The Edifice In Question, However, Fulfils Con-
Ditions Enough; In Particular, Its Little Court Offers
Hospitality To The Big Buttress Of The Church.
Another
buttress, corresponding with this (the two, between
them, sustain the gable of the north transept), is
planted in
The small cloister, of which the door on the
further side of the little soundless Rue de la Psalette,
where nothing seems ever to pass, opens opposite to
that of Mademoiselle Gamard. There is a very genial
old sacristan, who introduced me to this cloister from
the church. It is very small and solitary, and much
mutilated; but it nestles with a kind of wasted friend-
liness beneath the big walls of the cathedral. Its
lower arcades have been closed, and it has a small
plot of garden in the middle, with fruit-trees which I
should imagine to be too much overshadowed. In
one corner is a remarkably picturesque turret, the
cage of a winding staircase which ascends (no great
distance) to an upper gallery, where an old priest, the
_chanoine-gardien_ of the church, was walking to and fro
with his breviary. The turret, the gallery, and even
the chanoine-gardien, belonged, that sweet September
morning, to the class of objects that are dear to paint-
ers in water-colors.
III.
I have mentioned the church of Saint Martin,
which was for many years the sacred spot, the shrine
of pilgrimage, of Tours. Originally the simple burial-
place of the great apostle who in the fourth century
Christianized Gaul, and who, in his day a brilliant
missionary and worker of miracles, is chiefly known
to modem fame as the worthy that cut his cloak in
two at the gate of Amiens to share it with a beggar
(tradition fails to say, I believe, what he did with the
other half), the abbey of Saint Martin, through the
Middle Ages, waxed rich and powerful, till it was
known at last as one of the most luxurious religious
houses in Christendom, with kings for its titular ab-
bots (who, like Francis I., sometimes turned and
despoiled it) and a great treasure of precious things.
It passed, however, through many vicissitudes. Pillaged
by the Normans in the ninth century and by the
Huguenots in the sixteenth, it received its death-blow
from the Revolution, which must have brought to
bear upon it an energy of destruction proportionate
to its mighty bulk. At the end of the last century
a huge group of ruins alone remained, and what we
see to-day may be called the ruin of a ruin. It is
difficult to understand how so vast an ediface can
have been so completely obliterated. Its site is given
up to several ugly streets, and a pair of tall towers,
separated by a space which speaks volumes as to the
size of the church, and looking across the close-pressed
roofs to the happier spires of the cathedral, preserved
for the modern world the memory of a great fortune,
a great abuse, perhaps, and at all events a great pen-
alty.
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