Today, I visited the Notre Dame cathedral in Chartres, France, not to be confused with the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris (there are a lot of Notre Dames out there, like there are a lot of "Our Lady of the's" out here). Chartres is a fairly small town about an hour's train ride from Paris. Of course, it took me about 45 min to get from Orsay to the appropriate Paris train station (there are four major train stations), and the train wasn't leaving right when I got there, so it took me a little over two hours to get out there.
Why would I travel for two hours when there is so much to see and do in Paris you might ask? Well, if you've ever traveled with me, you'll know that I'm a church nut. I love big, beautiful churches, of which Europe has a few. Poor Carrol got dragged into every church we came across when we spent three and a half weeks in Europe. The Chartres cathedral is the best-preserved example of a gothic cathedral in Europe. First of all, it's the best example of a gothic cathedral period because it only took about 30 years to build whereas Notre Dame, Paris took 122 years to build so it has examples of several styles in it. Chartres is pure gothic (with one exception I will mention later). Second, the Chartres cathedral escaped a lot of the damage a lot of the other French cathedrals suffered from the Puritans (apparently, the Puritans were a bunch of rowdies who liked to go around smashing statues and stained glass windows and breaking relics [bones and personal items of the saints, for the non-Catholics out there] because they were examples of papist idolatry [no comments about idolatry from the Protestants out there]; no wonder they sent them over here) and revolutionaries (who thought that anything [living or otherwise] with a crown on it should have its head chopped off--saint or not and they didn't like the Catholic Church too much because of the connections between the hierarchy and the nobility). Apparently, there was a city councilman who was able to convince the revolutionaries that the cathedral would eventually become a tourist attraction as a wonderful work of art. Then there were the bombs from a couple of World Wars (the townspeople removed all of the stained glass windows [several hundred] from the cathedral and buried them to protect them from bombing during WWII, and miraculously, the cathedral itself escaped unscathed although there were some close calls). So, with one thing and another, the vast majority of what is in the cathedral is the original gothic architecture and art. Pretty cool, huh?
So, the things to see at Chartres are the stained glass windows. Gothic architecture was supposed to be inspired by light--the light of God, if you will--and they created the vaulted ceilings (which required flying butresses) so they could make bigger and bigger stained glass windows to bring in more light. It's sort of difficult to believe this when you go into one because it seems pretty darn dark, but that's because the windows have several centuries' worth of dirt accumulated on them. At Chartres, they are in the process of cleaning the windows but they are only half done. On one of the windows, Mary was black. Now, I'm perfectly willing to accept that Mary might not have been as pale as she is commonly shown, given that she was of middle-eastern descent, but I'm fairly certain she was not a black woman.
The other problem is that these windows go all the way to the ceiling which is several stories high, so it's kind of difficult to see what's at the top. And most of these windows are composed of 10 or 20 smaller panes each having a seperate scene in them. I really wish I had brought binoculars.
Every day Mon. thru Sat. there are tours in English--one at noon, and one at 1:45 given by an Englishman who has spent the last 50 years studying the cathedral--everything in it, everything about it, just everything. He's a bit eccentric (read: crochety; he told off one Italian tour guide for being too loud, shushed a large group of school children, glared at a car for several minutes while we were outside and told us in no uncertain terms that the enormous statue of the Assumption of Mary that was behind the altar was hideous and in terribly poor taste because it is not gothic, but from some other period [it did look a bit incongruous]), but it's definitely worth the 10 euros to take the tour. He took us through several of the windows, telling us what was depicted in each of the panes because 1: there's a lot of symbolism, so modern Christians might not understand what's going on, and 2: nobody can see the top because it's so frickin' high. The windows often depict bible stories and dogma, because most people who lived during the Middle Ages couldn't read, so they needed to be taught using pictures. How they saw the top ones I'll never know. Maybe that's why the stories all start at the bottom left and you read the window left to right, bottom to top. Of course, that would mean the general populace wouldn't know how these stories ended. There may have been a lot of people who didn't know Christ was crucified because they couldn't see the end of the Gospel story. I guess that's why they also read the important parts at Sunday Mass. One of the popular themes for stained glass windows was the Jesse tree. It showed the lineage of Christ starting with Jesse at the bottom, then a few of the important kings in the middle, then ending with Jesus. These are a lot prettier than the Jesse trees we made during catechism class every advent. Those were generally sticks with hand-colored ornaments on them. I never knew why they were called Jesse trees. Guess I was more interested in the coloring.
