Ch. 6 - The Virgin of Chartres - Page 2

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