1876
The spring, in Paris, since it has fairly begun, has been enchanting.
The sun and the moon have been blazing in emulation, and the difference
between the blue sky of day and of night has been as slight as possible.
There are no clouds in the sky, but there are little thin green clouds,
little puffs of raw, tender verdure, entangled among the branches of the
trees. All the world is in the streets; the chairs and tables which have
stood empty all winter before the doors of the cafés are at a premium;
the theatres have become intolerably close; the puppet-shows in the
Champs Elysées are the only form of dramatic entertainment which seems
consistent with the season. By way of doing honour, at a small cost, to
this ethereal mildness, I went out the other day to the ancient town of
Chartres, where I spent several hours, which I cannot consent to pass
over as if nothing had happened. It is the experience of the writer of
these lines, who likes nothing so much as moving about to see the world,
that if one has been for a longer time than usual resident and
stationary, there is a kind of overgrown entertainment in taking the
train, even for a suburban goal; and that if one takes it on a charming
April day, when there is a sense, almost an odour, of change in the air,
the innocent pleasure is as nearly as possible complete. My
accessibility to emotions of this kind amounts to an infirmity, and the
effect of it was to send me down to Chartres in a shamelessly optimistic
state of mind. I was so prepared to be entertained and pleased with
everything that it is only a mercy that the cathedral happens really to
be a fine building. If it had not been, I should still have admired it
inordinately, at the risk of falling into heaven knows what æsthetic
heresy. But I am almost ashamed to say how soon my entertainment began.
It began, I think with my hailing a little open carriage on the
Boulevard and causing myself to be driven to the Gare de l'Ouest--far
away across the river, up the Rue Bonaparte, of art-student memories,
and along the big, straight Rue de Rennes to the Boulevard Montparnasse.
Of course, at this rate, by the time I reached Chartres--the journey is
of a couple of hours--I had almost drained the cup of pleasure. But it
was replenished at the station, at the buffet, from the pungent bottle
of wine I drank with my breakfast. Here, by the way, is another
excellent excuse for being delighted with any day's excursion in
France--that wherever you are, you may breakfast to your taste. There
may, indeed, if the station is very small, be no buffet; but if there is
a buffet, you may be sure that civilisation--in the persons of a
sympathetic young woman in a well-made black dress, and a rapid,
zealous, grateful waiter--presides at it. It was quite the least, as the
French say, that after my breakfast I should have thought the cathedral,
as I saw it from the top of the steep hill on which the town stands,
rising high above the clustered houses and seeming to make of their
red-roofed agglomeration a mere pedestal for its immense beauty,
promised remarkably well. You see it so as you emerge from the station,
and then, as you climb slowly into town, you lose sight of it. 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.
I spent a long time looking at this monument. I revolved around it, like
a moth around a candle; I went away and I came back; I chose twenty
different standpoints; I observed it during the different hours of the
day, and saw it in the moonlight as well as the sunshine. I gained, in a
word, a certain sense of familiarity with it; and yet I despair of
giving any coherent account of it. Like most French cathedrals, it rises
straight out of the street, and is destitute of that setting of turf and
trees and deaneries and canonries which contribute so largely to the
impressiveness of the great English churches. Thirty years ago a row of
old houses was glued to its base and made their back walls of its
sculptured sides. These have been plucked away, and, relatively
speaking, the church is fairly isolated. But the little square that
surrounds it is deplorably narrow, and you flatten your back against the
opposite houses in the vain attempt to stand off and survey the towers.
The proper way to look at them would be to go up in a balloon and hang
poised, face to face with them, in the blue air. There is, however,
perhaps an advantage in being forced to stand so directly under them,
for this position gives you an overwhelming impression of their height.
I have seen, I suppose, churches as beautiful as this one, but I do not
remember ever to have been so fascinated by superpositions and vertical
effects. The endless upward reach of the great west front, the clear,
silvery tone of its surface, the way three or four magnificent features
are made to occupy its serene expanse, its simplicity, majesty, and
dignity--these things crowd upon one's sense with a force that makes the
act of vision seem for the moment almost all of life. The impressions
produced by architecture lend themselves as little to interpretation by
another medium as those produced by music. Certainly there is an
inexpressible harmony in the façade of Chartres.
