Saving the Light at Chartres

by Victor A. Pollak

  In the vast interior space—almost eight stories tall—lancet-shaped stained-glass windows occupied most of the ascending stone walls. The paramount purpose of the walls was not to support the roof but to feature—to extol—the great windows. Most were more than three stories tall. When the windows are uncovered, one’s eyes follow their two parallel rows wrapping around the building from west to east, circumventing the apse and returning to the west facade, where the great western rose window is poised over its three large lancet windows. In the center of each end of the transept, north and south, a rose window stands above its own set of five smaller lancets.

  On a normal sunny day, with no scaffolding, a visitor who enters the cathedral is greeted by an ocean of light that changes during the day with the movement of the sun. Early in the morning, the visitor seems to be gaining access to the interior of a huge ship, with the high band of lancet windows glistening like a ship’s sails in sunlight. The light that strikes the high windows on the east end above the altar is so bright that it becomes saturated with colors, bleaching into a white brighter than the human eye can process. Then, as the visitor’s eyes pass to each successive window, the saturation subsides and the rich colors of the glass capture the light like a bright parasail aloft into the great space illuminating the sanctuary, first in a wash of transfiguring color and then moderating for the human eye to focus on the images of the windows’ story panels, which portray ancient tales and depict medieval benefactors who paid for the windows and artisans who forged the windows from sand and iron.

  Almost a millennium ago, the windows taught vital lessons to masses of illiterate congregants eager to learn. To be in this place on a sunny day was like standing inside a jewel as it rotates through the day, the light evolving and transforming as it transits the sky, each movement altering light patterns reflecting off of surfaces inside the sanctuary, the movement and color changes continuously reinventing the experience every few minutes, dawn to dusk.

  The cathedral’s wonders did not begin with the windows. Its location, on the hilltop with subterranean grottoes where Chartres now stands, was once the site of a sacred forest, a patch of holy ground where—according to mystics—powerful currents come out of the earth, and the cathedral itself has been a fountain of innovation in building, sculpture, window making, and other fields. The cathedral school at Chartres, which was founded in the twelfth century, has served as a European center of learning.

  The cathedral also represents the evolution of high Gothic art, containing not only the windows but also around four thousand sculptures, whose faces show a new stage in Western culture. Rodin called it the “Acropolis of France.” The cathedral is the best preserved of all Europe’s Gothic cathedrals. Most of its sculptures are intact. The Royal Portal illustrates twelfth-century technical innovation of the column statue, combining support and decoration in a single stone block.

  The cathedral for centuries has held precious relics that have brought a stream of pilgrims and money to Chartres.

  The cathedral’s groundbreaking innovations included side doors in its transept, features created to display the array of windows to project light in a new way, higher vaults to provide more room for stained glass, and among the earliest flying buttresses for the same purpose. And its two towers, of different heights and differing architectural styles, illustrate an older symbolism, the dimensions of the taller tower relating to the solar calendar and those of the shorter to the lunar cycle. Their sun-moon and masculine-feminine symbolism echoes pagan traditions.

  And the windows themselves tell thousands of stories. Malcolm Miller likens this cathedral to a modern public library. He said, “Its texts are written in the stained glass and sculpture of the 12th and 13th centuries. Printing had not yet been invented; paper did not exist in Europe. Most of the population could not read or write, but people knew how to ‘read’ a window. The lives of the saints were well known, and the educated could understand the more complex symbolic interpretations of the biblical texts.”

  The windows’ colors are uniquely intense, especially the blue. The light pouring through the windows casts reflections in moving patterns throughout the day over the limestone walls, the floor, and the columns inside the cathedral. The blue, made eight hundred years ago, is said to no longer be replicable today. Even the purest and brightest natural colors, such as the madder-root orange, are actually blends of many colors, such as yellow, blue, red, and white. They can be distinguished under a microscope. By contrast, chemical colors often consist of only a single color.

