Saving the Light at Chartres

by Victor A. Pollak

  That nave had been destroyed by fire in 1194. Two priests are said to have rushed into the burning building and taken hold of its most sacred relic: the tunic, or Sancta Camisa (a cloth over sixteen feet long), posited to have been worn by Mary at the birth of Jesus (or, some say, at the Annunciation) and given to Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, by Byzantine emperor Nikephoros I when Charlemagne had passed through Constantinople, returning from Jerusalem. The two priests had retreated with the relic into the crypt, where they would remain trapped while the fire burned above. There—in the Crypt of Saint Lubin—they were sheltered from danger, including burning and falling timbers, molten lead, and burning coals. Three days later, they emerged from the crypt holding the Camisa.

  When the trucks with crates arrived back from the railhead, the priests with the keys guided workers back into the cathedral during the night to stack crates in the inner crypt through two small doorways, sealable by iron gates. There they stored the remaining windows of the cathedral and of two other Chartres churches not on their way to Fongrenon. In the workers’ rush to get them back into the inner crypt, they could not place them in any particular order, but still they managed to get them in, and the priests locked the gates and disguised and fenced off the inner crypt to minimize chances of its secret being revealed. They and Mastorakis put out the word to all concerned that the whereabouts of the windows must remain a secret.

  After the train carrying two cars full of crates had left the station at Berchères-les-Pierres, it had headed south and west to its first destination, Courville-Sur-Eure, where the engineer might have planned to wait for darkness and then try to make most of the run at night. Perhaps the engineer was a pressure-tested veteran trainman. Along his route, stations were jammed with refugees, and Luftwaffe spotter planes and fighters were attacking more rail installations, with French warplanes fighting back. Chaos reigned throughout the rail system in the eastern and northern regions of France and expanded southward and westward from Paris.

  The route to La Tour-Blanche likely would have taken the train through river valleys. They would probably have traveled from Berchères-les-Pierres to Courville-Sur-Eure and then on to Le Mans, and after that along the Loire River to Tours. Then they would have headed over the hills south of the river to Poitiers and into the Charente River valley to Angoulême, and then through La Rochebeaucourt-et-Argentina, farther south in the direction of Bordeaux to the small town of Cherval, and then twenty miles farther to La Tour-Blanche, the crates there to be unloaded onto trucks for the haul to Fongrenon. Somewhere along the way, they would need to stop to take on more water for the engine, and maybe more coal, in case there was none at La Tour-Blanche, for their return run. Best they do so far from any lights and away from any crowds of passengers.

  With Germans threatening from the air, shouldn’t we take routes with the most tunnels, to be able to run from tunnel to tunnel?

  In case of attack, one could aim for the next tunnel—or even back to the last—to be able to stop and wait inside until risk subsided. But congestion and delays or accidents or clogging rail traffic—with thousands of refugees everywhere, overrunning stations—could strand this engine and its boxcars with no escape. They probably had to choose between smaller routes, on the one hand—many with a single track but with less traffic, although more vulnerable to interruptions—or, on the other hand, routes with two or more sets of tracks. But the latter option would have been carrying more traffic with greater risk of stranding the train. A key choice would have been to take routes having at least some tunnels.

  The engineer searched the late afternoon and evening skies for danger from the air, mindful of how far away the next tunnel would be in which to be able to take cover. The initial arrival time was Sunday morning—as early as possible, to give the work crews scheduled to meet the train time to evaluate how to manage the unloading process in a place out of sight. The crew expected that the unloading at La Tour-Blanche would take longer than had the onloading at Berchères-les-Pierres. But lengthy unloading time would not be the only problem. Air-raid alerts along the way compelled the train to make incessant stops on the tracks to stay out of sight of planes, so three days would elapse before the train could arrive at La Tour-Blanche.

