THE CURATE—A TALL, MIDDLE-AGED PRIEST WITH STRANDS OF SALT-and-pepper hair showing from the sides of his round black silk zucchetto skullcap—walked east into morning sunlight across the hilltop courtyard to Chartres Cathedral, and the rooftops of the town at the base of the hill shimmered as light reached them. Leaves of the courtyard’s trees rustled a hint of early fall color in the crisp air. The sun, with its mid-September slant, accentuated in silhouette a new structure now guarding the south portal on the right side of the cathedral ahead. Similar new structures secured the two other portals. In front of him on the cathedral’s west facade, a boxcarlike enclosure—fifty feet wide and thirty feet tall—shrouded the Royal Portal. A skin of fiberboard plates covered the enclosure’s framework, a giant sleeve of a boxlike winter coat built to guard the cathedral from the winter tide of war. The curate entered through its doorway into a dark interior vault that was lined floor-to-ceiling with sandbags like a regiment of stubby mythical warriors standing watch around its base on the front and sides of the passageway into the cathedral’s only remaining available west entrance: the portal door under the right-hand arch. The wall of sandbags inside the structure, packed tightly and bulging from behind its steel and wood framework, now protected the portal’s cherished and delicate ancient array of Old Testament and Last Judgment sculptured figures.
As the priest walked through, he may have thought it a travesty that those sculptures had to be hidden now—especially under such a crude leviathan. But better they be secluded for a time under this behemoth than annihilated under German bombing and lost for eternity. Yet why was all of this happening?
The curate opened the frayed door-sized hatch through the aged portal door of the cathedral into the wood-paneled entryway. He tugged on the small inner door, pulled aside the heavy plum-purple velvet light-blocking curtain, and made contact with the sweeping almond-brown, smooth stone floor of the nave, which he recognized had been cleared of all crates, tarps, and equipment. The clamor of workers and steel pipes and machines that had intruded into the sanctuary in August and September 1939 had now mostly been silenced.
Now one could hear isolated sounds of caster wheels squeaking and foremen directing workmen to roll the wooden confessionals to positions away from aisle walls, which were now lined with sandbags from the floor to the sills of the window openings. Other workmen were bringing in some of the thousands of wooden chairs from storage across the courtyards.
The curate would have been pleased that all the windows had been successfully removed and were in their crates and safely in the crypt, and he would have been gratified to see the cathedral being restored so quickly to religious use. But he may have felt a strange disappointment that the crude, massive new structures obscured the entrance and may well have felt an even greater blow from the abrupt change to the lighting and atmosphere inside the cathedral that removal of the stained-glass windows had caused. In the greater part of the nave, choir, and apse, the cathedral was now dark, as if a huge shroud had been placed over the building. Opaque vitrex panels inserted end-to-end into the jambs of the high lancet and rose windows now blocked most light, except for thin bands of faint white daylight. The rich-colored tones that had bathed those spaces for centuries were gone. But worse, in the aisles on the sides of the nave under the clerestory balconies, the vitrex panels now covered only the upper half of the window jambs. The lower third was now screened instead by plain canvas mounted on wooden frames to provide for temporary closure of the window openings into which a few rows of translucent plastic panels could be installed. As a result of this temporary measure, much more light was now penetrating the building through its side aisles. One of those absent lower windows had been the deeply colored Noah Window, in the north aisle, famous for its rich marine hues.
Historically, one of the most striking impressions of the interior of the cathedral had been the concentrated, colorful, saturated light. It was as though the cathedral, with its stained-glass windows, was “full of picture books, with pages of colored glass,” as described by Philip Ball, in his book Universe of Stone. “In the Middle Ages,” Ball writes, “the ordinary man and woman, illiterate and never likely to set eyes on the parchment pages of a book, would have gazed in wonder at these stories of Christ and the Virgin, the saints and the Old Testament, glowing in miraculous visions in the dark stone. . . . One simply didn’t see colors like this in everyday life. Ruby reds, sapphire blues, emerald greens. . . . They evoke the Scriptures in a way that even the most eloquent priest could not rival.”
