hing is
pinched and airless. The Christ, too roughly wrought, looks savage. The
pupils only of the supreme masters of Chartres evidently adorned these
portals.

Was there a guild, a brotherhood of these image-makers, devoted to the
holy work, who went from place to place to be employed by monks as
helpers of the masons and labourers, builders for God? Did they first
come from the Benedictine Abbey of Tiron founded at Chartres near the
market, by that Abbot Saint Bernard whose name figures on the list of
benefactors to the church, in the necrology of the cathedral? None may
know. They worked humbly, anonymously.

And what souls these artists had! For this we know: they laboured only
in a state of grace. To raise this glorious temple, purity was required
even of the workmen.

This would seem incredible if it were not proved by authentic documents
and undoubted evidence.

We possess letters of the period preserved in the Benedictine annals, a
letter from an Abbot of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dive, found by Monsieur Leopold
Delisle, in MS. 929 of the French collection in the Bibliotheque
Nationale, and a Latin volume of the Miracles of Our Lady, discovered in
the Vatican Library, and translated into French by Jehan le Marchant, a
poet of the thirteenth century. And these all relate the way in which
the Sanctuary dedicated to the Virgin was rebuilt after destruction by
fire.

What then occurred was indeed sublime. This was a crusade, if ever there
was one. It was here no question of snatching the Holy Sepulchre from
the power of the infidels, of meeting armies on the field of battle, and
fighting with men; the Lord Himself was to be attacked in His
entrenchments, Heaven was besieged, and conquered by love and
repentance! And Heaven confessed itself beaten; the angels smiled and
yielded; God capitulated, and in the gladness of defeat He threw open
the treasury of His grace to be plundered of men.

Then, under the guidance of the Spirit, came a battle in every workshop
with brute matter, the struggle of a nation vowing, cost what it might,
to save a Virgin, homeless now as on the day when Her Son was born.

The manger of Bethlehem was a mere heap of cinders. Mary would be left
to wander, lashed by bitter winds, across the icy plains of La Beauce.
Should the same tale be repeated, twelve hundred years later, of
pitiless households, inhospitable inns, and crowded rooms?

Madonna was loved then in France--loved as a natural pare