Mont Saint Michel and Chartres: Ch. 6 - The Virgin of Chartres

Ch. 6 - The Virgin of Chartres

We must take ten minutes to accustom our eyes to the light, and we
had better use them to seek the reason why we come to Chartres
rather than to Rheims or Amiens or Bourges, for the cathedral that
fills our ideal. The truth is, there are several reasons; there
generally are, for doing the things we like; and after you have
studied Chartres to the ground, and got your reasons settled, you
will never find an antiquarian to agree with you; the architects
will probably listen to you with contempt; and even these excellent
priests, whose kindness is great, whose patience is heavenly, and
whose good opinion you would so gladly gain, will turn from you with
pain, if not with horror. The Gothic is singular in this; one seems
easily at home in the Renaissance; one is not too strange in the
Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk
blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all
these styles seem modern, when we come close to them; but the Gothic
gets away. No two men think alike about it, and no woman agrees with
either man. The Church itself never agreed about it, and the
architects agree even less than the priests. To most minds it casts
too many shadows; it wraps itself in mystery; and when people talk
of mystery, they commonly mean fear. To others, the Gothic seems
hoary with age and decrepitude, and its shadows mean death. What is
curious to watch is the fanatical conviction of the Gothic
enthusiast, to whom the twelfth century means exuberant youth, the
eternal child of Wordsworth, over whom its immortality broods like
the day; it is so simple and yet so complicated; it sees so much and
so little; it loves so many toys and cares for so few necessities;
its youth is so young, its age so old, and its youthful yearning for
old thought is so disconcerting, like the mysterious senility of the
baby that--

Deaf and silent, reads the eternal deep,
Haunted forever by the eternal mind.

One need not take it more seriously than one takes the baby itself.
Our amusement is to play with it, and to catch its meaning in its
smile; and whatever Chartres maybe now, when young it was a smile.
To the Church, no doubt, its cathedral here has a fixed and
administrative meaning, which is the same as that of every other
bishop's seat and with which we have nothing whatever to do. To us,
it is a child's fancy; a toy-house to please the Queen of Heaven,--
to please her so much that she would be happy in it,--to charm her
till she smiled.

The Queen Mother was as majestic as you like; she was absolute; she
could be stern; she was not above being angry; but she was still a
woman, who loved grace, beauty, ornament,--her toilette, robes,
jewels;--who considered the arrangements of her palace with
attention, and liked both light and colour; who kept a keen eye on
her Court, and exacted prompt and willing obedience from king and
archbishops as well as from beggars and drunken priests. She
protected her friends and punished her enemies. She required space,
beyond what was known in the Courts of kings, because she was liable
at all times to have ten thousand people begging her for favours--
mostly inconsistent with law--and deaf to refusal. She was extremely
sensitive to neglect, to disagreeable impressions, to want of
intelligence in her surroundings. She was the greatest artist, as
she was the greatest philosopher and musician and theologist, that
ever lived on earth, except her Son, Who, at Chartres, is still an
Infant under her guardianship. Her taste was infallible; her
sentence eternally final. This church was built for her in this
spirit of simple-minded, practical, utilitarian faith,--in this
singleness of thought, exactly as a little girl sets up a doll-house
for her favourite blonde doll. Unless you can go back to your dolls,
you are out of place here. If you can go back to them, and get rid
for one small hour of the weight of custom, you shall see Chartres
in glory.

The palaces of earthly queens were hovels compared with these
palaces of the Queen of Heaven at Chartres, Paris, Laon, Noyon,
Rheims, Amiens, Rouen, Bayeux, Coutances,--a list that might be
stretched into a volume. The nearest approach we have made to a
palace was the Merveille at Mont-Saint-Michel, but no Queen had a
palace equal to that. The Merveille was built, or designed, about
the year 1200; toward the year 1500, Louis XI built a great castle
at Loches in Touraine, and there Queen Anne de Bretagne had
apartments which still exist, and which we will visit. At Blois you
shall see the residence which served for Catherine de Medicis till
her death in 1589. Anne de Bretagne was trebly queen, and Catherine
de Medicis took her standard of comfort from the luxury of Florence.
At Versailles you can see the apartments which the queens of the
Bourbon line occupied through their century of magnificence. All put
together, and then trebled in importance, could not rival the
splendour of any single cathedral dedicated to Queen Mary in the
thirteenth century; and of them all, Chartres was built to be
peculiarly and exceptionally her delight.

