A Tour Through Old ProvenceForrest, A. S. (Archibald Stevenson)
History
A Tour Through Old Provence
Forrest, A. S. (Archibald Stevenson)
Provence (France) -- Description and travel
The church is lit entirely from the dome, and the light that streams
down from the eight windows above the choir is hardly sufficient to
penetrate into the five deep vaulted bays of the nave. The style of the
whole interior, for want of a better name, is called Romanesque, a style
of the transition period between the rigid simplicity of the Roman times
and the flowing ornamentation of the Middle Ages. Many of the most
cherished monuments of the Cathedral were desecrated, pillaged, and
destroyed during the Revolution, Spanish prisoners were lodged in it,
and generally it was about as badly used as any of the religious
buildings in Provence.
It, however, still retains the fine marble chair which is assumed to be
the ancient Papal throne, with the lion of St. Mark and the ox of St.
Luke carved in deep relief on either side of it.
In the small chapel to the right of the choir stands the lovely tomb of
Pope John XXII., an excellent piece of fourteenth-century pointed Gothic
work which suffered much mutilation during the Revolution, when it was
dislodged from its place and the statue of its occupant stolen together
with the statuettes that adorned the niches round its base. The tomb was
restored in the middle of the last century, and is now at rest in its
original position within the little chapel founded by John XXII.
himself. It is a work of great beauty, of slender spires and delicate
mouldings, of pillared niches with finely pierced canopies, of tapering
columns and richly crocketed and perforated gables: a monument all too
elegant for the mentally and physically deformed Pontiff to whose memory
it is erected.
John XXII. was a man of humblest origin, Jacques d’Euse by name, born in
1244 at Euse. Son of a shoemaker, he rose to the most elevated position
of his time; his talents, opportunities, and craftiness combining to
bring about his elevation to the Papal Chair. Superstitious and cruel,
he stooped to methods of revenge that match in diabolic ferocity the
most sanguinary reprisals of the buccaneers. One of his clergy, a
bishop, was by his command flayed alive and torn to pieces by wild
horses.
In his later years John got into sore trouble with the theological
authorities by promulgating the heretical doctrine “that the Saints at
death fell asleep and did not enjoy the beatific vision till after the
resurrection.” Whether this was a genuine conviction with him or no, he
was forced by the religious opinion of his contemporaries to make a
semblance of retracting it, but his monument seems to suggest that he
believed it was to be his only resting-place until the last great day.
His religious intolerance brought the Papacy into grave disrepute, but
his grasping avarice greatly benefited its treasury, for at his death it
was found that he had amassed for it eighteen millions of gold florins
in bullion and about seven millions in plate and jewels.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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