Anyway, after going through some of the windows, we headed outside to see some of the statues. Like Notre Dame, Paris, some of these statues had had their heads chopped off, but unlike Notre Dame, Paris, they had not be replaced and there was not any plan to do so. However, a lot of the statues had been cleaned and you could see remnants of the original (centuries old) paint. Apparently, the statues on the outside of Gothic cathedrals were painted. Now, they are all just grey stone, but at one time, they were very colorful. I guess they decided not to maintain the paint-job over the years. Also, some of the windows had been replaced in the 19th century because they wanted something more simple. Apparently, for a very long time gothic was considered really hideous.
Our guide told us a little bit about the history of the cathedral, too. The first cathedral there had not been dedicated to Mary, but to another saint. Then, when they decided to build a new cathedral (I think because the other one burnt down [by the way, we found out that all of these old stone churches had a lot of wood concealed behind the stone, especially in the ceilings, that's why they were able to burn down]), someone, I forget who (the king probably) gave the church a very special relic. It was a very large piece of silk cloth worn by Mary when she gave birth to Jesus (which has been since proved to be about 2000 years old, by the way, but, as our guide pointed out, that doesn't prove it actually belonged to Mary). This was pretty major relic, so they decided to dedicate the new cathedral to Mary. In 1184 or so, the cathedral burned down, but the relic was miraculously untouched. As Rick Steve's said in my guide book, "The townspeople were so stoked" that they worked their butts off to build a new cathedral in 30 years, which is an amazingly short amount of time considering how large the cathedral is. At the time, the cloth was called a chemise, because people pictured it as a robe or a dress, but eventually people started calling it the veil of Mary. The entire veil has been on display for centuries, but now, they only display a small piece of it and keep the rest locked up to protect it (it had already been torn by some Puritan or revolutionary or somebody). Yes, I saw it. I think the entire thing would have been more impressive, but they only bring that out on special holy days. Please, nobody comment on the likelihood of a poor, unwed, teenage mother having an enormous piece of expensive cloth. Maybe it was a gift, you never know. John wanted to know if they had tested it for DNA, but then I asked, "and whose DNA would you compare it to?" I doubt the Virgin Mary would appear so that someone can swab the inside of her mouth (actually, if she did, you probably wouldn't have to do the test at all because she'd probably tell you if it was hers or not, but I suppose some people would want to have the test to make it all scientific).
Since I got to Chartres just after noon, I missed the first tour, so I did wander around the town a bit before seeing the cathedral. I found a pretty little canal and a really really old church that isn't open any more. I had to go down a few hundred steps to get to the canal and church and I really regreted that on the way back up. I also toured the shopping district.
Unfortunately, I missed my train back to Paris because I got lost on the way to the station. I know you folks haven't been to Chartres, but if you had, you might say something like, "how can you possibly get lost, the cathedral is about 4 blocks fromm the statioin!" Well, since I knew I had plenty of time, I decided to stop at a chocolatier to bring back to the lab before catching the train. I thought I knew where I was, but I guess I didn't. The chocolatier was only a couple of blocks from the cathedral in the same direction, but I guess I took a wrong turn somewhere. I think the problem is that I'm from the midwest and I tend to think of all streets being laid out in a grid. So, if you take the next street over and head down it, you should end up just a block over at the endd of it. But the streets in the old parts of these cities curve very slightly, sometimes unnoticeably, such that you get to the end and find yourself 10 blocks away from where you want to be. Finding the cathedral from the train station had been easy because the cathedral is so enormous you can see it from anywhere in town, but the train stationn is not so obvious. After asking a large number of people "Ou est la gare?" and running furiously, around a large street construction project, in the middle of traffic, I missed my train by about 3 minutes and had to wait another 20 for the next one.
Fortunately, the talks at the conference ran late, so I came in a few minutes after John. We have been seriously confusing the poor man at the hotel front desk because when you leave the hotel, you have to give them the key (it's a real key, they don't do the keycard thing), so when you come back in, you have to ask for the key for your room and the poor man looks a bit frantic when it's not there like he must've given it to the wrong person or a potential axe murderer or something. Anyway, John and I took off after the same people we had dinner with last night who had went ahead when John found out I wasn't back at the hotel yet. This time, we ate at an Italian restaurant and I had a wonderful pizza and a "demi-bouteille" (half-bottle) of wine which John and I shared.
No comments:
Post a Comment