Pilgrimage to Chartres

On the morning of our second full day in France, Rachel and I set out on pilgrimage to Chartres.  We traveled with more luxurious provisions than pilgrims from centuries past, having bought a pistachio macaroon and a piece of chocolate cake to much on while we rode the air-conditioned train!

The Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Chartres has been an important shrine to the Virgin Mary for hundreds of years.  Legend says that a pagan temple once stood on this site and ancient prophetesses foretold that one day a Virgin would give birth to the King of Heaven.  A local ruler who heard the prophecy is said to have prepared a wooden image of the Madonna and Child and inscribed it with the words Virgini pariturae, or "to the Virgin who would give birth."

The faithful who journeyed to Chartres venerated this ancient statue in the crypt, but the cathedral's most important relic by far was the sancta camisia, the tunic believed to have been worn by the Virgin Mary when she gave birth to the Christ Child.  The cathedral caught fire at the end of twelfth century and was almost completely destroyed.  The famous entrance in the west facade, known as the Royal Portal, and some of the stained glass survived.  The sancta camisia also escaped unharmed, and in recognition of the miracle, the people of Chartres rebuilt an even grander Gothic cathedral.  You can still see the sancta camisia today.  I took this picture of it.  In the Middle Ages it was enclosed in a box, and amazingly it survived the French Revolution--the revolutionaries didn't care much for things like relics or tombs or art!

Chartres Cathedral is also a pilgrimage site for art historians and medievalists!  Unlike many Gothic cathedrals--including Notre-Dame de Paris--much of the sculpture at Chartres is original, and it still has an enormous amount of medieval stained glass.  It's quite remarkable that things as fragile as windows could have survived centuries of wars, storms, iconoclasm, and natural disasters.  This is one of my favorite windows.  It narrates the story of the death of the Virgin Mary.  In the lower roundel you can see all the apostles surrounding her bed as she breathes her last.

This is the rose window from the northern transept with the Virgin Mary held in the arms of her mother, St. Anne, in the central lancet below.  She is flanked by Old Testament kings.  When you enter a Gothic cathedral, you are supposed to feel like you have walked into heaven with the vaults soaring up over your head and the stone walls reduced to skeletal frames holding huge windows of colored light.  I think it's sad and quite ironic that the term "Gothic" has a fairly negative connotation nowadays.  So often people associate it with darkness, creepy corridors, and horrible hunchbacks hiding behind the corners!  In reality, Gothic architecture was about light.  The cathedral was supposed to resemble the Apostle John's vision of the New Jerusalem descending from heaven, with its foundation made from colored stones.

This is the rose window from the south transept.  It's difficult to see, but four of the lancets below the main rose depict Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John riding on the shoulders of Old Testament prophets.  It is a wonderful way of showing how their accounts of Christ's life build on and fulfill the ancient prophecies of God's first covenant.

More stained glass.  You can spend hours staring up at the brightly lit panels and trying to decipher stories from the life of Christ and legends of the saints.

The cathedral also has a little shrine to a black Madonna.  Among the statues and paintings of the Madonna and Child that are believed to work miracles, a large number of them are carved from dark wood or painted with dark hues.  Some people believe that the dark color may be due to centuries of candle smoke and soot.

Votive candles burning in the darkness.

A Renaissance choir screen carved from stone surrounds the sanctuary.  It depicts scenes from the life of Christ and the Virgin Mary.

And here is a poor picture of my very favorite window in Chartres.  It is called Notre-Dame de la Belle Verrière, or "Our Lady of the Beautiful Window."  I'd been to Chartres once before, and it was being restored so I didn't get to see it.  It is very old--dating to the Romanesque structure that was destroyed by fire, although it's been restored many times.  The Christ Child sits enthroned on his mother's lap, backed by the brilliant blue of her mantle while worshiping angels swing incense censors and offer candles.

