We will leave for the present the exterior of the Cathedral and return later to the consideration of the north and south porches. For it is time to enter, by the western portal which we know, the sanctuary of Notre-Dame. Here, amid the dim shadows of old dreams, the mystic may indulge his fancy, and here, if anywhere, wandering through this veritable gallery of Madonnas, in escaping from the feverish passions of the world, a man may cool his hands awhile in the gray twilight of Gothic things. More souls, they say, have been healed at Chartres than bodies at Lourdes. In solitude and silence it is best; but wonderful also and impressive is the Cathedral when filled with long trains of pilgrims, whose shuffling feet and murmured prayers echo through the vast nave and resound from the innumerable chapels. These sounds, these sights carry us back in a flash of memory to those mediæval days when Sébastien Rouillard was astonished at the crowds of all nations who congregated here ‘and slept all night in the church or in the grottoes for lack of lodgings.’ On the very threshold the sloping floor of the west end of the nave, so made that it might the more easily be cleansed, suggests that scene.
Surely the vast nave with its gloomy spaces is filled with the ghosts of forgotten worshippers, and it thrills with the unheard echoes of unanswered prayers. It is melancholy with the records of perverted faith and false enthusiasm, and it is magnificent with the chanted hopes of the faithful and the undying promises of the Risen Lord. The blood of martyrs and the blood of infidels cries aloud from those stones which once resounded with the fiery exhortations of a crusading monk or of a fanatic preaching the extermination of the Jews and the persecution of the Huguenots.
Here knights have kept their vigil and watched by their armour on the eve of a Crusade, and here many a young squire after his night watch by the altar, clothed in vestments of white linen that symbolised his moral purity, has been struck on the shoulder with the consecrated sword and made ‘a knight in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.’ Hither, again, courtier pilgrims have brought with them the perfume of Paris, and Norman peasants the odour of the fields. Here many a penitent Magdalen has poured out her soul in contrite supplication. Here, too, the hand of the sacrilegious destroyer has wrought its vile work, and yet failed to leave more than a few blots and stains upon the mighty fabric reared by mediæval faith.