And no one was more fitted to comprehend the glory of the three XII-century windows, also dismounted and reset in those years, than John of Salisbury’s successor at Chartres, his intimate of many years past, Pierre de Celle, who, while abbot of St. Remi at Rheims, had adorned the lovely Primary Gothic choir he built there with admirable colored lights. The south tower was crowned with its mighty spire in his day, and he paved the streets of Chartres and raised the town walls. Both these best types of scholastic authors were interested in maintaining the high repute of their cathedral school. As Pierre de Celle died in 1183, he was spared the sight of his cathedral’s destruction.
On the night of June 10, 1194, a terrible conflagration wiped out Fulbert’s Romanesque basilica. To its cavernous crypt the clerks bore the treasured relics, and after three days emerged, when the fire was spent. Only the crypt and the more recent west façade, with its two towers, escaped destruction; the north tower at the time still lacked its upper stories.
On the smoking ruins the pope’s legate made an appeal to the people’s generosity, and once again Chartres presented the devotional scenes of 1145. Bishop and canons gave up three years of their revenue, and pious confraternities dragged in the big stones. Those passionate rivals, Richard Cœur-de-Lion and Philippe-Auguste, were donors. Thus every part of Chartres Cathedral has been raised by the hands and hearts of faith, and surely the personality which builders impart to their work breathes here in a piety of the soul that not all the science of later times has ever been able to simulate. Non est hic aliud nisi Domus Dei et porta coeli.
The new cathedral went forward apace; early in the XIII century the big west rose was added to the much-transformed façade. By 1224 the upper vaulting was entirely closed in. The formal dedication was postponed till 1260, to allow for the completion of the two elaborate porches before the transept’s doors. To that delayed consecration came St. Louis and his court.
The name of the architect of Chartres is unknown, but its unity of plan is proof that it emanated from the brain of one man. The choir had double aisles, the nave a single one. It is believed that to the absence of side chapels in the nave is due the exceptionally good acoustic properties of this church in which the preacher’s voice carries to every part. Unknown, too, is the architect of the tower built in the dawn of Gothic art, two generations before the present cathedral. The veriest amateur as he gazes at it is conscious that he has before him one of the supreme things of France.
The more closely the clocher vieux is analyzed, the more it becomes a touchstone by which will be judged other towers. A miracle of just gradation, it sprang in one jet from the brain of a man of genius. With a pleasurable sense of harmony the eye travels from the base to the tip of the spire. Proportion, not ornament, is the secret of its transcendent influence. The width is right—and so many towers fail there—the division of the stories is right, and radiantly right is that crucial point, the transition from the vertical square shaft to the inclined octagonal spire, accomplished here by means of dormers and turrets. An innovator was the architect of Chartres’ belfry when he placed open windows in the gables. To obviate any monotonous optical effect, he made a ridge down each inclined plane of the spire, which spire is a massive pyramid forming almost half of the tower’s height. Its bare nobility surpasses the richer open stonework of the spire to the north.
It is confusing that the north tower at Chartres façade should be called the clocher neuf because of its Flamboyant Gothic upper stories, for its lower Romanesque parts were built before the clocher vieux. When towers were rising in every part of France as the XVI century opened, the chapter of Chartres Cathedral invited a local architect, Jean de Texier, called Jean de Beauce,[109] to complete their truncated northern tower, whose temporary top had just been consumed by fire. Jean de Beauce saw that the XIII-century rose window had crowded the south belfry. While the rose was making, a new story had been added to the north tower. To that tower he decided to add still another story before he topped it with an elaborate lacework spire. In consequence the clocher neuf is out of all proportion to its mate. Nor does it carry the eye smoothly from soil to tip; its renewals are abrupt. However, if it lacks subtlety, its crown is none the less a strikingly effective monument of the final phase of Gothic architecture. The spire is adjusted to the shaft by means of little flying buttresses which spring from the angle and face turrets, and help to unify the design.
Some human vanity the north tower of Chartres displays, but no arrogant pride, no Renaissance pretentiousness. And in the inscription commemorating its renewal still breathes the reverential, loving, personal note of the Middle Ages:
“I was once built of lead, till after the fire on the feast of St. Anne, six o’clock in the evening, 1506, Messires the Chapter ordered me rebuilt in stone. In my necessity good people helped me. May God be gracious to them.”