LETTERS ON PAINTED GLASS 441

3

ORLEANS, May 24th.

I HAVE been a little reconciled to beading, by finding it used in these twelfth siècle windows, and in some others, with excellent effect; but it is always very small in proportion to the subject, not greater than is shown at the bottom of fig. 1 (there was no beading here, I only put it for illustration), while Ward’s are about as big as any people’s heads would be. But in almost all the windows of Chartres and Rouen the border is like that which occurs on the right and left of fig. 1, a plain band jointed with iron [word missing-? rivets] one or more of which occur according to the pattern. You see the border of the circle in fig. 2 is red, blue, and white, and of the lozenge red and pale yellow, no beading. This is what I want for my subjects. Apropos of white, there are all shades of it in these windows, but invariably green in hue. There is no marked distinction between the whites and greens, they pass perpetually into one another. The palest white, seen by itself, would be a beautiful clear chrysoprase green.

I don’t know that I have anything more to say. Ward must design the horsemen with jacinth breastplates, for they puzzle me.

We start for Briare to-day; I hope to send you the designs from Auxerre or Dijon. The cathedral here is so frightful that when I walk in the town I keep my head turned the other way lest I should see it.¹ It is unquestionably the most intensely barbarous building in Europe, covered with work of the most vicious and vile kind. Every fault that can possibly be committed in architecture may be illustrated from it. Nothing in England is so bad, old or new.

There was a fair at Chartres while we were there. On one of the booths,-like Richardson’s-there was the following inscription:-

THEATRE

Ici on represente

La Passion de N. S. J. C.

Tragedie en cinq actes.

Suivie de la resurrection, avec un Apotheose.

Aujourd’hui

Paul et Virginie

Point de Vue Maritime.

Terminé par le Naufrage et l’Apotheose.

In another part of the fair a grocer had for a sign a large devil made of plums riding on a pig made of figs. Would not this be a nice devil for Ward, peculiarly illustrative of temptation? I am in hopes, if we do our window nicely, that the congregation will have the other lights filled. In that case we would come over to Chartres, and copy our windows, and give them some nice legends. If Mr. Langar would put in his shopman and a shirt, and Mr. Partington his, with some barley-sugar, we could get on gloriously.

¹ [Compare the Letters to a College Friend, Vol. I. p. 430, and Stones of Venice, vol. i. (Vol. IX. p. 124).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]