It was as slender and colourless as Roger Van der Weyden’s Virgins, who are so fragile, so ethereal, that they might blow away were they not held down to earth by the weight of their brocades and trains.  Here was the same mystical conception of a long-drawn body and an ardent soul, which, unable to free itself completely from that body, strove to purify it by reducing it, refining it, almost distilling it to a fluid.

The building bewildered him with the giddy flight of its vault, the dazzling splendour of its windows.  The weather was gloomy, and yet a furnace of gems flamed in the lancets of the windows and the blazing wheels of the roses.

Up there, high in air, as they might be salamanders, human beings with faces ablaze and robes on fire dwelt in a firmament of glory; but these conflagrations were enclosed and limited by an incombustible frame of darker glass which set off the youthful and radiant joy of the flames by the contrast of melancholy, the suggestion of the more serious and aged aspect presented by gloomy colouring.  The bugle cry of red, the limpid confidence of white, the repeated Hallelujahs of yellow, the virginal glory of blue, all the quivering crucible of glass was dimmed as it got nearer to this border dyed with rusty red, the tawny hues of sauces, the harsh purples of sandstone, bottle-green, tinder-brown, fuliginous blacks, and ashy greys.

As at Bourges, where the glass is of the same period, Oriental influence was visible in these windows at Chartres.  Not only had the figures the hieratic appearance, the sumptuous and barbarous dignity of Asiatic personages, but the borders, in their design and the arrangement of their colours, were an evident reminiscence of the Persian carpets which undoubtedly served as models to the painters; since it is known from the Livre des Metiers that in the thirteenth century hangings copied from those which the Crusaders brought from the Levant were manufactured in France, and in Paris itself.

But, apart from the question of subjects or borders, the various colours of these pictures were, so to speak, but an accessory crowd, handmaidens whose part it was to set off another colour, namely blue—­a glorious, indescribable blue, a vivid sapphire hue of excessive transparency, pale but piercing and sparkling throughout, glittering like the broken glass of a kaleidoscope—­in the top-lights, in the roses of the transepts, and in the great west window, where it burned like the blue flame of sulphur, among the lead-lines and black iron bars.

Taken for all in all, with the tones of its stone-work and its windows, Notre Dame de Chartres was fair with blue eyes.  He personified Her as a sort of white fairy, a tall and slender virgin, with large blue eyes under lids of translucent rose.  This was the Mother of a Christ of the North, the Christ of a Pre-Raphaelite Flemish painter.  She sat enthroned in a Heaven of ultramarine, surrounded by these Oriental hangings of glass—­a pathetic reminder of the Crusades.