One has grown so used to this sort of loose comparison, this
reckless waste of words, that one no longer adopts an idea unless it
is driven in with hammers of statistics and columns of figures. With
the irritating demand for literal exactness and perfectly straight
lines which lights up every truly American eye, you will certainly
ask when this exaltation of Mary began, and unless you get the
dates, you will doubt the facts. It is your own fault if they are
tiresome; you might easily read them all in the "Iconographie de la
Sainte Vierge," by M. Rohault de Fleury, published in 1878. You can
start at Byzantium with the Empress Helena in 326, or with the
Council of Ephesus in 431. You will find the Virgin acting as the
patron saint of Constantinople and of the Imperial residence, under
as many names as Artemis or Aphrodite had borne. As Godmother [word
in Greek] Deipara [word in Greek], Pathfinder [word in Greek],
afterwards gave to Murillo the subject of a famous painting, told
that once, when he was reciting before her statue the "Ave Maris
Stella," and came to the words, "Monstra te esse Matrem," the image,
pressing its breast, dropped on the lips of her servant three drops
of the milk which had nourished the Saviour. The same miracle, in
various forms, was told of many other persons, both saints and
sinners; but it made so much impression on the mind of the age that,
in the fourteenth century, Dante, seeking in Paradise for some
official introduction to the foot of the Throne, found no
intercessor with the Queen of Heaven more potent than Saint Bernard.
You can still read Bernard's hymns to the Virgin, and even his
sermons, if you like. To him she was the great mediator. In the eyes
of a culpable humanity, Christ was too sublime, too terrible, too
just, but not even the weakest human frailty could fear to approach
his Mother. Her attribute was humility; her love and pity were
infinite. "Let him deny your mercy who can say that he has ever
asked it in vain."

Saint Bernard was emotional and to a certain degree mystical, like
Adam de Saint-Victor, whose hymns were equally famous, but the
emotional saints and mystical poets were not by any means allowed to
establish exclusive rights to the Virgin's favour. Abelard was as
devoted as they were, and wrote hymns as well. Philosophy claimed
her, and Albert the Great, the head of scholasticism, the teacher of
Thomas Aquinas, decided in her favour the question: "Whether the
Blessed Virgin possessed perfectly the seven liberal arts." The
Church at Chartres had decided it a hundred years before by putting
the seven liberal arts next her throne, with Aristotle himself to
witness; but Albertus gave the reason: "I hold that she did, for it
is written, 'Wisdom has built herself a house, and has sculptured
seven columns.' That house is the blessed Virgin; the seven columns
are the seven liberal arts. Mary, therefore, had perfect mastery of
science." Naturally she had also perfect mastery of economics, and
most of her great churches were built in economic centres. The
guilds were, if possible, more devoted to her than the monks; the
bourgeoisie of Paris, Rouen, Amiens, Laon, spend money by millions
to gain her favour. Most surprising of all, the great military class
was perhaps the most vociferous. Of all inappropriate haunts for the
gentle, courteous, pitying Mary, a field of battle seems to be the
worst, if not distinctly blasphemous; yet the greatest French
warriors insisted on her leading them into battle, and in the actual
melee when men were killing each other, on every battle-field in
Europe, for at least five hundred years, Mary was present, leading
both sides. The battle-cry of the famous Constable du Guesclin was
"Notre-Dame-Guesclin"; "Notre-Dame-Coucy" was the cry of the great
Sires de Coucy; "Notre-Dame-Auxerre"; "Notre-Dame-Sancerre"; "Notre-
Dame-Hainault"; "Notre-Dame-Gueldres"; "Notre-Dame-Bourbon"; "Notre-
Dame-Bearn";--all well-known battle-cries. The King's own battle at
one time cried, "Notre-Dame-Saint-Denis-Montjoie"; the Dukes of
Burgundy cried, "Notre-Dame-Bourgogne"; and even the soldiers of the
Pope were said to cry, "Notre-Dame-Saint-Pierre."