  The glass, although it appears flat, is not. Its uneven surface and impurities mixed with its coloring elements (gold for pure red, cobalt for blue, and manganese for purple) cause the glass to shimmer. These impurities highlight that in striving for perfection, imperfection, accident, and vulnerability play a vital role. The itinerant glassmakers lived close to forests, where they obtained their supplies of wood, resulting in the bumpy glass, full of bits of leaves and dust motes.

  In all, the light at Chartres has special significance. Joan Gould describes it as inner space and outer light, not light in the twentieth-century sense showing us a view, but “light for its own sake, sent through windows that filter the colorless air of day and make the rainbow inside it visible to our eyes.”

  I imagined a Sunday in late August 1939, when the cathedral and its priceless windows faced the peril of a threatened new German invasion. I could feel the history surrounding me. In the glow of candles and lingering scent of burnt incense, I imagined hearing shuffling feet of generations of congregants who’d passed through its portals for christenings, confirmations, marriages, funerals, and more and the thousands of craftsmen who’d devoted years to constructing this monument and the hundreds of artists who’d forged and fashioned and painted the windows. And now on this imagined August Sunday in 1939, war would threaten Chartres again—just as war had in 1918. Even a single bomb hitting any nearby site would obliterate the stained glass.

  My wife and I strolled down one of the pair of ambulatories to the other end of the structure and back through the opposite passageway. In the limited light that filtered through the remaining stained glass, we smelled the incense and heard indistinct voices of priests and visitors faintly echoing through the building, and I felt the cool air on my face and the underlying peace of the ancient space.

  We descended a flight of worn stone steps but were blocked by a locked heavy iron gate through which we peered down to the crypt through a long dark passageway with its stone floor, rubbed smooth by centuries of passing feet, and the long, low, barrel-vault ceiling.

  We returned to the nave and bought our tickets to climb the 195 spiral steps of the north tower. As we climbed, I imagined Colonel Griffith must have seen and felt the same as he inched his way up slowly, his weapon aimed up, step by step, fearing German soldiers were hiding up there, ready to fire. We emerged onto the tower’s sunbathed balustrade, its dominant view before us. As we lingered at the top to drink in the sights, I ran my hand along the rough, cool vertical granite exterior and across the horizontal stone surface of the balcony banister, and then I reached up to touch one of the ancient stone gargoyles that overlooked the cathedral and the city and countryside below.

  We took a few photos and then descended the same spiral stairwell. With each step down, I touched the surrounding stone wall, and I peered out through the series of small leaded tower windows that lined the stairwell to see the green copper roofs and plaza below. I imagined that these were the same things the colonel must have seen and touched and the sounds he listened for as he climbed down and tasted his relief from the fear he must have felt in his throat as he risked his life to save this monument.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Groceries: Quanah, Texas, 1914–1918

  ONE SEPTEMBER MORNING IN 1914, NOT LONG AFTER LABOR DAY, Welborn Barton Griffith Jr.—Web to his fellow sixth graders—walked toward the two-story Old Reagan School near the center of Quanah, Texas. Up the street,
a railroad engine waiting at the depot hissed steam, and horses clopped down the road pulling wagonloads of ranch supplies.

  It had been less than a month since war had erupted in Europe. Just that morning the Dallas Morning News had reported that the French Army—with aid from six hundred taxi cabs helping move troops to the front—had counterattacked thirty miles northeast of Paris and forced a German retreat sixty miles to the Aisne River. But the young boy, not yet thirteen, had his mind on more local concerns.

  Web’s schoolmates jabbered about the previous weekend’s family picnics, swimming at Lake Pauline, Lake Copper Breaks, or old Gyp Rock, and getting a chance to help their dads in the harvest and ride in the cattle drive. As they walked up the school steps, they were greeted by their teachers—Web’s aunt Ella Smith among them—who hoped a cheerful welcome would distract their charges’ thoughts from the war, which was already affecting Texas ranchers and its cotton and wheat farmers. The war represented change, something all too familiar to folks in Quanah.

