Chartreuse

“ Chartres was a local shrine, in an agricultural province, not even a part of the royal domain, and its cathedral was the work of society, without much more tie than the Virgin gave it. Socially Chartres, as far as its stone-work goes, seems to have been mostly rural; its decoration, in the porches and transepts, is royal and feudal; in the nave and choir it is chiefly bourgeois. The want of unity is much less surprising than the unity, but it is still evident, especially in the glass. The mosaics of Monreale begin and end; they are a series; their connection is artistic and theological at once ”

“ But with the example of the disastrous leadership of Peter the Hermit before his eyes, S. Bernard wisely declined. ‘Who am I,’ he wrote to the Pope, ‘that I should order the lines of battle, and go out before the faces of armed men, or what is more remote from my profession?’ Count Henry gained great renown in the Holy Land, and when at last, after fifty years of opposition to his King, the old Count died, he left to his valorous eldest son the County of Champagne, and Chartres and Blois passed to his second son, Thibault, owing homage to Henry. ”

“ Such, briefly, was the constitution of the famous mediæval guilds, such were their faults and excellences. The record of these Cathedral windows helps us to realise their importance in the history of Chartres, and also enables us to imagine the state and the character of the old town’s trade. In spite of the exactions and taxes levied by bishop and count, chapter, monastery and viscount, the merchants of Chartres flourished mightily in the thirteenth century, and the fairs of the town held during the four feasts of Our Lady rivalled in importance even those of Brie and Champagne. ”

“ It is the granary of France. Le blé c’est la Beauce et la Beauce c’est Chartres. [2]
And on every side of it, spread out in the summer time like a many-coloured carpet under the great dome of the sky, stretch the cornfields, cut by the black lines of the railway, or by the straight, disheartening lengths of roads which run beyond the distant horizon of monotonous level, to Dreux, to Orléans, to Paris. The twin spires of Chartres are the only landmark. The sole beauty in this country must be found in its fecundity ”

“ For Chartres was the Lourdes of the Middle Ages. The maimed and the halt recovered their powers, leapt from the waggons and flung away their crutches; the blind received their sight, the sick were healed, and all joined, after returning thanks before the altar, in the task of building the house of their Redeemer.
You see their work, you behold the material in which they wrought, as you stand before the western façade [58] and gaze in wonder; for the stones, it seems, have become intelligent, and matter is here spiritualised. ”

“ But France is never long content to repeat her effects; and between Maintenon and Valençay she puts Chartres and Blois. Ah, these grey old cathedral towns with their narrow clean streets widening to a central place—at Chartres a beautiful oval, like the market-place in an eighteenth-century print—with their clipped lime-walks, high garden walls, Balzacian gables looking out on sunless lanes under the flanks of the granite giant! Save in the church itself, how frugally all the effects are produced—with how sober a use of greys and blacks, and pale high lights, as in some Van der Meer interior ”

“ The beautiful glass through which the light still pours its coloured streams were being set up in the lower lights of the western façade, and in the sacristy was accumulating that collection of jewels and relics, of chalices, censers and crucifixes, of liturgies bound in silver, gold and precious stones, and of ecclesiastical ornaments, which was to render the treasury of Chartres one of the richest in the world, till the Vandals of the eighteenth century laid their sacrilegious hands upon it. ”

“ Last and not least permanent of the effects of the Crusades was the influence exercised by the East upon art. The Porche Royal of the Cathedral, and the stained glass windows which are the glory of Chartres, would not have been as they are had Peter the Hermit never led his hundred thousand pilgrims to destruction, or if Bohémond, Prince of Antioch, had not taken the Cross in the sanctuary of Notre-Dame. ”

“ She has been always the first town of Our Lady, the chosen citadel of the Virgin. The friars of the Middle Ages, who obtained the right of coining money, stamped on their coins the legend Prima Sedes Francie, and Charles-le-Chauve, when he presented to the town the Veil of the Blessed Mary, chose the Church of Chartres as the earliest and most august sanctuary of the cult of the Virgin. ”