Stained glass, and light that has passed through it, has been regarded as a metaphor for the divine. Nowhere was that more evident than in the cathedral, because of the way the stained-glass windows changed the light as its rays penetrated them. The curate and his priest colleagues were so familiar with the movement of the light passing through the stained glass—and the way the shafts of light touched the surfaces of wood and stone and the people within the building. The effect would trigger something exquisite in them and in almost everybody.
Ball describes the reactions of those who would later visit the interior of the windowless Chartres Cathedral during World War II. They said it was bathed with a harsh, uncolored “natural light” and, as a result, was “a harsher space, its elegant lines no longer softened by the reddish violet effulgence of Gothic illumination.” In fact, they felt there was “something improper” about this untransformed light, “as though it [were] the Virgin herself who ha[d] been disrobed and exposed under the harsh glare of the noon sun. The space look[ed] crude and cold, the stones pale and exhausted.”
In the following weeks in the autumn of 1939 after the curate’s tour, glass-workshop artists painted color-infused scenes onto the protective translucent plastic panels inserted into the lowest few rows of the window jambs, which had the effect of softening and coloring the light passing through them to shine on the congregants as they would sit in the nave.
In the first few weeks following the September Anglo-French declaration of war, the people of Chartres did not feel much impact from the warfare under way to the east. But by the end of that year, they felt an abrupt influx of refugees from areas near the German border, which began to change life in Chartres. Prefect Jean Moulin noticed that tolerance for refugees was already declining. He made a series of visits to the railway station to secure food and shelter for refugees and made a point there of displaying an accepting posture, to pressure unwelcoming railway managers. Although Jean Chadel and his staff had been of help to the Fine Arts Administration, by arranging resources and clearances for removal of the Chartres windows, Moulin himself had not been much involved with the windows until the spring of 1940. He had been compelled to deal with wider issues stemming from the displacement of French workers and evacuees and from the influx of foreign castaways. All of that would change, however, when the war arrived in Chartres and the search for a more secure hiding place for the windows would, for Moulin—like so many other causes—become a passion and a matter of urgency.
In late February 1940, Georges Huisman, director general of the Fine Arts Administration, convened a special meeting of the Historic Monuments Commission to enable Huisman’s staff to report on the overall evacuation of artworks and stained-glass windows from a multitude of churches and museums across France and from private collections at their owners’ request and report on protection of historic monuments in conflict zones. The meeting did not occur at the administration’s Palais-Royal offices on the Rue de Valois but instead in a ceremonial location: a large chamber in the recently constructed Palais de Chaillot, in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement. It was a grandiose building designed for the World’s Fair of 1937 in a “classicizing ‘moderne’” style, located on the site of the former Trocadéro Palace—an iconic promontory rising above the Square of Freedom and Human Rights, overlooking the valley of the Seine, with a view down past the Place du Trocadéro, to the Eiffel Tower and beyond.
Twenty-seven members of the Historic Monuments Commission attended the meeting called by Huisman, along with Jean Trouvelot and Fine Arts Administration staffers, who were there to answer questions about the just-completed operations at Chartres and across France and to be honored by the members of the commission for the operation’s success.
One of the newest commission members present at the meeting was Jacques Jaujard, director of National Museums and the School of the Louvre. Jaujard would go on to try (unsuccessfully) to convince the Germans to maintain an inventory of artworks and the destinations to which they chose to relocate them. Instead, fortunately, the important task of recording the works taken by the Germans—and the locations to which they were taken—would be secretly carried out by a member of Jaujard’s staff, who would eventually be recognized for her valuable work. She was Rose Valland, a longtime unpaid volunteer and assistant in charge of the Jeu de Paume museum; she has been described by author Robert Edsel as a woman with a forgettable, bland style and manner who ingratiated herself with the Nazis and spied on their activities for the four years of the occupation. After the liberation of Paris, the extent and importance of her secret information, which she fiercely guarded, had a pivotal impact on the discovery of looted works of art from France. She would be recognized as a hero. Following the war, Jaujard would be honored and decorated for his own protecting and safeguarding of works of art stolen by the Germans and would be appointed to succeed Georges Huisman as director general of the Fine Arts Administration.
