Sens: The Home of a Treasure

Extract

There are a few perfect settings still to be found in this world. They are the ‘apples of gold in pictures of silver’ of the Wise Man.

Most golden things have quite another setting— like the jewel of gold in a pig’s snout to which the same Wise Man likens the beauty of a foolish woman.

A perfect picture in a perfect shrine, or a beautiful Cathedral in a beautiful City would find a fitting symbol in the first. For the second . . . . ! Quite lately when I saw for the first time one of the most famous historic French Cathedrals of the Middle Ages—a thing of rare beauty—it was this which came unsought to my mind.

The Cathedral, from its jewelled windows to its priceless Treasure, is a gem, but its setting is a mean and sordid town—so mean that it does not seem to know how great a treasure it possesses in its Cathedral. Its eyes have been blinded by a petty and venomous anti-clericalism. It has met with its reward. The historic and aesthetic significance which once made it great in Europe has disappeared, and its only value now in the eyes of the world (with the exception of a few savants and beauty-lovers who are not of this world) is as a place of passage where motors halt for the night and the owners sleep, eating and drinking abundantly, if not choicely.