“All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

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Henry Adams311

journalist, historian, academic, novelist 1838–1918

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“The Chartres apse is as entertaining as all the other Gothic apses together, because it overrides the architect. You may, if you really have no imagination whatever, reject the idea that the Virgin herself made the plan; the feebleness of our fancy is now congenital, organic, beyond stimulant or strychnine, and we shrink like sensitive plants from the touch of a vision or spirit; but at least one can still sometimes feel a woman's taste, and in the apse of Chartres one feels nothing else.”

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