The Cathedrals of Northern FranceMansfield, M. F. (Milburg Francisco)
History
The Cathedrals of Northern France
Mansfield, M. F. (Milburg Francisco)
Cathedrals -- France; France -- Description and travel
Rabida's "Bretagne" states that there are "nombreux des Anglais a St.
Servan, des jeunes gens vivant dans les pensions brittaniques--des
familles venant l'ete faire en Bretagne une cure d'economies pour
l'hiver." Continuing, this discerning author says: "Bathers, bicyclists,
golfists, promenaders, and excursionists abound." Better then let them
hold forth here to their hearts' content; there is little that the lover
of churches will gain from what remains to-day of the town's former
Cathedral of St. Pierre.
XII
TREGUIER
This old cathedral city, at the junction of two small streamlets, a
short distance from the sea, lies perhaps a dozen miles away from the
nearest railway. With St. Pol de Leon and St. Brieuc it is, in local
characteristics and customs alike, a something apart from any other
community in northern France. The Bretons are commonly accredited as
being a most devout race, and certainly devotion could take no more
marked turn than the many evidences here to be seen in this "land of
Calvaries." St. Brieuc is a bishopric, suffragan of Rennes, whose
cathedral is a hideous modern structure of the early nineteenth century
quite unworthy as a shrine; but Treguier's power waned with the
Revolution. Its fourteenth-century church, however, is sufficiently
remarkable by reason of its situation and surroundings, none the less
than in its fabric, to warrant a deviation from well-worn roads in
order to visit it. Chiefly of a late period, it possesses in the Tour de
Hasting, named after the Danish pirate (though why seems obscure), which
enfolds the north transept, a work of the best eleventh-century class.
This should place the church, at once, within the scope of the
designation of a "transition" type. In this tower the windows and
pilasters are of the characteristic round variety of the period. The
south porch is the most highly developed feature as to Mediaeval style,
but the attraction lies mainly in its ensembled massiveness, with its
two sturdy towers and a ridiculously spired south _clocher_. Beyond a
certain grimness of fabric the church fails, not a little, to impress
one with even simple grandeur, even when one takes into consideration
the charms of its florid but firmly designed cloister, which, with the
church itself, is classed by the _Departement des Beaux Arts_ as one of
the twenty-three hundred "_Monumentes Historiques_." Nevertheless, the
building proves more than ordinarily gratifying, though by no stretch of
the imagination could it be classed as grand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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