In a way, its topographical situation, as above noted, accounts far more for its tendencies of life, the art expression of its churches, and its ancient enamels and pottery of to-day, than does its climatic situation. It is climatically of the southland, but its industry and its influences have been greatly northern.
With the surrounding country this is not true, but with its one centre of population – Limoges – it is.
II
L'ABBAYE DE MAILLEZAIS
Maillezais is but a memory, so far as its people and power are concerned. It is not even a Vendean town, as many suppose, though it was the seat of a thirteenth-century bishopric, which in the time of Louis Quatorze was transferred to La Rochelle.
Its abbey church, the oldest portion of which dates from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, is now but a ruin.
In the fourteenth century the establishment was greatly enlarged and extensive buildings added.
To-day it is classed, by the Commission des Monuments Historiques, among those treasures for which it stands sponsor as to their antiquity, artistic worth, and future preservation. Aside from this and the record of the fact that it became, in the fourteenth century, the seat of a bishop's throne, – with Geoffroy I. as its first occupant, – it must be dismissed without further comment.
III
ST. LOUIS DE LA ROCHELLE
The city of La Rochelle will have more interest for the lover of history than for the lover of churches.
Its past has been lurid, and the momentous question of the future rights of the Protestants of France made this natural stronghold the battle-ground where the most stubborn resistance against Church and State was made.
The siege of 1573 was unsuccessful. But a little more than half a century later the city, after a siege of fourteen months, gave way before the powerful force brought against it by Cardinal Richelieu in person, supported by Louis XIII.
For this reason, if for no other, he who would know from personal acquaintance the ground upon which the mighty battles of the faith were fought will not pass the Huguenot city quickly by.
The Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle naturally might not be supposed to possess a very magnificent Roman cathedral. As a matter of fact it does not, and it has only ranked as a cathedral city since 1665, when the bishopric was transferred from Maillezais. The city was in the hands of the Huguenots from 1557 until the siege of 1628-1629; and was, during all this time, the bulwark of the Protestant cause in France.
The present cathedral of St. Louis dates only from 1735.
Its pseudo-classic features classify it as one of those structures designated by the discerning Abbé Bourassé as being "cold-blooded and lacking in lustre."
It surely is all of that, and the pity is that it offers no charm whatever of either shape or feature.
It is of course more than likely that Huguenot influence was here so great as to have strangled any ambition on the part of the mediæval builders to have erected previously anything more imposing. And when that time was past came also the demise of Gothic splendour. The transition from the pointed to the superimposed classical details, which was the distinctive Renaissance manner of church-building, was not as sudden as many suppose, though it came into being simultaneously throughout the land.
There is no trace, however, in the cathedral of St. Louis, of anything but a base descent to features only too well recognized as having little of churchly mien about them; and truly this structure is no better or worse as an art object than many others of its class. The significant aspect being that, though it resembles Gothic not at all, neither does it bear any close relationship to the Romanesque.
The former parish church of St. Barthèlemy, long since destroyed, has left behind, as a memory of its former greatness, a single lone tower, the work of a Cluniac monk, Mognon by name. It is worth hours of contemplation and study as compared with the minutes which could profitably be devoted to the cathedral of St. Louis.
IV
CATHÉDRALE DE LUÇON
When the see of Luçon was established in the fourteenth century it comprehended a territory over which Poitiers had previously had jurisdiction. A powerful abbey was here in the seventh century, but the first bishop, Pierre de la Veyrie, did not come to the diocese until 1317. The real fame of the diocese, in modern minds, lies in the fact that Cardinal Richelieu was made bishop of Luçon in the seventeenth century (1606 to 1624).
The cathedral at Luçon is a remarkable structure in appearance. A hybrid conglomerate thing, picturesque enough to the untrained eye, but ill-proportioned, weak, effeminate, and base.
Its graceful Gothic spire, crocketed, and of true dwindling dimensions, is superimposed on a tower which looks as though it might have been modelled with a series of children's building-blocks. This in its turn crowns a classical portal and colonnade in most uncanny fashion.
In the first stage of this tower, as it rises above the portal, is what, at a distance, appears to be a diminutive rosace. In reality it is an enormous clock-face, to which one's attention is invariably directed by the native, a species of local admiration which is universal throughout the known world wherever an ungainly clock exists.
The workmanship of the building as a whole is of every century from the twelfth to the seventeenth, with a complete "restoration" in 1853. In the episcopal palace is a cloistered arcade, the remains of a fifteenth-century work.
A rather pleasing situation sets off this pretentious but unworthy cathedral in a manner superior to that which it deserves.
V
ST. FRONT DE PÉRIGUEUX
The grandest and most notable tenth-century church yet remaining in France is unquestionably that of St. Front at Périgueux.
From the records of its history and a study of its distinctive constructive elements has been traced the development of the transition period which ultimately produced the Gothic splendours of the Isle of France.
It is more than reminiscent of St. Marc's at Venice, and is the most notable exponent of that type of roofing which employed the cupola in groups, to sustain the thrust and counterthrust, which was afterward accomplished by the ogival arch in conjunction with the flying buttress.
Here are comparatively slight sustaining walls, and accordingly no great roofed-over chambers such as we get in the later Gothic, but the whole mass is, in spite of this, suggestive of a massiveness which many more heavily walled churches do not possess. Paradoxically, too, a view over its roof-top, with its ranges of egg-like domes, suggests a frailty which but for its scientifically disposed strains would doubtless have collapsed ere now.
This ancient abbatial church succeeded an earlier basilique on the same site. Viollet-le-Duc says of it: "It is an importation from a foreign country; the most remarkable example of church-building in Gaul since the barbaric invasion."
The plan of the cathedral follows not only the form of St. Marc's, but also approximates its dimensions. The remains of the ancient basilica are only to be remarked in the portion which precedes the foremost cupola.
St. Front has the unusual attribute of an avant-porch, – a sort of primitive narthen, as was a feature of tenth-century buildings (see plan and descriptions of a tenth-century church in appendix), behind which is a second porch, – a vestibule beneath the tower, – and finally the first of the group, of five central cupolas.
The clocher or belfry of St. Front is accredited as being one of the most remarkable eleventh-century erections of its kind in any land. It is made up of square stages, each smaller than the other, and crowned finally by a conic cupola.
Its early inception and erection here are supposed to account for the similarity of others – not so magnificent, but like to