Notre-Dame de Chartres

We traveled to Chartres today. We rode the train from Paris and arrived in the fog. The steeples of the cathédrale were barely visible. Cold and beautiful. Chartres is an old village with many medieval streets and buildings.  Everything closes for a couple hours at lunch time. Old fashioned. It reminded me a little of Avignon. Chartres is a place of pilgrimage, and has been for hundreds of years. Since 876, pilgrims have come to see the cathedral's relic, the tunic of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Our guide, the renowned Malcolm Miller, admonished us as we left that we had not seen Chartres Cathedral. One cannot see the Cathedral in two hours, he said. That would be like thinking you'd read all the books in a library because you looked around for two hours. He'd given us only a small "taste" of what Chartres has to offer. Indeed, a small, but wonderful taste: Malcolm has been guiding groups through Chartres for fifty years. He's delightful, knowledgeable and very British—a consummate storyteller.

We sat for a long time before the rose window that is over the west entrance. I found it mesmerizing. It literally seemed to lift out into a three-dimensional illusion as I watched in the half-light. Quite extraordinary. Mind-altering. There were workers in the cathedral tearing down the scaffolding. They were noisy. We listened to Malcolm on headsets. A group of pilgrims came into the sanctuary singing. I found the cacophony exuberant. The acoustics were intoxicating.

Chartres was different than I expected. I've been searching for words that explain it. Intimate comes to mind. Gentle. Kind. Sweet. Sincere. I think it's the effect of all the blue glass and the reverberations, the palpable sensation of hundred of years of pilgrimage.  It feels holy, sacred. It was an emotional experience that inspired an open heart. I have read that beauty is a way to God. Chartres reinforces that supposition.

We walked the village of Chartres too. Behind the cathedral there's a green parklike area that makes it's way down the hill with a staircase, moss covered walls, and a grassy maze. The cathedral sits atop a hill, the highest point in the area. The spires of Chartres can be seen for miles, guiding pilgrims to their goal.

The village is medieval in character with narrow alleyways and streets that climb the hillside. It has many wattle and daub buildings. Everything looks very old and charming. There's even a little river running through the center of town. All these things, the staircase, the river, the medieval buildings are part of a setting in my novel. Tori and Liszt walk down the staircase from Chartres Cathedral and stop on a bridge that crosses the River Eure where they watch some young boys playing. Quite by accident, we took that walk. I even found the old hotel where everyone is staying.

One thing that makes it likely that I'll keep Chartres as a setting in my book, is the fact that it seems a place that Alexandrine might have visited. Alexandrine is the woman who had the affair with Gericault. She was confined by her husband to their estate near Versailles, but Chartres is very near Versailles, and in the opposite direction of Paris. If she was allowed to travel anywhere, a pilgrimage to Chartres is one of the most likely.

I have been toying with the idea that her path might cross Georges Sand and Tori's in Chartres, that it's a place where a coincidental meeting, unplanned by either side might take place, where we might learn her story.

These are ideas that are in mind. I won't know if I'm really going in that direction until I start trying to write the prose that carry them. The big question I'm grappling with has to do with how the story is moving in time, whether it follows a chronological unfolding or uses something more like flashbacks. These are big questions that have to do with the telling. If, for example, my narrator is speaking from the dead... well, there's a lot of room in that. If Madame Lanormande, the fortune teller, is the storyteller, then she's likely to be doing just that, speaking from the dead.