It had not struck Madame Bavoil that the friends were speaking in fun, and she replied quite humbly,—
"God Almighty has never yet required me to strew my bread with ashes or to graze the field—if He should give me the order, I should certainly obey it.—But it does not matter."
And she was so far from enthusiastic that they all laughed.
"Then the Cathedral as a whole," said the Abbé Gévresin after a short silence, "dates from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, excepting, of course, the new spire and numerous details."
"Yes."
"And the names of the architects are unknown?"
"As are those of almost all the builders of great churches," replied the Abbé Plomb. "It may, however, be safely assumed that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Benedictines of the Abbey of Tiron directed the building of our church, for that monastery had established a House at Chartres in 1117; we also know that this convent contained more than five hundred Brothers practising all the arts, and that sculptors, image-makers, stone-cutters, or workers in pierced stone, were numerous. It would therefore seem very natural that these monks sent to live at Chartres were the men who drew the plans of Notre Dame, and employed the horde of artists whom we see represented in one of the old windows of the apse—men in furred caps shaped like a jelly bag, who are busily carving and polishing the statues of kings.
"Their work was finished at the beginning of the sixteenth century by Jehan Le Texier, known as Jehan de Beauce, who erected the northern belfry, called the New Belfry, and the decorative work inside the church, forming the niches for the groups on the walls of the choir-aisles or ambulatory."
"And has no one ever been able to discover the name of
any one of the original architects, sculptors, or glass-makers of this Cathedral?"