The measure of this devotion, which proves to any religious American
mind, beyond possible cavil, its serious and practical reality, is
the money it cost. According to statistics, in the single century
between 1170 and 1270, the French built eighty cathedrals and nearly
five hundred churches of the cathedral class, which would have cost,
according to an estimate made in 1840, more than five thousand
millions to replace. Five thousand million francs is a thousand
million dollars, and this covered only the great churches of a
single century. The same scale of expenditure had been going on
since the year 1000, and almost every parish in France had rebuilt
its church in stone; to this day France is strewn with the ruins of
this architecture, and yet the still preserved churches of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries, among the churches that belong to
the Romanesque and Transition period, are numbered by hundreds until
they reach well into the thousands. The share of this capital which
was--if one may use a commercial figure--invested in the Virgin
cannot be fixed, any more than the total sum given to religious
objects between 1000 and 1300; but in a spiritual and artistic
sense, it was almost the whole, and expressed an intensity of
conviction never again reached by any passion, whether of religion,
of loyalty, of patriotism, or of wealth; perhaps never even
parallelled by any single economic effort, except in war. Nearly
every great church of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries belonged
to Mary, until in France one asks for the church of Notre Dame as
though it meant cathedral; but, not satisfied with this, she
contracted the habit of requiring in all churches a chapel of her
own, called in English the "Lady Chapel," which was apt to be as
large as the church but was always meant to be handsomer; and there,
behind the high altar, in her own private apartment, Mary sat,
receiving her innumerable suppliants, and ready at any moment to
step up upon the high altar itself to support the tottering
authority of the local saint.

Expenditure like this rests invariably on an economic idea. Just as
the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital
in a railway system in the belief that they would make money by it
in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the
Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it
with interest in the life to come. The investment was based on the
power of Mary as Queen rather than on any orthodox Church conception
of the Virgin's legitimate station. Papal Rome never greatly loved
Byzantine empresses or French queens. The Virgin of Chartres was
never wholly sympathetic to the Roman Curia. To this day the Church
writers--like the Abbe Bulteau or M. Rohault de Fleury--are
singularly shy of the true Virgin of majesty, whether at Chartres or
at Byzantium or wherever she is seen. The fathers Martin and Cahier
at Bourges alone left her true value. Had the Church controlled her,
the Virgin would perhaps have remained prostrate at the foot of the
Cross. Dragged by a Byzantine Court, backed by popular insistence
and impelled by overpowering self-interest, the Church accepted the
Virgin throned and crowned, seated by Christ, the Judge throned and
crowned; but even this did not wholly satisfy the French of the
thirteenth century who seemed bent on absorbing Christ in His
Mother, and making the Mother the Church, and Christ the Symbol.

The Church had crowned and enthroned her almost from the beginning,
and could not have dethroned her if it would. In all Christian art--
sculpture or mosaic, painting or poetry--the Virgin's rank was
expressly asserted. Saint Bernard, like John Comnenus, and probably
at the same time (1120-40), chanted hymns to the Virgin as Queen:--

O salutaris Virgo Stella Maris
Generans prolem, Aequitatis solem,
Lucis auctorem, Retinens pudorem,
Suscipe laudem!

Celi Regina Per quam medicina
Datur aegretis, Gratia devotis,
Gaudium moestis, Mundo lux coelestis,
Spesque salutis;

Aula regalis, Virgo specialis,
Posce medelam Nobis et tutelam,
Suscipe vota, Precibusque cuncta
Pelle molesta!

O Saviour Virgin, Star of Sea,
Who bore for child the Son of Justice,
The source of Light, Virgin always
Hear our praise!

Queen of Heaven who have given
Medicine to the sick, Grace to the devout,
Joy to the sad, Heaven's light to the world
And hope of salvation;

Court royal, Virgin typical,
Grant us cure and guard,
Accept our vows, and by prayers
Drive all griefs away!

As the lyrical poet of the twelfth century, Adam de Saint-Victor
seems to have held rank higher if possible than that of Saint
Bernard, and his hymns on the Virgin are certainly quite as emphatic
an assertion of her majesty:--

Imperatrix supernorum!
Superatrix infernorum!
Eligenda via coeli,
Retinenda spe fideli,
Separatos a te longe
Revocatos ad te junge
Tuorum collegio!

Empress of the highest,
Mistress over the lowest,
Chosen path of Heaven,
Held fast by faithful hope,
Those separated from you far,
Recalled to you, unite
In your fold!

