Chartres

Cathedral at Chartres.

My first weekend back in France, Lisa and I decided to take a day-trip to Chartres in the region of Centre, home the famous Gothic cathedral (a UNESCO World Heritage site!). This involved a three-hour train ride to the east of Rennes across the région of the Pays de la Loire ("the Indiana/Ohio of France"). For those of you keeping score at home, I have now been to five of mainland France's twenty-one régions and Lisa has been to eight - so we're well on our way to completing our goal of visiting every région!

Upon arriving in Chartres, we made our obligatory first stop at the tourist office. Not only did we get our free city map, we also purchased a guidebook to the cathedral because it's famous for its many stained glass windows and its elaborate exterior sculptures. We thought the guidebook would help us figure out what we were looking at and did it ever!

The cat, whose name sounded like
LaTisha (though it's a he).

Vegetarian croque-monsieur.

We walked to the cathedral but we quickly abandoned our original plan of eating our packed lunch outside (it was around noon at this point). Northern France may be warmer than the US in winter, but it's still winter and, in fact, the Saturday we visited was unseasonably cold, making it difficult to eat our lunch outdoors. After wandering the streets for a while looking for a reasonably-priced place to eat and after passing through Chartres' Saturday produce market, we finally found one. (Because Chartres is a fairly small town and quite a tourist attraction, they can get away with charging more for meals, I guess.) It was a nice little rustic-style brasserie where Lisa got to make friends with the resident cat and where, despite being out of much of the food on their menu, they were able to whip up something vegetarian for Lisa.

Seven Arts.

Following lunch, we returned to the cathedral and began examining the exterior sculptures. The church was built very rapidly (by medieval standards!) between 1194 and 1220. The west side where the main entrance is located is mostly decorated with scenes from Christ's life, ascension, and the Last Judgement. Among these, though, are carvings of the signs of the zodiac, the months, and (my favorite) the seven liberal arts with a depiction of an ancient representative of that art (Aristotle for philosophy, for example, and Cicero for rhetoric). The north porch of the church is decorated with Old Testament figures and the south porch (which would have received more light during most of the year) with New Testament figures. We tried to read the book about all of these carvings, but given the cold and the wind, it didn't take us long to decide we should just go inside to try to warm up!

Cathedral interior.

The interior is famous for its medieval stained glass windows, many of which have survived intact since the 13th century. In 1939, sensing what could happen, the windows were all removed and stored in the houses of local residents until after the war. In addition, following the Allied invasion of Normandy, the cathedral was put on a list of bombing targets. However, an American officer recognized the cultural importance of the cathedral and volunteered to sneak behind German lines to see if, in fact, the Germans were occupying the cathedral as a command post. With one other soldier, they made it to the cathedral, determined the Germans were not using it, returned to the American side to report their findings, and the cathedral was not bombed. (Sadly, the officer was killed not long afterward while fighting the Germans not far from Chartres).

In the circular image, Mary and Elisabeth.  We've affectionately
captioned this, "I have to say..." "Well, I don't know about that."

The windows are pretty amazing in their color, their level of detail, and their creativity. Most of them depict episodes from the lives of various saints or from Biblical stories. There are some pretty amazing ones showing a Tree of Jesse, the life of Christ, and the Last Judgement. The windows over the north porch depict Old Testament figures and those over the south porch depict New Testament figures (matching the themes of the carvings on the porches outside). Thankfully, we had Lisa's new camera with all its powerful lenses she had from high school which we could use to get a closer look at some of the windows, especially the ones on the second story. It was very difficult to see them with the naked eye and it's hard to believe that medieval

Rose window.

church-goers would have been able to see very much. (Sadly, the area around the altar, the choir and the ambulatory are all closed for renovation so we couldn't walk around the entire church and see every window.) The windows are also larger and more numerous than in many other churches of the same date and to accomplish this, the church uses larger and more extensive flying buttresses to make up for the lack of stonework in the walls themselves.

Labyrinth and rose window.

The other major feature of the inside of the church (besides the Gothic architecture, of course!) is the labyrinth in the pavement of the nave. Lisa's a big fan of labyrinths, so she greatly enjoyed this. Unfortunately for us, though, they only remove the chairs from the labyrinth once a month so we weren't able to walk it (as we were able to do with the labyrinth in Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco, which is based on Chartres' labyrinth). Also, as a classicist, I have to mention that the center of the labyrinth originally contained a bronze plaque showing Theseus defeating the Minotaur (apparently a symbol of the triumph of Christianity over paganism!), but this plaque was removed during the French Revolution and melted down for weaponry.

Another interesting note about our visit to the cathedral: while looking at the exterior of the main door, we saw a man outside begging for change. At first we just thought he was a typical beggar, looking for money from tourists and pious church-goers. Upon leaving the church, we saw another person doing the same thing and we realized that she and (we're pretty sure) the first beggar, too, were using scallop shells to hold their coins. The scallop shell is the symbol of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain so now we think these two people were actual pilgrims looking for money to help them continue their journey!

Cat number 2.

Following our visit to the cathedral, we stopped by the stained glass museum but because we had to catch our train home, we didn't pay to go in (although Lisa did get to meet another cat! We're hoping to save that for another trip back to Chartres when we have more time to spend there - and when it's not quite so cold!