Cecil Headlam - The Story of Chartres

The Rue du Bourg
The Rue du Bourg

colophon
London: J. M. Dent & Co.
Aldine House, 29 and 30 Bedford Street
Covent Garden W.C. decorative image decorative image 1902

Quae qui non vidit jam similia
non videbit, non solum ibi, sed in
tot Francia.

La vile esteit mult bone, de grande antiquit,
Iglise i aveit bele, de grant anctorit;
De la sainte Virge Marie mre de D
I esteit la kemise tenue en grant chiert.
Robert Wace (Roman du Rou).

The most wonderful thing in France.
James Russell Lowell.

Notre-dame de Chartres! A world to explore, as
if one explored the entire Middle Ages.
Walter Pater.

TO
MY FRIEND
GEORGE MONTAGU
IN MEMORY OF DAYS
IN THE
OLD WORLD AND THE NEW

An excellent train, leaving the Gare S. Lazare at mid-day, runs through from Paris in one hour and a half. A good djeuner is served in the train on starting. Returning from Chartres, most of the trains run into the Montparnasse Station, south of the river and twenty minutes drive from the Place de lOpra.

The road is straight and level and a favourite one with automobilists. Chartres may also, of course, be approached from Normandy vi Rouen, vreux, 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.

An itinerary for those who have but a short time to spare at Chartres is suggested on page 352.

HotelsGrand Monarque (Automobile Club de France); Duc de Chartres; France.

The Story of Chartres

B UILT half on the slope and half on the strath in a depression of calcareous soil, Chartres lies along the banks of the gliding Eure, breaking the long levels of La Beauce.

La Beauce, indeed, is still the waterless, shadeless, woodless plain that the Bishop of Poitiers described in the sixth century, but it is now also one immense field of corn in which man has planted a few scattered farms and pleasure houses.

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 Orlans, to Paris. The twin spires of Chartres are the only landmark. The sole beauty in this country must be found in its fecundity; in the fields of standing corn, which the passing breezes curve into travelling waves, and in the endless perspective of sameness which inspires the same emotions of mingled pleasure and sadness as the sight of the vast and melancholy ocean. And, like a ship for ever a-sail in the distance, everywhere the great Church of Chartres is visible, with the passing light or shadow upon its grey, weather-beaten surfaces, or, as it seemed to Lowell:

Silent and grey as forest-leaguered cliff
Left inland by the oceans slow retreat.

Chartres is no place for an Atheist. The exclamation of Napoleon on first entering the Cathedral of Notre-Dame is the keynote and summary of the town. For from the earliest dawn of its history down to the present day Chartres has preserved, almost unbroken, the tradition of a religious centre. Other notes have indeed been struck here and died away in the distance of ages. There have been discords in the score of her worldly history. The armies of Csar and of Hastings have come and gone; the armies of England, of France, of Germany, have marched through the narrow, tortuous streets of this ancient city and left scarce a trace behind. Medivalism with all its charm and all its vileness has disappeared before the excesses of that Revolution which sowed the seed of modern French civilisation. The thick forests which were once the glory of the Druids have vanished and given place to innumerable acres of tillage, whilst the sound of the woodmans axe has been replaced by the swish of the scythe and the hum of the threshing machine. But through all these changes Chartres has remained true to her heritage. 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