"She is alive, she breathes gently," wrote Dom Guéranger, "her silence is at the same time both grief and a prayer." Dom de la Tremblaye asks what Italian master of the Renaissance has rendered faith more profoundly than this Magdalene, whose desolation is closer to a smile of ecstasy than to the contraction of grief. Even the neo-classic XVII century admired this image, and Richelieu wished to transport it to his château in Poitou.
Some fifty years later, while Jean Bougler ruled Solesmes, was made the Burial of the Virgin, whose setting is entirely of the Renaissance, though the imagery remains faithful to the French Gothic spirit. It is said that the monk at Our Lady's feet represents the prior, Jean Bougler (1515-56), who returned to the lord of Sablé the eternal answer of the spiritual to the temporal powers. Accosted one day on the bridge over the Sarthe by the baron, against whom he had just maintained the priory's rights, the irate layman cried out: "Monk, if I did not fear God, I should throw you into the Sarthe." "If you fear God, Monseigneur," replied the prior, "I have nothing to fear."
Out in the night there's an army marching ... Endless ranks of the stars o'er-arching Endless ranks of an army marching ... Measured and orderly, rhythmical, whole, Multitudinous, welded and one ... Out in the night there's an army marching, Nameless, noteless, empty of glory, Ready to suffer, to die, and forgive, Marching onward in simple trust.... Endless columns of unknown men, Endless ranks of the stars o'er-arching.... Out in the night they are marching, marching ... Hark to their orderly thunder-tread! --ALFRED NOYES, _Rank and File_.[173]
In size, if not in name, the church that tops St. Quentin's hill is a cathedral, an achievement of the apogee hour of Gothic fitted to close this group of stately churches. Throughout the World War battles raged round St. Quentin. The saints buried in its crypts, the cloud of witnesses in its window and sculptured groups, listened year after year to the marching millions, marching in the hope that a better world might emerge from the chaos, _ready to suffer and die and forgive_.
St. Quentin has always stood in the path of invading armies. Much of its precious glass was destroyed in 1557, when Philip II of Spain attacked the town on St. Laurence day, and in memory of his victory built the Escorial. The siege of 1870 damaged the city dedicated to Caius Quintinus, the Roman senator's son who evangelized this region where he met a martyr's death. In August of 1914 the invaders passed in swift advance on Paris. When the Marne battle drove them back, they dug themselves into trenches a mile from St. Quentin's suburbs and there, with tragic monotony, the giant battle fluctuated. On August 15, 1917, suddenly, like a candle in the night, St. Quentin's great church flamed up, lighting the country for miles around. The projectiles came from the south where the invaders, not the Allies, were intrenched. From beneath this hill, in April of 1918, started the final desperate thrust toward Paris. Four months later the Allies, taking the offensive, swept all before them, and in October the Germans quitted the city in too great haste to destroy the big church, as the bored holes in every one of its piers would indicate had been their intention. A ghost of its former self is the collegiate of St. Quentin to-day. The venerated crypt, part of which dated from 840, was blown up with gunpowder before the evacuation (1918). The notably good XIII-and XV-century windows are wrecked, and the Flamboyant Gothic Town Hall, close to the church, is a ruin.