The sixth storey, surrounded by a gallery in Flamboyant style, panels of rich tracery and gargoyles, and pinnacles at the corners of the octagon, contains the room of the watchmen, whose duty it was every half-hour during the night to walk round this gallery and give the alarm when they saw a fire in the town. A Latin inscription records that by the peculiar grace of God this pyramid was preserved from the effects of a fire (1674) due to the watchman’s carelessness. This good man, Gendrin by name, finding that the hours of the night watch hung heavy on his hands, used to amuse himself by reading. One night the candle fell and set light to his straw mattress, and thence the flames spread rapidly to the timber of the room. The wooden belfry was saved from destruction by the great bravery of a workman named Claude Gauthier. A quotation from Psalms cxxvii., outside the western door, draws the moral, ‘Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’ It is signed F. Foucault. But the significance of the name has died away.
At last, after having mounted 377 steps, we reach the seventh storey, where hangs the ‘Tocsin’ bell, ‘in accordance with which,’ says an old writer, ‘all the people of Chartres order and conduct themselves.’[75] It weighs 5000 kilos., and was cast on the 23rd September, 1520, by Pierre Sayvet, as the inscription tells us, ‘Petrus Sayvet me fecit.’ Another and longer inscription, in beautiful Gothic characters, runs round the bell in two lines. The bell, speaking in Latin verses, tells us that it has been raised ‘to the lofty summit of this mighty building to announce the eclipses of the sun and the moon.’ And it fixes its date as 1520, with a reference to the great event of that year, the meeting of Henry VIII. and François I., near Calais, on the field of the Cloth of Gold, ‘when the Frenchmen met the English and lay down together in everlasting goodwill.’
‘Facta ad signandos solis luneque labores Evehor ad tante culmina celsa domus Annus erat Christi millesimus adde priori Quingentos numero bis quoque junge decem Illo quippe anno quo francus convenit anglum Perpetuaque simul discubuere fide.’
The arms of the Chapter, the chemisette of Notre-Dame, and the escutcheon of a dauphin will be noticed at the end of the last line.