The doors are rather low, as those of the English cathedrals are apt to
be, but (standing three together) are set in a deep framework of
sculpture--rows of arching grooves, filled with admirable little images,
standing with their heels on each other's heads. The church, as it now
exists, except the northern tower, dates from the middle of the
thirteenth century, and these closely-packed figures are full of the
grotesqueness of the period. Above the triple portals is a vast
round-topped window, in three divisions, of the grandest dimensions and
the stateliest effect. Above this window is a circular aperture, of huge
circumference, with a double row of sculptured spokes radiating from its
centre and looking on its lofty field of stone, as expansive and
symbolic as if it were the wheel of Time itself. Higher still is a
little gallery with a delicate balustrade, supported on a beautiful
cornice and stretching across the front from tower to tower; and above
this is a range of niched statues of kings--fifteen, I believe, in
number. Above the statues is a gable, with an image of the Virgin and
Child on its front, and another of Christ on its apex. In the relation
of all these parts there is such a high felicity that while on the one
side the eye rests on a great many large blanks there is no approach on
the other to poverty. The little gallery that I have spoken of, beneath
the statues of the kings, had for me a peculiar charm. Useless, at its
tremendous altitude, for other purposes, it seemed intended for the
little images to step down and walk about upon. When the great façade
begins to glow in the late afternoon light, you can imagine them
strolling up and down their long balcony in couples, pausing with their
elbows on the balustrade, resting their stony chins in their hands, and
looking out, with their little blank eyes, on the great view of the old
French monarchy they once ruled, and which now has passed away. The two
great towers of the cathedral are among the noblest of their kind. They
rise in solid simplicity to a height as great as the eye often troubles
itself to travel, and then suddenly they begin to execute a magnificent
series of feats in architectural gymnastics. This is especially true of
the northern spire, which is a late creation, dating from the sixteenth
century. The other is relatively quiet; but its companion is a sort of
tapering bouquet of sculptured stone. Statues and buttresses, gargoyles,
arabesques and crockets pile themselves in successive stages, until the
eye loses the sense of everything but a sort of architectural lacework.
The pride of Chartres, after its front, is the two portals of its
transepts--great dusky porches, in three divisions, covered with more
images than I have time to talk about. Wherever you look, along the
sides of the church, a time-worn image is niched or perched. The face of
each flying buttress is garnished with one, with the features quite
melted away.
The inside of the cathedral corresponds in vastness and grandeur to the
outside--it is the perfection of gothic in its prime. But I looked at it
rapidly, the place was so intolerably cold. It seemed to answer one's
query of what becomes of the winter when the spring chases it away. The
winter hereabouts has sought an asylum in Chartres cathedral, where it
has found plenty of room and may reside in a state of excellent
preservation until it can safely venture abroad again. I supposed I had
been in cold churches before, but the delusion had been an injustice to
the temperature of Chartres. The nave was full of the little padded
chairs of the local bourgeoisie, whose faith, I hope for their comfort,
is of the good old red-hot complexion. In a higher temperature I should
have done more justice to the magnificent old glass of the
windows--which glowed through the icy dusk like the purple and orange of
a winter sunset--and to the immense sculptured external casing of the
choir. This latter is an extraordinary piece of work. It is a high
gothic screen, shutting in the choir, and covered with elaborate
bas-reliefs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, representing
scenes from the life of Christ and of the Virgin. Some of the figures
are admirable, and the effect of the whole great semicircular wall,
chiselled like a silver bowl, is superb. There is also a crypt of high
antiquity and, I believe, great interest, to be seen; but my teeth
chattered a respectful negative to the sacristan who offered to guide me
to it It was so agreeable to stand in the warm outer air again, that I
spent the rest of the day in it.
Although, besides its cathedral, Chartres has no very rare architectural
treasures, the place is pictorial, in a shabby, third-rate,
poverty-stricken degree, and my observations were not unremunerative.
