Page:History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 1.djvu/508

 476 FRENCH ARCHITECTURE. Part II. The uses which the various nations of Christendom made of the circular form of building left them by the Romans have been more than once adverted to in this work. The Italians used it almost always standing alone as a tomb-house or as a baptistery; the Germans converted it into a western apse, while sometimes, as at Bonn and elsewhere, they timidly added a porch or nave to it; but the far more frequent practice with the Germans, and also in England, was to build first the circular church for its own sake, as in Italy : then the clergy for their own accommodation added a choir, that they might pray apart from^the people. The French took a different course from all these. They built circular churches like other nations, appar- ently, in eai-ly times at least, Avhicli were intended to stand alone; but in no in- stance do they appear to have applied them as naves, nor to have added choirs to them. On the contrary, the clergy always retained the circular building as the sacred dej)ository of the tomb or relic, the Holy of Holies, and added a straight-lined nave for the people. Of this class was evidently the church which Perpetuus built in the fifth century over the grave of St. Martin at Tours. There the shrine was sur- rounded by seventy-nine pillars arranged in a circular form : the nave was lined by forty-one — twenty on each side, with one in the centre of the west end as in Germany. When the church required re- building in the 11th century (1014?), the architect was evidently hampered by find- ing himself obliged to follow the outline of the old basilica of Perpetuus, and having to labor on the same foundation so as not to disturb either the shrine of the saint or any other place which had become sacred in this, which was the most celebrated and revered of the churches of Gaul. All this is made clear in the plan of the new church (Woodcut No. 341). The arrangement of the circular ]>art and the nave exactly accord with the description of the old church, only that the latter has been considei-ably enlarged according to the fashion of the day. But the juxtaposition of the two shows how nearly the chevet arrangement was completed at that time. Another church, that of Charroux on the Loire, looks as though it had been built in direct imitation of the church of Perpetuus. The ki^:!-^ 342. Chui-eli of Charroux Scale lOU ft. to 1 iu.