ky hill two hundred feet
above the Rhone. Some hundreds of years later the first Christian
missionaries to Gaul landed near the mouth of this river,--Mary the
mother of James, Saint Sara the patron of gypsies, Lazarus, his sister
Martha, and Saint Maximin. Before these storm-tossed Saints lay the fair
and pagan country of Provence, the scene of their future mission; and if
tradition is to be further believed, each went his way, to work mightily
for the sacred cause. Maximin lived in the town that bears his name,
Lazarus became the first Bishop of Marseilles, and Saint Martha ascended
the Rhone as far as Avignon and built near the site of the present
Cathedral an oratory in honour of the Virgin "then living on the earth."
Two early churches, of which this chapel was perhaps a part, were
destroyed in the Saracenic sieges of the VIII century; an inscription in
the porch of the present Cathedral records the very interesting mediaeval
account of its re-building and re-consecration nearly a hundred years
later. It was, so runs the tale, the habit of a devout woman to pray in
the church every night; and after the Cathedral had been finished by the
generous aid of Charlemagne, she happened there at midnight, and
witnessed the descent of Christ in wondrous, shining light. There at the
High Altar, surrounded by ministering angels, he dedicated the Cathedral
to His Mother, Our Lady of Cathedrals; and so it has been called to the
present day. If it is an impossible and ungrateful task to disprove that
the re-construction, or at least the re-founding of this Cathedral was
the work of Charlemagne, so munificent a patron and dutiful a son of the
Church, to prove it is equally impossible. A martyrology of the XI
century speaks of a dedication in 1069, but as this ceremony had been
preceded by another extensive re-building, and was followed by many
other changes, the oldest portions of the present church are to be most
accurately ascribed to the XI, XII, and XIV centuries. The additions of
the centuries following the papal return to Rome have greatly changed
the appearance of the church. A large chapel, built in 1506, gives
almost a northern nave. In 1671, Archbishop Ariosto thought the interior
would be gracefully improved by a Renaissance gallery which should
encircle the entire nave from one end of the choir to the other. To
accomplish this new work, the old main piers below the gallery were cut
away, the wall arches were changed, and