Frozen Music

To get an idea of just how omnipresent matters of the spirit were nine centuries ago here in western Europe one needs only to visit the small town of CHARTRES. You do that preferably by train from across the flat terrain of fields and low woods that surround it. For miles in the distance, even before you see the town itself, you can see the two famously asymmetrical spires of its great cathedral jutting into the sky. In the big cities like Paris and Rouen, the great Gothic cathedrals don’t stand out in quite such powerful relief, but in Chartres, with nothing to compete with it, the cathedral is the leitmotif of your every moment.

Henry Adams, that moody, lyrical Massachusetts Yankee (and no relation) wrote a great study of Chartres that I first read as a teenager living in rural New Hampshire and trying to imagine what France was like.

Adams enjoys contemplating the spires. He talks about the two spires of the cathedral and how whimsically different they are—and about how the plainer, older of the two (dating from roughly 1150 A.D.), the one without the dense, elaborate ornamentation, is, in his words, “the one that we are expected to recognize as the most perfect piece of architecture in the world.”

For Adams the spire is “the simplest part of the Romanesque or Gothic architecture, and needs least study in order to be felt. It is a bit of sentiment almost pure of practical purpose. It tells the whole of its story at a glance, and its story is the best that architecture had to tell, for it typified the aspirations of man at the moment when man’s aspirations were highest.”

Saint Bernard thought that towers were “an excrescence due to pride and worldliness.” Adams seems to think that Saint Bernard, like the later Tolstoy, was a grump who had no time for art and mere aesthetic matters. He, Saint Bernard, seemed irritated that something so extravagant and useless as a spire would be built simply as an ornament, simply to gratify the artistic sense of beauty.

The afternoon is warm and the light clear. Early spring in the French countryside, only a half-hour ride from Illiers-Combray, where Charles Swann and the Guermantes had their summer residences. We step into the cathedral, and the first sensation that hits us is not the magnificence of its interior but the shocking drop in temperature. Inside it’s really cold, and until one’s eyes are adjusted it’s dark—the dark chill of the crypt. Who would want to leave the warmth and cheer of the natural world to enter into this tomb-like surrounding? But then your body and senses accustom themselves to the interior. The light is subtle, screened and filtered through the dozens of vitrines, each of which tells a fantastically detailed story.

A small part of the interior has been cleaned, and the contrast between its clear white surfaces and the old, dirty, smudged walls and statues is shocking. We’ve come to think of Gothic cathedrals as places full of shadows and darkness, but in fact that’s really the accretion of centuries of dirty air and smoke. Scrubbed of all that crud, the original stonework is so luminous it virtually reflects light.

It’s impossible not to feel spiritually lifted by being at Chartres. Perhaps this is because, as Henry Adams points out, the imagery in the thousands of statues and bas-reliefs is free of fear and loathing. The Christ of the main portals, Adams says, is a herald of salvation. “There is no hint of fear, punishment or damnation. And this is the note of the whole time. Before 1200 the Church seems not to have felt the need of appealing habitually to terror; the promise of hope and happiness was enough…a hundred years later every Church portal showed Christ not as Savior but as Judge…at Chartres Christ is identified with His Mother, the sprit of love and grace, and His Church is the Church Triumphant.”

Across the small street from the south side of the cathedral we find several quiet bistros offering lunch. Is there some local feminist wit in their names? One is called “La Reine de Saba” (The Queen of Sheba). The other, perhaps in honor of Eve, is “Cafe Serpente.” We choose the snake over the queen, and enjoy a midafternoon repast before once more entering into the vaulted glory for one last look.