MEAUX is a beautifully situated little town on the banks of the Marne some thirty miles from Paris, on the way to the Champagne country. Its general appearance can best be gathered from the delightful public promenade along the river-side which is entered immediately on the right of the station. The Cathedral dates back to the early thirteenth century, but very shortly after it was finished, either owing to the work of construction being hurried or to the foundations being insecure, large cracks and actual shifting of the masonry declared themselves, and a great deal of remodelling and alterations became necessary. The vaulting and first stage of the choir aisles—or triforium ambulatory—were removed, the aisles being thereby doubled in height. The choir elevation is a very beautiful expression of thirteenth-century design. The transept is short, and has a large rose window and a richly-decorated portal.

It is said that at one time, namely in the thirteenth century, architects conceived the idea of covering the walls on the inside of the porch with some vast design of decoration, by which the colour poured into the church through the large rose-window should be enhanced by great spaces of painted wall-surface. This conception, however, was very short-lived, and towards the end of the century painted subjects were confined almost entirely to the windows; and the internal decoration of the revers of the porches was conceived, as at Meaux, more in an architectural spirit with pilasters, arcading, etc., as motives, rather than with features suggested by the painter’s art.

Meaux as well as LÂon, Soissons, Beauvais, Noyon and other towns in the district felt the effects of the Jacquerie revolts in the thirteenth century. Indeed, many of the ladies who suffered from the horrors of the persecution at Beauvais fled at first to Meaux to escape the fury of the rebels; and once having got within the town, they did not dare to leave it, so that to all intents and purposes they were prisoners within its walls. Throughout the whole district bands of robbers and furious peasants infested the roads or lay in ambush to catch the unwary, and it was thus very dangerous to go from one town to another, even under an armed escort. Hearing of the plight of these ladies in Meaux, among whom were the Duchesses of OrlÉans and Normandy, the Earl of Foix and the Captal de Buch resolved to go to their aid, and set out forthwith from ChÂlons, to find a great host of the peasantry also bound for the same place. The rebels had heard that Meaux was chiefly inhabited by refugee women and children, also that it contained a great deal of treasure; and they were now flocking down every road, from Valois, from Beauvoisie and from Paris, towards the little town upon the Marne. Foix and his company were received with the utmost joy, for the peasants had already begun to fill the streets and to do what damage they could, and the ladies were naturally in great alarm. “But when these banditti perceived such a troop of gentlemen, so well equipped, sally forth to guard the market-place, the foremost of them began to fall back. The gentlemen then followed them, using their lances and swords. When they felt the weight of their blows, they, through fear, turned about so fast, they fell one over the other. All manner of armed persons then rushed out of the barriers, drove them before them, striking them down like beasts, and clearing the town of them, for they kept neither regularity nor order, slaying so many that they were tired. They flung them in great heaps into the river. In short, they killed upwards of seven thousand. Not one would have escaped if they had chosen to pursue them further.”

MEAUX
MEAUX

Another siege famous in the annals of Meaux is that during the wars of Henry V., when the English king encamped before the town in October, 1421, and set engines to batter down the gates and walls, having entrenched his own army meanwhile in a strong position between hedges and ditches. “The King of England,” Monstrelet tells us, “was indefatigable in the siege of Meaux, and having destroyed many parts of the walls of the market-place, he summoned the garrison to surrender themselves to the King of France and himself, or he would storm the place. To this summons they replied that it was not yet time to surrender, on which the King ordered the place to be stormed. The assault continued for seven or eight hours in the most bloody manner; nevertheless, the besieged made an obstinate defence, in spite of the great numbers that were attacking them. Their lances had been almost all broken, but in their stead they made use of spits, and fought with such courage that the English were driven back from the ditches, which encouraged them much.” This state of affairs lasted for six months; the garrison of Meaux, who seem to have behaved all through with the utmost gallantry, were in hopes of relief from the Dauphin, but at the end of April, finding further resistance impossible, they gave themselves up into the hands of Henry. A treaty was set on foot whereby, “on the 11th day of May, the market-place and all Meaux were to be surrendered into the hands of the kings of France and England.” The leaders were made prisoners of war, and the chief offender, the bastard of Vaurus, who “had in his time hung many a Burgundian and Englishman,” was beheaded and hung as a warning on a tree outside the walls of the town. King Henry himself—adds the French chronicler—“was very proud of this victory, and entered the place in great pomp, and remained there some days with his princes to repose and solace himself, having given orders for the complete reparation of the walls that had been so much damaged by artillery at the siege.”

Meaux is of course notably associated with Bossuet, the famous preacher, who was appointed to its bishopric in 1681. The study and garden where he wrote many of his sermons are still shown among his other memorials in the ÉvÊchÉ, near the Cathedral.

