The sad, patient images by the doorways of the crowded church seemed
suffering now chiefly from the cold. It was almost like a funeral--
the penitential violet, the wandering taper-light, of this half-
lenten feast of Purification. His new companions, at the head and in
the rear of the long procession, forced every one, even the Lord
Bishop himself, to move apace, bustling along, cross-bearer and
acolyte, in their odd little copes, out of the bitter air, which made
the jolly life Gaston now entered on, around the great fire of their
hall in the episcopal palace, seem all the more winsome.

Notre-Dame de Chartres! It was a world to explore, as if one
explored the entire Middle Age; it was also one unending, elaborate,
religious function--a life, or a continuous drama, to take one's part
in. Dependent on its structural completeness, on its wealth of well-
preserved ornament, on its unity in variety, perhaps on some
undefinable operation of genius, beyond, but concurrently with, all
these, the church of Chartres has still the gift of a unique power of
impressing. In comparison, the other famous churches of France, at
Amiens for instance, at Rheims or Beauvais, may seem but formal, and
to a large extent reproducible, effects of mere architectural rule on
a gigantic scale. The [29] somewhat Gothic soul of Gaston relished
there something strange, or even bizarre, in the very manner in which
the building set itself, so broadly couchant, upon the earth; in the
natural richness of tone on the masonry within; in its vast echoing
roof of timber, the "forest," as it was called; in the mysterious
maze traced upon its pavement; its maze-like crypt, centering in the
shrine of the sibylline Notre-Dame, itself a natural or very
primitive grotto or cave. A few years were still to pass ere
sacrilegious hands despoiled it on a religious pretext:--the catholic
church must pay, even with the molten gold of her sanctuaries, the