Saving the Light at Chartres

by Victor A. Pollak

  Because of missing windows and destroyed vitrex coverings, the cathedral had been open to the elements. Photos taken during the winter of 1944 and 1945 showed that snow had accumulated around the floors and had covered woodwork, wooden chairs, and the altar, and in winter priests had been unable to celebrate services or other ceremonies, except in the north side aisle of the crypt. Some reported experiencing this problem during the previous winter as well. By mid-1945, moisture had damaged the building, furniture, and organs.

  In late August 1945, three months after the German surrender, Trouvelot wrote to René Capitant, who had been installed as the new minister of national education in the provisional government, requesting resources, including trucks, fuel, and men, to repatriate the windows from Fongrenon.

  As of late August 1945, around one-third of the windows had been restored, despite the scarcity of materials such as tin and lead, as well as coal, gas, and electricity to heat the soldering irons. Another third of the windows had been largely restored with the exception of those in the crates not accessible in storage at Chartres or hidden at Fongrenon. The last third of the windows comprised stained glass that had yet to be completely restored: the rose windows, the bays of the west facade, and the independent bays of the Chapel of Saint Piatus of Tournai that adjoined the choir.

  No sooner had Trouvelot sent his letter than Raoul Doutry, the new minister of reconstruction, toured the cathedral and agreed that the windows should be returned and the building sealed. Jean Chadel, who had become prefect of Eure-et-Loir, assured Trouvelot he would assist in obtaining the necessary fuel, and his secretary-general and Jean Maunoury (again architect of the Historic Monuments Commission) worked to arrange transportation. Trouvelot also discussed preparations for these operations with Jean Verrier, inspector general of historic monuments, who had been active in safeguarding and repatriating artworks.

  Doutry and Jean Chadel pledged assistance to obtain five thousand liters of fuel for nine trucks to travel empty to the Dordogne from their home companies in Eure-et-Loir, either in convoy or individually, to pick up the sixty-five tons of window-loaded crates and transport them back from Fongrenon to the cathedral. The Fine Arts Administration also undertook to help arrange for a small truck to be in La Tour-Blanche to shuttle the crates down from the quarry to the highway where the crates could be loaded on the large trucks. Trouvelot engaged master glassmaker Françoise Lorin to begin restoring the windows situated in forty of the crates that had remained at the cathedral. Françoise was the son of Charles Lorin, who had participated in the 1918 removal and later reinstallation of the Chartres windows, as well as in the 1939 removal and concealment of the windows.

  Meanwhile, architect Froidevaux again inspected the crates at Fongrenon quarry and found that the seventy were too dilapidated from moisture to make the trip to Chartres. Trouvelot arranged for seventy replacement crates to be manufactured and shipped by truck to Fongrenon.

  In October, Trouvelot completed his estimate for all remaining work that could be accomplished prior to return of the stained glass, consisting of repair of metalwork, procurement and assembly of scaffolding, repair of window openings, and replacement of about fifty-three hundred square feet of restored stained glass, all of which would permit full closure of two chapels of the ambulatory, a number of high bays of the nave, and various isolated bays.

  Late in October, Trouvelot received word from the departmental dispatcher of Road Transport that only until December 1, 1945, could the Fine Arts Administration have access to nine trucks from trucking companies surrounding Chartres, ranging in size from five to fifteen tons each, which would collectively be capable of transporting the sixty-five tons of window-carrying crates and would have reserved for it five thousand liters of fuel, but the truckers would be required to provide insurance in the amount of one million francs for each five tons of stained glass.

  The directorate at the Fine Arts Administration would make 500,000 francs available to the prefecture, of which 350,000 francs would cover the transportation and fuel and 150,000 francs would cover labor and other costs. Inspector General Jean Verrier worked with Trouvelot to prepare for the operation. Froidevaux recommended, and Trouvelot agreed, that on-site assistance at La Tour-Blanche should be arranged, but the Fine Arts Administration had only fifteen days to give definitive instructions and carry out the operation, after which the service would no longer have the transportation at its disposal.

  On the last day of October at Chartres, some local children found some incendiary pellets left by the Germans and had some fun throwing these at the wooden containers holding the windows from the Church of Saint-Pierre, and a fire broke out in the chapel of the crypt, and these windows were destroyed. Two other items in the crypt also burned in the blaze: lapidary vestiges of the cathedral’s rood screen and a fourteenth-century statue of the Virgin Mary from the tympanum of the open door of the cathedral’s Chapel of Saint Piatus of Tournai.

  By the start of winter, of the total amount of glass included in Trouvelot’s October estimate, approximately six thousand square feet had been reinstalled.

  By mid-November, the Fine Arts Administration had instructed the Fongrenon depot’s guards to permit removal of the crates. Eight trucks departed to the Dordogne in a pair of convoys in time to arrive on November 25. They were furnished by truckers from Dreux, Nogentle-Rotrou, Chartres, Charray, Courville, and Gallardon. Glassworker François Lorin left his Chartres workshop with members of his team to travel to Fongrenon to handle the stained glass in the quarry under supervision of Froidevaux, with plans to return with the convoy of trucks. The larger trucks were unable to maneuver all the way to the quarry.

