Notre Dame de Chartres

Apart from a general idea of ‘large gothic cathedral, stained glass, Chartres blue, blah blah’ my understanding of Chartres to date has been garnered from the tales of Dornford Yates. Jonah Mansel and Richard Chandos would stop there for breakfast after unloading the Rolls early from the boat at Calais and bypassing Rouen because it is too ‘hot’. While Carson filled the tank and checked under the bonnet, Mansel and Chandos would admire the cathedral windows in the morning light. Actually I think it was Boy and Adele in one of the Berry books – Mansel would probably have only gone into the cathedral to meet an informer or pursue a villain. Anyway, my point is that I knew very little about it.

Notre Dame de Chartres makes Notre Dame de Paris look like a parish church. (Ok, it is, but that’s beside the point.) It is bigger, older, has more stained glass windows, and is more gob-smacking than any other church you are ever likely to be in. It’s also probably colder.


The windows live up to every encomium I’ve ever read. They are like enamelled jewel boxes, with intricate little pictures. Photos don’t capture the colours, the vivid reds and blues and golds and subtle greens. Like the Monets in the Orangerie you can sit and look for hours, and we would have if it hadn’t been so effing cold.

At Notre Dame in Paris I was impressed by the sacred surviving the onslaught of the profane. That is here too; while the cameras buzz and rude Japanese tourists barge and jostle, the devout carry out their private devotions in the chapels and consult the priest in a confessional in the ambulatory. The artisans who created this place found a way to combine the sacred and secular in their work. We don’t know their names because they donated the windows as guilds and did their work in teams. But the windows, the carving, the engineering all display craftsmanship as vocation and worship.


Another man who has found his vocation at Chartres is Malcolm Miller, a distinguished-looking gentleman who has guided tours in English here for fifty-three years. He first came here in 1956 as a student completing his French degree (he still wears his purple and white Durham scarf). The French government made him a Chevalier of the Order of Merit and of the Order of Arts and Letters for his work here and around the world writing and talking about the cathedral, so I think we can assume his delivery is informed. It is also amusing, full of witty comments and anecdotes about saints, tourists and art historians. Describing how the Allies almost bombed the building in 1944, he added, ‘I’m glad they didn’t, because I’d be teaching French to horrible school children in Birmingham.’ Rather than filling our radio headsets full of facts, Malcolm focused on the symbolism of the building, and how the windows, statues and other objects relate to each other, describing and commenting on Biblical narrative and theology – in other words, teaching us to read the building as the unlettered artisans and worshippers of the thirteenth century did.

When we walked out into the sunshine we took off our scarves, opened our coats to let the warmth in and had lunch at a little Italian restaurant called La Voûte Romane in Rue Fulbert on the southern (sunny) side of the cathedral. Brilliant food and atmosphere, and no tourist groups.