To delight in the childish jingle of the mediaeval Latin is a sign
of a futile mind, no doubt, and I beg pardon of you and of the
Church for wasting your precious summer day on poetry which was
regarded as mystical in its age and which now sounds like a nursery
rhyme; but a verse or two of Adam's hymn on the Assumption of the
Virgin completes the record of her rank, and goes to complete also
the documentary proof of her majesty at Chartres:--

Salve, Mater Salvatoris!
Vas electum! Vas honoris!
Vas coelestis Gratiae!
Ab aeterno Vas provisum!
Vas insigne! Vas excisum
Manu sapientiae!

Salve, Mater pietatis,
Et totius Trinitatis
Nobile Triclinium!
Verbi tamen incarnati
Speciale majestati
Praeparans hospitium!

O Maria! Stella maris!
Dignitate singularis,
Super omnes ordinaries
Ordines coelestium!
In supremo sita poli
Nos commenda tuae proli,
Ne terrores sive doli
Nos supplantent hostium!

Mother of our Saviour, hail!
Chosen vessel! Sacred Grail!
Font of celestial grace!
From eternity forethought!
By the hand of Wisdom wrought!
Precious, faultless Vase!

Hail, Mother of Divinity!
Hail, Temple of the Trinity!
Home of the Triune God!
In whom the Incarnate Word had birth,
The King! to whom you gave on earth
Imperial abode.

Oh, Maria! Constellation!
Inspiration! Elevation!
Rule and Law and Ordination
Of the angels' host!
Highest height of God's Creation,
Pray your Son's commiseration,
Lest, by fear or fraud, salvation
For our souls be lost!

Constantly--one might better say at once, officially, she was
addressed in these terms of supreme majesty: "Imperatrix
supernorum!" "Coeli Regina!" "Aula regalis!" but the twelfth century
seemed determined to carry the idea out to its logical conclusion
in defiance of dogma. Not only was the Son absorbed in the Mother, or
represented as under her guardianship, but the Father fared no
better, and the Holy Ghost followed. The poets regarded the Virgin
as the "Templum Trinitatis"; "totius Trinitatis nobile Triclinium."
She was the refectory of the Trinity--the "Triclinium"--because the
refectory was the largest room and contained the whole of the
members, and was divided in three parts by two rows of columns. She
was the "Templum Trinitatis," the Church itself, with its triple
aisle. The Trinity was absorbed in her.

This is a delicate subject in the Church, and you must feel it with
delicacy, without brutally insisting on its necessary
contradictions. All theology and all philosophy are full of
contradictions quite as flagrant and far less sympathetic. This
particular variety of religious faith is simply human, and has made
its appearance in one form or another in nearly all religions; but
though the twelfth century carried it to an extreme, and at Chartres
you see it in its most charming expression, we have got always to
make allowances for what was going on beneath the surface in men's
minds, consciously or unconsciously, and for the latent scepticism
which lurks behind all faith. The Church itself never quite accepted
the full claims of what was called Mariolatry. One may be sure, too,
that the bourgeois capitalist and the student of the schools, each
from his own point of view, watched the Virgin with anxious
interest. The bourgeois had put an enormous share of, his capital
into what was in fact an economical speculation, not unlike the
South Sea Scheme, or the railway system of our own time; except that
in one case the energy was devoted to shortening the road to Heaven;
in the other, to shortening the road to Paris; but no serious
schoolman could have felt entirely convinced that God would enter
into a business partnership with man, to establish a sort of joint-
stock society for altering the operation of divine and universal
laws. The bourgeois cared little for the philosophical doubt if the
economical result proved to be good, but he watched this result with
his usual practical sagacity, and required an experience of only
about three generations (1200-1300) to satisfy himself that relics
were not certain in their effects; that the Saints were not always
able or willing to help; that Mary herself could not certainly be
bought or bribed; that prayer without money seemed to be quite as
efficacious as prayer with money; and that neither the road to
Heaven nor Heaven itself had been made surer or brought nearer by an
investment of capital which amounted to the best part of the wealth
of France. Economically speaking, he became satisfied that his
enormous money-investment had proved to be an almost total loss, and
the reaction on his mind was as violent as the emotion. For three
hundred years it prostrated France. The efforts of the bourgeoisie
and the peasantry to recover their property, so far as it was
recoverable, have lasted to the present day and we had best take
care not to get mixed in those passions.