  It fell upon Jean Maunoury and Paul Cocula, ordinary architects of historic monuments for Eure-et-Loir and Périgord, respectively, to orchestrate the hiring and supervision of laborers to transport the crates from the small station at La Tour-Blanche up to the quarry. In the Dordogne, the tiny town of Cercles adjoined the village of La Tour-Blanche and Fongrenon on the east. Cercles’ mayor of five years had been Francis Mazières. Who were the men recruited to unload the crates at La Tour-Blanche and transport them by truck to Fongrenon? Based on Jean Moulin’s political orientation and that of his counterpart, the precept of the Dordogne, they would have been leftists and farmers. The area of the Dordogne that surrounded the site featured truck farming and dairy and livestock production, with a large forested area to the northeast and vineyards to the south.

  The train arrived at the railhead with the crates of windows intact, and somehow, the boxcars, parked in the small rail yard amid cranes and piles of newly quarried stone, lay sufficiently out of the way of rail traffic and out of view to passers-by to avoid scrutiny of German warplanes. From the train, the men loaded the crates onto wagons drawn by oxen and cows in a multiday process to the base of the embankment that led up to the quarry.

  Château de Fongrenon was located within the village limits of Cercles. The road to the castle ran through La Tour-Blanche to Fongrenon, which was just over the boundary line with Cercles. Stone walls and a moat enclosed Fongrenon’s several-acre compound. Half was tree-shaded, on which stood the castle’s half dozen three- and four-story white-brick buildings, framed with ornate stonework, red terra-cotta tile roofs overseen by several classic tile-roofed Aquitaine-style “pigeonnier” or dovecote-topped towers extending another a story or two above the buildings, the tallest of which resembled a medieval defense tower. In 1940, it was likely unoccupied, so the crews on-site to unload and guard the windows would have had to fend for themselves for food, water, rest, and sanitation and would likely have spent their time at the site without telephone or radio communication.

  The compound sat atop a 470-foot white limestone promontory overlooking otherwise flat or rolling landscape. Large cultivated fields and livestock pastures, interspersed with small woodlots, surrounded it on all sides. Beneath the compound, carved into the limestone, lay the castle’s underground quarry, consisting of a network of a dozen rooms cut into limestone with fifteen-foot ceilings, rough flat rock floors, and vertical walls with straight cut marks revealing where four-foot-square limestone blocks had been cut and removed. The quarry’s two entrances penetrated the cliff of the promontory on the west and south beneath a tree-covered ridge, which hid both entrances. The men brought the crates in through the west entrance, which was cut forty or fifty feet into the ivy-covered limestone cliff.

  Under the direction of local manager Alexis Moreau, the men unlocked the quarry’s large ivy-clad steel doors three hundred yards up an embankment off a gravel lane at the base of the cliff and transported the crates on handcarts with ropes. Through the doors, they entered the space carved into the limestone. It had an L-shaped floor plan consisting of two long, high-ceilinged corridors. The west door led into one hallway running north-south (perpendicular to the west entrance) one hundred feet to the right and two hundred to three hundred feet to the left. The longer hallway, on the left, met another perpendicular corridor joining on the right, which led to a large double doorway fifty feet past the junction. Through the doorway, the corridor continued for another three hundred to four hundred feet deep into the rock wall. Along both hallways, masons had carved a dozen square-cornered rooms of various sizes deep into the rock, half on each side. The long hallway to the right led to eight such rooms, four on the left and four on the right. The temperature in the quarry was a constant
fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit. The men wheeled the crates all the way back to be stacked into three of the farthest-back such rooms, consisting of the penultimate room on the left (numbered as room one), the last room on the left (numbered three), and the last room on the right (numbered two).

  From the west entrance, a ramp led down to the floor of the large front quarry room, whose level was five or six feet below the base of the door. The floor surface was relatively flat but bumpy, also resulting from the cutting and removal of blocks of limestone, but free enough of obstacles to permit use of a handcart for teams of men to haul each crate from the entrance back to the storage rooms—but not without difficulty.