There is a little church of Saint-Aignan, of the sixteenth century, with
an elegant, decayed façade, and a small tower beside it, lower than its
own roof, to which it is joined, in unequal twinship, by a single long
buttress. Standing there with its crumbling Renaissance doorway, in a
kind of grass-grown alcove, it reminded me of certain monuments that the
tourist encounters in small Italian towns. Most of the streets of
Chartres are crooked lanes, winding over the face of the steep hill, the
summit of the hill being occupied by half a dozen little open squares,
which seem like reservoirs of the dulness and stillness that flow
through the place. In the midst of one of them rises an old dirty brick
obelisk, commemorating the glories of the young General Marceau, of the
first Republic--"Soldier at 16, general at 23, he died at 27." Such
memorials, when one comes upon them unexpectedly, produce in the mind a
series of circular waves of feeling, like a splash in a quiet pond.
Chartres gives us an impression of extreme antiquity, but it is an
antiquity that has gone down in the world. I saw very few of those
stately little hôtels, with pilastered fronts, which look so well in
the silent streets of provincial towns. The houses are mostly low,
small, and of sordid aspect, and though many of them have overhanging
upper stories, and steep, battered gables, they are rather wanting in
character. I was struck, as an American always is in small French and
English towns, with the immense number of shops, and their brilliant
appearance, which seems so out of proportion to any visible body of
consumers. At Chartres the shopkeepers must all feed upon each other,
for, whoever buys, the whole population sells. This population appeared
to consist mainly of several hundred brown old peasant women, in the
seventies and eighties, with their faces cross-hatched with wrinkles and
their quaint white coifs drawn tightly over their weather-blasted
eye-brows. Labour-stricken grandams, all the world over, are the
opposite of lovely, for the toil that wrestles for its daily bread,
morsel by morsel, is not beautifying; but I thought I had never seen the
possibilities of female ugliness so variously embodied as in the crones
of Chartres. Some of them were leading small children by the
hand--little red-cheeked girls, in the close black caps and black
pinafores of humble French infancy--a costume which makes French
children always look like orphans. Others were guiding along the flinty
lanes the steps of small donkeys, some of them fastened into little
carts, some with well-laden backs. These were the only quadrupeds I
perceived at Chartres. Neither horse nor carriage did I behold, save at
the station the omnibuses of the rival inns--the "Grand Monarque" and
the "Duc de Chartres"--which glare at each other across the Grande
Place. A friend of mine told me that a few years ago, passing through
Chartres, he went by night to call upon a gentleman who lived there.
During his visit it came on to rain violently, and when the hour for his
departure arrived the rain had made the streets impassable. There was no
vehicle to be had, and my friend was resigning himself to a soaking.
"You can be taken of course in the sedan-chair," said his host with
dignity. The sedan-chair was produced, a couple of serving-men grasped
the handles, my friend stepped into it, and went swinging back--through
the last century--to the "Grand Monarque." This little anecdote, I
imagine, still paints Chartres socially.
Before dinner I took a walk on the planted promenade which encircles the
town--the Tour-de-ville it is called--much of which is extremely
picturesque. Chartres has lost her walls as a whole, but here and there
they survive, and play a desultory part in holding the town together. In
one place the rampart is really magnificent--smooth, strong and lofty,
curtained with ivy, and supporting on its summit an old convent and its
garden. Only one of the city-gates remains--a narrow arch of the
fourteenth century, flanked by two admirable round towers, and preceded
by a fosse. If you stoop a little, as you stand outside, the arch of
this hoary old gate makes a capital setting for the picture of the
interior of the town, and, on the inner hill-top, against the sky, the
large gray mass of the cathedral. The ditch is full, and to right and to
left it flows along the base of the mouldering wall, through which the
shabby backs of houses extrude, and which is garnished with little
wooden galleries, lavatories of the town's soiled linen. These little
galleries are filled with washerwomen, who crane over and dip their
many-coloured rags into the yellow stream. The old patched and
interrupted wall, the ditch with its weedy edges, the spots of colour,
the white-capped laundresses in their little wooden cages--one lingers
to look at it all.