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Queen Bertha’s Tower 266 Old Dormer Window from Maison du Saumon 268 Chartres Besieged by M. le Prince de Condé, March 1568 275 Tower of S. André 283 Courtyard, Maison du Médecin 287 Renaissance Oriel, Rue de la Corroierie 297 Place de l’Hôtel de Ville 319 Rue des Béguines 331 Old Houses in the Rue S. Même 347 Plan of Chartres facing 354

Chartres is actually
	86	kilometres	from Paris.
	71	"	from Orléans.
	35	"	from Dreux.

An excellent train, leaving the Gare S. Lazare at mid-day, runs through from Paris in one hour and a half. A good déjeuner is served in the train on starting. Returning from Chartres, most of the trains run into the Montparnasse Station, south of the river and twenty minutes’ drive from the Place de l’Opéra.

The road is straight and level and a favourite one with automobilists. Chartres may also, of course, be approached from Normandy viâ Rouen, Évreux, Dreux, and, if you include Amiens to the North-west, and Caen (whence you will visit Bayeux, Lisieux, and Falaise) to the North-east, Chartres will be found to provide the perfect finish to a delightful and instructive, and also economical, tour.

An itinerary for those who have but a short time to spare at Chartres is suggested on page 352.

Hotels—Grand Monarque (Automobile Club de France); Duc de Chartres; France.

CHAPTER I

Druids and Romans: The Crypt

BUILT half on the slope and half on the strath in a depression of calcareous soil, Chartres lies along the banks of the gliding Eure, breaking the long levels of La Beauce.

La Beauce, indeed, is still the waterless, shadeless, woodless plain that the Bishop of Poitiers described in the sixth century, but it is now also one immense field of corn in which man has planted a few scattered farms and pleasure houses.[1] It is the granary of France. Le blé c’est la Beauce et la Beauce c’est Chartres.[2]

And on every side of it, spread out in the summer time like a many-coloured carpet under the great dome of the sky, stretch the cornfields, cut by the black lines of the railway, or by the straight, disheartening lengths of roads which run beyond the distant horizon of monotonous level, to Dreux, to Orléans, to Paris. The twin spires of Chartres are the only landmark. The sole beauty in this country must be found in its fecundity; in the fields of standing corn, which the passing breezes curve into travelling waves, and in the endless perspective of sameness which inspires the same emotions of mingled pleasure and sadness as the sight of the vast and melancholy ocean. And, like a ship for ever a-sail in the distance, everywhere the great Church of Chartres is visible, with the passing light or shadow upon its grey, weather-beaten surfaces, or, as it seemed to Lowell:—

Chartres is no place for an Atheist.[3] The exclamation of Napoleon on first entering the Cathedral of Notre-Dame is the keynote and summary of the town. For from the earliest dawn of its history down to the present day Chartres has preserved, almost unbroken, the tradition of a religious centre. Other notes have indeed been struck here and died away in the distance of ages. There have been discords in the score of her worldly history. The armies of Cæsar and of Hastings have come and gone; the armies of England, of France, of Germany, have marched through the narrow, tortuous streets of this ancient city and left scarce a trace behind. Mediævalism with all its charm and all its vileness has disappeared before the excesses of that Revolution which sowed the seed of modern French civilisation. The thick forests which were once the glory of the Druids have vanished and given place to innumerable acres of tillage, whilst the