If you are to get the full enjoyment of Chartres, you must, for the
time, believe in Mary as Bernard and Adam did, and feel her presence
as the architects did, in every stone they placed, and every touch
they chiselled. You must try first to rid your mind of the
traditional idea that the Gothic is an intentional expression of
religious gloom. The necessity for light was the motive of the
Gothic architects. They needed light and always more light, until
they sacrificed safety and common sense in trying to get it. They
converted their walls into windows, raised their vaults, diminished
their piers, until their churches could no longer stand. You will
see the limits at Beauvais; at Chartres we have not got so far, but
even here, in places where the Virgin wanted it,--as above the high
altar,--the architect has taken all the light there was to take. For
the same reason, fenestration became the most important part of the
Gothic architect's work, and at Chartres was uncommonly interesting
because the architect was obliged to design a new system, which
should at the same time satisfy the laws of construction and the
taste and imagination of Mary. No doubt the first command of the
Queen of Heaven was for light, but the second, at least equally
imperative, was for colour. Any earthly queen, even though she were
not Byzantine in taste, loved colour; and the truest of queens--the
only true Queen of Queens--had richer and finer taste in colour than
the queens of fifty earthly kingdoms, as you will see when we come
to the immense effort to gratify her in the glass of her windows.
Illusion for illusion,--granting for the moment that Mary was an
illusion,--the Virgin Mother in this instance repaid to her
worshippers a larger return for their money than the capitalist has
ever been able to get, at least in this world, from any other
illusion of wealth which he has tried to make a source of pleasure
and profit.

The next point on which Mary evidently insisted was the arrangement
for her private apartments, the apse, as distinguished from her
throne-room, the choir; both being quite distinct from the hall, or
reception-room of the public, which was the nave with its
enlargements in the transepts. This arrangement marks the
distinction between churches built as shrines for the deity and
churches built as halls of worship for the public. The difference is
chiefly in the apse, and the apse of Chartres is the most
interesting of all apses from this point of view.

The Virgin required chiefly these three things, or, if you like,
these four: space, light, convenience; and colour decoration to
unite and harmonize the whole. This concerns the interior; on the
exterior she required statuary, and the only complete system of
decorative sculpture that existed seems to belong to her churches:--
Paris, Rheims, Amiens, and Chartres. Mary required all this
magnificence at Chartres for herself alone, not for the public. As
far as one can see into the spirit of the builders, Chartres was
exclusively intended for the Virgin, as the Temple of Abydos was
intended for Osiris. The wants of man, beyond a mere roof-cover, and
perhaps space to some degree, enter to no very great extent into the
problem of Chartres. Man came to render homage or to ask favours.
The Queen received him in her palace, where she alone was at home,
and alone gave commands.

The artist's second thought was to exclude from his work everything
that could displease Mary; and since Mary differed from living
queens only in infinitely greater majesty and refinement, the artist
could admit only what pleased the actual taste of the great ladies
who dictated taste at the Courts of France and England, which
surrounded the little Court of the Counts of Chartres. What they
were--these women of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--we shall
have to see or seek in other directions; but Chartres is perhaps the
most magnificent and permanent monument they left of their taste,
and we can begin here with learning certain things which they were
not.

