Rheims Cathedral

By Pierre Loti

This article by Pierre Loti (Captain Viaud) originally appeared in L'Illustration as the last of a series of three entitled "Visions of the Battle Front," and is translated for The New York Times Current History by Charles Johnston.

TO see it, our legendary and marvellous French basilica, to bid it farewell, before its fall and irremediable crumbling to dust, I had made my military auto make a detour of two hours on my return from completing a service mission.

The October morning was foggy and cold. The hillsides of Champagne were on that day deserted; with their vines with leaves of blackened brown, damp with rain, they seemed all clad in a sort of shining leather. We had also passed through a forest, keeping our eyes alert, our weapons ready, for the possibility of marauding Uhlans. And at last we had perceived the immense form of a church, far off in the mist, rising in all its great height above the plots of reddish squares, which must be the roofs of houses; evidently that was it.

The entrance to Rheims: defences of every kind, barriers of stone, trenches, spiked fences, sentinels with crossed bayonets. To pass, the uniform and accoutrements of a soldier are not enough. We must answer questions, give the pass-words....

In the great city, which I had not visited before, I ask the way to the cathedral, for it is no longer visible; its silhouette which, seen from a distance, so completely dominates everything, as a giant's castle might dominate the dwellings of dwarfs, its high gray silhouette seems to have bent down to hide itself. "The cathedral," the people reply, "at first straight on; then you must turn to the left, then to the right, and so on." And my auto plunges into the crowded streets. Many soldiers, regiments on the march, files of ambulance wagons; but also many chance passers-by, no more concerned than if nothing was happening; even many well-dressed women with prayer-books in their hands, for it is Sunday.

Where two streets cross, there is a crowd before a house, the walls of which have been freshly scratched; a shell fell there, just now, without any useful result, as without any excuse. A mere brutal jest, to say: "You know, we are here!" A mere game, a question of killing a few people, choosing Sunday morning because there are more people in the streets. But, in truth, one would say that this city has completely made up its mind to being under the savage field-glasses ambushed on the neighboring hillsides; these passers-by stop a minute to look at the wall, the marks of the bits of iron, and then quietly continue their Sunday walk. This time it was some women, they tell us, and little girls that this neat jest laid low in pools of blood; they tell us that; and they think no more of it, as if it were a very small thing in days like these.... Now the district becomes deserted; closed houses, a silence, as of mourning. And at the end of a street, the great gray doors appear, the high pointed arches marvellously chiseled, the high towers. Not a sound, and not a living soul on the square where the phantom basilica still sits enthroned, and an icy wind blows there, under an opaque sky.

It still keeps its place as by a miracle, the basilica of Rheims, but so riddled and torn that one divines that it is ready to founder at the slightest shock; it gives the impression of a great mummy, still upright and majestic, but which a mere nothing will turn to ashes. The ground is strewn with precious relics of it. It has been hurriedly surrounded with a solid barrier of white boards, within which its holy dust has formed heaps: fragments of rose-windows, broken piles of stained glass, heads of angels, the joined hands of saints. From the top of the tower to the base, the charred stone has taken on a strange color of cooked flesh, and the holy personages, still upright in rows on the cornices, have been peeled, as it were, by the fire; they no longer have faces or fingers, and, with their human forms, which still persist, they look like the dead drawn up in files, their contours vaguely indicated under a sort of reddish grave-clothes.

We make the circuit of the square without meeting anyone, and the barrier which isolates the fragile and still admirable phantom is everywhere solidly closed. As for the old palace adjoining the basilica, the episcopal palace where the kings of France came to rest on the day of their consecration, it is no longer anything more than a ruin, without windows or roof, everywhere licked and blackened by the flame.

What a peerless jewel it was, this cathedral, still more beautiful than Notre Dame in Paris. More open and lighter, more slender also, with its columns like long reeds, wonderful to be so fragile, and yet to hold firm; a wonder of our French religious art, a masterpiece which the faith of our ancestors had caused to blossom there in its mystic purity, before they came to us from Italy, to materialize and spoil everything, the sensual heaviness of what we have agreed to call the Renaissance....

Oh! the coarse and cowardly and imbecile brutality of those bundles of iron, launched in full flight against the lace-work, so delicate, that had risen confidently in the air for centuries, and which so many battles, invasions, scourges have never dared to touch!...

That great closed house, there, on the square, must be the Archbishop's residence. I try ringing the bell at the entrance to ask the favor of admission to the cathedral. "His Eminence," I am told, "is at mass, but will soon return." If I am willing to wait.... And, while I wait, the priest who receives me relates to me the burning of the episcopal palace: "Beforehand, they had sprinkled the roofs with I know not what diabolical substance; when they then threw their incendiary bombs, the timbers burned like straw, and you saw everywhere jets of green flame, which spread with the noise of fireworks."