  The men hauled the carts as far as possible up the embankment and rigged ropes and pulleys with which they hauled handcarts to the top of the embankment by tying the rope to another vehicle that edged its way down the hill, pulling the rope to lift the cart and its crate. At the top, they transferred the crate to another handcart, eased it down the ramp, and pushed it through the hallways of the quarry into its designated back room. In the three innermost rooms, they stored the crates on edge in rows in a single layer, stacked side by side against each other—not atop each other—on what appeared to be the dry limestone floor, as they’d been stacked in the crypt of the cathedral, and secured them with wood framing. In room one, they stored 100 crates; in room two, 120 crates; and in room three, the remaining 309. The windows in their crates finally rested at Fongrenon under twenty-four-hour guard.

  Ironically, the idea of rushing the windows westward to be stored to protect them from war damage was perhaps not as sound as believed at the time. Within weeks of the time the windows arrived at Fongrenon, the German-occupied zone that would be established under the armistice would not only cover the north and east of France but also extend through Normandy and down along the Atlantic coast southwest all the way to Spain. The demarcation line between the occupied zone and the Vichy zone ran north-south, through the Dordogne a little more than ten miles west of Fongrenon. All effort to escape from the rush of the westbound Germans closing in from the east and north ended up drawing the windows closer to the eastbound German units coming from the Atlantic coast for the occupation. So the staff guarding that half of the windows hidden at Fongrenon had to be no less preoccupied with secrecy and security than the staff guarding the other half of the windows concealed in the crypt at the cathedral.

  In Paris, on June 9, the beginning of the end commenced. Senior government ministers debated the need for civilian evacuation but subordinated that need to that of evacuation of government officials and offices. Georges Mandel, minister of the interior, objected to plans to evacuate Paris’s civilian population. In fact, he ordered punishment of prefects, mayors, and police commissioners who ordered evacuations or assisted fleeing civilians. Prime Minister Reynaud, on the one hand, wanted the military to defend the city and fight the Germans to the end, but, on the other hand, he wanted to spare Paris from destruction and its citizens from bloodshed.

  On June 10, Weygand and Reynaud declared Paris an open city, and the French government fled Paris. Parisians followed in the thousands, jamming roads out of the city, in cars, buses, wagons, and carts and on bicycles and foot. The slow-moving columns of refugees took ten hours to cover less than twenty miles. That day, just north of Chartres, air raids hit again, causing the worst damage yet. In the afternoon, Jean Moulin drove with his friend Antoinette Sachs to his apartment in Paris to recover papers belonging to himself and his former Air Force boss, Minister Pierre Cot. Antoinette would later travel with those papers on the liner SS Massilia to seek exile in Algiers.

  In Dreux, twenty miles north of Chartres, raids caused one hundred fatalities between June 9 and 11, and much of the center of the town was destroyed, including most hospitals. Moulin drove frequently to Dreux during those days but found much to do in Chartres. A group of high-ranking military officers and civil servants in retreat from Paris passed through Chartres on June 10, causing a serious blow to the morale of Moulin’s staff.

  On June 12, the French military issued a general order for withdrawal. Sirens stopped warning of air raids when the Air Force deserted the Chartres airbase that day, but aerial bombing continued. Moulin devoted the day to arranging hospital care for patients arriving from Berlin, and the next day Moulin received a letter from Colonel du Tille, the local commander, ordering evacuation of the department’s civilian population. The colonel called Moulin the following morning to confirm the order and tell Moulin that since the time he’d left his post on the Belgian frontier, Moulin was the first prefect du Tille had found at his post.

  By June 14, the population was quickly emptying from Chartres. Bombing destroyed much of its center, with the most intense bombing in the afternoon hitting bridges and houses, killing another thirty-three. Moulin closed the railway station and promised to provide meals to refugees at the prefecture that evening. When he returned to Chartres on the evening of June 14, a cloud of smoke rose above the city. Moulin’s whole staff assembled at the prefecture, preparing to leave. Moulin grew angry when he learned that Bishop Harscouët was also leaving his cathedral, along with the right-wing mayor, Raymond Gilbert, whose sister and daughter-in-law had been killed in the air raids. Moulin had to accept the order for military retreat beyond the Loire River.

