Romance of the French abbeys

Front matter

ELIZABETH • W • CHAMPNEY

By ELIZABETH W. CHAMPNEY

ROMANCE OF THE FEUDAL CHATEAUX.

Preface

SCATTERED throughout the length and breadth of France, almost forgotten in their out-of-the-way nooks, the abbeys, though forsaken and ruinous, still afford fascinating shrines of pilgrimage to the thoughtful tourist.

The architect will find in them the entire development of the Romanesque and Gothic styles and the first dawn of the Renaissance. He will feel a brother's pride in the achievements of the architect monks of Cluny, who travelled even into other nations building the abbeys of their order, as well as in the engineering exploits of that other brotherhood who wore the red hammer embroidered upon their sleeves, the Freres Pontifes, or bridgebuilders, who spanned great rivers with fortified bridges which endure to this day, that pilgrims might journey to the Holy Land, and v/hile constructing the Pont Saint Esprit, which crosses the Rhone, believed that the divine Son of the Carpenter laboured with them. He will trace the history of stained

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Preface glass in the shattered windows of the abbeys, and that of goldsmithry and enamelhng in the chahces and rehquaries preserved in the museums as precious examples of the riches which once filled their "tresors.'" He will admire in their grilles the noble craft of the iron-worker, in their choir stalls that of the wood-carver, and in their tombs the art of the sculptor. The spoils of the scriptoria in the National Library of Paris alone will awaken wonder at the immense patience and skill of the illuminators; and though France can boast of no painter-monks to rank with Fra Angelico and Fra Lippo Lippi, her debt to her monasteries in the department of letters is deeper than that of Italy. They were the first universities, their monks the first historians, and they furnished a refuge not alone for saddened and penitent hearts, but a career for refined and scholarly minds.

Of such absorbing interest is the art of the abbeys that the connoisseur may be pardoned indifference to their creators, should he say of them with Browning :

" They might chirp and chaffer, come and go, For pleasure or profit the men alive, My business was hardly with them I trow, But with empty cells of the human hive;

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" With the chapter-room, the cloister porch, The church's apsis, aisle or nave, Its crypt one fingers along with a torch, Its face set full for the sun to shave."

The empty hives are themselves fast passing fromi the scene. The massive walls of masonry, which neither the disintegrating forces of nature nor the fierce hatred of religious wars has been able utterly to demolish, are being turned to secular uses. The suppression of the religious orders, decreed at the time of the French Revolution, has at last been very thoroughly effected. Distilleries, factories, barracks, prisons have been established in some of the noble buildings; some have been entirely razed, often the chapel only subsists as the present parish church; others serve as quarries for the neighbourhood, and only a few are protected by the government as historical monuments or are lovingly cherished by private owners.

Certain itineraries found especially delightful by the author in different vagrant summers, in ProA^ence, Savoy, Burgundy, Isle de France, and Normandy, are outlined in the last chapter of this volume ; but the present age is one of change, and he who would see even the ruins of the abbeys must act quickly.

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Preface

The student of history, the lover of the great drama of human hfe, will find in them an interest different from that of the artist, an irresistible desire to reconstruct in imagination the state of society, the mood of mind, and form of faith which not only reared them, but made them in their time a beneficent influence. He will tell us how it happened that at the close of the "Dark Ages," the year looo a.d., dawned a true millennium, and with the incredible spread of monasticism and the building of many hundred abbeys ' a tidal wave, not alone of religious revival, but of civilisation, swept over France. He will explain how, in an age brutal and unscrupulous beyond our conception, persecutors and tyrants stood suddenly abashed before the denunciation of the Church,

^ The Benedictines alone at the time of their greatest prosperity boasted thirty-seven thousand monasteries, of which a great part were in France.

The Monasticon GalUcarum, a book written in 1645 by Dom Michel Germain, a Benedictine of the Congregation of Saint Maur, gives plates of one hundred and sixty-eight great French abbeys of his order and time.

