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Duc de Nemours, still more highly of the Duc d'Orléans, and said the Comte de Paris was a very promising boy. He regretted the want of an hereditary peerage in France, and the little independence that body possessed in consequence. I remarked the smallness of fortunes: that 60,000 francs a year were thought a good fortune for a peer. He said not fifty peers of France possessed that; many could not keep their carriage. Spoke of the clergy as not high enough in point of acquirements – he did not say their discipline or piety was defective, but that they were not a match in information, ability, and powers of mind, for those opposed to them. Wished the higher classes would send their sons into orders, – a Royal Prince, for instance, would be a good example. The tax on land in France is nearly one-fifth of the produce; very heavy; 200l. a year in land a deputy's qualification. Soon after getting to our inn, which was right opposite the west front of the Cathedral, we attended a Low Mass, and at eight o'clock a chanted Mass: it was a Mass for the dead. The outside of Reims is all that can be conceived of beauty, grandeur, unity of conception, delicacy and boldness of execution; and this, though the one great design of the architect has not been completed, for the four towers of the transepts have had no spires since the great fire of 1491; and the western towers are also without theirs, and so end incompletely, the eye positively requiring them. The design of these towers is very singular; and the skill with which a strength sufficient to support spires 400 feet high is veiled, so as to make the towers appear quite pierced and open, seems to me one of the greatest marvels of architecture. The prototype exists in the four towers of Laon, which have the same design in embryo; but this is so enriched, expanded, and beautified by the architect of Reims, as to become his own work in point of originality, and certainly in grace and boldness not to be surpassed. The superiority of the western front, even over that of Amiens, is very marked – indeed, I think it perfect; and the whole of the rest of the outside of the church reaches nearly the same degree. No words can convey any notion of it. The north-west tower was half covered with scaffolding; for here, as every where, great reparations are going on. To the interior I do not give quite so much praise, though it is still of exceeding grandeur, simplicity, and beauty: perhaps, were all its windows like those of the clerestory, the effect might equal or surpass that of Chartres. The west end is, I think, the finest which I know, bearing in mind Amiens and St. Ouen; in addition to a rose window of exceeding brilliancy, and colouring inexpressible, which, forty feet in diameter, crowns the top, there is a smaller one over the doorway, answering to the deep recess of that matchless portal outside. This is a feature of great beauty, though the glass is far from equalling that of the upper rose. There is happily no organ here, but at the end of the north transept, where it has not quite so much to spoil. The transept is inferior to the rest of the church in style. It was restored after the great fire in 1491; and this part of the church, with the whole of the choir and arrangements of the eastern chapels, struck me as decidedly inferior to Amiens. There is not, indeed, generally the same impression of vastness and wondrous height produced on the mind. The pillars are cylinders with four columns at the corners, like Amiens, very simple and severe; but the strength is not quite enough veiled. We went all round the galleries inside and outside, up the centre belfry, which rises ninety-two steps over the top of the vaulting, with an interval of about ten feet besides. It is a forest of wood, and had once a spire of wood, which since the fire has not been restored; this and the six towers have been covered 'provisoirement en ardoises,' as the guide told us, 'mais ce provisoirement a duré long temps;' indeed, from 1491 to our time, without much chance of being improved. We went up the great towers, and could hardly admire enough the delicacy and boldness of the four corner turrets in open work. The present towers are 240 or 250 feet high; they would, I think, equal or surpass Strasburg and Antwerp, had they spires. The immense quantity of sculpture all over this exterior cannot be conceived, nor the ingenuity with which it is made to serve for decoration. A day is far too short a time to carry off the impression of it. The mind is fatigued and exhausted during many a visit, and is not at ease till it has sufficiently mastered the whole, in order to fix itself for admiration and contemplation on some particular part. It would be a week's good work to see it, and it should be visited once a year by all those who talk of the darkness of the Middle Ages, and the greatness of the nineteenth century, which is sorely taxed to keep in repair what they constructed, and has not sufficient piety to restore a part where the architect's design has been left incomplete. Such parts remain, like the window of Aladdin's palace, to show that a materialising philosophy, with all its improved physical powers, remains at immeasurable distance behind the efforts of faith and piety. M. Cousin should be sent to study truth on his knees in Notre Dame of Amiens, or of Reims.Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
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