Passant,ne fais icy de bruit,Et garde bien qu'il ne s'eveille,Car voicy la premiere nuit,Que le Pauvre Scarron sommeille."There is rather a quiet,satisfactory place in front of the cathedral,with some good "bits"in it;notably a turret at the angle of one of the towers,and a very fine,steeproofed dwelling,behind low walls,which it overlooks,with a tall iron gate.This house has two or three little pointed towers,a big,black,precipitous roof,and a general air of having had a history.There are houses which are scenes,and there are houses which are only houses.The trouble with the domestic architecture of the United States is that it is not scenic,thank Heaven!and the good fortune of an old structure like the turreted mansion on the hillside of Le Mans is that it is not simply a house.It is a person,as it were,as well.It would be well,indeed,if it might have communicated a little of its personality to the front of the cathedral,which has none of its own.Shabby,rusty,unfinished,this front has a romanesque portal,but nothing in the way of a tower.
One sees from without,at a glance,the peculiarity of the church,the disparity between the romanesque nave,which is small and of the twelfth century,and the immense and splendid transepts and choir,of a period a hundred years later.Outside,this end of the church rises far above the nave,which looks merely like a long porch leading to it,with a small and curious romanesque porch in its own south flank.The transepts,shallow but very lofty,display to the spectators in the place the reach of their two clerestory windows,which occupy,above,the whole expanse of the wall.The south transept terminates in a sort of tower,which is the only one of which the cathedral can boast.Within,the effect of the choir is superb;it is a church in itself,with the nave simply for a point of view.As Istood there,I read in my Murray that it has the stamp of the date of the perfection of pointed Gothic,and Ifound nothing to object to the remark.It suffers little by confrontation with Bourges,and,taken in itself,seems to me quite as fine.A passage of double aisles surrounds it,with the arches that divide them supported on very thick round columns,not clustered.
There are twelve chapels in this passage,and a charming little lady chapel,filled with gorgeous old glass.
The sustained height of this almost detached choir is very noble;its lightness and grace,its soaring symmetry,carry the eye up to places in the air from which it is slow to descend.Like Tours,like Chartres,like Bourges (apparently like all the French cathedrals,and unlike several English ones)Le Mans is rich in splendid glass.The beautiful upper windows of the choir make,far aloft,a sort of gallery of pictures,blooming with vivid color.It is the south transept that contains the formless image a clumsy stone woman lying on her back which purports to represent Queen Berengaria aforesaid.
The view of the cathedral from the rear is,as usual,very fine.A small garden behind it masks its base;but you descend the hill to a large place de foire,adjacent to a fine old pubic promenade which is known as Les Jacobins,a sort of miniature Tuileries,where Istrolled for a while in rectangular alleys,destitute of herbage,and received a deeper impression of vanished things.The cathedral,on the pedestal of its hill,looks considerably farther than the fairground and the Jacobins,between the rather bare poles of whose straightly planted trees you may admire it at a convenient distance.I admired it till I thought I should remember it (better than the event has proved),and then I wandered away and looked at another curious old church,NotreDamedelaCouture.This sacred edifice made a picture for ten minutes,but the picture has faded now.I reconstruct a yellowishbrown facade,and a portal fretted with early sculptures;but the details have gone the way of all incomplete sensations.
After you have stood awhile in the choir of the cathedral,there is no sensation at Le Mans that goes very far.For some reason not now to be traced,Ihad looked for more than this.I think the reason was to some extent simply in the name of the place;for names,on the whole,whether they be good reasons or not,are very active ones.Le Mans,if I am not mistaken,has a sturdy,feudal sound;suggests something dark and square,a vision of old ramparts and gates.Perhaps I had been unduly impressed by the fact,accidentally revealed to me,that Henry II.,first of the English Plantagenets,was born there.Of course it is easy to assure one's self in advance,but does it not often happen that one had rather not be assured?
There is a pleasure sometimes in running the risk of disappointment.I took mine,such as it was,quietly enough,while I sat before dinner at the door of one of the cafes in the marketplace with a bitteretcuracao(invaluable pretext at such an hour!)to keep me company.I remember that in this situation there came over me an impression which both included and excluded all possible disappointments.The afternoon was warm and still;the air was admirably soft.The good Manceaux,in little groups and pairs,were seated near me;my ear was soothed by the fine shades of French enunciation,by the detached syllables of that perfect tongue.There was nothing in particular in the prospect to charm;it was an average French view.
Yet I felt a charm,a kind of sympathy,a sense of the completeness of French life and of the lightness and brightness of the social air,together with a desire to arrive at friendly judgments,to express a positive interest.I know not why this transcendental mood should have descended upon me then and there;but that idle halfhour in front of the cafe,in the mild October afternoon,suffused with human sounds,is perhaps the most definite thing I brought away from Le Mans.