THE OLD MILLS AT MEAUX
THE OLD MILLS AT MEAUX

“Dans les choses nÉcessaire, l’unitÉ; dans les douteuses, la libertÉ; dans tous les cas, la charitÉ.” In these few words one may look for the keynote of Bossuet’s whole life. Temperate in all things, yet possessed with an eloquence more moving, it was said, than that of any man since the days of the Christian Fathers, and employed always in the cause of the Church he loved so well, the “Aigle de Meaux” well deserves his place among the greatest ecclesiastics France has ever known, and France, just at this time, was rich in ecclesiastical genius. There was FÉnÉlon at Cambrai and Mascaron at Tulle, there were Massillon and Bourdaloue, Arnauld and Fleury—all of them men of note, both in the pulpit and in the world of books; but Bossuet stands out before them all.

He made an early entrance into the cultivated world, preaching his first sermon, upon a subject chosen at random, in the salon of the HÔtel Rambouillet, when hardly out of his teens; and the Marquis de FeuquiÈres, who had introduced him into this society of PrÉcieuses, soon found reason to be proud of his protÉgÉ. The young man was destined to go on as he had begun; a few more years saw him established as Canon of Metz, the close friend of CondÉ and of the Calvinist Paul Ferri, with whom he never tired of disputing theological questions in a perfectly amicable spirit, acting up to his maxim of “liberty in doubtful things”; and finally his reputation brought him to Paris, where he preached during Lent, 1656, and brought before the world the sermon as he created it, purified from the profanities of an immoral age, strengthened by his steadfast simplicity, and quickened by the fire of his eloquence. Bossuet found that in spite of himself his fame as an orator—a fame after which he had never striven—was firmly established in the capital, and after he had preached before the king in the chapel of the Louvre his success was practically assured. Honours and dignities came fast upon him; he became Bishop of Condom, and in the following year (1670) was entrusted with the education of the Dauphin, while the AcadÉmie FranÇaise opened its doors to his genius, and in 1681 he was appointed to the See of Meaux. Hardly had Bossuet settled down, however, in the quiet little ÉvÊchÉ, with its pleasant green garden, than he was called out again into the world of noise and controversy. In 1682 Louis XIV. convoked the famous assembly of clergy to discuss the breach which had lately disclosed itself between the State of France and the Papacy. The king contended for the right of patronage over any vacant sees or benefices, claiming that so long as they remained unoccupied, their revenues fell due to the Crown; and called together the clergy of the realm to uphold his right and to draw up a code of rules that should set a line between spiritual and temporal authority. Bossuet preached the sermon which was to open the Convocation; and his clear practical sense and eloquent denunciation of the encroachments of the Papacy destroyed the remnants of Pope Innocent’s power in France. He summed up the case in four clauses. First, “That the Pope has no temporal power over kings”; secondly, “That his spiritual authority is inferior to that of a general assembly”; thirdly, “That, in consequence, the use of this authority ought to be regulated by the canons of the Church and by customs generally approved”; and last, “That the papal decision on matters of faith is only infallible by consent of the Church.” Thus did Bossuet establish the privileges and the liberty of the Gallican Church.

As soon as possible the great bishop disengaged himself from the affairs of the nation, and was occupied, not in gaining fresh honours, but with the care of his diocese. The picture of his last years is a graceful and pleasant one, and shows the great man leading the life of a simple country priest; writing sermons in his study or garden, directing his convents, schools and hospitals, visiting his poor and sick people, even catechising the children of Meaux; and at times retiring into the seclusion of the monastery of La Trappe, to gather strength and courage for the better fulfilment of his pastoral duties.

The old timber water-mills behind the Town Hall are the outward sign of one of the great industries of Meaux. They have withstood for many generations the rushing torrents of the Marne, which threaten to undermine the starlings and timbers of the mills and to engulf them in its waters. These for some reason or other are almost as green as the outpourings of the Rhone at Geneva. It would be interesting to know if Meaux possessed any feudal right over the neighbouring peasants, compelling them to come and wait their turn at the mill, and pay whatever price might be demanded, and forbidding them, even in times of heavy yield, to get their corn ground elsewhere. Such oppressions actually existed in the villages attached to the great chÂteaux, where the seigneur had a right to keep huge rabbit-warrens and pigeon-houses, whose inhabitants devastated, year in, year out, the surrounding crops of the peasants.

