At Chartres the church services are Mary’s own tastes; the church is Mary; and the chapels are her private rooms.  She was not pleased with the arrangements made for her in her palace at Paris; they were too architectural; too regular and mathematical; too popular; too impersonal; and she rather abruptly ordered her architect at Chartres to go back to the old arrangement.  The apse at Paris was hardly covered with its leading before the architect of Chartres adopted a totally new plan, which, according to Viollet-le-Duc, does him little credit, but which was plainly imposed on him, like the twelfth-century portal.  Not only had it nothing of the mathematical correctness and precision of the Paris scheme, easy to understand and imitate, but it carried even a sort of violence—­a wrench—­in its system, as though the Virgin had said, with her grand Byzantine air:—­I will it!

[Illustration with caption:  Chartres]

“At Chartres,” said Viollet-le-Duc, “the choir of the Cathedral presents a plan which does no great honour to its architect.  There is want of accord between the circular apse and the parallel sides of the sanctuary; the spacings of the columns of the second collateral are loose (laches); the vaults quite poorly combined; and in spite of the great width of the spaces between the columns of the second aisle, the architect had still to narrow those between the interior columns.”

The plan shows that, from the first, the architect must have deliberately rejected the Paris scheme; he must have begun by narrowing the spaces between his inner columns; then, with a sort of violence, he fitted on his second row of columns; and, finally, he showed his motive by constructing an outer wall of an original or unusual shape.  Any woman would see at once the secret of all this ingenuity and effort.  The Chartres apse, enormous in size and width, is exquisitely lighted.  Here, as everywhere throughout the church, the windows give the law, but here they actually take place of law.  The Virgin herself saw to the lighting of her own boudoir.  According to Viollet-le-Duc, Chartres differs from all the other great cathedrals by being built not for its nave or even for its choir, but for its apse; it was planned not for the people or the court, but for the Queen; not a church but a shrine; and the shrine is the apse where the Queen arranged her light to please herself and not her architect, who had already been sacrificed at the western portal and who had a free hand only in the nave and transepts where the Queen never went, and which, from her own apartment, she did not even see.

[Illustration with caption:  Laon]