“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.”

— Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

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Henry Adams 311

journalist, historian, academic, novelist 1838–1918

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“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.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

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“If you cannot feel the color and quality,— the union of naïveté and art,— the refinement,— the infinite delicacy and tenderness — of this little poem ["Tombeor de Notre Dame"], then nothing will matter much to you; and if you can feel it, you can feel, without more assistance, the majesty of Chartres.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The anonymous thirteenth-century poem "Tombeor de Notre Dame", of which Adams gives a fairly detailed summary, is translated in Of the Tumbler of Our Lady and Other Miracles, edited by Alice Kemp-Welsh (London: Chatto & Windus, 1909).
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)