In the first place, they were not in the least vague, dreamy, or
mystical in a modern sense;--far from it! They seemed anxious only
to throw the mysteries into a blaze of light; not so much physical,
perhaps,--since they, like all women, liked moderate shadow for
their toilettes,--but luminous in the sense of faith. There is
nothing about Chartres that you would think mystical, who know your
Lohengrin, Siegfried, and Parsifal. If you care to make a study of
the whole literature of the subject, read M. Male's "Art Religieux
du XIIIe Siecle en France," and use it for a guide-book. Here you
need only note how symbolic and how simple the sculpture is, on the
portals and porches. Even what seems a grotesque or an abstract idea
is no more than the simplest child's personification. On the walls
you may have noticed the Ane qui vielle,--the ass playing the lyre;
and on all the old churches you can see "bestiaries," as they were
called, of fabulous animals, symbolic or not; but the symbolism is
as simple as the realism of the oxen at Laon. It gave play to the
artist in his effort for variety of decoration, and it amused the
people,--probably the Virgin also was not above being amused;--now
and then it seems about to suggest what you would call an esoteric
meaning, that is to say, a meaning which each one of us can consider
private property reserved for our own amusement, and from which the
public is excluded; yet, in truth, in the Virgin's churches the
public is never excluded, but invited. The Virgin even had the
additional charm to the public that she was popularly supposed to
have no very marked fancy for priests as such; she was a queen, a
woman, and a mother, functions, all, which priests could not
perform. Accordingly, she seems to have had little taste for
mysteries of any sort, and even the symbols that seem most
mysterious were clear to every old peasant-woman in her church. The
most pleasing and promising of them all is the woman's figure you
saw on the front of the cathedral in Paris; her eyes bandaged; her
head bent down; her crown falling; without cloak or royal robe;
holding in her hand a guidon or banner with its staff broken in more
than one place. On the opposite pier stands another woman, with
royal mantle, erect and commanding. The symbol is so graceful that
one is quite eager to know its meaning; but every child in the
Middle Ages would have instantly told you that the woman with the
falling crown meant only the Jewish Synagogue, as the one with the
royal robe meant the Church of Christ.

Another matter for which the female taste seemed not much to care
was theology in the metaphysical sense. Mary troubled herself little
about theology except when she retired into the south transept with
Pierre de Dreux. Even there one finds little said about the Trinity,
always the most metaphysical subtlety of the Church. Indeed, you
might find much amusement here in searching the cathedral for any
distinct expression at all of the Trinity as a dogma recognized by
Mary.

One cannot take seriously the idea that the three doors, the three
portals, and the three aisles express the Trinity, because, in the
first place, there was no rule about it; churches might have what
portals and aisles they pleased; both Paris and Bourges have five;
the doors themselves are not allotted to the three members of the
Trinity, nor are the portals; while another more serious objection
is that the side doors and aisles are not of equal importance with
the central, but mere adjuncts and dependencies, so that the
architect who had misled the ignorant public into accepting so black
a heresy would have deserved the stake, and would probably have gone
to it. Even this suggestion of trinity is wanting in the transepts,
which have only one aisle, and in the choir, which has five, as well
as five or seven chapels, and, as far as an ignorant mind can
penetrate, no triplets whatever. Occasionally, no doubt, you will
discover in some sculpture or window, a symbol of the Trinity, but
this discovery itself amounts to an admission of its absence as a
controlling idea, for the ordinary worshipper must have been at
least as blind as we are, and to him, as to us, it would have seemed
a wholly subordinate detail. Even if the Trinity, too, is anywhere
expressed, you will hardly find here an attempt to explain its
metaphysical meaning--not even a mystic triangle.

The church is wholly given up to the Mother and the Son. The Father
seldom appears; the Holy Ghost still more rarely. At least, this is
the impression made on an ordinary visitor who has no motive to be
orthodox; and it must have been the same with the thirteenth-century
worshipper who came here with his mind absorbed in the perfections
of Mary. Chartres represents, not the Trinity, but the identity of
the Mother and Son. The Son represents the Trinity, which is thus
absorbed in the Mother. The idea is not orthodox, but this is no
affair of ours. The Church watches over its own.

The Virgin's wants and tastes, positive and negative, ought now to
be clear enough to enable you to feel the artist's sincerity in
trying to satisfy them; but first you have still to convince
yourselves of the people's sincerity in employing the artists. This
point is the easiest of all, for the evidence is express. In the
year 1145 when the old fleche was begun,--the year before Saint
Bernard preached the second crusade at Vezelay,--Abbot Haimon, of
Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives in Normandy, wrote to the monks of Tutbury
Abbey in England a famous letter to tell of the great work which the
Virgin was doing in France and which began at the Church of
Chartres. "Hujus sacrae institutionis ritus apud Carnotensem
ecclesiam est inchoatus." From Chartres it had spread through
Normandy, where it produced among other things the beautiful spire
which we saw at Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives. "Postremo per totam fere
Normanniam longe lateque convaluit ac loca per singula Matri
misericordiae dicata praecipue occupavit." The movement affected
especially the places devoted to Mary, but ran through all Normandy,
far and wide. Of all Mary's miracles, the best attested, next to the
preservation of her church, is the building of it; not so much
because it surprises us as because it surprised even more the people
of the time and the men who were its instruments. Such deep popular
movements are always surprising, and at Chartres the miracle seems
to have occurred three times, coinciding more or less with the dates
of the crusades, and taking the organization of a crusade, as
Archbishop Hugo of Rouen described it in a letter to Bishop Thierry
of Amiens. The most interesting part of this letter is the evident
astonishment of the writer, who might be talking to us to-day, so
modern is he:--