But on this February day in 1940, Huisman opened the meeting and recognized Lucien Prieur, Ernest Herpe, and René Planchenault for their work to protect monuments in the militarized zones—which included the work at Chartres—as well as Jeanne Laurent, the young state secretary at the Fine Arts Administration, one of the small number of women in the government, who had taken charge of passive defense from the time of the declaration of war and, like Moulin and Zay, would later be active in the Resistance.
As a result of this meeting, the Historic Monuments Commission authorized another five hundred thousand francs for Chartres Cathedral to install protections against threat of bomb damage to its choir fence and another twenty million francs to repair and relead the stained-glass windows over three years, to be completed before they could be reinstalled.
The attendees at the meeting also did not foresee that France would suffer a swift, humiliating military defeat and surrender, much less that France would be divided into an occupied zone and the collaborationist Vichy zone. In addition, the Germans were already establishing a separate Gestapo organization that would be dedicated not to protecting the treasures of artwork embodying the French cultural heritage but to the systematic looting of artworks, which they intended to display in a grand “Führermuseum” that Hitler envisioned would be built in Linz, near his birthplace, Braunau.
Various members of the Historic Monuments Commission recommended publicizing the Fine Arts Administration’s mass evacuation of artworks from museums, churches, and private collections. One senator urged that a report be published in the Bulletin des Monuments historiques and other journals. Another urged that a “luxurious” book be published that could be sold by subscription, and another spoke in support of work already under way to film removal of the windows of various of the most famous buildings, including Chartres. Had the members known that the Third Reich would sponsor its widespread theft of art from France and other countries of Western Europe, they would have sworn all to secrecy and insisted on burying all records. As it turned out, many of those records should probably have been burned in the last-minute escape from Paris before the arrival of the Germans.
Still, the Chartres windows continued to lie in the crypt of the cathedral—exposed to bombardment of the airfield and rail yard. Even into April 1940, no action had been taken to move them to a different, less exposed location.
It isn’t clear why that task was taking so long. Georges Huisman and his team at the Fine Arts Administration, including Jeanne Laurent, may have thought the war was going to be a short one. They had not yet identified a single hiding place that would be large enough for all of the Chartres crates and would meet all of the fire, security, and logistical standards required by the Historical Monuments Service. They likely worried about the shortages of trucks, petrol, and drivers and feared those resources would become even scarcer by the time the site could be identified and secured. And all over France, refugees were crowding onto trains.
Why move the windows? Why not follow Achille Carlier’s recommendation that the windows stay in the crypt for the duration of the war? The answer may have been that the Fine Arts Administration staffers were discovering in real time that this was going to be a new kind of war, mechanized and aerial. Bombs being readied for use in the next war, Carlier contended, already had ten times the force of those used in World War I. Separate from the risk of fire in the cathedral, there was the danger that the cathedral might entirely collapse if bombed. A Gothic cathedral of the Chartres type is a stack of precision-cut-and-polished stones, held in place by balance between the internal pressures of the arches and external pressure of the flying buttresses. The stones are masterfully carved and fitted together. They are not bolted or stapled together. If a bomb with sufficient force were to hit, the cathedral might crash down to the floor and break through into the crypt, destroying the entire collection of the stored windows inside their wooden crates.
Why not put them in the location used when the windows were removed during World War I? For one thing, it is not clear where the Chartres Cathedral windows were stored when removed in 1918. Considerable repair to the windows was required following the 1918 removal, so shipment to a distant location would not have been likely. The prospect of shipping such a large collection of stained glass to another location in 1918—especially a distant location across the country—seems more remote even than it would have been in 1940. In those early decades of the twentieth century, trucks were advancing, but roads were not yet widely developed—especially in isolated areas. The railroads were functioning, but the network of spurs to rural castles would have been less developed even than in 1940. It stands to reason that, in 1918, the windows were kept in the crypt of the cathedral.