  Quanah had sprouted up as a railroad town in the north Texas prairie and marsh country below the Red River, east of what would become the Dust Bowl, where the Oklahoma panhandle joins the pan. Quanah’s 1,500 inhabitants voted it the county seat in 1890, when windblown native grasses, prickly pears, and scattered mesquite trees were the area’s primary vegetation. Web’s parents, Welborn and Lula, were originally from outside of Temple, where Welborn had sold groceries wholesale for W. A. Harkey, and had started their life together some 130-odd miles north of their hometown, in Dallas, where Welborn then sold groceries at the store of a friend, James Wilson. After a time, Welborn acquired a farm to the east, near Cobb Switch in Kaufman County, but he sold it a year later because Lula preferred living in town.

  The Welborn Griffiths moved to Quanah in 1909 with Web and his two little brothers, Philip and Lawrence. There Welborn’s brother Fuller—who went by F. O.—owned a grocery he’d bought out from and operated with two brothers. Upon arriving in town, Welborn worked for F. O. for a year and then bought in as partner at F. O. Griffith & Co.

  Now, in 1914, change was driving Web’s world. Familiar smells of cattle, horse, and sheep manure were being overpowered by coal smoke, fueled by the arrival of hundreds of settlers annually, enticed to Quanah by cheap railroad tickets and promotions for ranchland, principally promoted by the Quanah Tribune-Chief—run by Harry Koch, grandfather of the entrepreneurial Koch brothers. Quanah’s settlers tried to convert their farms in part by plowing ranch grass into fields for cotton or wheat, but many failed and moved on, hoping to sell later, seeking work in the interim.

  That year in school, Web was readying for seventh grade’s serious learning: English, ancient history, and algebra. He was the oldest child in the family, which by now had grown by two girls—“Baby” Dorothea and “Tiny” Virginia Harrison.

  Each day after school, Web would walk home on dirt streets lined with sidewalks and houses to the Griffiths’ home at 700 Cain Street—a two-story clapboard house his father had built for the family—with its painted trim, fruit trees, and row of whitewashed locust trees the Griffiths had planted, and two pine trees that shaded the front door. On one side of their fenced-in grassy backyard stood the Griffiths’ metal-and-wood A-frame swing, which offered a place for Web to talk alone with one or both of his parents, away from siblings, its pair of wooden seats facing each other, connected by a hinged foot platform.

  Dallas—two hours away by train—was the largest of Texas’s few cities, but in 1914 four million Texans had spread across the state in five hundred towns like a layer of jam on toast: thin, but enough to taste. Each town occupied its own world—especially true of Quanah, home to three railroads. Quanah was becoming an urban marketing center for ranchers and farmers, with its new stone-and-brick three-story county courthouse on a tree-shaded block. Graded streets and residential neighborhoods a ten-minute walk from downtown had replaced the windswept dust and sparse vegetation.

  Quanah’s four thousand residents were now experiencing growth and adopting modern innovations. Web could see his parents’ drudgeries easing somewhat each year, with public schools, telephones, a fire department, electric lighting indoors and out, and a waterworks under construction. Those who needed work could find it at ranches and farms, a cottonseed-oil mill, two cotton gins, packing houses, a wholesale dry-goods dealer, a flour mill, two grain elevators, and—in Acme, several miles west—twin gypsum-plaster and cement factories. Two wholesale grocery houses fed the town, together doing $2 million yearly, half of which was the business of F. O. Griffith & Co.

  Web helped his father and uncles at the store after school and on Saturdays, which meant almost everybody in town who came to buy at the store knew the young boy and grew familiar with the Quanah branches of the extended Griffith family. Over a period of six years, Web clerked part-time—first with chores, cleaning, and restocking shelves, and then filling orders, riding delivery wagons, and learning how Welborn and F. O. ordered from suppliers. He worked alongside his brothers and cousins, including Orville (F. O. Griffith Jr.), who was six years Web’s senior.