The inhabitants of Chartres have combined to aid in the construction
of their church by transporting the materials; our Lord has rewarded
their humble zeal by miracles which have roused the Normans to
imitate the piety of their neighbours ... Since then the faithful of
our diocese and of other neighbouring regions have formed
associations for the same object; they admit no one into their
company unless he has been to confession, has renounced enmities and
revenges, and has reconciled himself with his enemies. That done,
they elect a chief, under whose direction they conduct their waggons
in silence and with humility.

The quarries at Bercheres-l'Eveque are about five miles from
Chartres. The stone is excessively hard, and was cut in blocks of
considerable size, as you can see for yourselves; blocks which
required great effort to transport and lay in place. The work was
done with feverish rapidity, as it still shows, but it is the
solidest building of the age, and without a sign of weakness yet.
The Abbot told, with more surprise than pride, of the spirit which
was built into the cathedral with the stone:--Who has ever seen!--
Who has ever heard tell, in times past, that powerful princes of the
world, that men brought up in honour and in wealth, that nobles, men
and women, have bent their proud and haughty necks to the harness of
carts, and that, like beasts of burden, they have dragged to the
abode of Christ these waggons, loaded with wines, grains, oil,
stone, wood, and all that is necessary for the wants of life, or for
the construction of the church? But while they draw these burdens,
there is one thing admirable to observe; it is that often when a
thousand persons and more are attached to the chariots,--so great is
the difficulty,--yet they march in such silence that not a murmur is
heard, and truly if one did not see the thing with one's eyes, one
might believe that among such a multitude there was hardly a person
present. When they halt on the road, nothing is heard but the
confession of sins, and pure and suppliant prayer to God to obtain
pardon. At the voice of the priests who exhort their hearts to
peace, they forget all hatred, discord is thrown far aside, debts
are remitted, the unity of hearts is established.

But if any one is so far advanced in evil as to be unwilling to
pardon an offender, or if he rejects the counsel of the priest who
has piously advised him, his offering is instantly thrown from the
wagon as impure, and he himself ignominiously and shamefully
excluded from the society of the holy. There one sees the priests
who preside over each chariot exhort every one to penitence, to
confession of faults, to the resolution of better life! There one
sees old people, young people, little children, calling on the Lord
with a suppliant voice, and uttering to Him, from the depth of the
heart, sobs and sighs with words of glory and praise! After the
people, warned by the sound of trumpets and the sight of banners,
have resumed their road, the march is made with such ease that no
obstacle can retard it ... When they have reached the church they
arrange the wagons about it like a spiritual camp, and during the
whole night they celebrate the watch by hymns and canticles. On each
waggon they light tapers and lamps; they place there the infirm and
sick, and bring them the precious relics of the Saints for their
relief. Afterwards the priests and clerics close the ceremony by
processions which the people follow with devout heart, imploring the
clemency of the Lord and of his Blessed Mother for the recovery of
the sick.

Of course, the Virgin was actually and constantly present during all
this labour, and gave her assistance to it, but you would get no
light on the architecture from listening to an account of her
miracles, nor do they heighten the effect of popular faith. Without
the conviction of her personal presence, men would not have been
inspired; but, to us, it is rather the inspiration of the art which
proves the Virgin's presence, and we can better see the conviction
of it in the work than in the words. Every day, as the work went on,
the Virgin was present, directing the architects, and it is this
direction that we are going to study, if you have now got a
realizing sense of what it meant. Without this sense, the church is
dead. Most persons of a deeply religious nature would tell you
emphatically that nine churches out of ten actually were dead-born,
after the thirteenth century, and that church architecture became a
pure matter of mechanism and mathematics; but that is a question for
you to decide when you come to it; and the pleasure consists not in
seeing the death, but in feeling the life.

Now let us look about!

Back to chapter list of: Mont Saint Michel and Chartres