We sketch the marvellous history of the Abbey of Cluny, with its hundreds of dependent, abbeys, and of its rival Citaux. In less than twenty- five years after the founding of the latter abbey it sent out sixty thousand Cistercian monks, and in 1790 three thousand six hundred monasteries acknowledged her rule.

Preface

IX and kings like Robert II., in fear of her judgments, gave up their best beloved at her mandate, while Jezebels such as Queen Bertrade retired to lives of humiliation in convents.

We Protestants may at first say, patronisingly:

There 's something in that ancient superstition, Which, erring as it is, our fancy loves;

but as we study the development of the system we must acknowledge that in its beginning at least it was divine.

It is not within the scope of the present volume to tell how the good fruit ripened and rotted, how Pope Leo X. placed in the hands of Francis I. the power of nominating his favourites as commendatory abbots, and how the evil grew so that in 1788 there were fifteen thousand ecclesiastical sinecures under royal appointment, and abbots were sovereign princes and sybarites took the places of saints until, as Dante foretold, the flood came and destroyed them all.^ The author is neither

» *' The walls for abbeys reared are turned to dens. Jordan was turned back A.nd a less wonder. Thus the refluent sea May at God's pleasure work amendment here."

Paradiso, Canto XXXII.

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archgeologist nor sociologist, but a trovere of romance. She has brought back from her pilgrimages only a few incidents which have moved her in the history of her best -loved abbeys: legends of the Saints Bernard and Francis from Clairvaux and the Abbey of Montmajour; a tale of chivalrous adventure from a Commandery of the Knights Hospitallers; the story of the ambition of one of the artisan monks of Cluny; an echo of the horror of the Inquisition which still lingers about the dungeon w^alls of Carcassonne, and the portal of Saint Ouen; the tradition of the flowering of a woman's love in the Gothic arches of the abbey church of Brou ; a fantasy from Saint Denis of the childhood of Saint Louis; a burlesque from the playwrights of the miracle spectacles from Fecamp; chronicles of passions which wrapped like flames the abbey fortresses of Vezelay and Mont Saint Michel during the strife of Huguenot and Leaguer; and from the lovely ruin of Saint Wandrille a story of the revival of faith in the Jesuit missions at the time when France was most faithless.

If she is asked what romance can be found in communities which strove to eliminate the eternal feminine, she can only cite Hallam,

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who finds that love plays but a subordinate role in mediaeval romances, which, he asserts, repose equally on three columns — chivalry, gallantry, and religion.

And are not such ambitions as the love of achievement and of fame in scholarship and in art, the love of power, and the love of struggle for the mere joy of the fight — such enthusiasms as devotion to one's abbey and one's order, or purely to humanity — emotions as worthy of the soul of man, and as interesting to the observer in their development as the love of woman ?

Moreover, that love was not always wanting. Often it existed so purified from passion that it became a mystical sentiment, supernatural and transcendent. Sometimes alas! (though not so frequently as cavillers would have us believe) human nature was too frail for such sublime renunciation, and tragedies like that of Abelard and Heloise, as well as the pathetic self-sacrifice of nobler souls, point the moral of these tales — that the mistake of monasticism was celibacy.

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CHAPTER

Chapter I

'"T^HAT is what all the wise ones called it, * Madame. They were as much puzzled as the simplest when the old Abbot Heribert's tomb was opened and all that golden glory flashed before them.

"They had gathered from far and near, for the great architect Monsieur VioUet-le-Duc had come from Paris to make such restorations as he thought fit in this ancient Abbey of Vezelay, and it was surmised that interesting discoveries might be made.

"So, when my father, who was mastermason, with his force of assistants, hfted the lid of the sarcophagus in that canopied niche, — a heavy hd, as Madame sees, for the effigy of Abbot Heribert was carved upon it, — all the learned ones who stood around craned their necks like the gargoyles over the church door.