In any event, it seems that the Fine Arts Administration in 1940 had at its disposal all necessary information regarding disposition of the removed windows in 1918 and the years that followed. Several members of the Historic Monuments Commission present at its meetings in 1937 and 1940 were also involved in the commission’s meetings during World War I. They would have known or been able to determine where the removed windows had been stored between 1918 and the time they were reinstalled at Chartres.
The record is not clear on why the Fine Arts Administration had failed to identify a storage location for the Chartres windows even as late as April 1940—or, if they had identified one, why they waited even beyond that date to give the order to move the windows.
There were likely many reasons. It was such a large collection, including the largest concentration of twelfth- and thirteenth-century stained glass in a single location anywhere in the world. As such, breaking it up into segments to be stored in multiple locations may have seemed unthinkable. Jeanne Laurent reported at the February 23 meeting that there were over a hundred additional sites already serving as storage depots but most may have been already filled, which would have required that the Chartres collection be divided into pieces. Trucks and fuel were in short supply, but surely if there were a will to move the Chartres windows, wouldn’t there be a way? Ironically, the events of June 1940 themselves decided for everyone whether the Chartres collection would be separated into pieces or remain whole.
In addition, the French wondered what parts of the country would become embroiled in conflict, so the Fine Arts Administration was searching for places far in the southwest, yet still away from the Atlantic coast. And there was growing unrest throughout France from relocation of defense workers and, to a much greater extent, displacement of refugees.
That all being said, it would prove to be only the shock of German onslaught and the clear prospect of French defeat at the front—and the realization that war would be different this time, without a “front”—that would convince the Fine Arts Administration to take the huge risk of moving the Chartres windows.
By the late spring of 1940, the nation’s entire infrastructure was becoming overwhelmed and frayed by, among other things, the arrival of masses of refugees and spreading fear.
But Chartres was fortunate. Jean Moulin was unique in his dedication as prefect of Eure-et-Loire, and, despite his young age, he had a multitude of personal acquaintances among the prefecture staffs of various western departments. It was a stroke of luck that he hailed originally from the southwest of France and had worked a short stint as a prefect in one of its departments—as an attaché to the cabinet at the departmental prefecture for Hérault, centered in Montpellier. It was even more fortunate that he had known Marcel Jacquier, who was now serving as the prefect of the Dordogne. Jacquier, a World War I veteran, had served in the interwar years in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in various foreign assignments and in the prefectures of various departments, starting with the department of Hérault, located in Montpellier, where Jean Moulin had attended law school at Montpellier University.
On March 22, 1940, Paul Reynaud replaced Daladier as prime minister of France. A week later, France and Britain agreed that neither would enter into a separate peace without the other. Less than three weeks later, on April 9, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, and then the British and French forces who were sent to confront those incursions failed to stop the German forces. Shortly thereafter, Churchill replaced Chamberlain as British prime minister.
The citizens of Chartres felt the war was moving closer. Reports of the German bombing in Poland, Denmark, and Norway fueled those fears, and the Fine Arts Administration likely felt mounting pressure to find a safe place to hide the windows.
In Paris, the first air-raid sirens sounded on May 10, but planes did not appear. Even so, the Minister of Information announced to the Parisians on the radio that “the real war had begun.” Parisian suburbanites reported hearing cannon fire and bombs exploding. The Wehrmacht invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg, the Luftwaffe entered French airspace, and three days later the Germans entered France.
Fear of the invasion spread rapidly though the northern French departments. The government offered only limited assistance to residents in those departments, and it forbade civilians from participating in what had been an “official evacuation” of Alsace-Lorraine. Within a week following the German attack, Belgian refugees swarmed into France. Although the newspapers were not reporting the military movement, those refugees were spreading the word. Then, as bombs fell on urban centers, millions of civilian refugees fled from northern France, heading west and south. And soon thereafter, the French State, and any organized evacuation structure, headed toward collapse.
