The Virgin of Chartres
Chartre Cathedral was built for Mary in the spirit of simple, practical, utilitarian faith and in the singleness of thought with which a little girl sets up a dollhouse for a favorite doll.
The palaces of earthly Queens were hovels compared with these palaces of the Queen of Heaven built at Chartres, Paris, Laon, Noyon, Reims, Amiens, Rouen, Bayeux . . .
The share of capital invested in the Virgin, cannot be fixed . . . but in a spiritual and artistic sense, it was almost the whole; and expressed an intensity of conviction never again reached by any passion, whether of religion, of royalty, of patriotism, or of wealth; perhaps never even paralleled by any single economic effort, except in war.
Had the Church controlled her, the Virgin would perhaps have remained prostrate at the foot of the Cross. . . . but backed by popular insistence and impelled by overpowering self interest, the Church accepted the Virgin throned and crowned, seated by Christ, the Judge, throned and crowned; and even this did not wholly satisfy the French of the Thirteenth century who seemed bent on absorbing Christ in his Mother, and making the Mother the Church and Christ the Symbol. . . .
--extracted from Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, 1904
