we naturally place the
Lady chapel, as we find it in most cathedrals.

"Plants emblematic of Our Lady's attributes are abundant."

"The mystical rose of the Litanies!" exclaimed Madame Bavoil.

"H'm!" said Durtal; "the rose has been much bedraggled. Not only was it
the erotic blossom of Paganism, but in the Middle Ages Jews and
prostitutes were compelled in many places to wear a rose as a
distinctive mark of infamy."

"True," said the Abbe Plomb, "and yet Peter of Capua uses it, with an
interpretation of love and charity, to figure the Virgin; Saint
Mechtildis, again, says that roses are symbolical of martyrs, and in
another passage of her work on 'Specific Grace,' she compares this
flower to the virtue of patience."

"Walafrid Strabo, in his '_Hortulus_,' also speaks of the rose as the
blood of the martyred saints," the Abbe Gevresin murmured.

"'_Rosae martyres, rubore sanguinis_,' according to the key of Saint
Melito," the other priest added, in confirmation.

"We will admit that shrub," cried Durtal. "Now for the lily--"

"Here I must interrupt you," exclaimed the Abbe Plomb, "for it must be
at once understood that the lily of the Scriptures has nothing to do
with the flower we know by that name.

"The common white lily which grows in Europe, and which even before the
Middle Ages was regarded by the Church as emblematic of virginity, does
not seem to have existed in Palestine; and when, in the Song of Songs,
the mouth of the Beloved is compared to a lily, it is evidently not in
praise of white, but of red lips. The plant spoken of in the Bible as
the lily of the valleys, or the lily of the fields, is neither more nor
less than the anemone.

"This is proved by the Abbe Vigouroux. It abounds in Syria, round
Jerusalem, in Galilee, on the Mount of Olives; rising from a tuft of
deeply-cut, alternate leaves of a rich, dull green, the flower cup is
like a delicate and refined poppy; it has the air of a patrician among
flowers, of a little Infanta, fresh and innocent in her gorgeous
attire."

"It is certainly the fact," observed Durtal, "that the innocence of the
lily is far from obvious, for its scent, when you think of it, is
anything rather than chaste. It is a mingling of honey and pepper, at
once acrid and mawkish, pallid but piercing; it is suggestive rather of
the aphrodisiac conserves of the East and the erotic sweetmeats of the
Indies."

"But, after all," said the Abbe Gevresin, "granting that there