God has made the men of La Beauce in the image of the soil whence they have sprung. They have the regularity, the monotony and the hardness of their native land. They are without passion or imagination, cold and avaricious, and their women are like them. Their wit, when they have any, is of the kind that delights in carping, ironical raillery. Their minds, when they are developed, are cast in a logical and scientific mould. Therefore it is that the representative writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at Chartres are Pierre Nicole, the moralist and theologian of the Port Royal School (Essais de Morale); Michel Félibien, the critical and scientific historian of Paris (Histoire de la Ville de Paris); the cold, but elegant, courtier poet, Philippe Desportes, and his nephew, Mathurin Régnier, the creator of French satire (1573-1613).
The School of Chartres had, we know, long been famous. When, at the end of the fifteenth century, the new movement in literature, philosophy and art began to be felt through France, the successors of Fulbert were not unaffected by it. They welcomed the new learning. The discussions of the schoolmen yielded place to the new appreciation of Greek and Latin, art and literature. Nor were the Chartrains slow to apply the new discovery of the art of printing. Twelve years after the introduction of Gutenberg’s invention into France, Pierre Plume, a learned canon of Notre-Dame, caused to be printed, at his own expense, in his house in the cloister, and by the printer Jean Dupré, a magnificent folio missal for the use of the diocese (1482). A fine copy of this missal (Missale Secundum usum ecclesiæ Carnotensis) is in the town library.
In the architecture of this period the same tendency towards the adoption or imitation of classical models, as interpreted by the Italian artists, is evident. Jean de Beauce abandoned the Flamboyant style in which he had hitherto so triumphantly wrought, and built the Renaissance clock tower of the Cathedral; and a certain doctor, Claude Huvé by name (1501-1559), in his enthusiasm for the revival of the old classical style, erected the house in the Rue du Grand Cerf (number
8), which still goes by the name of the Maison du Médecin. The Renaissance façade and court of this house contrast strikingly with the narrow, mediæval streets and Gothic style of the old town. They speak with strange distinctness of the intellectual and artistic awakening of the world after the slumber of the Dark Ages. And, as you read the inscription on the front of the house—