The tombs include those of the Duchesse d’Orléans, the foundress of the chapel, of Louis Philippe and his queen and their young children, and the Duchesse de Bourbon Condé, mother of the unfortunate Duc d’Enghien.
The Church of St. Pierre, with its odd-looking unfinished towers, has a somewhat severe interior, relieved by the beauty of its sixteenth-century glass. The nave is fifteenth century and the choir and transepts twelfth or thirteenth. A holy-water basin, or bénitier, of the twelfth century is of great interest, and so is the chapel on the south side of the nave, containing wall-paintings of the inhabitants of the town who made the pilgrimage of St. James of Compostella (Santiago in Spain) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The beautiful ambulatory has graceful pillars without capitals, and the sounding-board of the pulpit rests on palm-tree supports, as at Louviers.
During the Huguenot war Dreux and its neighbourhood was involved in heavy fighting. In 1562 the first pitched battle was fought near the town, the Catholic Leaguers being led by Montmorency and François, Duc de Guise, and the Protestants by Coligny and Condé. Although the Catholics were successful, it was a closely fought battle, in which 4,000 perished, and both Montmorency and Condé were taken prisoners.
When Henry of Navarre had become Henri IV., although still only recognized as King by a few of the provinces of France, he laid siege to Dreux in 1590, but retired a few miles northwards to Ivry, in the plain of St. André, on the approach of the Catholic army under Mayenne, numbering about 16,000. ‘My friends,’ said Henri, as he fastened on his helmet, ‘yonder is the enemy; here is your King; and God is on our side. If you should lose your standards, rally round my white plume: you will always find it in the path of honour and of victory!’ The fight began at ten in the morning, and in two hours the army of Mayenne was in full flight.
THE ROAD TO CHARTRES
Outside the town the journey across the great agricultural plain is continued. There are still no hedges between the strips of green and brown, sometimes broken by distant belts of woodland, going away to the soft blue horizons in heaving undulations. The first village passed is Marville-Moutier-Brûlé. One can see the high-pitched green roof and small spire of its eleventh-century church on the left.
Le Boullay Mivoye, the next village, which also has a little twelfth to fifteenth century church, consists of a very compact collection of uniformly low thatched or green-tiled cottages and barns, practically surrounded by a wall, beyond which there is no sign of any habitation until the next village is in sight.
Speeding southwards there appears right ahead on the horizon, at the end of a very straight perspective of road, an enormous building with two spires. There is nothing else in sight beyond a few low trees, and the stranger at once realizes that he is approaching a building of the greatest consequence. It is the vast Gothic cathedral of Chartres.
On entering the town, by going to the right along the Rue de la Couronne, one reaches the Place des Epars, where the hotels are situated. (See town plan of Chartres on p. 67.)