A View Through the Portail of
Chartres, which Louis IX Walked Barefooted
Twenty-one Miles to Present, in a Lowly
Spirit, to the Church.
The [Cathedral of Chartres] was rebuilt, only to be burned down one hundred and fifteen years after by the Normans. During this siege the non-combatants of the town confidently took refuge in the cathedral with their bishop instead of buying off the pirates with gold from the Holy Altar as the people of Rheims had done (they are all gone now and God knows which did best). Unexpectedly, neither church nor bishop impressed the Normans, who overturned the city walls, burned the buildings, massacred the bishop, and every one else who came in their way; but after the Normans left, the Chartrians had the cold comfort of gathering their dead and laying them away beside the Well of Saint Lubin and “through the merits of those there reposing a crowd of miracles were wrought.” About this period the disease we now know as erysipelas came to be highly respected. In France it was called le mal des ardents; in England, the “sacred fire”; for, one thousand years ago processions like those that now visit Lourdes were pressing on to Chartres to drink of the holy spring. The world moves, but somewhat in a groove. At this Lourdes of the Dark Ages the afflicted were tended by nuns, but we find a certain telltale regulation:—after nine days (ample time for blood poisoning to develop unmistakably) the sick must go home, “cured or not.”
Was medical practice then so much worse than ours during the Rebellion, when old rags of the nation were collected and all sorts and conditions of women scraped them into lint full of germs for the wounded soldiers? But if the church was a crazy physician, she was a gentle nurse. She established a chivalry toward the sick that no Cervantes would laugh away. It lives in medical ethics, and the quixotic obligation of the doctor to leave no stone unturned for his patient has been the foundation of medical science. Some of the old Hotels-Dieu of blessed name and memory have developed into up-to-date hospitals and medical schools, like Charing Cross Hospital, London, which still enjoys its mediæval benefice, while modern hospitals, in general, are moral descendants of the old ideal.
Again the old Church of Chartres was rebuilt, again to stand for a little over a century. This building had the satisfaction (may we not use the figure, for the mediæval church was very human) of seeing the Normans, under Rollo, defeated by an army marching under its blessed standard, the Sancta Camisia of the Virgin borne aloft as a banner. But later, Rollo married the daughter of Charles the Simple, settled down in Normandy, presented his castle to the see of the Bishop of Chartres and adopted the Christian religion. A double victory for the church! Many of the first Norman converts were baptized a dozen times, for the sake of excitement or for the white garment given them at the ceremony. Thereafter the funeral of Rollo was rendered doubly memorable by the slaughter of one hundred captives and rich gifts to the monasteries.
In spite of the Sancta Camisia, in spite of all the remains of all of the martyrs that had been aggregating in the martyrium under the church for seven hundred years, in 962 Richard of Normandy burned the cathedral with the town. But the relics had not been powerless, for this was the last pagan outbreak. The church had the holy triumph of Christianizing her adversaries, and the martyrium, between the excellence of its building material, the water of the spring of Saint Lubin near by, and “the merits of those there reposing,” remained intact and was found in the excavations of 1901; but the spring is gone; it was probably diverted by the foundations of the present cathedral.
Though a paralyzing conviction had come upon the people, Bishop Vulpard immediately started to rebuild. It had somehow been very generally decided that the world would come to an end in the year 1000, so near at hand.
How did this private information regarding the future affect the multitude? They probably took it riotously,—at least, such has been the experience in times of plague and horror, when it seemed that the race was about to be wiped out. Indeed, it is only for others that the saner, better life is led—best of all, unconsciously led.