"They had read the record of the saintly life of this good man who lived and died away back in the tenth century, for it is engraved in Latin on the brazen plate. His statue, too, has a certain dignity even in its mutilation, robed in full canonicals with its thin hands piously folded over its quiet breast. To have found those carven vestments duplicated in costly stuffs would have surprised no one, but a cry of astonishment echoed through the church when it was perceived that the gorgeous robe of cloth of gold now revealed was a woman's, that the form it shrouded was a woman's, and a little woman's at that. The tiny pinched face was framed in black hair, which swept from under a red velvet cap to the very tips of her dainty shoes.

"But what changed the first dazzled exclamation of admiration of the queenly gembroidered robe to one of horror was the sight of a ghastly, gaping wound in the little lady's forehead, the frontal bone crushed to splinters by some murderous blow, and the beautiful hair torn and clotted.

"When the corpse had remained for a time exposed to the air it crumbled to dust, but the gold threads in the woof of its dress were pure metal and did not vanish with the rest. The government claimed the robe and it was carried away to some museum.

"The learned ones wrangled long over the 'Golden Mystery,' as it was popularly named, and some said it was the robe in which Queen Eleanor listened here at Vezelay to the preaching of the Second Crusade by Saint Bernard, and that she had sent it to the Abbey as a souvenir of her visit. But none could solve the riddle of why it shrouded the little lady with the fractured skull, nor why she should have been laid to rest in the Abbot's tomb.

"Golden and grim it remained a mystery to those learned ones, but its solution has been granted to me, Madame, simple peasant though I am, for I have pondered and brooded over it all my life, and have pieced together every scrap of history that has fallen in my way, and all the legends of the old people, until suddenly one night I saw it all crystal clear, and knew that only in this way could it have happened. It was when my father told me that among the bits of bones, which the learned ones had overlooked in the dust of the tomb, he had found a finger- joint and on it a marriage ring with the initials ' O. de C. to E. de H.' I have the ring and the bit of blackened bone still, Madame, to witness if Hie."

Our guide, Martin Quatrevaux, tugged at a stout string which encircled his neck and drew from his bosom a soiled chamois-skin bag, and from the bag the relic of which he spoke. If a forgery it had been cunningly prepared, and the man's face was too honest for the most sceptical to harbour suspicion. Beside the initials there was the date 1569, and everything was clear.

"Odet de Coligny to Elizabeth de Hauteville!" we exclaimed, and Quatrevaux nodded gravely.

"Madame is not like certain other tourists who visit Vezelay," he said, "Madame is not so ignorant as one might suppose, while those others — croyez vous, I have shown the ring to certain imbeciles who not only could not guess for what names the initials stood, but had never even heard of the great Cohgnys. Sheep — calves! Is it possible that human beings can be so idiotic ? ' '

"We know very little more, Quatrevaux," we replied, ' ' beyond the fact that the brother of the great Gaspard de Coligny was, before his excommunication, Abbot of this magnificent Abbey."

"And afterward, Madame. It was not until the Mother Church cast him out that Odet de Coligny troubled himself greatly about Vezelay. Cardinal at sixteen. Archbishop of I know not how m.any wealthy sees, and flattered at Court, he had little use for this lonely fortress. But when he took his stand with the Huguenots and fought by the side of his great brother the Admiral at the battle of St. Denis, and was excommunicated and banished, tracked and betrayed, and in danger of his life — then the monks of Vezelay (who had already been converted to Protestantism by one of their own number, Theodore de Beze) acclaimed their heretic Abbot, and this Abbey became his sure castle of defence.

* ' It was not just on account of his religion, I'm thinking, but because along with that he had shown himself a worthy successor of the old fighting Abbots of Vezelay, for that is the tradition — the Abbey is a citadel, the strongest in this part of Burgundy, and its lords have ever been more expert with the mace than with preaching. Come out on the terrace, Madame, and look at the walls and tell me if Vezelay is not a place to tempt men to be obstinate and to have the courage of their opinions."

Such it was and still is, for the ruins of this citadel Abbey of Vezelay rise on an isolated spur of one of the mountain ranges of the Morvan, lonely and invincible even in their decay, a fortress that a handful of men might still hold against an army.

