Chartres, 1260-1960

Seven hundred years ago, according to tradition, the King of France--later St. Louis--walked 17 miles from Nogent-le-Roi to help dedicate the great new church in the town of Chartres. Built on a hill above a windy plain, pointing the tiny town beneath it to heaven with its spires, the new church was the seventh to rise upon the sacred spot--sacred to the Druids for its shrine to the mysterious "Virgin Who Shall Bear a Son," sacred later to the Christians as a place of prayer built by Saints Potentian and Albin. Before King Louis on that dedication day in 1260, a great cross was drawn on the cathedral floor with ashes, and the people of Chartres who had labored on it for 65 years rejoiced at the house they had built for their Virgin and her Son.

They could not have imagined in what spirit their work would be commemorated in 1960, for to modern man Chartres Cathedral is a precious and perfect fossil of a pre-secular time when faith and the church held together the whole structure of society.

More than a Dollhouse. In Chartres Cathedral the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared many times and wrought miracles. In 861, three years after the church was destroyed for the first time (by the northern invader Hastings). Charles the Bald donated a treasured relic, the shift of the Virgin (now known as the Sacred Veil). By charging admission to see it, he reasoned, money could be raised for the church's rebuilding. The veil is still there, and Chartres is dedicated to the Virgin. "This church was built for her," wrote Henry Adams, "in this spirit of simpleminded, practical, utilitarian faith--in this singleness of thought." In a mawkish conceit, he added: "Exactly as a little girl sets up a dollhouse for her favorite doll."

But Chartres was more than a sacred dollhouse. It was a great book of knowledge for the Middle Ages, whose illiterate people could read the Old Testament and the New in its carvings and fabulous stained glass, as well as theology, science, history and the liberal arts.

Building like Bread. In the 18th century reign of reason, the cathedral almost became useful in another sense; only its sheer size kept it from being blown up and quarried for stone like many another great church. In 1794 the lead roof was stripped to make bullets, and during the liberation of France in World War II six Nazis used its north tower as a snipers' nest. War and religious strife have broken the hands and heads of saints, smashed panes of irreplaceable glass. Even worse wreckers were the 19th century restorers who plastered the apse with inanities--candelabra that cast no light, bas-reliefs that conceal the beauties of the structure. Yet today Chartres again stands serene, outcropping grass and flowers, bathed within with blue and red and changing light. "This building is like bread. You have to bake it every day." says one stonemason of Chartres. "All the time we pull out stones, replace them with new ones."

The architects who planned this greatest of Gothic churches, the sculptors and stonemasons, wandering guildsmen and artisans of glass who labored on it for generations, are as anonymous as the men and women of the countryside who counted it their pious privilege to drag stones to the site. Last week the faithful of a far more individualistic time celebrated their work and the seven centuries between in a High Mass with 50 altar boys, vicars, priests, friars, bishops, archbishops and ten orders of nuns. Said Maurice Cardinal Feltin of Paris: "The cathedral has accomplished its mission over the years--it has revealed the grace of God. It is one of the privileged meeting places of God and man."

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