nt and the benefactors to the
Church, but this hypothesis is no less illusory. The truth is that,
though all these personages have had sceptres in their hands, scrolls,
ribands, and breviaries, not one of them displays the attributes which
would serve to identify them in accordance with the religious symbolism
of the Middle Ages. At most might we venture to give the name of Daniel
to a headless figure because a formless dragon writhes under his feet,
emblematical of the Devil conquered by the prophet at Babylon.

"The most striking and the strangest of these figures are the queens.

"The first, the royal virago with the prominent stomach, is ordinary
enough; the last, opposite to this princess at the furthest end of the
front near the old tower, has lost half her face, and the remaining
portion is not attractive; but the three others, standing in the
principal doorway, are matchless.

"The first, tall, slender, and very straight, wears a crown on her brow,
a veil, hair banded on each side of a middle parting, and falling in
plaits on her shoulders; her nose turns up a little, is somewhat common;
her lips firm and judicious; her chin square. The face is not very
young. The body is swathed, and rigid, in a large cloak with wide
sleeves, and the richly-jewelled sheath of a gown that betrays no
feminine outline of figure. She is upright, sexless, shapeless; her
waist slight and bound with a girdle of cord, like a Franciscan Sister.
She stands looking, with her head slightly bent, attentive to one knows
not what, seeing nothing. Has she attained to the perfect negation of
all things? Is she living the life of Union with God beyond the worlds,
where time is no more? It might be thought so, since it is noteworthy
that, in spite of her royal insignia and the magnificence of her
costume, she has the self-centred look, the austere demeanour of a nun.
She seems more of the cloister than of the Court. Then we wonder who can
have placed her on guard by this door, and why, faithful to a charge
known to none but herself, she watches, day and night, with her far-away
gaze across the square, waiting motionless for some one who for seven
hundred years has failed to come.

"She might be an embodiment of Advent, stooping a little to listen to
the woeful supplications of man as they rise from earth; in that case,
she must be an Old Testament queen, dead long before the birth of the
Messiah she perhaps may have prophesied.

"As she hold