“ At Chartres, more than anywhere in France, the Middle Ages seem to have bequeathed to us the great heartbeat of their middle classes. Here we see about us the sturdy workers of the city, the guilds of its industrious burghers. True, the great rose windows of the transepts show us the royalty and chivalry of the kingdom, but somehow they seem decorative and not dominating as they do at Rheims. Nor are our friends of the guilds here present by any man’s let or by virtue of kingly condescension. ”

“ The window of the Chapel of S. Anne should be noted. S. Anne is represented carrying the Blessed Mary. When we examine the upper church we shall be struck by the importance of the position allotted to S. Anne in glass and statuary—as, for instance, in the great window of the north transept. The explanation is that Louis, Count of Chartres, who died on the fourth Crusade, sent to the Chapter from Constantinople the head of that saint.
Opposite the Sacristy is the entrance to the Martyrium or Chapel of S. Lubin (see p. 36) , which is immediately under the sanctuary. ”

“ UNLIKE the English, who, in public, prefer to ignore genius, the French provincials, when they have any great men born within the borders of their town, are not ashamed to honour them. They erect monuments easily, and it even occurs to them to call their streets after the names of great writers. In Chartres you have the Rue Félibien [92] and the Rue Régnier, [93] with the house in which Mathurin Régnier was born.
God has made the men of La Beauce in the image of the soil whence they have sprung. They have the regularity, the monotony and the hardness of their native land. ”

“ Fulbert’s labours, supported by the enthusiastic devotion of the people, were interrupted by the turbulent behaviour of Godfrey, Viscount of Châteaudun. He, since Eudes had acquired the county of Champagne, and took, therefore, little interest in the affairs of Chartres, had, like the other great vassals of Eudes, followed the example of his suzerain. He was endeavouring, by building himself first the Castle of Gallardon, and now of Illiers, in the very centre of the bishop’s possessions, to aggrandise himself at the expense of the King and the Church. ”

“ It was supplied by popular enthusiasm, inspired by religious fervour. For though the work of building, impeded by plague and famine, and a terrible fire which destroyed the town in 1134, went on slowly at first, in 1144 a great outburst of devotion occurred throughout the land. Whole populations arose and came to Chartres to labour at the work of God’s house. A noble rivalry urged every man to toil, and women even took their share in a burden which their faith rendered light, in a task which their devotion made both pleasant and honourable. ”

“ But of infernal beasts and Vices there is at Chartres, so much is this the Church of Our Lady, a decided scarcity. Of the Virtues there are many: most celebrated is the proud statue of Liberty in the left bay of the north porch, in which some writers have seen a reference to the Communal freedom granted to the people by the Kings, but which is in reality only{126} one of the series of fourteen Heavenly Beatitudes as described by the mediæval theologians, which fill some of the rows of the vaulting of this bay. ”

“ The Bishop of Chartres in 1200 was very much too enlightened a prelate to accept the Chronicle or Turpin or Charlemagne himself, still less Roland and Thierry, as authentic in sanctity; but if the young and beautiful Dauphine of France, and her cousins of Chartres, and their artists, warmly believed that the Virgin would be pleased by the story of Charlemagne and Roland, the Bishop might have let them have their way in spite of the irregularity. That the window was an irregularity, is plain; that it has always been immensely admired, is certain ”

“ When news was brought to Chartres of the seizure of their bishop, people and clergy alike rose to arms to rescue him. But he wrote forbidding them to use violence for his sake. ‘War,’ he said, ‘is for wolves, not for shepherds. I did not obtain my bishopric by arms, and by arms I do not care to recover it.’ In like manner he restrained the nobles who were eager to fight against the King in his defence, and, for fear of stirring up rebellion, he refused for a long time to publish the letters which the Pope had despatched, denouncing the scandalous marriage of Philippe. ”