  For the loading, unloading, and handling, the service requested that contractors be limited to companies who had worked for Historic Monuments because the service was familiar with their personnel and such companies were familiar with careful handling of artworks. A company that had been previously engaged by the Historic Monuments Service provided a team of men in the Dordogne to haul the crates by cart from the three rooms in which the crates had been concealed deep inside the quarry out to its west doorway and the small truck to shuttle them down the three hundred-foot incline to the road on which the convoy of trucks and other workers waited. From the back of the quarry, a pickup truck loaded the crates and shuttled them to the trucks waiting on the main road near Fongrenon Manor.

  The Fine Arts Administration had difficulty arranging food and overnight lodging for the twenty to thirty workers and drivers in the countryside along the convoy’s route in the town of La Tour-Blanche. Everywhere people were refusing to house and feed workers, because people had hardly enough food for their own needs. At the site, the loading of crates took two days, and police officers watched over the work during a two-day loading process and accompanied the convoy back to Chartres. The convoy was equipped with fire extinguishers. It left La Tour-Blanche on the twenty-seventh for the two-day return trip to Chartres, the first pair of convoys of trucks, framed by police vehicles, carried most of the sixty-five tons of stained glass to be returned to the cathedral, excluding the windows contained in the seventy damaged crates.

  On the morning of November 28, the convoy of trucks delivered the crates to the cathedral, and the crates entered through the Royal Portal doors—first opened for Henry IV in 1594 on the occasion of his coronation and since then opened only on rare occasions. Buntings hung in front of the steps of the forecourt. Workmen placed the crates containing the upper windows in the attics and those for the lower windows in the crypt.

  The seventy replacement crates finally arrived at Fongrenon two weeks later, and the windows from the damaged crates were transferred by Lorin’s men. The second and last convoy left Périgord on December 15, and by the end of the day all the crates had been stored in the crypts of the cathedral.

  By the end of December, Trouvelot submitted another estimate, this time for replacement of sixty-four hundred square feet of fully restored stained glass, whi
ch could only be replaced following the repair of the iron frameworks and some secondary repairs. It included the five hundred square feet that had already been newly replaced in addition to five hundred square feet previously replaced.

  Once the funds for those items were approved, Trouvelot had hoped to carry out the immediate replacement of all of the windows that by then had been restored, consisting of, approximately, 11,840 square feet. This would complete the reinstallation of the first third of the windows.

  For the second third of the windows, the partially restored stained glass, Trouvelot estimated that roughly three-fourths required work that could be done fairly quickly, but the remainder would require more time. He estimated the cost of that work to be 2.5 million francs.

  For the final third of the windows—comprising stained glass that had not been restored since the nineteenth century and would require the repair of its leadwork and require large scaffoldings—Trouvelot estimated the cost to be four to five million francs. He also estimated that by November 1947 two-thirds, perhaps more, of the windows would be reinstalled.

  Trouvelot estimated that if workers commenced work right away, they should be able to complete all glazing of the upper part of the choir before the onset of winter and could close many of the bays, always beginning with the work that could be completed quickly on the partly restored or easy-to-restore bays—the importance being to close the largest amount of surface area as quickly as possible. But even into the spring of 1946, Trouvelot was unable to obtain official approvals to permit payment for the work.

  In March, a snowstorm of exceptional power swept over the region, with snow penetrating the cathedral and requiring architect Maunoury to order a crew to shovel it out.

  Given these conditions, still with no official approvals for payment having arrived by late August, Trouvelot took the initiative on August 28, even before receiving final authorization, to appoint Lorin, along with glassmakers from the Gaudin workshop, to carry out the restoration work under Trouvelot’s supervision, with work to commence immediately after the holidays, and to perform window restoration work in parallel with window reinstallation.

  Trouvelot had reported to his superiors that the glassmaker workshop company had been required to make considerable cash advances of their own, becoming obliged to obtain loans and post collateral to pay their staff, while their lenders had become more and more demanding, refusing to make any more uncollateralized advances. To avoid a slowdown or stoppage of work, he implored his superiors and finally succeeded in having them open a line of credit to be made available to the glassmakers to limit their need to post additional security and further immobilize the companies’ financial resources. Official approvals and payment finally came. On-site workshops were assembled and staffed, scaffolding was erected, and the teams of glassmakers went to work.

  By October 1948, all of the stained glass had been restored and rein-stalled, consisting of 7,595 panels. This work was done by the Lorin and Gaudin workshops under the supervision of architect Trouvelot. The final panel of the final window to be reinstalled was the Annunciation panel (panel 1) of the Incarnation Window (Delaporte’s window number 2), which is the center lancet window beneath the western glass rose window.

  In the 2007 words of scholar Baritaud, the cathedral, with the rein-stallation of that panel—as if to embody the building’s twelfth- and thirteenth-century glass heritage—did “once again become the cathedral of light, powerful and colorful, transmitting its true message of beauty and spirituality.”

