EVREUX TO CHARTRES, 47¾ MILES
(77 KILOMETRES)
DISTANCES ALONG THE ROUTE
Kil. Miles.
=Evreux= to Thomer =13= 8
=Thomer= to Nonancourt =16= 10
=Nonancourt= to Dreux =14= 8¾
=Dreux= to Chartres =34= 21
NOTES FOR DRIVERS
This portion of the route goes across the great flat plain of St.
André and the two little hills, one on leaving Dreux, and another
halfway to Chartres, are not worth mentioning. Squalls of wind and
rain sometimes assail one with tremendous force.
PLACES OF INTEREST ON THE ROUTE
=Evreux.=--Old and historic town, with barracks; cathedral includes
several periods, from 1125 to 1630; town belfry, built in 1490,
contains bell of 1406; museum, with Roman discoveries from
Vieil-Evreux; Church of St. Taurin, Norman and fifteenth century,
contains in the sacristy a thirteenth-century silver-gilt
reliquary.
=Nonancourt.=--Small town, with remains of castle, built by Henry I.
of England.
=Dreux.=--Hôtel de Ville, in middle of street, built 1512-1537, has
fine interior; Chapelle Royale, on hill above town (where are also
the ruins of the castle), a burial-place of the Bourbons; Church of
St. Pierre, twelfth and fifteenth centuries, with holy-water stoup
of twelfth century.
Evreux is a cathedral town, with comparatively wide, but very
unassuming, streets of old houses, having their original charm generally
hidden under a covering of plaster. Cavalrymen, with horsehair falling
from their helmets, and the numerous clergy seem to make up a
considerable proportion of the population. In walking through the town
one frequently comes to little canals, which take the water of the River
Iton in several directions, in a similar fashion to the Stour at
Canterbury.
The spacious square in front of the Hôtel de Ville is overlooked by
public buildings, whose new appearance might give one a wrong impression
of the antiquity of the town, if it were not for the beautiful belfry
tower, with a pinnacled spire, standing in one corner. It was built in
the latter part of the fifteenth century, and the bell, whose notes are
frequently heard, was cast in 1406, and is nearly a century older than
the tower, which was built in place of an earlier one. The Museum, in
the same square, is interesting, on account of the Roman remains it
contains, found at the village of Vieil-Evreux, a Roman site about four
and a half miles to the west.
[Illustration: TOWN PLAN NO. 6.--EVREUX.]
From the museum a short street, the Rue de l’Horloge, leads to the
Cathedral, whose lately restored spire appears above the roofs from
nearly every point of view. From the eleventh right down to the
nineteenth century rebuilding or alterations have been taking place on
the great church, and now, to the architect, as well as those who are
interested in the history of France, there are the records in stone of
the changes which those eight centuries have witnessed.
The first Norman cathedral was burnt, in 1119, by Henry I. of England,
who rebuilt the nave about twenty-six years later. During the fighting
in Normandy in the time of Philippe Auguste the church again suffered,
and the triforium of the nave was rebuilt about the middle of the
thirteenth century. The present choir followed at the beginning of the
fourteenth century. The following summary covers the chief periods of
the cathedral:
1076. Consecration of the Norman church.
1119. Burnt by Henry I.
_c._ 1125. Nave rebuilt by Henry I.
_c._ 1240. Nave triforium rebuilt.
1298-1310. Choir built.
1352-1417. North-west tower built; rebuilt in classic style
1608-1630.
1400. The west window.
1461-1483. The spire built when Cardinal de la Balue was Bishop.
_c._ 1465. The Lady-chapel (partly thirteenth century).
_c._ 1515. North transept built by Bishop Ambroise le Veneur.
_c._ 1545. The Renaissance west front begun by Bishop Gabriel le
Veneur.
1545-1630. South-west tower reconstructed in the classic style.
The west front is unique in being the only completely classic façade
among all the cathedrals of France. It almost gives the feeling of the
François I. châteaux by the Loire. The interior is a most inspiring
example of pure French Gothic. In the chapels are several windows
containing beautiful stained glass of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries; that in the south transept is sixteenth century.
The Bishop’s Palace, on the south side of the cathedral, can only be
seen from the Boulevard Chambaudouin, where its fortified exterior is
washed by one of the canals of the Iton. It is an interesting building
of the fifteenth century, and in 1603 was, for a time, the residence of
Henri IV., whose famous victory at Ivry, a few miles south of Evreux, is
described at the end of this chapter.
At the end of the Rue Joséphine is the Church of the Benedictine Abbey
of St. Taurin. The life-story of that otherwise obscure worthy of the
Church is told in the windows of the choir, and one of them shows his
successful attack on the devil, who had entered the temple of Diana in
Evreux. The sacristan will show the casket containing relics of the
saint (small gratuity) to those who ask permission. It is worth while to
do so, as this silver-gilt reliquary is one of the most sumptuous
examples in existence of goldsmiths’ work of the thirteenth century.
The choir, the tower, and part of the nave of St. Taurin belong to the
fifteenth century, and the other portions are Romanesque work of the
eleventh century. Evreux suffered the most terrible buffets in the
unsettled period when Normandy was the battle-ground of England and
France. Henry I. burnt the town and John sold it to Philippe Auguste,
regaining it treacherously after the release of Richard I. Philippe,
however, having captured it, massacred a large proportion of the
miserable townsfolk.
It is generally believed that the Devereux family obtained their name
from this Norman town.
