The Story of Chartres

by Cecil Headlam

The architecture is therefore in the style of the Renaissance, though the main entrance belongs to the fourteenth century. The small entrance on the left of the façade is pleasing. The church was sacked during the Revolution and all its artistic treasures stolen. The building itself was used as a magazine, a prison and a military hospital till 1822, when it was restored to religious use by private generosity. The painfully unsuccessful polychrome decorations perpetrated by M. Boeswilwald make it impossible to remember the interior with any pleasure. Perched, as it seems, in the air, the exterior, beheld from the boulevards and bridges south-west of the town, forms, with S. Père and the Cathedral, one of the most prominent features of the most unforgettable view of Chartres. But the tower is destitute of grace, and the building, as a whole, devoid of any beauty of form.

If the nave were worthy of the apse and crypt, it would be another matter, and S. Aignan would be worthy of its place between S. Père and Notre-Dame. Approach it from the Rue Saint-Pierre by the steps of Saint-François, and the east end of the church with the enormous buttresses which support it, and the massive buttressed walls of the street which hold up the old parish cemetery, now the garden of the Presbytère, give you the impression of a mighty fortress frowning above you. But seen from a distance this effect is lost.

There is a legend in connection with this church worth recounting.

A poor tailor of Chartres, the story runs, made a contract to deliver himself body and soul to the Devil at the end of the year if his daughter should recover her health and make the fine marriage on which she had set her heart. At the date fixed when the tailor must fulfil his part of the bargain Satan appeared. It was evening. The man’s wife threw herself on her knees, and by her prayers and entreaties obtained the concession that the infernal treaty should not be enforced so long as the candle burning in the cottage should last. Then the cunning wife rose from her knees, blew out the candle and ran full speed with it to the Church of S. Aignan, where she hid it near the present stoup, in the first pier on the left at which the masons were then working. Wonderful to relate, the pier was immediately completed, and the candle hidden within it safe from the clutches of the Evil One.

Fifty years after the Battle of Châlons, the Franks, under Clovis, established the French monarchy in Gaul. It was not established by the force of arms alone.

The Merovingian King had always allowed his Gallic subjects free exercise of religious worship. Now, at the instance of his wife, Clotilda, niece of the King of Burgundy, he listened to the Bishop of Reims. He and his followers, who were equally ready to follow him to the battlefield or the baptismal font, were received into the Catholic Church at Reims.

This meant that Clovis had on his side the hundred prelates who, under the Roman Empire, had gradually acquired a sovereign power throughout Gaul in matters temporal as well as spiritual. He paid the price in rich gifts to their churches. ‘S. Martin,’ he remarked on a famous occasion, ‘is an expensive friend.’ It was to this alliance with the Church that the establishment of the French monarchy in Gaul was largely due. The valour, policy and seasonable conversion of Clovis soon added the Northern Provinces of Gaul to his kingdom, whilst the great prelates were left free to strengthen their own hold over the people with whose instructions they were entrusted. And with the Franks the social system of nobles and serfs, which was the basis of mediæval life, was introduced.

The Dark Ages creep on. The Frankish conquest of Gaul was followed, says Gibbon, by ten centuries of anarchy and ignorance.

So far as Chartres is concerned, the conversion of Clovis is connected with the name of her first authentic bishop, Solemnis,[18] whom he caused to accompany and catechise him on his campaigns. It is even stated, though without sufficient reason, that Clovis founded the Abbey of S. Père (St. Pierre), of which the extremely interesting fourteenth-sixteenth century church is now all that remains. The rest is cavalry barracks.

Of the secular history of Chartres under the succeeding Merovingian Kings there is nothing worth relating. Whatever there was of sweetness and light in this barbarous epoch survived in the cloister, not the court. One turns with relief from the records of the quarrels and crimes of Clother and his sons to the story of some saintly life like that of S. Lubin, shepherd, monk, hermit, Abbé of Brou, and lastly, Bishop of Chartres in succession to S. Ethère. S. Lubin was a typical and charming saint, whose name and fame still live in the hearts of the people.