ort as there is here, nowhere is
prayer so fervent as at Chartres!"

"Those are heaven-sent words!" cried Madame Bavoil. "And you shall have
a glass of old black currant liqueur for your pains! Yes, indeed, he is
quite right--our friend is right," she went on, addressing the priests,
who laughed. "Everywhere else, excepting at Notre Dame des Victoires in
Paris and, more especially, Notre Dame de Fourviere at Lyon, when you go
to meet Her, you wait and wait; and often enough She does not come.
Whereas in our Cathedral She receives you at once, just as She is. And I
have told him, told our friend, that he should attend the first morning
Mass in the crypt, and he will see what a welcome our Mother gives her
visitors."

"Chartres is a marvellous place," said the Abbe Gevresin, "with its two
black Madonnas--Notre Dame of the Pillar, above in the body of the
church, and Notre Dame de Sous-Terre below, in the vault over which the
basilica is built. No other sanctuary, I believe, possesses the
miraculous images of Mary, to say nothing of the antique relic known as
the Shift or Tunic of the Virgin."

"And what in your opinion constitutes the soul of Chartres?" asked the
Abbe Plomb.

"Certainly not the souls of the citizens' wives and the church servants
that are poured out there," replied Durtal. "No, its vitality comes from
the Sisterhoods, the peasant women, the pious schools, the pupils of the
Seminary, and perhaps more especially from the children of the choir,
who crowd to kiss the Pillar and kneel before the Black Virgin. As for
the devotion of the respectable classes! It would scare away the
angels!"

"With a few rare exceptions the fine flower of female Pharisaism is no
doubt the outcome of that class," said the Abbe Plomb, and he added in a
half jesting, half sorrowful tone,--

"And I, here at Chartres, am the distressful gardener of these souls!"

"To return to our starting point," said the Abbe Gevresin: "what was the
birthplace of the Gothic?"

"France: so Lecoy de la Marche emphatically asserts. 'The buttress made
its appearance as the essential basis of a style in the early years of
Louis le Gros, in the district lying between the Seine and the Aisne.'
In his opinion the first practice of this form was in the Cathedral of
Laon; other authorities regard it as merely supplementary to earlier
basilicas, instancing Saint-Front at Perigueux, Vezelay, Saint-Denis,
Noyon, and the ancient college chapel at Poissy