In fact, the barbarians had premeditated this sacrilege, and prepared it long ago; in spite of their foolishly absurd pretexts, in spite of their shameless denials, what they wished to destroy here was the very heart of old France; some superstitious fancy drove them to it, as much as their instinct of savages, and this is the task they plunged into desperately, when nothing else in the city, or almost nothing, suffered.

"Could not an effort be made," I said, "to replace the burned roof of the cathedral?—to cover the vaulted roofs again as quickly as possible? For without this they cannot resist the coming winter."

"Evidently," he said, "at the first snows, at the first rains, there is a risk that everything will fall, the more so, as those charred stones have lost their power of resistance. But we cannot even try that, to preserve them a little, for the Germans never take their eyes off us; at the end of their field-glasses, it is the cathedral, always the cathedral; and as soon as a man ventures to appear on a turret, in a tower, the rain of shells immediately begins again. No, there is nothing to be done. It is in the hands of God."

Returning, the prelate graciously gives me a guide, who has the keys of the barrier, and at last I penetrate into the ruins of the cathedral, into the denuded nave, which thus appears still higher and more immense. It is cold there; it is sad enough to make one weep. This unexpected cold, this cold much keener than outside, is, perhaps, what from the first takes hold of you, disconcerts you; instead of the slightly heavy odor which generally fills ancient churches—the vapor of so much incense that has been burned there, the emanations of so many coffins that have been blessed there, of so many generations of men that have crowded there, for agony and prayer—instead of this, a damp and icy wind, which enters rustling through all the crevices of the walls, through the breaches in the stained glass windows and the holes in the vaulted ceilings. Those vaulted roofs, up there, here and there smashed by grapeshot—one's eyes are immediately lifted up by instinct to look at them, one's eyes are, as it were, drawn to them by the up-springing of all these columns, as slender as reeds, which rise in sheaves to sustain them; they have retreating curves of exquisite grace, which seem to have been imagined, so as not to allow the glances sent heavenward to fall back again. One never grows weary of bending one's head back in order to see them, to see the sacred roofs which are about to fall into nothingness; and they are up there also, far up, the long series of almost aerial pointed arches, on which they are supported, pointed arches indefinitely alike from one end of the nave to the other, and which, in spite of their complicated carvings, are restful to follow in their retreating perspective, so harmonious are they.

And it is better to go forward beneath them with raised head, not too carefully looking where one walks, for this pavement, rather sadly sonorous, has recently been soiled and blackened by the charring of human flesh. It is known that, on the day of the fire, the cathedral was full of German wounded, stretched on straw beds which caught fire, and it became a scene of horror worthy of a dream of Dante; all these creatures, whose raw wounds were baked in the flames, dragging themselves, screaming, on their red stumps, to try to reach the narrow doors. One knows also the heroism of the ambulance bearers, priests and nuns, risking their lives in the midst of the bombs, to try to save these hapless brutes, whom their own brother Germans had not even thought of sparing; however, they did not succeed in saving them all; some remained, and were burned to death in the nave, leaving foul clots on the sacred flagstones, where of old processions of kings and queens slowly dragged their ermine mantles, to the music of the great organ and the Gregorian chants....

"Look!" says my guide to me, showing me a large hole in one of the aisles, "that is the work of a shell which they fired at us yesterday evening; then come and see a miracle." And he leads me into the choir, where the statue of Jeanne d'Arc, preserved, one would say, by some special grace, is still there, intact, with eyes of gentle ecstasy.

The most irreparable loss is that of the great stained glass windows, which the mysterious artists of the thirteenth century so religiously composed, in meditation and dream, gathering the saints by hundreds, with their translucent draperies, their luminous halos. There also German scrap-iron rushed in great stupid bundles, crushing everything. The masterpieces, which no one will ever reproduce, have scattered their fragments on the flagstones, forever impossible to separate, the golds, the reds, the blues, whose secret is lost. Ended, the rainbow transparencies, ended, the graceful, naïve attitudes of all these holy people, with their pale little ecstatic faces; the thousands of precious fragments of these stained glass windows which, in the course of centuries, had little by little become iris-tinted like opals, are lying on the ground—where they still shine like jewels....

A whole splendid cycle of our history, which seemed to go on living in this sanctuary, with a life almost terrestrial, though immaterial, has just been plunged suddenly into the abyss of things that are ended, whose very memory will soon perish. The Great Barbarity has passed by, the modern barbarism from beyond the Rhine, a thousand times worse than the ancient, because it is stupidly and outrageously self-satisfied, and, in consequence, fundamental, incurable, final—destined, if it be not crushed, to throw a sinister night of eclipse over the world....

Verily, this Jeanne d'Arc in the choir has very strangely remained, untouched, immaculate, in the midst of the disorder, with not even the slightest scratch on her dress....