Читать книгу The Cathedrals of Southern France - Mansfield Milburg Francisco - Страница 7

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.