Invincible the Abbey has always remained through all the storms of war which have swept through Burgundy. Its fighting Abbots were distinguished even before the English invasion, when Hughes de Maison Comte was made prisoner with his men-at-arms at the battle of Poitiers.

It was during this Abbot's imprisonment in England that Vezelay fortified itself still more strongly, that the . massive encircling walls and huge sentinel towers sprang up which enabled its monks to laugh defiance when English Edward III. cavalcaded by

GENERAL VIEW OF VEZELAY.

FORTIFIED GATE, VEZELAY.

their very gates, and which guarded the Abbey inviolate through every subsequent attack.

Knowing as much as this it was pleasant to find an enthusiast in the guide who showed us Vezelay. A Protestant, like many of the descendants of the refugees who sought asylum here during the sixteenth century from the massacres in Lorraine, he had preserved a certain isolation from his Catholic neighbours, and united to great simplicity a dignity of speech and m^ore of intelligence than is usually to be met with in the French peasant. He cherished a positive worship for the memory of Odet de Coligny, and his spirited wife, Elizabeth de Haute ville, and he firmly believed the story which he told us of the heretic Abbot and the noble woman whose love during the last decade of his adventurous life was his guiding star, and, in despite of the doom which dogged his steps and finally overtook him, was also his exceeding great reward.

"It all began in this way, Madame. Odet de Coligny was pacing this terrace one fair evening in June very much as we are doing now — ^looking out on the level champaign which stretched away all green with growing crops and pasture until it met the darker forest-covered hills. The scent of the Annunciation lilies in the Abbey garden was borne to him on the soft air, and the nightingales were singing in the acacias. But his heart was burdened with care, not for himself alone, but' for his hot-headed monks, an obstinate flock, determined to wander far from the fold of the Church with which he was then hoping for reconciliation.

' ' Slowly the sunset faded and a white mist rolled over the plain like the tide of doubt and perplexity which was overwhelming him. He lifted his heart to God, beseeching a sign that he was not forsaken, and suddenly, just above the line of the hill yonder to the northeast, a star glittered, blue as a great sapphire. Other familiar stars wheeled into sight and moved through the heavens, but this strange new one neither rose nor disappeared, but hung low on the horizon, piercing the dark with its steady radiance.

"He gazed at it long and wonderingly, and retired to dream that an angel had lighted it in answer to his prayer. . He awoke in the early morning with this conviction, and opening his casement saw the star still shining, though dawn had brightened the sky above it and other stars were dim, and not till the sun shot up in all its glory did its light entirely go out.

"Now, if the Abbot had known as much as Madame probably does about astronomy, he would have recognised that this was no heavenly body, but even so it might have seemed to him the more miraculous, for through the perplexing days that followed, he was upborne by the thought that the star was a pledge of sustaining grace. Night after night he sought and found it. Its pure calm beam entered his very soul and filled him with celestial peace, helping him to bear his heavy weight of responsibility and to move with serene dignity in the midst of this great crisis of his life.

"The Abbot was returning late one night from a conference with Conde at his brother d'Andelot's Chateau of Tanlay. He was mounted on his white mule Humilite, while his valet Gaucelim jogged behind him, and it was an unspeakable consolation as he neared Vezelay to see that his star was shining calmly above the opposite range of hills.

"'Ave Maria Stella Maris,' he chanted, and Gaucelim followed questioningly the direction of his master's gaze.

lo French Abbeys

'"Do you not see it, Gaucelim?' the Abbot asked, 'my star — lighted by my good angel for my benediction ? '

'"That is no star, my master,' Gaucelim replied, 'but a feu follet, a will-o'-the-wisp sent by the evil one to mislead travellers. I saw it as I was coming back to Vezelay from visiting my sweetheart at Chastellux. It is not in the sky as it appears from this side of the hill, but is a little dancing fire that flutters over the old burial-ground on the Col de Mont Joie. I saw it move from the gate to the little mound in the centre, where stands the old disused lanterne des morts. There it paused, and, as I was curious as to what this might signify, I entered the cemetery and found a tiny taper burning in the glass globe which stands on the stone pillar. But there was no one in the lonely graveyard ; the sexton lives in the valley below and never visits it except to dig a grave. It came over me that some ghoul or ghost had lighted it to work an evil spell on Christians, and I ran up to it and beat out the flame with my hat. When I was half-way down the hill I looked back and I saw that it was lighted again, though I had left no living soul in the burying -ground and no one had passed me on the road.'