  Gene Currivan had written from Chartres in the New York Times ten days after Griffith’s death, describing his visit to the cathedral with two other reporters, as workmen in the building ended their day of repairs by lighting candles:

  CHARTRES CATHEDRAL

  Architecture, statuary, stained glass expressed the unity of the human spirit. The workmen on this Cathedral, after the long day, “lighted candles on the carts around the church, over which they kept watch, singing hymns and songs.”

  If we cannot now re-create the feeling of that age, at least we can look back reverently to “the Court of the Queen of Heaven,” as Henry Adams wrote, and be glad that this monument to piety and art has not been ruined by Hitler’s Yahoos.

  Currivan was not able to witness the windows, as they had not yet been reinstalled. Now they finally had been.

  Captain Walter Hancock, another of the Monuments Men—who visited the cathedral the same week as had Currivan and the demolitions expert, Stewart Leonard—is reported to have said about the cathedral after standing inside it, “One could stand within the enclosure and see in a new, overhead light the figures of the kings and queens of Judah and the Christ of the Apocalypse. For a moment, the cathedral seemed both a monument to the Allied triumph and a structure out of time, beyond the war, something that would stand forever, even when the world was gone.”

  The windows’ repatriation and reinstallation had spanned thirty-seven months since Trouvelot’s August 1945 letter seeking authorization from the Fine Arts Administration, but the story did not end with the reinstallation. Criticism would arise two years later concerning the administration’s placement of seven of the 7,595 panels. Two years later, Carlier published criticisms in his April–June 1950 issue of Les pierres de France, complaining about the placement of five of the panels during the reinstallation. A few months later, Le Monde published an article echoing Carlier’s criticisms. Trouvelot promptly reported to the Fine Arts Administration with his explanation of seven alleged errors raised by Carlier and others and of the corrective action he and his staff had already taken.

  In a report of August 5, 1950, Jean Maunoury, the architect of historic monuments for Chartres, reported to the director of architecture of the Fine Arts Administration refuting some of the allegations made by Le Monde and replying to Carlier’s allegations repeated in the newspaper. Maunoury informed the director of the corrections made and to be made still and fired back a refutation. A month later, Trouvelot filed a report with the director in which he placed the matter in perspective and praised the work done:

  I thought it may be of some use to provide a brief retelling of the history of the removal of the stained glass windows, given that we have read on a number of different occasions various articles containing gross errors, repeated either by complaisance or by ignorance. . . .

  NOTE: The reinstallation of the stained glass was carried out by Mr. Lorin, glassworker of Chartres who, with significant dedication by himself and his team made, in particularly difficult conditions, a section of the removal, oversaw the transportation, the restoration work and the reinstallation. Despite their care, the mistakes indicated above have occurred, mistakes that may have been made during the re-placement in the midst of scaffoldings that covered up sections of the windows and made it difficult to take a view of the entirety. Mr. Lorin was the first to recognize and rectify these mistakes. He and his extremely conscientious workers, who love their art, have taken great pains to avoid making mistakes in the Cathedral of Chartres which they have a particularly strong affection for.

  EPILOGUE—CHARTRES AND THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: SPRING 1944–1995

  FOUR MONTHS AFTER GRIFF’S DEATH, AT A CEREMONY AT FORT HAMilton in New York, the US Army post nearest Nell’s Brooklyn home, an Army officer pinned the Distinguished Service Cross onto her coat, representing his posthumous award—the second highest award for valor, next to the Medal of Honor—while she stood in a line facing the audience with other family members. The DSC was awarded for Griff’s “extraordinary heroism in connection with military operations against an armed enemy.” The Army also posthumously awarded him the Purple Heart, the Legion of Merit, and the Silver Star.

  Nell and little Alice, and the other members of Griff’s family, had been left with many questions about his death. Those who knew Griffith, and most members of his family, attributed the highest of motives and conscious public purposes to Griff’s inspection of the cathedral and to his valor in l
eading the push through Lèves. Some were incensed by any suggestion that Griff’s motives could have been anything but the finest. Alice Griffith Irving, Griff’s daughter—his only living descendant, aged thirteen when he died—told me seventy years later, “His main mission that fateful day was to investigate the delay of the Seventh Armored Division for their mission to clear the advancement to Paris. He . . . no doubt was appalled that our own forces were on the verge of destroying the cathedral. He was the kind of man who would take charge of a volatile situation. The same attitude led to his death later in the day. He was doing a job someone else should have been doing and was doing poorly.”

  Another close relative, retired Army lieutenant general Thomas N. Griffin Jr., Griff’s nephew—eleven years old when his Uncle Griff was killed—told me in 2013 that, having studied all the facts he could find, including US Army archives, he is certain that there was no actual order to attack the cathedral; in fact, there were orders to the contrary. But he is also sure that there were young soldiers from the Seventh Armored Division who were new to combat and likely would have wanted to destroy the cathedral towers if they thought they were being used by the Germans to spot artillery and that General Eisenhower’s order concerning protection of monuments was well known. He also believes that although Griff was on the back of an armored vehicle when he was killed, Griff would not have been leading a column in such a vehicle.