Chartres: Glory in Glass

Bon jour, mes amies.
When I got back home Crazy Guy was chanting away and panhandling as well, but he's gone now.
Today is a Tour de France rest day, so I could go farther afield, and I decided to out out to Chartres and revisit the cathedral.  What this meant is that I not only left Paris.  I left Greater Paris and the Ile de France.  Chartres, I believe, is in Picardy--although I don't know the name of the modern department it's in.
I looked up trains.  French trains belong to the Society National Chemin de Fer--SNCF, for short and standing for National Society of the Iron Way in literal translation.
I took the metro to Gare Montparnasse.  Well.  This is a bigger and more impressive station than the Hauptbahnhofs that were my mainstays the last two summers.  I easily got a day return ticket to Chartres and had some time to snoot around the station--something I enjoy doing.  I kept an eye on the Departure Board.  When the platform was announced I validated my ticket--Do Not Neglect to Do This!--in one of the numerous yellow "Composte" boxes and hunted up the platform and boarded the train.  Since Chartres was the terminal point, I sat on the upper level of the double decker train.
I'd brought my kindle and read until the train pushed off.  Then I looked out the window at the passing Paris scene.  I cannot say the outer limits of the city are particularly picturesque.  There's a mixture of commercial buildings, more traditional living quarters like apartments from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, and nasty-looking Corboursier-style towers.  The Ile de France is densely settled with some empty space, but not much.  I passed junkyards, hypermarches, and a lot of towns.
But then we left the Ile and our train passed through green and gold countryside.  I saw woodland--most of it coppiced for commercial use, but some wild.  I can tell the difference by looking at the height of the trees and undergrowth.  If there is little undergrowth and the height it uniform, it's a coppice.
And naturally I kept my eyeballs busy spying on people's backyards or small houses, or haute bourgeois houses, or the farms, the small towns.  And a small part of France--a singularly beautiful country.  But the sky was overcast.  I wanted sun in order to appreciate my experience to the full.  Fortunately once I arrived the sun peeked out.
The trip to Chartres takes about a hour and a half.  Finding the town center and the Cathedral de Notre Dame is easy.  See the towers?  Go in that direction.
Experts and Aficionados of the High Gothic Style revere Chartres for the purity of its style and decoration--oh--and that Medieval Stained Glass--acres--or rather since we are European--hectares of it.  The nave was under restoration, but visitors could walk the aisles and visit the high altar.  The deal is the giant windows full of exquisite glass and the famous Chartres blue creating a vision of another and far more virtuous, heavenly world.  If you come see if you can take a guided tour by someone able to "read" the windows to you.  They are meant to be read--visual images given to teach a largely illiterate population.  And don't miss the statues on the facade or the western portal!
The town itself is charming and an afternoon suffices to explore it in a leisurely way.  I popped in to a Romanesque chapel of St. Aignan, and passed half timbered buildings and used the Medieval stone bridges over the River Eure.  The town center is largely pedestrianized and offers good shopping.  Of course there are the usual touristy stops.  I even forced myself to buy some post cards.
I was glad to leave the big city for this comparatively peaceful place.
A demain