The road to Chartres goes southwards from Evreux over the hedgeless
plain of St. André in a perfectly straight line. The hamlet of Thomer,
with its little church with a spiky spire on the left, is passed
through, and here and there another village is seen across the fields;
but otherwise, for some eighteen miles the great plain stretches away to
a flat horizon, with so few features that one marvels how a peasant can
find his way to the particular field he was working in on the previous
day. There are no hedges, no roadside cottages, and scarcely a tree to
serve as a guide to any particular square of the great patchwork of
green and brown!
NONANCOURT
On reaching this old town one goes over a level-crossing, and, turning
to the left, goes through the street, getting a passing glimpse of the
market-house standing on wooden posts. Henry I. chose this place to
build a castle for the defence of Normandy, and in it an agreement was
signed between Richard I. and Philippe Auguste, by which those two
kingly warriors promised not to molest one another’s dominions while
absent on the Crusades. Here also they arranged their respective shares
in the Third Crusade.
On leaving Nonancourt the River Avre is
[Illustration: ROUEN CATHEDRAL FROM THE SOUTH.
The Tour de Beurre is on the left, and the Portail de la Calende appears
at the end of the street beneath the great central tower. (_Page 32._)]
crossed, and about nine miles farther one reaches the interesting town
of
[Illustration: No. 4. EVREUX TO CHARTRES.]
DREUX
The most conspicuous feature is the Hôtel de Ville, a large square
tower-like building, with slightly projecting circular turrets at each
corner. It was built between 1512 and 1537, and is a most interesting
example of the transition from Flamboyant Gothic to Classic forms. The
tall conical roof is broken with dormers, and ends in a bell-turret.
Inside there is a beautiful staircase, a Renaissance fireplace, several
fine rooms, a library, and old armour.
Built on the steep hill that dominates the town on the north side, where
the ruins of the keep and towers of the Castle dismantled in 1593 still
stand, is the Chapelle Royale, erected in 1816 by the Duchesse
d’Orléans. After suffering imprisonment and banishment during the
Revolution, she returned to France in 1814, and resided at Ivry, a few
miles to the north of Dreux. The tombs of her father and the Princes of
her family in the vaults of the old collegiate church at Dreux had been
broken open during the Revolution, but certain pious folk having hidden
the bones, the Duchess decided to build a chapel in which they could be
preserved. It was completed in 1820, and her son Louis Philippe
afterwards built a larger structure. Lenotre describes how Louis refused
to have any assistance in the work of sorting up the confused heap of
the bones of his ancestors. ‘These poor dead people,’ he said, ‘have
already been sufficiently tormented. Leave me alone with them’; and,
shut up by himself for a great part of a night, he laid out the bones on
cloths, measuring, examining, and sorting them by the light of a lamp.
The tombs include those of the Duchesse d’Orléans, the foundress of the
chapel, of Louis Philippe and his queen and their young children, and
the Duchesse de Bourbon Condé, mother of the unfortunate Duc d’Enghien.
The Church of St. Pierre, with its odd-looking unfinished towers, has a
somewhat severe interior, relieved by the beauty of its
sixteenth-century glass. The nave is fifteenth century and the choir and
transepts twelfth or thirteenth. A holy-water basin, or _bénitier_, of
the twelfth century is of great interest, and so is the chapel on the
south side of the nave, containing wall-paintings of the inhabitants of
the town who made the pilgrimage of St. James of Compostella (Santiago
in Spain) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The beautiful ambulatory has graceful pillars without capitals, and the
sounding-board of the pulpit rests on palm-tree supports, as at
Louviers.
During the Huguenot war Dreux and its neighbourhood was involved in
heavy fighting. In 1562 the first pitched battle was fought near the
town, the Catholic Leaguers being led by Montmorency and François, Duc
de Guise, and the Protestants by Coligny and Condé. Although the
Catholics were successful, it was a closely fought battle, in which
4,000 perished, and both Montmorency and Condé were taken prisoners.
When Henry of Navarre had become Henri IV., although still only
recognized as King by a few of the provinces of France, he laid siege to
Dreux in 1590, but retired a few miles northwards to Ivry, in the plain
of St. André, on the approach of the Catholic army under Mayenne,
numbering about 16,000. ‘My friends,’ said Henri, as he fastened on his
helmet, ‘yonder is the enemy; here is your King; and God is on our side.
If you should lose your standards, rally round my white plume: you will
always find it in the path of honour and of victory!’ The fight began at
ten in the morning, and in two hours the army of Mayenne was in full
flight.
THE ROAD TO CHARTRES
Outside the town the journey across the great agricultural plain is
continued. There are still no hedges between the strips of green and
brown, sometimes broken by distant belts of woodland, going away to the
soft blue horizons in heaving undulations. The first village passed is
Marville-Moutier-Brûlé. One can see the high-pitched green roof and
small spire of its eleventh-century church on the left.
Le Boullay Mivoye, the next village, which also has a little twelfth to
fifteenth century church, consists of a very compact collection of
uniformly low thatched or green-tiled cottages and barns, practically
surrounded by a wall, beyond which there is no sign of any habitation
until the next village is in sight.
Speeding southwards there appears right ahead on the horizon, at the end
of a very straight perspective of road, an enormous building with two
spires. There is nothing else in sight beyond a few low trees, and the
stranger at once realizes that he is approaching a building of the
greatest consequence. It is the vast Gothic cathedral of Chartres.
On entering the town, by going to the right along the Rue de la
Couronne, one reaches the Place des Epars, where the hotels are
situated. (See town plan of Chartres on p. 67.)