France and the Republic: A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces During the 'Centennial' Year 1889Hurlbert, William Henry
History
France and the Republic: A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces During the 'Centennial' Year 1889
Hurlbert, William Henry
France -- Description and travel; France -- Politics and government -- 1870-1940; Republicanism -- France
The city of Aire-sur-la-Lys itself, like St.-Omer, shows traces still of
its connection with Flanders and with Spain. I do not know if it is true
of Aire as M. Lauwereyns de Roosendaele, writing about Jacqueline
Robins, declares it to be of St.-Omer, that there are people there, even
now, who think of the days of the Spanish rule as the 'good old times.'
But there is a certain Castilian stateliness about the older buildings
of Aire; and the portals of the larger residences, leading from the
street into charming secluded courts, gay with trees and flowers, remind
one of the zaguans of the Andalusian houses. Very Spanish, too, is the
Jesuit Church, despite some extraordinary decorations due to the zeal of
its more recent possessors.
The Flemish past of the city is commemorated especially by a very
remarkable little building known as the Corps de Garde, and by certain
portions of the Church of St.-Pierre.
Aire formerly had a cathedral, but during the worst period of the Terror
that exemplary ruffian, Joseph Lebon of Arras, the unfrocked priest, who
organised pillage and massacre throughout the Pas-de-Calais, frightened
the good people of Aire into a frenzy of destruction and devilry. The
Church of St.-Pierre was then a collegiate church, but it was turned
over to the worship of the Supreme Being invented by Robespierre,
desecrated and defaced and left in a deplorable state. It had already
suffered, like so many other churches all over France and England, from
the ingenious 'restorers' of the eighteenth century, who have left their
sign-manual on the upper part of the edifice and on the mass of a huge
organ loft which crushes and disfigures the main entrance. The greater
part of the building is of the fifteenth century; and it has been
restored within our own times as tastefully and effectively as in the
circumstances was possible, under the supervision and in part, I
believe, at the cost of a devoted and conscientious curate, a member of
a Scotch family long fixed in Artois, the Abbe Scott, who took charge of
the church at the end of the reign of Charles X. and who now lies buried
in the building he did so much to preserve. It is a very considerable
church, measuring three hundred feet in length and a hundred-and-twenty
in width; with a height of seventy feet in the main nave. The ogival
windows are filled with rich, stained glass; all the ancient monuments
which escaped the fury of 1793 have been excellently restored, and the
church bears witness in its condition to the active piety of the
faithful of Aire.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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