  After some time, next to the cathedral two specialist glass artisans of the Lorin workshop established a small work space in the basement of the bishop’s palace, to which they quietly—likely in the dark, late at night—removed one crate at a time from the inner crypt and transported it to the work space, where they made repairs and took photographs; when they’d completed the repair work on all panels stored in such a removed crate, they returned it to the inner crypt and removed another of those that were accessible. Over the four years of the occupation, the glassmakers would repair the window panels concealed in those crates of the inner crypt that they could reach furtively, but the storage portion of the crypt had been disguised and fenced off in order to avoid “indiscretions,” as Jean Trouvelot would call them, and the glassmakers could not have replaced any of the remaining crates without attracting attention, so repair of panels in these remaining crates was deferred.

  On Saturday, June 25, Jean Moulin estimated that only seven-to eight hundred of Chartres’ population of twenty-three thousand remained. Refugees and sick people too ill to travel were pouring into the cathedral’s crypt, seeking shelter. Moulin managed to keep the municipal hospital operating with the help of nuns and a military dentist, mainly serving people too ill to travel and refugees, including many who had congregated in the crypt of the cathedral. He arranged to move them out. He also arranged for eight hundred loaves of bread to be brought in from another town and was seen walking through the streets carrying the loaves to distribute to people passing through from the region around Paris. The next day was filled with deserting soldiers—or those who seemed disinterested—escaping civilians and incidents of looting, and Moulin’s car was stolen from the prefecture by French soldiers.

  On the seventeenth, Moulin was waiting in his office at 3:00 a.m. when he heard tanks. He had been expecting Germans but saw French units retreating. Three hours later, a regiment of Senegalese soldiers passed through, appearing to Moulin to be trying to fight rather than be taken prisoner. The next hour, German soldiers arrived in a motorcade. One of the German officers assured Moulin that the Germans would treat civilians with respect. The next morning, Moulin heard that Senegalese members of the French Army had made efforts to prevent the Germans from entering Chartres, but soon Moulin saw Germans driving through on motorcycles. In the early evening, as Moulin was sitting down to eat, German soldiers came in, arrested him, and demanded that he sign a “protocol” stating that black French troops had raped and murdered a group of French women and children. The Germans took him to a remote location to see mutilated bodies of the women and children, ostensibly as evidence of the alleged massacre, but Moulin concluded that the w
omen and children had been victims of a bombing. The Germans, meanwhile, had shot and killed most of the Senegalese.

  The Germans were infuriated with Moulin and locked him in a cellar with some of the corpses, but he still refused to sign. He tried to run off, and they shot him for attempted escape; then they took him back to Chartres and beat him again, finally leaving him in a makeshift cell, an isolated one-room house on the hospital grounds, with a surviving Senegalese soldier. The soldier gave Moulin the only mattress, and Moulin fell asleep.

  When Moulin woke, he tried to kill himself by cutting his own throat with broken window glass. The Germans found him and took him to the hospital. After treatment, they drove him away and eventually dropped him at the prefecture. Within a week, Moulin had sufficiently recovered to resume his duties. Soon Frenchmen nationwide would hear about his beating and attempted suicide, one of many incidents that would lead to his recognition for civic courage alongside de Gaulle among the foremost resisters. The cut on his neck resulted in a scar. Photographs of Moulin taken thereafter show him wearing a scarf around his neck, which became his trademark image.

  In November, Moulin was removed from office by the Vichy government for failure to comply with its order for all prefects to dismiss left-wing elected mayors of towns and villages. Jean Moulin was a man of determination, and he proved it during the war, as none other. In the next several years, he would travel secretly to London and meet with de Gaulle.

  In December, the German occupation forces demanded that the manuscripts and books from the Chartres library that had been moved to the Château de Villebon the year before be returned to Chartres as a propaganda move to reassure the population that they need not fear Nazi occupation. Those in charge of the library could not refuse the order.