The staff at the Fine Arts Administration finally caught a break. Jean Trouvelot had made a request specifically directed to Yves-Marie Froidevaux, of Périgord, chief architect for historic monuments of the department of the Dordogne. Périgord architect Paul Cocula had had the original idea to hide the Chartres windows in an underground quarry. He knew that the excellent stone from quarries at Ribéracois had been used in restoration of monuments. Froidevaux had been appointed chief architect in the Dordogne only the year before but was familiar with the château in his department. By then, the Departments of Museums and Fine Arts had already hidden many deposits of artworks and museum pieces in the basements of several other castles in Périgord.
Together they identified a possible site, Château de Fongrenon, a castle in the village of Cercles, close to the town of La Tour-Blanche. The castle was listed in the General Inventory of Cultural Heritage that René Planchenault had refined. Château de Fongrenon was listed as a “classic-era” castle built in the seventeenth century, perched on a small rocky promontory and surrounded by a moat. Over three centuries, masons had drilled underground high-ceilinged quarries into the promontory, which were sealed by large lockable doors. And, critically, besides being equipped with its underground quarries, Fongrenon had a nearby railroad spur, served by a road that also led to other roads up to the quarries’ entrance.
The Fine Arts Administration—working with Jacquier in the Dordogne prefecture—obtained the right to use an inactive portion of the quarry at Fongrenon for two hundred francs per month. Once they had done so, Captain Lucien Prieur and Ernest Herpe of the Monuments Service of the GQG went to work with Michael Mastorakis and the local Chartres staff to plan the evacuation of the crates. They still had to find a way to transport them. Long-distance trucks would be nearly impossible to obtain for the nearly three-hundred-mile voyage south to La Tour-Blanche. For such a long trip, Prieur’s obvious choice would be conveyance by rail, but to get the crates onto a train, together with the contingent of guards and workmen to accompany them, he would have to find trucks to transport the crates to a railhead. By late May 1940, crowds of refugees at the railway station at Chartres would make it necessary to find another rail-head. A convoy of trucks could not possibly find space to deliver the crates to, or near, the station. Besides, Prieur must have anticipated that the freight yard at Chartres would be an early target for German planes. No, they would need to search for another site near Chartres to which freight cars could be shuttled and parked long enough to be loaded and then hauled by a locomotive across the country toward the rail hub nearest Fongrenon.
Prieur set out to locate trucks that could navigate the narrow streets of Chartres up the hill to the cathedral, get as close as possible to the cathedral for the crates to be loaded, and then carry the crates to the railhead—once one could be located. He would need fifteen trucks, each with a capacity of five to eight tons, that would be expected to carry the crates in two trips.
By the end of May, Parisians were losing their determination to remain in the city. Refugees in increasing numbers were passing through Paris. Then news of crisis sounded with reports of the British evacuation of Dunkirk. By the start of June, war was closing in, and fear caught hold in Paris.
On June 3, a formation of German bombers attacked the Chartres airfield. There were fifteen twin-engine Dornier bombers in the German group, with only three French planes able to get off the ground, two piloted by Czechs, who suffered as many as thirty hits from heavy defensive fire generated by the German planes. Somehow, the cathedral and its windows escaped serious damage.
At about the same time, Lucien Prieur’s team received word from the railway that it could deliver four railcars to a siding in the small wheat-farming village of Berchéres-les-Pierres, six miles southeast of Chartres. Prieur and Mastorakis knew what they had to do. Could they round up the trucks and manpower and get all of the crates to that village in time? Could they make the journey and get the crates loaded onto the train before detection by German planes or ground forces? And, once loaded, could a railroad engine get to that site to haul the cars far enough west to avoid being sighted and hit by attacking German forces?