 I had also never been down to the crypt before.  It was pitch black down there, and it took a while for our eyes to get adjusted.  The French revolutionaries destroyed the statue of the "Virgin who would give birth," but this is a modern reconstruction of what it may have looked like.

Medieval pilgrims also venerated an ancient well in the crypt.  It was believed that early Christian martyrs in France had been thrown by their murders into this well, and pilgrims thought that they could be cured of diseases by being in close proximity to their bones.  It was very deep.

Chartres has three main entrances.  The western Royal Portal was partially covered up with scaffolding sadly, and there was a man singing "Ave Maria" at the doorway and holding a shell to collect money.  That was kind of strange, although a shell attached to your hat used to be a sign that you were on pilgrimage, so I guess it wasn't completely out of place!  This is the south transept entrance.

There was a fabulously carved tympanum over the door with Christ judging the world while the Virgin Mary and John the Beloved pleaded for souls on either side.

Here are jamb statues supporting the archivolts over another door, like columns turned into saints.

Like most sculpture on the exterior of medieval churches, these were once painted.  You can still see a little bit of green on the scales of this dragon.

Here I am surrounded by stone saints in the porch of the transept.

This is the northern transept of the cathedral with its ornate porch, rose window, and a tower from the facade.

And this is a view from the back of the cathedral, where the apse and ambulatory are.  You can see the flying buttresses, supporting the walls but allowing light to flood into the stained glass.

Before we left, Rachel and I walked through the maze of the labyrinth.  The purpose of Gothic labyrinths are still a little mysterious.  They sometimes appear traced on the floor of the church.  Many people believe that they were meditative exercises, encouraging you to ponder and undertake a "spiritual journey" as you walked back and forth through the winding path of the maze until you reached the center.  We were lucky since Chartres only removes the chairs covering the labyrinth once a week.

 Back in Paris, we went walking before getting dinner.  Rachel was nice enough to go along with me to visit an interesting little shrine known as Notre-Dame-de-la-Médaille-Miraculeuse.  In the nineteenth century, St. Catherine Labouré, a nun in the Abbey of St. Vincent de Paul, claimed that the Madonna had appeared to her in a vision and instructed her to prepare holy medals depicting the Virgin Mary as the "Miraculous Mother."  The image associated with this medal is popular all over the world.  You see it on votive candles in the grocery store and carved as garden statues.  This shrine in Paris is where the vision is said to have taken place.  Mass was about to begin, and the chapel was filled with nuns in blue habits and worshipers.

We walked on to the cavernous Church of Saint-Sulpice.

Mass had just begun here as well, and so we didn't get to walk around.

The light in Paris has a golden color to it, especially as it reflects off the ivory-colored stone of all the elegant buildings.

Here is a picture of Notre-Dame de Paris in that golden light--nice enough to be a postcard, don't you think?!  We ate dinner at a very small, very busy bistro not far from the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.  The tables outside were packed so close together that we were practically eating with the American family sitting next to us!  They were frequent visitors to Paris and told us that we had selected one of the best bistros in the city.  The food was fabulous.  I had a veal dish in a wonderful sauce, and Rachel had an incredible tureen of beef stew with little pasta shells.

After dinner we walked around the Quartier Latin, the student section of the city built around the Sorbonne University.  The beautiful academic buildings are linked together and line the wide avenues. 

Soufflot's eighteenth-century Panthéon is just around the corner.  Built in Neo-Classical style like a Roman temple, the structure was originally a church dedicated to St. Geneviève, the child patron of Paris.  Today it houses the remains of famous French citizens, including Victor Hugo, Voltaire, and Rousseau.

And next door to the Panthéon is the Church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont in late Gothic style.  Inside is the tomb of St. Geneviève.

Rachel and I finished off the day by going to see the Eiffel Tower lit up at night.  It was spectacular--one of those things that you sometimes dismiss as being "just for tourists" but then realize that there is a reason that all the tourists want to go there!