"And how good must They both be," Durtal said to himself, as he looked
round and found himself alone, "never to abandon this desert, never to
weary of waiting for worshippers! But for the honest country folk who
come at all hours to kiss the pillar, what a solitude it would be, even
on Sunday, for this cathedral is never full. However, to be just, at the
nine o'clock mass on Sundays the lower end of the nave is thronged," and
he smiled, remembering that end of the church packed with little girls
brought in schools by Sisters, and with peasant women who, not being
able to see there to read their prayers, would light ends of taper and
crowd together closely, several looking over one book.

This familiarity, this childlike simplicity of piety, which the dreadful
sacristans of Paris would never endure in a church, were' so natural at
Chartres, so thoroughly in harmony with the homely and unceremonious
welcome of Our Lady!

"A thing to be ascertained," said Durtal, starting on a new line of
thought, "is whether this church has preserved its surface uninjured, or
whether it may not have been coloured in the thirteenth century. Some
writers assert that, in Mediaeval times, the interiors of cathedrals were
always painted. Is that the fact? Or, admitting that the statement is
correct as to all Romanesque churches, is it equally so with regard to
Gothic churches?

"For my part, I like to believe that the sanctuary of Chartres was never
befooled with gaudiness, such as we have to endure at Saint Germain des
Pres, in Paris, and Notre Dame la Grande at Poitiers. In fact such
colour can only be conceived of--if at all--as used in small chapels;
why stain the walls of a cathedral with motley? For this tattooing, so
to speak, reduces the sense of space, brings down the roof, and makes
the pillars clumsy; in short, it eliminates the mysterious soul of the
nave, and destroys the sober majesty of the aisle with its feebly vulgar
fret or guilloche, lozenges or crosses, scattered over the pillars and
walls, in a paste of treacly yellow, endive-green, vinous purple, lava
drab, brick red--a whole range of dull and dirty colours; to say nothing
of the horror of a vault dotted with stars that look as if they had been
cut out of gilt paper and stuck against a smalt background, a sky of
washing-blue!

"It is endurable--if it must be--in the Sainte-Chapelle, because it is
very small, an oratory, a shrine; it might even be intelligible in th