PÉRIGUEUX

Périgueux is a town the quality of which lies in its possession of two kinds of monuments: one of a sort which you may find scattered up and down throughout western Europe, and particularly throughout France; the other unique, peculiar to the place itself.

What Périgueux has in common with so many other towns is a Roman foundation, or nucleus, and a considerable body of mediæval remains to which one must add one or two very fine bits of the Renaissance. What it has quite peculiar to itself and unlike any other monument I know in the West, is the Church of St. Front, which one does not know whether to call an invasion of the Orient into the heart of France, with no forerunners and no trace of the way by which it came, or a characteristic creation of the Western mind inspired by some vague memory or some fleeting suggestion which that mind had recorded from the architecture of the East.

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Périgueux was Vesona, the capital of a countryside in the hills standing on the bend of a river in the middle of fruitful but wooded country—the great roads pass to the east or to the west of this central tumbled land and not through it. Why it should have been so considerable a centre, first, probably, in independent Gaul, later, certainly, in Roman Gaul, we cannot tell. But the town still bears all the marks of its Roman foundation. It is a true Roman provincial capital, and has rightly given its name to the whole district of the Périgord. The Roman amphitheatre, used as a quarry for so many generations, has still some of the lower courses of its oval wall remaining, though in ruin; one or two arches stand, and the foundations of its ellipse are completely marked out. The trace of the Roman city is still everywhere apparent, and one may say, I think, that only one element of such origin is lacking; one cannot clearly see what it was that made the citadel; there is no defined stronghold site in the whole place. But the Roman air and the Roman tradition remain.

Of the Middle Ages you find examples at every turn, unexpected and striking enough. The late mediæval corner tower of the outer wall stands intact; the houses, which still bear their pointed turrets here and there, the names of the narrower streets, with ogives of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, built into the mass of many older buildings; while the Renaissance has one particularly fine example: some wealthy burgher’s house standing upon the riverside by the end of the chief bridge—as perfect in its miniature way as the things of the Loire. For Périgueux was that which the Revolution has everywhere marred and crippled, a vivid centre of local life; nor would any social reform be of greater advantage to the French to-day than the reorganisation of local freedoms which should give to these provincial capitals a new and vigorous life such as they possessed for so many centuries until the change of a hundred and thirty years ago, clinched as it was by the mathematical genius of Napoleon, centralised and newly ordered all things.

You will find in Périgueux a statue erected to the memory of Montaigne, upon the pedestal of which is a citation from his pen, which citation exactly expresses the pride of the old provincial capitals in their local life:

I would rather be the first man in Périgueux than the second or the third in Paris.

No man feels that to-day!

CATHEDRAL.

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I have said that the peculiar and unique thing about Périgueux was the Church of St. Front; and to discover how special a case it is, how much a thing of its own kind, not to be paralleled anywhere else in the West, consider this: that wherever else you go throughout Gaul, you find the regular plan of the old Roman Church changing with the early Middle Ages into the pointed Gothic and later into the quite new type of the Renaissance. But here the domes are not of Gaul at all, but of the Orient; the domes and the campanile are such as you might never find farther west than Padua or Venice. You say as you first see them that they came thither from the eastern Mediterranean, and that Byzantium was their origin; and you are right. But in the great Church of St. Front you have this second consideration, that the character of the Orient has disappeared. In detail, in spirit, even in main effect, it is not at all from beyond the Adriatic; it is rather as though some one had seen the things of the eastern Mediterranean once vividly in youth, and had come back with a mere memory of them in his mind, and setting out under that influence to build, had built that which he could not help making a Western thing. Nowhere is there the least trace of a re-entrant curve: nowhere is there that characteristic of all things Oriental, an attempt at lightness. The huge church, in its modern restoration as much as in its original decayed stones, has about it the characteristics of our Western race and culture—strength, density, and the ponderous stuff which is determined upon eternity. It does not lift, it imposes. The five great domes are of massive stones. The high, square bell tower dominating them is of huge square blocks. The ornamentation is insignificant and conventional. The keynote everywhere is the round arch and nothing but the round arch, from which endless combinations are formed merely by imposing variations upon this seemingly monotonous and essentially austere theme.

There is within the church a modern mosaic, not very distinguishable, in front of one of the altars, the picture of an elephant, and under the mosaic in stone letters, ‘_Fortitudo_.’ That is St. Front: a magnificent animal of great purpose, planted for ever upon this slope above the river. As you look up to it from the waterside, it gives something of the effect of a cluster of rocks in its immensity and strength; and, at any rate, there is nothing of its kind elsewhere. It stirs me strangely to sit in that nave and consider the weight that here reposes upon the rock. Here is no facing of marble upon brick, no encrustation, no filling in of parallel walls with rubble, no thin curtain, no drawn-out pilasters. Here is one simple pile of titanic masonry square shafts yards thick, plain semicircular ridges, the width of a palace vault across. All the large semicircular arches are of thick stone, and all the mighty domes as well. Everywhere one scheme of line, the perpendicular, the horizontal, and the semicircular, worked into imposingly symmetrical designs, and everywhere one material and one only.

There has been plenty of blame offered to those who thus decided to renew the old church and to make it weatherproof again after its hundreds of years—so that now you can hardly tell where an old stone is to be found, at any rate, in its outer structure—but, for my part, I am glad that they have acted so. Give it another thousand years, and St. Front will be a witness to a thousand years ago, for it was built before the Crusades. Give it another thousand years after this modern restoration—perhaps our civilisation will not be capable of much more work upon this scale, for we are already in peril of decline—give it another thousand years, and men, forgetting that it was ever restored, will say to themselves, ‘Here is a thing of twenty centuries, stark with the spirit of the Dark Ages, unornamented, enormous, proclaiming certitude, and therefore a just emblem of the spirits which designed it.’

I say men will speak thus. But I am not so sure that all these generations hence there will be enough left of our culture to allow them to use any such language. There is so much of mediæval lore and culture of which we of to-day have been able to understand but a little, that it is only reasonable to expect the next thousand years to obscure the vistas of the past as callously as have the two centuries just ended. It is more likely that those men of the future will speak of such things as the ‘work of the ancients’ and will worship them without any recollections of their origins.