The Golden Mystery ii

"Odet de Coligny was not so superstitious as to believe his valet's theory that the lamp in the old lanterne des morts had been lighted by ghosts; the thing must have some natural explanation. Accordingly, late the following afternoon he mounted Humility and rode away alone in the direction of the graveyard on the hill. He found, as Madame will to-day if she takes the trouble to visit the spot, a row of tombs backed against the wall on every side, and the space so fenced in filled with crosses and slabs adorned with wreaths of bead-work, which tinkled elfishly in the evening breeze. In the very centre of the square, with four paths leading up to it, stood the lanterne des morts, a pinnacled pillar with a tiny phare (lighthouse) protected by glass, where in other times a lighted lamp was hung by pious hands. But no one had been buried here for years, the cemetery was remote and the hill steep, and the custom had long fallen into neglect. The shadows deepened and the Abbot was about to turn from the cemetery when suddenly a gleam of light twinkled in one of the tombs. He had only time to step behind a yew tree when the grille grated harshly on its rusted hinges, and a figure clothed in white issued from the sepulchre, holding in one hand a taper floating in a blue glass. The spectre, or maiden, walked rapidly to the lanterne des marts, placed the little light in its niche, and knelt for a moment at the base in prayer. The Abbot stepped impulsively from the shelter of the yew tree with a ' Peace be with you, my daughter.'

"In spite of the words intended to be reassuring, the startled girl fled with a faint cry to the tomb from which she had appeared, and closed the iron gate behind her. Through its bars the Abbot could see that the tomb had another door at its back, opening through the wall of the cemetery into the park of a country residence. The young woman had neglected, in her haste, to close this door and he could see her fleeing across the greensward toward a small chateau, that of Mont Joie, belonging to the old Comte de Haute ville.

' ' The Abbot smiled. The . lady was evidently a member of the Count's household, and was in the habit of entering the cemetery by the family tomb to tend this lantern for the lonely dead, because she herself dreaded the dark. It was a strange result of his discovery that his supposed star was only a lamp lighted by human hands, that its beam still continued to exercise the same sustaining effect upon his spirit. He looked for it each evening, and prayed that its unknown guardian might receive the same comfort in her own troubles which all unwittingly she had ministered to him.

"Why make a long story when what followed is so evident? After that the Abbot was a frequent visitor at the Chateau of Mont Joie — he loved the very name, and found it strangely appropriate— and he met Mademoiselle also at his brother's Chateau of Tanlay, or at Conde's at Noyers, for the Protestant nobility drew together in these troublous times. It was written in heaven that they should belong to each other. When Elizabeth de Haute ville was away from home, Odet de Coligny knew it, for no star beamed for him, and forthwith an ungovernable restlessness possessed him, and he called for Humilite and ambled away to Noyers to visit his dear cousin of Conde: but if Elizabeth were not there, Conde's discussion of politics became to him as the vain patter of the rain upon the eaves, and he felt it incumbent upon him to fare farther to assure himself of the health and well-being of his brother d' Andelot.

' ' She was at Tanlay on the breaking out of the second civil war, and herself buckled on his armour before he set out for the battlefield of St. Denis. D'Andelot was shouting to his brother that his Vezelaian arquebusiers had arrived and were demanding their commander, and that it was time to be off. They had but an instant more together, but in that instant all barriers were swept away like stubble before devouring flame, and Odet de Coligny knew that his excommunication had brought him the greatest blessing of his life,

"The campaign was a short one, and on his return to Tanlay Theodore de Beze, now the Admiral's chaplain, united him to Elizabeth de Hauteville in the little chapel, in the presence of the Coligny family, the Condes, and a few other true and tried friends.

