An itinerary for those who have but a short time to spare at Chartres is suggested on page 352.
Hotels--Grand Monarque (Automobile Club de France); Duc de Chartres; France.
Built 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.[1] It is the granary of France. _Le blé c’est la Beauce et la Beauce c’est Chartres._[2]
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 Orléans, 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 ocean’s slow retreat.’
Chartres is no place for an Atheist.[3] 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 Cæsar 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. Mediævalism 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 woodman’s 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 _Prima Sedes Francie_, and Charles-le-Chauve, when he presented to the town the Veil of the Blessed Mary, chose the Church of Chartres as the earliest and most august sanctuary of the cult of the Virgin. And even before the Christian era it was so. For, by a strange coincidence, in which there has been found something more than a coincidence, or nothing more than a reflection of Isis worship, or, again, merely a monkish invention, but by a strange coincidence, at any rate, the grotto, above which, in after years, the mediæval masons were to rear the superb superstructure of their Cathedral, was dedicated by the ancient Druids: ‘To the Virgin who shall bear a son’--_Virgini Parituræ_.--There, upon the very spot in the dim vast crypt which is to-day the most famous and the most frequented shrine in the world, they worshipped an image which was the forerunner of the statue of Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre.