It was a splendid starlight night;the stillness of a sleeping ville de province was over everything;I had the whole place to myself.I turned to my right,at the top of the street,where presently a short,vague lane brought me into sight of the cathedral.I approached it obliquely,from behind;it loomed up in the darkness above me,enormous and sublime.It stands on the top of the large but not lofty eminence over which Bourges is scattered,a very good position,as French cathedrals go,for they are not all so nobly situated as Chartres and Laon.On the side on which I approached it (the south)it is tolerably well exposed,though the precinct is shabby;in front,it is rather too much shut in.These defects,however,it makes up for on the north side and behind,where it presents itself in the most admirable manner to the garden of the Archeveche,which has been arranged as a public walk,with the usual formal alleys of the jardin francais.I must add that I appreciated these points only on the following day.As I stood there in the light of the stars,many of which had an autumnal sharpness,while others were shooting over the heavens,the huge,rugged vessel of the church overhung me in very much the same way as the black hull of a ship at sea would overhang a solitary swimmer.It seemed colossal,stupendous,a dark leviathan.
The next morning,which was lovely,I lost no time in going back to it,and found,with satisfaction,that the daylight did it no injury.The cathedral of Bourges is indeed magnificently huge;and if it is a good deal wanting in lightness and grace it is perhaps only the more imposing.I read in the excellent handbook of M.Joanne that it was projected "des 1172,"but commenced only in the first years of the thirteenth century."The nave"the writer adds,"was finished tant bien que mal,faute de ressources;the facade is of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in its lower part,and of the fourteenth in its upper."The allusion to the nave means the omission of the transepts.The west front consists of two vast but imperfect towers;one of which (the south)is immensely buttressed,so that its outline slopes forward,like that of a pyramid,being the taller of the two.If they had spires,these towers would be prodigious;as it is,given the rest of the church,they are wanting in elevation.There are five deeply recessed portals,all in a row,each surmounted with a gable;the gable over the central door being exceptionally high.Above the porches,which give the measure of its width,the front rears itself,piles itself,on a great scale,carried up by galleries,arches,windows,sculptures,and supported by the extraordinarily thick buttresses of which I have spoken,and which,though they embellish it with deep shadows thrown sidewise,do not improve its style.