The little city of Senlis, with its girdle of Roman walls and watch towers, is one of the most attractive places within reach of Paris. It is situated about thirty-five miles to the northeast, in the midst of the great forest land of Hallatte and Chantilly. Until the dissolution of the Carlovingian empire Senlis enjoyed the privileges of a royal residence, and, indeed, down to the time of Henri de Navarre the kings of France continued to visit the city, and were lodged in a castle built on the site of the Roman prÆtorium. The ruins of this castle, some of which date from the eleventh century, may still be seen among the attractions of Senlis; and of even greater interest are the Roman ramparts which surround the town and which were built when it still held its position as the township of the Silvanectes. These walls, “twenty-three feet high and thirteen feet thick, are, with those of St. Lizier (AriÈge) and Bourges, the most perfect in France. They enclosed an oval area 1024 feet long from east to west and 794 feet wide from north to south. At each of the angles formed by the broken lines of which the circuit of 2756 feet is composed, stands or stood a tower; numbering originally twenty-eight and now only sixteen, they are semicircular in plan, and up to the height of the wall are unpierced. The Roman city had only two gates; the present number is five.”

As one approaches the town from the station through the boulevard, the Renaissance tower of Saint Pierre and the beautiful flÈche of the Cathedral stand right ahead. The first of these two churches is now desecrated and converted into a large market hall, having previously been used as cavalry barracks. It is short and broad, having only three bays to the nave, two to the choir, and an apse of three lights; but it has one very marked feature, which is also seen, though to a lesser extent, in the Cathedral of Saint Gatien at Tours—the axis of the choir trends northwards, making with the nave an angle of some seventeen to twenty degrees. There is a certain amount of early Gothic work worth notice, but the prevailing style is Flamboyant; in the two last side chapels of the choir some curious vaulting is to be found, resembling rude attempts at fan tracery with heavy keyed pendants.

The Cathedral of Notre-Dame covers during its construction a period of some four hundred years, and is probably only part of what was originally designed. The glory of the building is the beautiful spire to the south-west tower. Rising from a base octagonal in plan, the angles are lightened by detached pillars supporting a pyramidal canopy; the upper dormer windows are high and lancet-shaped, with the back of their gables sloping downwards and forming a sharp angle with the richly crocketed spire. Internally the church is a mixed product of the Transition and Flamboyant architects; the large clerestory windows may have been rebuilt later when the vaulting was constructed. In the ambulatory behind the altar the twelfth-century capitals remain, showing archaic Romanesque sculpture; and traces of this early work are to be found in many other parts of the building. The large west door is of the Chartres type; in the tympanum are the figures of our Lord and the Virgin Mary, with a representation of the resurrection of the dead; some of the figures are flying upwards, while others are being tenderly awakened by angels swinging censers.

SENLIS
SENLIS

Long before the train arrives at Beauvais the Cathedral is seen like a huge fortress in the distance, overtopping the quiet, modest landscape of the ThÉrain valley; and its great size is more acutely felt as one approaches its south doorway along the streets of little white-painted houses and shop-fronts. The immediate effect of the interior of this marvellous building is startling. Whatever emotion has been aroused in the architectural traveller by the glories of Amiens, Chartres, or Bourges, is for the moment entirely eclipsed by the first view of the choir of Beauvais, whose clerestory windows soar upwards with such a restless vitality as almost to pierce the vaulting. These choir bays look like shafts of masonry so elongated, so delicate, that one trembles for their stability. And this sensation gradually increases. The sense of strength and repose gives way to a feeling that this great “church in the air” is struggling against dissolution, and that its vast flying buttresses are only just sufficient to withstand the tremendous strain that is constantly being exerted on the building. It is only fair, however, to the architect of Beauvais choir to say that he was hampered by the want of means and probably also by the insufficient site assigned to him for the planning out of his Cathedral. Had he worked under more favourable conditions he would have accomplished “an incomparable work,” for it is not, as Viollet-le-Duc remarks, “the theory” that was fatal to its construction, but the execution, which is poor and mediocre. The lesson learnt from the Beauvais architect’s temerity on the one hand, and from his beautiful disposition of plan on the other, was of the greatest value to the designers of other Cathedrals executed at the same time—notably that of Cologne, which was constructed more or less contemporaneously with Beauvais.

West of the Cathedral is the Basse Œuvre, a building which Fergusson describes as an example of the Latin style, and a stepping-stone from the Roman basilica to the Gothic church. This intermediate style is noticeable in the Romanesque church of S. Vicenzo alle Fontane in Rome, where the bay is divided simply into pier arch and clerestory, showing in very simple terms an arrangement nearly approaching to Gothic.

Of the history of Beauvais there is but little to be said, for it possesses none worthy of the name, or rather—since every town must have a story of some kind—none which associates itself to any great degree with outside events. It was established in the Roman era as the capital of the Bellovaci, under the name of CÆsaromagus; it was Christianised by Saint Lucian, who for his good works suffered martyrdom within the town; and later on it became the head of a countship. This dignity, however, Beauvais did not long retain, for in the tenth century the temporal power of the count was vested in the spiritual power of the bishop, and any celebrity which the town may have attained was henceforth of purely ecclesiastical order.

