re two or three curious old
churches. Notre Dame la Grande, in the market-place, a small romanesque
structure of the twelfth century, has a most interesting and venerable
exterior. Composed, like all the churches of Poitiers, of a light brown
stone with a yellowish tinge, it is covered with primitive but ingenious
sculptures, and is really an impressive monument. Within, it has lately
been daubed over with the most hideous decorative painting that was
ever inflicted upon passive pillars and indifferent vaults. This
battered yet coherent little edifice has the touching look that resides
in everything supremely old; it has arrived at the age at which such
things cease to feel the years; the waves of time have worn its edges to
a kind of patient dulness; there is something mild and smooth, like the
stillness, the deafness, of an octogenarian, even in its rudeness of
ornament, and it has become insensible to differences of a century or
two. The cathedral interested me much less than Our Lady the Great, and
I have not the spirit to go into statistics about it. It is not
statistical to say that the cathedral stands half-way down the hill of
Poitiers, in a quiet and grass-grown _place_, with an approach of
crooked lanes and blank garden-walls, and that its most striking
dimension is the width of its facade. This width is extraordinary, but
it fails, somehow, to give nobleness to the edifice, which looks within
(Murray makes the remark) like a large public hall. There are a nave and
two aisles, the latter about as high as the nave; and there are some
very fearful modern pictures, which you may see much better than you
usually see those specimens of the old masters that lurk in glowing
side-chapels, there being no fine old glass to diffuse a kindly gloom.
The sacristan of the cathedral showed me something much better than all
this bright bareness; he led me a short distance out of it to the small
Temple de Saint-Jean, which is the most curious object at Poitiers. It
is an early Christian chapel, one of the earliest in France; originally,
it would seem--that is, in the sixth or seventh century--a baptistery,
but converted into a church while the Christian era was still
comparatively young. The Temple de Saint-Jean is therefore a monument
even more venerable than Notre Dame la Grande, and that numbness of age
which I imputed to Notre Dame ought to reside in still larger measure in
its crude and colourless little walls. I call them c