y St. Honore
used to stand there to receive you,--he is banished now to the north
porch, where nobody ever goes in. This was done long ago, in the
fourteenth-century days, when the people first began to find
Christianity too serious, and devised a merrier faith for France, and
would have bright-glancing, soubrette Madonnas everywhere--letting
their own dark-eyed Joan of Arc be burned for a witch. And
thenceforward, things went their merry way, straight on, 'ca allait,
ca ira,' to the merriest days of the guillotine.

But they could still carve, in the fourteenth century, and the Madonna
and her hawthorn-blossom lintel are worth your looking at,--much more
the field above, of sculpture as delicate and more calm, which tells
St. Honore's own story, little talked of now in his Parisian faubourg.

8. I will not keep you just now to tell St. Honore's story--(only too
glad to leave you a little curious about it, if it were
possible)[45]--for certainly you will be impatient to go into the
church; and cannot enter it to better advantage than by this door. For
all cathedrals of any mark have nearly the same effect when you enter at
the west door; but I know no other which shows so much of its nobleness
from the south interior transept; the opposite rose being of exquisite
fineness in tracery, and lovely in lustre; and the shafts of the
transept aisles forming wonderful groups with those of the choir and
nave; also, the apse shows its height better, as it opens to you when
you advance from the transept into the mid-nave, than when it is seen at
once from the west end of the nave; where it is just possible for an
irreverent person rather to think the nave narrow, than the apse high.
Therefore, if you let me guide you, go in at this south transept door,
(and put a sou into every beggar's box who asks it there,--it is none of
your business whether they should be there or not, nor whether they
deserve to have the sou,--be sure only that you yourself deserve to have
it to give; and give it prettily, and not as if it burnt your fingers).
Then, being once inside, take what first sensation and general glimpse
of it pleases you--promising the custode to come back to _see_ it
properly; (only then mind you keep the promise;) and in this first
quarter of an hour, seeing only what fancy bid you--but at least, as I
said, the apse from mid-nave, and all the traverses of the building,
from its centre. Then you will know, when you go outside aga