angels, stained glass windows, dragons and writers

There are relics, altarpieces, gargoyles and chimeras, in the Dictionary of Cathedral Lovers by Pauline de Préval. Angels, stained glass windows, dragons. Writers (Charles Péguy, Georges Bernanos, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Claudel). Pilgrims who believe in heaven and onlookers who don’t believe in it. And a colorful crowd crowding the square, in Chartres, Reims, Amiens, Rouen, Strasbourg, “with the saints and the murderers, the women of the world and then the whores”, as Michel Polnareff hums in a song celebrating the apocatastasis – hear the universal salvation, even that of demons.

Wonderful vestibules of paradise, the “stone vessels” with which Europe covered itself from the IV^e century have the power to give hope that hell is empty, the Good Shepherd having succeeded in bringing back from nothingness the most lost of his lost sheep. But modern man does not even think of this triumph of divine love, observes Pauline de Préval in the entry entitled…