Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [277]
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TRANSPORT: CHARTRES
Distance from Paris 88km
Direction Southwest
Travel time 55 to 70 minutes by train
Car A6 from Paris’ Porte d’Orléans (direction Bordeaux-Nantes), then A10 and A11 (direction Nantes), exit ‘Chartres’.
SNCF train More than 30 SNCF trains a day (20 on Sunday) link Paris’ Gare Montparnasse (€12.90) with Chartres, all of which pass through Versailles-Chantiers (€10.90, 45 to 60 minutes). The last train back to Paris leaves Chartres a bit after 9pm weekdays, just before 9pm on Saturday and sometime after 10pm on Sunday.
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The most venerated object in the cathedral is the Sainte Voile (Holy Veil) relic, originally part of the imperial treasury of Constantinople but offered to Charlemagne by the Empress Irene when the Holy Roman Emperor proposed marriage to her in 802. It has been in Chartres since 876, when Charles the Bald presented it to the town. Indeed, the cathedral was built because the veil survived the 1194 fire. It is contained in a cathedral-shaped reliquary and is currently displayed in a small side chapel off the eastern aisle.
Chartres’ Musée des Beaux-Arts (Fine Arts Museum; 02 37 90 45 80; 29 Cloître Notre Dame, Chartres; adult/12-18yr/under 12yr €4.20/2.80/free; 10am-noon & 2-6pm Mon & Wed-Sat, 2-6pm Sun May-Oct, 10am-noon & 2-5pm Mon & Wed-Sat, 2-5pm Sun Nov-Apr), accessed via the gate next to the cathedral’s north portal, is in the former Palais Épiscopal (Bishop’s Palace), built in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its collections include 16th-century enamels of the Apostles made for François I, paintings from the 16th to 19th centuries and polychromatic wooden sculptures from the Middle Ages.
Chartres’ carefully preserved old town is northeast and east of the cathedral along the narrow western channel of the River Eure, spanned by a number of footbridges. From rue Cardinal Pie, the stairways called Tertre St-Nicolas and rue Chantault, the latter lined with medieval houses, lead down to the empty shell of the 12th-century Collégiale St-André, a Romanesque collegiate church that closed in 1791 and was damaged in the early 19th century and again during WWII.
Along the river’s eastern bank, rue de la Tannerie and its extension rue de la Foulerie are lined with flower gardens, millraces and the restored remnants of riverside trades: wash houses, tanneries and the like. Rue aux Juifs (Street of the Jews) on the western bank has been extensively renovated. Half a block down the hill there’s a riverside promenade. Up the hill, rue des Écuyers has many structures dating from around the 16th century, including a half-timbered, prow-shaped house at No 26 with its upper section supported by beams. At No 35 is the Escalier de la Reine Berthe (Queen Bertha’s Staircase), a towerlike covered stairwell clinging to a half-timbered house that dates back to the early 16th century.
There are some lovely half-timbered houses north of here on rue du Bourg and to the west on rue de la Poissonnerie; look for the magnificent Maison du Saumon (Salmon House) at Nos 10 to 14, with its carved consoles of the eponymous salmon, the Archangel Gabriel and Mary and Archangel Michael slaying the dragon.
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SAVED BY RED TAPE
Anyone who has tried to live or work legally in France will know that bureaucracy à la française is at best perfect material for a comedy sketch, and at worst a recipe for madness. Yet were it not for administrative bumbling, the magnificent cathedral at Chartres would probably have been destroyed during the French Revolution.
While antireligious fervour was reaching fever pitch in 1791, the Revolutionaries decided