Well, an attempt was made to revive there the worship of Our Lady, to incite a spirit of pilgrimage thither; but all is dead! That Cathedral no longer has a soul; it is an inert corpse of stone; try attending Mass there, try to approach the Holy Table--you will feel an icy cloak fall on you and crush you.

Is it the result of its emptiness, of its torpid services, of the froth of runs and trills they send up there, of its being closed in a hurry in the evening and never open till so late in the morning, long after daybreak?
Or has it something to do with the permitted rush of tourists, of London gapers that I have seen there talking at the top of their voice, sitting staring at the altar when the Holy Elements were being consecrated just in front of them?
I know not--but of one thing I am certain, the Virgin does not inhabit there day and night and always, as she does Chartres.
"Look at Amiens, again, with its colourless windows and crude daylight, its chapels enclosed behind tall railings, its silence rarely broken by prayer, its solitude.

There too is emptiness; and why I know not, but to me the place exhales a stale odour of Jansenism.

I am not at large there, and prayer is difficult; and yet the nave is magnificent, and the sculptures in the ambulatory, finer even than those of Chartres, may be pronounced unique.
"But here, too, the soul is absent.
"It is the same with the Cathedral of Laon--bare, ice-bound, dead past hope; while some are in an intermediate state, dying, but not yet cold: Reims, Rouen, Dijon, Tours, and Le Mans for instance; even in these there is some refreshment; and Bourges, with its five porches opening on a long perspective of aisles, and its vast deserted spaces; or Beauvais, a melancholy fragment, having no more than a head and arms flung out in despair like an appeal for ever ignored by Heaven, have still preserved some of the aroma of olden days.

Meditation is possible there; but nowhere, nowhere is there such comfort as there is here, nowhere is prayer so fervent as at Chartres!" "Those are heaven-sent words!" cried Madame Bavoil.