It did, however, play a prominent part in the peasant revolt known as the “Jacquerie” in the fourteenth century. A body of peasants, “without any leader,” says Froissart, rose up with the intent to exterminate the upper classes—a forerunner of the Revolution—and perpetrated the most horrible atrocities upon every knight and noble they could lay hands on in Beauvais. “They said that the nobles of the kingdom of France, knights and squires, were a disgrace to it, and that it would be a very meritorious act to destroy them all; to which proposition every one assented as a truth, and added, shame befall him who should be the means of preventing the gentlemen from being wholly destroyed.”

When the revolt grew, instead of being crushed, the “gentlemen of Beauvoisie” were forced to send for help out of France, since matters were come to such a pass that “in the bishoprics of Noyon, LÂon and Soissons, there were upwards of one hundred castles and good houses of knights and squires destroyed.” Aid soon came, notably from Flanders, Hainault and Navarre, the king of Navarre especially signalising himself by putting three thousand rebels to death in one day. “When they were asked,” says the chronicler, “for what reason they acted so wickedly, they replied they knew not, but they did so because they saw others do it; and they thought that by this means they should destroy all the nobles and gentlemen in the world.”

Edward III. besieged Beauvais in 1346, but without success, and it only fell into English hands in 1420 through the treachery of Bishop Pierre Cauchon, whose name also appears as one of the witnesses against Joan of Arc at Rouen eleven years later. The memory of this latter offence so preyed upon his mind that when he became bishop of Lisieux—having presumably been ejected from the see of Beauvais—Couchon sought to expiate his sin by dedicating a chapel to the Virgin in the Cathedral of Saint Pierre.

Hearing of the siege of CompiÈgne by the Burgundian forces, Joan had left Charles’s army, which was still dawdling by the Loire in a state of inaction, and marched off to CompiÈgne to relieve his party there. Arrived without the town, she soon headed a sortie against the Burgundians; they were driven back, and it is probable that the expedition would have been attended by the success which, to do her justice, had up to this moment crowned the efforts of the Maid, had not a body of Englishmen come up unexpectedly between her and the town and driven her into a corner. She was of course speedily captured. As soon as the news reached Paris both the University and the Vicar of the Inquisition demanded her person. Cauchon, however, stood firm. The Maid, he contended, had been captured within the diocese of Beauvais, and he, as the foremost prelate of the English party, claimed the right of putting her on trial; and after having paid to Burgundy 10,000 livres for this right, sent the Maid to Rouen, there to stand on her trial for sorcery, before a court of which Cauchon was president; and this fact alone might reasonably destroy all hope for poor Joan.

Another fourteenth-century bishop of Beauvais brought his diocese before the world in no small degree. Jean de Dormans was not only bishop; he became Chancellor of France, and obtained from Rome the rank of a cardinal, under the title of the Four Crowned Saints. In Paris Dormans endowed a foundation which still bears the name of CollÈge de Beauvais, though what remains of the building serves as barracks, and the light of learning has left its precincts for ever. The old college is now united to its neighbour, the CollÈge de Presle; but the fourteenth-century chapel dedicated to Saint John the Evangelist still stands almost intact, though it, too, has been desecrated, and now serves the use of the military occupiers. Formerly there stood within this chapel six life-size figures, representing three men and three women of the Dormans family, and it is believed that when mediÆval fragments were pieced together to form the chapel of AbÉlard and HÉloise, which is now part of the burial-ground of PÈre-la-Chaise, the figure of one of these ladies of the fourteenth century was used to represent that of HÉloise.

One name there is on the page of their history which the inhabitants of this town remember with a veneration almost equal to that which the OrlÉannais regard Joan of Arc, and whose memory even now receives an annual tribute. It is that of another Jeanne, poor and obscure, who rose to heroism in the moment of her city’s danger, and who, though she did not lead a mighty host to victory nor bring a monarch back to his own, yet saved her city from the encroachments of Burgundy, and gave the women of Beauvais a right to their country’s esteem. The besieging army of Charles the Bold probably never received such a surprise as on that day in the year of grace 1472, when Jeanne Hachette led her concitoyennes through the streets of Beauvais, menaced the foe from the ramparts, and actually bore away with her own hands one of the Burgundian standards. The banner is still kept in the HÔtel-de-Ville; and every year, on the feast of Ste. AngadrÈme, a grand procession marches through the streets, in which the women are given the right of precedence over the men, in memory of the brave deeds of Jeanne and her sisters.