The Cathedral
Interested Me Much Less Than Our Lady The Great,
And I Have Not The Spirit To Go Into
Statistics about it.
It is not statistical to say that the cathedral stands
half-way down the hill of Poitiers,
In a quiet and
grass-grown _place_, with an approach of crooked lanes
and blank garden-walls, and that its most striking
dimension is the width of its facade. This width is
extraordinary, but it fails, somehow, to give nobleness
to the edifice, which looks within (Murray makes the
remark) like a large public hall. There are a nave
and two aisles, the latter about as high as the nave;
and there are some very fearful modern pictures,
which you may see much better than you usually see
those specimens of the old masters that lurk in glow-
ing side-chapels, there being no fine old glass to dif-
fuse a kindly gloom. The sacristan of the cathedral
showed me something much better than all this bright
bareness; he led me a short distance out of it to the
small Temple de Saint-Jean, which is the most curious
object at Poitiers. It is an early Christian chapel,
one of the earliest in France; originally, it would seem,
- that is, in the sixth or seventh century, - a bap-
tistery, but converted into a church while the Christian
era was still comparatively young. The Temple de
Saint-Jean is therefore a monument even more vener-
able than Notre Dame la Grande, and that numbness
of age which I imputed to Notre Dame ought to reside
in still larger measure in its crude and colorless little
walls. I call them crude, in spite of their having
been baked through by the centuries, only because,
although certain rude arches and carvings are let
into them, and they are surmounted at either end with
a small gable, they have (so far as I can remember)
little fascination of surface. Notre Dame is still ex-
pressive, still pretends to be alive; but the Temple
has delivered its message, and is completely at rest.
It retains a kind of atrium, on the level of the street,
from which you descend to the original floor, now un-
covered, but buried for years under a false bottom.
A semicircular apse was, apparently at the time of its
conversion into a church, thrown out from the east
wall. In the middle is the cavity of the old baptismal
font. The walls and vaults are covered with traces
of extremely archaic frescos, attributed, I believe, to
the twelfth century. These vague, gaunt, staring
fragments of figures are, to a certain extent, a reminder
of some of the early Christian churches in Rome; they
even faintly recalled to me the great mosaics of
Ravenna. The Temple de Saint-Jean has neither the
antiquity nor the completeness of those extraordinary
monuments, nearly the most impressive in Europe;
but, as one may say, it is very well for Poitiers.
Not far from it, in a lonely corner which was ani-
mated for the moment by the vociferations of several
old, women who were selling tapers, presumably for
the occasion of a particular devotion, is the graceful
romanesque church erected in the twelfth century to
Saint Radegonde, - a lady who found means to be a
saint even in the capacity of a Merovingian queen.
It bears a general resemblance to Notre Dame la
Grande, and, as I remember it, is corrugated in some-
what the same manner with porous-looking carvings;
but I confess that what I chiefly recollect is the row
of old women sitting in front of it, each with a tray
of waxen tapers in her lap, and upbraiding me for
my neglect of the opportunity to offer such a tribute to
the saint. I know not whether this privilege is oc-
casional or constant; within the church there was no
appearance of a festival, and I see that the name-
day of Saint Radegonde occurs in August, so that the
importunate old women sit there always, perhaps, and
deprive of its propriety the epithet I just applied to
this provincial corner. In spite of the old women,
however, I suspect that the place is lonely; and in-
deed it is perhaps the old women that have made the
desolation.
The lion of Poitiers, in the eyes of the natives, is
doubtless the Palais de Justice, in the shadow of which
the statue-guarded hotel, just mentioned, erects itself;
and the gem of the court-house, which has a prosy
modern front, with pillars and a high flight of steps,
is the curious _salle des pas perdus_, or central hall, out
of which the different tribunals open. This is a
feature of every French court-house, and seems the
result of a conviction that a palace of justice - the
French deal in much finer names than we - should be
in some degree palatial. The great hall at Poitiers
has a long pedigree, as its walls date back to the
twelfth century, and its open wooden roof, as well as
the remarkable trio of chimney-pieces at the right end
of the room as you enter, to the fifteenth. The three
tall fireplaces, side by side, with a delicate gallery
running along the top of them, constitute the originality
of this ancient chamber, and make one think of the
groups that must formerly have gathered there, - of
all the wet boot-soles, the trickling doublets, the
stiffened fingers, the rheumatic shanks, that must have
been presented to such an incomparable focus of
heat. To-day, I am afraid, these mighty hearts are
forever cold; justice it probably administered with the
aid of a modern _calorifere_, and the walls of the palace
are perforated with regurgitating tubes. Behind and
above the gallery that surmounts the three fireplaces
are high Gothic windows, the tracery of which masks,
in some sort, the chimneys; and in each angle of this
and of the room to the right and left of the trio of
chimneys, is all open-work spiral staircase, ascending
to - I forget where; perhaps to the roof of the edifice.
This whole side of the _salle_ is very lordly, and seems
to express an unstinted hospitality, to extend the
friendliest of all invitations, to bid the whole world
come and get warm.
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