It is an injustice to Poitiers to approach her by night,as I did some three hours after leaving La Rochelle;for what Poitiers has of best,as they would say at Poitiers,is the appearance she presents to the arriving stranger who puts his head out of the window of the train.I gazed into the gloom from such an aperture before we got into the station,for I remembered the impression received on another occasion;but I saw nothing save the universal night,spotted here and there with an ugly railway lamp.
It was only as I departed,the following day,that Iassured myself that Poitiers still makes something of the figure she ought on the summit of her considerable bill.I have a kindness for any little group of towers,any cluster of roofs and chimneys,that lift themselves from an eminence over which a long road ascends in zigzags;such a picture creates for the moment a presumption that you are in Italy,and even leads you to believe that if you mount the winding road you will come to an old townwall,an expanse of creviced brownness,and pass under a gateway surmounted by the arms of a mediaeval despot.Why I should find it a pleasure,in France,to imagine myself in Italy,is more than I can say;the illusion has never lasted long enough to be analyzed.From the bottom of its perch Poitiers looks large and high;and indeed,the evening I reached it,the interminiable climb of the omnibus of the hotel I had selected,which I found at the station,gave me the measure of its commanding position.This hotel,"magnifique construction ornee de statues,"as the GuideJoanne,usually so reticent,takes the trouble to announce,has an omnibus,and,I suppose,has statues,though Ididn't perceive them;but it has very little else save immemorial accumulations of dirt.It is magnificent,if you will,but it is not even relatively proper;and a dirty inn has always seemed to me the dirtiest of human things,it has so many opportunities to betray itself.
Poiters covers a large space,and is as crooked and straggling as you please;but these advantages are not accompanied with any very salient features or any great wealth of architecture.Although there are few picturesque houses,however,there are two or three curious old churches.Notre Dame la Grande,in the marketplace,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 halfway down the hill of Poitiers,in a quiet and grassgrown place,with an approach of crooked lanes and blank gardenwalls,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 sidechapels,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 SaintJean,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 SaintJean 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 colorless little walls.I call them crude,in spite of their having been baked through by the centuries,only because,although certain rude arches and carvings are let into them,and they are surmounted at either end with a small gable,they have (so far as I can remember)little fascination of surface.Notre Dame is still expressive,still pretends to be alive;but the Temple has delivered its message,and is completely at rest.
It retains a kind of atrium,on the level of the street,from which you descend to the original floor,now uncovered,but buried for years under a false bottom.
A semicircular apse was,apparently at the time of its conversion into a church,thrown out from the east wall.In the middle is the cavity of the old baptismal font.The walls and vaults are covered with traces of extremely archaic frescos,attributed,I believe,to the twelfth century.These vague,gaunt,staring fragments of figures are,to a certain extent,a reminder of some of the early Christian churches in Rome;they even faintly recalled to me the great mosaics of Ravenna.The Temple de SaintJean has neither the antiquity nor the completeness of those extraordinary monuments,nearly the most impressive in Europe;but,as one may say,it is very well for Poitiers.