plum-green;
She gazed out with her sad and pensive pout--a pout very cleverly
restored by a modern glass-painter; and Durtal remembered that people
had come to pray to Her, as he now went to pray to the Virgin of the
Pillar and Notre Dame de Sous Terre.

Such devotion was a thing of the past; the men of our time need, it
would seem, a more tangible, a more material Virgin than this slender,
fragile image, hardly visible in dark weather; nevertheless, a few
peasants still kept up the habit of kneeling and offering a taper before
Her, and Durtal, who loved these old neglected Madonnas, joined them and
invoked Her too.

Two other windows also appealed to him by the singularity of the
figures, perched very high up, in the depths of the apse, and serving as
attendant pages, at a distance, to the Virgin holding Her Son in the
centre light commanding the whole perspective of the cathedral; these
each contained in a light-toned lancet, a barbarous and grotesque
seraph, with sharply-marked features, white wings full of eyes, and
robes with jagged, strap-like edges of a pale green colour; their legs
were bare, and they were represented as floating. These two angels had
jujube yellow aureoles tilted to the back like sailors' hats; and this
ragged attire, the feathers folded over the breast, the hat of glory,
with their general expression of refractory wilfulness, suggested the
idea that these beings were at once paupers, Apaches or Mohicans, and
seamen.

As to the remaining windows, especially those which included several
figures and were divided into several pictures, it would have needed a
telescope and have taken many days of study only to make out the story
they told, and discover the details; and months would not have sufficed
for the task, since the glass had been in many cases repaired and often
replaced without regard to order, so that it was especially difficult to
decipher it.

An attempt had been made to count the number of figures represented in
the cathedral windows; they were as many as 3889; in the mediaeval times
everybody had been eager to present a glass picture to the Virgin. Not
cardinals only, kings, bishops and princes, canons and nobles, but the
corporations of the town also had contributed these panels of fire; the
richest, such as the Guilds of Drapers and Furriers, of Goldsmiths and
Money-changers, had each presented five to Our Lady, while the poorer
companies of the Master Scavengers and Water-car