still deeper, with rows and
rows of inner arches full of saints, angels, devils, and flowers; and
this again is not straight, but so built that the arches go aslant, as
you sometimes see railway bridges when they cross roads at an angle.
Finally, there is a central tower which is neither Gothic nor
Romanesque but pure Italian, a loggia, with splendid round airy
windows taking up all its walls, and with a flat roof and eaves. This
some one straight from the south must have put on as a memory of his
wanderings.
The barn-transept is crumbling old grey stone, the Romanesque porches
are red, like Strasburg, the Gothic apse is old white as our
cathedrals are, the modern ambulatory is of pure white stone just
quarried, and thus colours as well as shapes are mingled up and
different in this astonishing building.
I drew it from that point of view in the market-place to the
north-east which shows most of these contrasts at once, and you must
excuse the extreme shakiness of the sketch, for it was taken as best I
could on an apple-cart with my book resting on the apples - there was
no other desk. Nor did the apple-seller mind my doing it, but on the
contrary gave me advice and praise saying such things as -
'Excellent; you have caught the angle of the apse ... Come now, darken
the edge of that pillar ... I fear you have made the tower a little
confused,' and so forth.
I offered to buy a few apples off him, but he gave me three instead,
and these, as they incommoded me, I gave later to a little child.
Indeed the people of Epinal, not taking me for a traveller but simply
for a wandering poor man, were very genial to me, and the best good
they did me was curing my lameness. For, seeing an apothecary's shop
as I was leaving the town, I went in and said to the apothecary -
'My knee has swelled and is very painful, and I have to walk far;
perhaps you can tell me how to cure it, or give me something that
will.'
'There is nothing easier,' he said; 'I have here a specific for the
very thing you complain of.'
With this he pulled out a round bottle, on the label of which was
printed in great letters, 'BALM'.
'You have but to rub your knee strongly and long with this ointment of
mine,' he said, 'and you will be cured.' Nor did he mention any
special form of words to be repeated as one did it.
Everything happened just as he had said. When I was some little way
above the town I sat down on a low wall and rubbed my knee strongly
and long with this balm, and the pain instantly disappeared. Then,
with a heart renewed by this prodigy, I took the road again and began
walking very rapidly and high, swinging on to Rome.