  Web’s world in Quanah was different from his schoolmates’; his experience in the store had taught him some things. The store did most of its trade with ranchers. Most goods came by train from Dallas, Houston, and Denver: produce, dry goods, coffee, and oil for lamps and heat. Working at the store meant Web encountered people from places all over, rural and urban alike; he heard talk of crop prices, costs of food and supplies, civic elections, and county fairs—with shows like Quanah Parker and his Indians returning from buffalo hunt at Goodnight Ranch. The store showed Web he could support himself and would give him opportunities to learn about the world outside of Quanah. And this—together with being the oldest of five kids at home—may have planted a seed from which his penchant for leadership grew. And it showed Web that his father had earned respect throughout town.

  Around the time he started high school—taking further courses of English, along with medieval and modern history, Spanish, and higher algebra—with World War I waging on, Web’s attention turned from just the store, the town, and the things his friends liked to bigger things, like war and other lessons of an international nature. At the store, on breaks, Web would likely have read newspapers and overheard, or joined in, conversations about events reported in the Quanah paper and those of nearby Dallas and Fort Worth. His world was expanding beyond his hometown.

  The Griffiths subscribed to The American Boy and other magazines and made books plentiful in the house, because they were eager for their kids to attend college, which neither Lula nor Welborn had completed. Welborn refused to read fiction but read every day. He said time and again that he would rather go to work without his trousers than without having read his Dallas Morning News. Welborn appeared a thoughtful man, his clear, focused eyes recessed beneath dark eyebrows, and his broad, unwrinkled forehead capped by a head of already-graying, wavy, coiffed hair, receding hairline, and shaved face—the gravity commensurate with his status as an already-mature businessman and civic leader. But Welborn now carried more concerns, conscious of a wider world. His friends were never in doubt about his convictions on current affairs.

  Welborn shared with his son stories from his daily read through the Dallas and Temple newspapers and from the biweekly Quanah Tribune-Chief, which was likely the first paper Web read.

  How would a young Web have reacted to its October 1914 story that reported from the war near Reims in France, where German and French lines were a few hundred yards apart? Fighting had stopped about nightfall, and German soldiers were entering their field kitchen for a warm meal. A French captain waved a white flag and mounted his trench. A German officer came to meet him. The French captain told the German his men were very hungry, having not eaten for days, and asked for food.

  “How many are you?” the German answered.

  “About a hundred,” said the Frenchman.

  “All right, call out your men.”

/>   So the French laid aside their arms, came over to their German enemy, and sat down to supper. For that night, they weren’t fighting. At the table, the French captain told the German officer his men were so famished they would not have been able to continue fighting without something to eat.

  Could it really have been that way? I’ll have to ask Dad. Could it be that there really are just and honorable wars with commanders and soldiers who exercise restraint?

  That December in another of Web’s magazines, The Youth’s Companion, he would have read about the shelling of Reims Cathedral:

  Nothing . . . during the war has aroused more discussion than the partial destruction by German shells of the Cathedral of Notre Dame at Reims. . . . The beautiful woodwork of the interior is consumed by the fire, and most, although not all, of the stained glass is ruined.

  . . . It is an old saying that the choir of Beauvais, the nave of Amiens, the portal of Reims, and the towers of Chartres would together make the loveliest church in the world.

  And Web would have taken interest in a piece about British Boy Scouts serving in the war in France that appeared in the November issue of the same magazine:

  Most of [the Boy Scouts] are only from twelve to fourteen years old; but they have . . . taken the gendarme’s place as a director of traffic and dispenser of information, for the gendarmes are most of them on the firing line . . .

  I witnessed an incident in Havre . . . I ran across the most desolate . . . British soldier I had seen. He was perched on the top of a tarpaulin-covered ammunition wagon, drawn by four horses, and he was lost . . . after an all-night downpour.

  “I sye,” he called, “you bloke on the sidewalk!” (I was the “bloke.”) . . . “Where is No. 4 camp?” I did not know, and said so. . . .