“ The road is straight and level and a favourite one with automobilists. Chartres may also, of course, be approached from Normandy viâ Rouen, Évreux, Dreux, and, if you include Amiens to the North-west, and Caen (whence you will visit Bayeux, Lisieux, and Falaise) to the North-east, Chartres will be found to provide the perfect finish to a delightful and instructive, and also economical, tour. ”

“ You perceive Chartres to be a rather shabby little ville de province, with a few sunny, empty open places, and crooked shady streets, in which two or three times you lose your way, until at last, after more than once catching a glimpse, high above some slit between the houses, of the clear gray towers shining against the blue sky, you push forward again, risk another short cut, turn another interposing corner, and stand before the goal of your pilgrimage. ”

“ The Chartres apse is as entertaining as all the other Gothic apses together, because it overrides the architect. You may, if you really have no imagination whatever, reject the idea that the Virgin herself made the plan; the feebleness of our fancy is now congenital, organic, beyond stimulant or strychnine, and we shrink like sensitive-plants from the touch of a vision or spirit; but at least one can still sometimes feel a woman's taste, and in the apse of Chartres one feels nothing else. ”

“ When in 987 Hugues Capet, Duke of France, decided to assume the title of King, the political unity of the Chartrains had long been broken by the territorial{53} usurpations of the great officers of the Crown. The government of the country under Charlemagne had been shared by seven counts—Chartres, Dreux, Châteaudun, Blois, Vendôme, Poissy and Mantes. But by Hugh Capet’s time these had been reduced to three—Chartres, Blois and Dreux—and in the person of Thibault-le-Vieux or le Tricheur, who was of Capetan stock, the counties of Blois and Chartres were united. ”

“ The four "enormous" columns of the croisee, carry, as Viollet-le-Duc says, the "enormous octagonal tower,"—like Saint Christopher supporting the Christ- child, before the image of the Virgin, in her honour. Nothing like this can be seen at Chartres, or at any of the later palaces which France built for the pleasure of the Queen of Heaven. We are slipping into the thirteenth century again; the temptation is terrible to feeble minds and tourist natures; but a great mass of twelfth and eleventh-century work remains to be seen and felt. To go back is not so easy as to begin with it ”

“ We who are below, the common people, understand that France claims to protect and defend the Virgin of Chartres, as her chief vassal, and that this ostentatious profusion of lilies and castles is intended not in honour of France, but as a demonstration of loyalty to Notre Dame, and an assertion of her rights as Queen Regent of Heaven against all comers, but particularly against Pierre, the rebel, who has the audacity to assert rival rights in the opposite transept. ”

“ I found Charters and Kirkton rather more soured and reckless than when I last saw them. Both had expected promotion to follow our first expedition to France, and both still enjoyed their respective ranks of full corporal and full private; thus when we betook us to rectifying the acidity of the Norman wine by pure cognac they began to moralize in their old fashion.
"The devil!" said Charters; "ten years have I worn a red coat, and I am tiring now even of it. But every day that passes into night is one march further forward to the land of the leal where we shall all meet at last ”

“ There we shall find her in her splendour on her throne, above the high altar, and still more conspicuously in the Rose of France in the north transept. Still again she is enthroned in the first window of the choir next the north transept. Elsewhere we can see her standing, but never does she come down to us in the full splendour of her presence. Yet wherever we find her at Chartres, and of whatever period, she is always Queen. Her expression and attitude are always calm and commanding. She never calls for sympathy by hysterical appeals to our feelings ”

“ About the castle, the Cathedral and the monastery there were gradually being established groups of artisans who, by instinct and necessity, herded together in distinct quarters of the town, and thus gradually formed the redoubtable corporations and guilds of the Middle Ages—unions which, in the learned and unlearned professions alike, still exercise so potent an influence in England and on the Continent. Already there were the quarters of the money-changers, the saddlers, the skinners, the goldsmiths in Chartres. ”