"The marriage was not immediately made public, and Elizabeth returned to the Chateau Mont Joie, to be near her husband and to await certain negotiations which it was believed would put the Protestants on an equal footing with the Romanists. It was at this juncture that the lanterne des morts, at first so piously tended, with no thought of any personal gain, became a means of communication between them. They developed an alphabet of flashes by means of alternately shading and displaying the light and shooting it from different sides of the lantern. Odet, who dabbled in chemistry, gave her a preparation of lime which burned with intense brilliancy and could be seen even on cloudy nights. They could now hold long conversations with each other, and though peasants occasionally noted the shooting beams they universally attributed them to the feux follets, the ghost fires or will-o'-the-wisps.

' ' Soon the Abbot had many serious matters to communicate to his wife. Both Protestants and Catholics were preparing quite openly for the third religious war, the bitterest and longest which had distracted France. The Protestant leaders were encouraged now by messages from Jeanne d'Albret that she would meet them at the first sign of the breaking out of hostilities at La Rochelle with her young son, Henri of Navarre, who burned to serve his first campaign under Gaspard de Coligny.

"The eyes of all France were soon to be fixed on this young hero. Already that serpent of a woman, Catherine de' Medici, recognised him as a powder to be reckoned with, crushed if possible, conciliated if he could not be crushed. He stood very near the throne. If her sons left no heirs he was the next in Hne. Very soon her plots would succeed, and she would marry him to her beautiful daughter, Marguerite de Valois. But while she schemed the Colignys also formed their plans. The one hope for Protestantism in France lay in the intervention of England. If Queen Elizabeth would espouse their cause, the King of France would not dare coerce his subjects of the Reformed Faith. The Virgin Queen was much older than the King of Navarre, then but fifteen, but age does not matter in royal alliances. It was agreed to send an ambassador to offer the Queen of England the hand of Henri of Navarre — and Odet de Coligny was selected as the one who could best perform this mission, and his wife was secretly preparing to accompany him.

"Gaucelim had Coligny 's sumpter mules loaded with necessities for the journey and was at his door with Humilite in the early dawn of the sixth of October, 1569, and the Abbot, bidding farewell to the chosen few who had been informed of his intended mission, was about to set foot in stirrup, when the great alarm-bell of the monastery rang out peal on peal, and the warden came running to tell him that the plain was alive with galloping artillerymen, who were hurriedly drawing up their pieces in a threatening attitude before the gates of the Abbey.

"It was the advance guard of the royal army under General Sansac, which had surprised them. They were in a state of siege, and with the exception of the false varlet Gaucelim, who ran away that night, not so much as a mouse might enter or issue for many weary months from the beleaguered Vezelay.

"It was not so easy a matter to reduce this impregnable Abbey as Sansac had imagined. The monks were courageous, and made many sorties, surprising and inflicting great loss upon their besiegers; though they could not entirely drive them away. But Sansac had come to spend the winter, and he waited for all his battalions to arrive and especially for Marshal Famine, well knowing that the beseiged would fight with less heart when their stomachs were empty.

"He had chosen for his own headquarters the Chateau of Mont Joie because it gave so extended a view of the plain to the east of Vezelay and of the monastery itself. He left the de Hautevilles in possession of the wing nearest the little graveyard, but told them that they must submit for their own safety to certain rules of his making, one of the most important of which was that they must not leave the grounds of the chateau. So they were both his prisoners and his hosts, for he ate at their table.

Elizabeth noted with satisfaction that the guard of the chateau patrolled the outer wall of the cemetery and that her access through the family tomb to the lanterne des mortsw a.s unimpeded. She could still hold communication with her husband, and she established it that night, sending him advices from the enemy's very headquarters. It was a great comfort to her to receive his answering signal, as it was to Odet de Coligny to know that she was unmolested. They cautiously avoided too frequent communication and for a time it was undiscovered.