At Poitiers, city of St. Hilaire who fought the Arians, is the most glorious window in the world--Christ triumphant on the Cross, and again we walk in procession to the strain of Bishop Fortunatus' hymn, and we read the Church Fathers in Greek and Hebrew in Queen Radegund's cloister. Aquitaine's line of troubadour dukes, passionate sinners, and prodigious repenters lives in every church in the old hill city, from the cathedral wherein Aliénor blended the indigenous art of her own Poitou with the Plantagenet suppleness of her Angevin husband, to the cupola-covered abbatial of St. Hilaire, where her son, Richard the Lion-hearted, was installed as duke.
At Caen we live with the Conqueror and Matilda in their penitential abbey-churches, full of thought and purpose, the architecture of hieratic pre-eminence which Normandy passed on to England. At Coutances, the cathedral walls record the Tancreds, so the people say; close by was the eyrie of that eagle brood who set up kingdoms in Italy and the Orient. At Rouen we mutter with the crowd in the market place that a grievous shame it is to burn a saint as a witch, and in reaction, soon we are to rear monuments whose every line is jubilant freedom. At Rheims we are crowned kings in a cathedral so sumptuous that on coronation days it needed no tapestries to adorn its walls. At Clermont and at Vézelay we don the crusaders' insignia with cries of enthusiasm. The lavish art of Bourges tells of Jacques Coeur's largess, the princely merchant who financed the army that rid France of her invaders, just as clearly as the ducal tombs and imagery at Dijon relate the pageantry of the XV-century Burgundian life. The stones of Pontigny tell of Becket the martyr, whose cause impassioned all Christendom, as many a sculptured group and storied window in France relate, and of another great Englishman, Stephen Langton, who passed from this cloistral peace--dividing the Bible into chapters for us--to the Magna Charta struggle in England. _By architecture we remember._
Until we have seen Albi's aggressive fortress-church what do we really know of the Albigensian heresy, of the disease un-European, antichristian, antisocial, that bred in the precocious civilization of Languedoc? What do we know of that terrible struggle called a crusade, when the greedy barons of the north descended on the Midi (ever brutal and refined), thinking to cure its soul by the sword and with the same blows to carve out for themselves rich principalities? Forever is the story told in the Jacobins' church at Toulouse, in the red cathedral fortress above the Tarn.