husband and wife were
embracing each other with the trepidation of a worthy old couple,
stammering with joy and clasping trembling hands, the same woman, seen
full-face this time, was so delighted at their happiness that she could
not keep still, but, holding up her skirts, was almost in the act of
dancing.

A little further on, the image-maker had represented the birth of Mary,
a thoroughly Flemish scene: in the background, a bed with curtains, on
which Saint Anna reclined, watched by a maid, while the midwife and her
attendant washed the infant in a basin.

But another of these bas-reliefs, close to the Renaissance clock, which
interrupts the series of this history told in the choir-aisle, was even
more astonishing. In this Mary was sewing at baby-clothes while reading,
and Saint Joseph, asleep in a chair, his head resting on his hand, was
instructed in a dream of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. And he
not only had his eyes shut, he was sleeping so soundly, so really, that
one could see him breathe, one felt his body stretching, relaxing, in
the perfect abandonment of his whole being. And how diligently the young
mother stitched while she was absorbed in prayers, her nose in her book!
Never, certainly, was life more closely apprehended, or expressed with
greater certainty and truth to life caught in the act, at the instant,
ere it moved.

Next to this domestic scene, and the Adoration of the Shepherds and
Angels, came the Circumcision of Jesus, with a white paper apron pasted
on by some low jester; then the Adoration of the Magi; and Jehan de
Soulas and the pupils of his studio had finished the work on their side.
They were succeeded by inferior craftsmen, Francois Marchant of Orleans,
and Nicolas Guybert of Chartres; and after them art went on sinking
lower and lower, down to one Sieur Boudin, who had dared to sign his
miserable puppets, down to the stupid conventionality of Jean de Dieu,
Legros, Tuby, and Mazieres, to the cold and pagan work of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But there was an improvement in
the eight last groups opposite the Virgin of the Pillar--some simple
figures carved by the pupils of Soulas; these, however, were to some
extent wasted, since they stood in the shadow, and it was almost
impossible to judge of them in that half-dead light.

In reviewing this ambulatory, in parts so pleasing and in others so
unseemly, Durtal could not help recalling the details of a similar