Above this window stretch a noble cornice and a simple balustrade which serve for communication between the two towers, and above this again are the sixteen niched figures which have earned for this gallery the title of the Gallery of Kings. Higher still is the gable which terminates the front, containing in a niche a colossal statue of the Virgin and Child, and on the apex a statue of Christ in the act of blessing. (Both these statues were re-made in 1855).
The kings stand upright in their niches; their pose is little varied; their costumes uniform. M. Viollet-le-Duc suggested that they represent the Kings of Judah, but there is no reason to doubt the tradition that, like the royal statues at Wells and Notre-Dame de Paris and the stained-glass figures at Strasbourg, they really represent the kings of the country who were benefactors of the church.
The first seven, then, are the figures of Merovingian Kings, the eighth Pepin-le-Bref, as you may tell by his small stature and the fact that he is standing upon a lion, in allusion to his courageous feat when, after challenging the French nobles who despised him for his smallness, he slew a raging lion single-handed, and then demanded, ‘Do you think me worthy to rule you now?’ The ninth statue was broken by a cannon-ball in the siege of 1591. It was Charlemagne or Charles-le-Fauve. The others are, according to M. Bulteau, Philippe I., Louis le Gros, Louis le Jeune, Philippe Auguste, Louis le Lion, Louis IX., and Philippe le Hardi, in whose reign the gallery was finished (1280).
As at Rouen and at Bayeux, it was originally intended that six new towers, two at each corner of the north and south front, making eight in all, should be grouped round the soaring spire of a central tower which was to rest on the four huge piers at the point of intersection of the transepts of the nave and choir. But they remain incomplete, even as, in accordance it might be fancied with some inscrutable degree, almost every Cathedral in the world is unfinished.
Thus at Chartres the Cathedral type, after which, with tentative, uncertain hand, the twelfth-century architects of Poitiers and Soissons, Laon and Paris had been striving, was struck out at last. It was to serve as a model for Central Europe throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, just as the sculpture of the western porch was to be copied at Corbeil and Paris, Sentis, Laon and Sens.