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Geo: 48.4444, 1.48417
I didn't sleep too badly last night. I woke up quite a lot but was able to get back to sleep. I did have some odd dreams though. In one, I was some sort of vengeance demon, and I sneaked up on a small evil person and flung him into space. I don't know
where that came from! Must've been the kir before dinner last night.
After we had all eaten (the usual sort of selection, and I was able to roll my own ham and cheese crepes), we walked back to the Cathedral and down into the lower town by the river Eure. At one time, the river was used for all sorts of awful trades and was generally filled with offal and other nasty stuff. When most of those trades were no longer needed and the river had some time to recover, along came the washerwomen. They worked in little riverside shacks with washboards on pulleys that could be lowered down to the water; the top parts of the shacks had wooden louvered windows and acted as the drying rooms. The river quickly became the center of gossip for the town thanks to the washerwomen.
There are several half-timbered structures in the lower town. In fact, there are a great deal more than one can see. Most of them at some point were plastered over and are nothing much to look at, but you can occasionally tell which ones are really half-timbered underneath: there's usually a giveaway like a wooden sill that sticks out from the second level, or there may be a vertical strip of wood that didn't get plastered because it sits behind a water pipe or utility pole. It's a pity that you can't see much half-timbering, but I suppose people don't want to have to take care of the wood.
We walked back up to the haute ville (the "high town"😉, passing by a butcher who recently won a prix d'honneur for making the best pâté de Chartres (Look! I found the special characters menu in this word processing program!), and arriving at the Cathedral at 10:00 to be given a private lecture by Malcolm Miller. Malcolm is an Englishman who came to Chartres when he was 24 over 59 years ago. He has made it his life's work to study and interpret the stained glass windows and some of the statuary of the Cathedral,
so he's basically "the" guy when it comes to the Cathedral's art. In 1985, when Ms. Moore bravely led some of us girls to Europe, she was absolutely beside herself that the tour company didn't organize a tour to Chartres so that we could see Malcolm Miller. "Malcolm Miller, Malcolm Miller!" That's all we heard for at least three of the five days we were in Paris. So, basically, I've been waiting 29 years to see this guy! He showed us several of the windows and some of the restoration work that has been done (it's been going on for quite some time and won't be finished for another ten years), and also talked about some of the statues outside. He was very interesting and rather sweet in a way, but he's also kind of crotchety and has no patience whatsoever with Japanese tour groups.
We were free for lunch after the lecture, so I wandered around the Cathedral some more and saw the altar, the Blue Virgin (stained glass where Mary is in a robe of what came to be known as "Chartres blue"😉, and the Virgin of the Pillar, a smallish statue of Mary looking regal with baby Jesus mounted on a pillar. Also found the obligatory statue of St. Teresa and lit a candle. The most interesting item was the so-called Veil of Mary. It was believed to have been the tunic Mary wore when she gave birth; Chartres acquired it sometime in the Middle Ages. When the Cathedral caught fire and burned down, many of the townspeople talked about leaving Chartres: obviously, God had sent the fire because He was not pleased, so the town must no longer be a place of safety. Not only that but the Cathedral had lost its holy relic, and the town would suffer from the lack of pilgrims. All hope was lost! Then, three days after the fire, the priests came up from the crypt carrying the Veil. Miracle of miracles! The people stopped talking about leaving the town and instead started planning a brand new cathedral. They managed to build it in less than 75 years, which is astonishing when you realize that other cathedrals could often take 200 years to complete. Anyway, whatever this piece of cloth's story really is, it has actually been dated to fifth-century Constantinople, so it's pretty fantastic that it still exists at all.
I got myself a croque monsieur from a bakery and wandered some of the back streets while eating it. (It wasn't very good.) I've noticed that there are several men in town with very big dogs. We saw some mastiff-type dogs yesterday, and today I saw two beefy German shepherds. But I also saw an adorable puppy being taken for a walk. He was
not a fan of that leash!
I came back to the hotel with the intention of getting on the internet. Earlier, I had locked my money belt and laptop in the room safe. I always test the safe a few times before actually putting something in it, and it seemed fine. I had, in fact, put stuff in, taken it out, and put it back again. But when I got back to the room, the safe wouldn't work at all. It was just dead. The manageress had to come up, and she spent around 10 minutes trying to fix it. It turned out to be the batteries behind the number panel. She replaced all six of them and finally it worked again. Thank goodness I found out during a time when someone could fix it, rather than tomorrow morning! That was a nerve-wracking quarter hour.
We all met again at 2:00 to go to the Stained Glass Centre, which is a museum/restoration facility. Our guide taught us about different kinds of stained glass and how panels are made, and we saw some up-close glass that had been removed from the Cathedral. Did you know that anytime you see brown in an old piece of stained glass, it's really violet that has aged badly? Four of us stayed behind after the visit to try our hands at painting stained glass. We were each given a square of colored glass -- I chose turquoise -- and then shown how to put the lead around it. You put one edge of the glass into a groove in the lead, pinch the lead, cut it partway through, flare out the edges with a tool, and then roll your piece of glass so that the next edge fits into the groove. When you've reached the end, you cut off the remaining lead and then pinch the corners of the lead on your glass. Then you solder the corners with tin, pinch the remaining edges down, and paint your glass. The lady had about 20 different patterns that we could copy. I chose a vine pattern that didn't look too difficult. It looked great while I was painting, but I later discovered that that was because the pattern sheet was still under my glass. When I lifted my glass up, there were way too many blobby bits and way too many thin bits. It looks like a six-year-old made it. But at least I have an interesting souvenir!
I ended up going to dinner with the group of seven who met on a Best of Italy tour two years ago. We went back to the place where we had dinner last night. I shared a pizza with Carrie from Bellingham, and I had beer instead of wine. The pizza was really good and hit the spot.
It's bedtime now. Tomorrow, nous allons!
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Mary
non-member comment
Why is there no photo here of your stained glass masterpiece?