a delightful artist and a true master, and his groups
may console us for the ignominious work of Bridan and the atrocious
decoration of the choir."

He then went to kneel before the Black Virgin, and returning to the
North transept near which She stands, he gazed once more in amazement at
the incandescent flowers of the windows; again he was captivated and
moved by the five pointed windows under the rose, in which, on each side
of the Mauresque Saint Anna, stood David and Solomon, a forbidding pair,
in a furnace of purple, and Melchizedec and Aaron with tawny complexions
and hairy faces, with enormous colourless eyes standing out passionless
in a blaze of daylight.

The radiating rose-window above them was not of the vast diameter of
those in Notre Dame de Paris, nor of the incomparable elegance of the
star-patterned rose at Amiens. It was smaller and heavier, sparkling
with flowers like saxifrages of flame, opening in the pierced wall.

Durtal turned on his heel to look at the South transept, where five
great windows faced those on the North. There he saw, blazing like
torches on each side of the Virgin placed exactly opposite Saint Anna,
the four Evangelists borne on the shoulders of the four greater
Prophets--Saint Matthew on Isaiah, Saint Luke on Jeremiah, Saint John on
Ezekiel, Saint Mark on Daniel--each stranger than the other, with their
eyes like the lenses of opera-glasses, their hair in ripples, their
beards like the up-torn roots of trees; excepting Saint John, who was
always represented as a beardless youth in the Latin Mediaeval Church, to
symbolize his virginity; but the most grotesque of these giants' was
perhaps Saint Luke, who, perched on Jeremiah's back, gently scratches
the prophet's head, as if he were a parrot, while turning woeful,
meditative eyes up to Heaven.

Durtal went down the nave, darker than the choir; the pavement sloped
gently to the door, for in the Middle Ages it was washed every morning
after the departure of the crowds who slept on it; and he looked down,
in the middle, on the labyrinth marked out on the ground in lines of
white stone and ribbons of blue stone, twisting in a spiral, like a
watch-spring. This path our fathers devoutly paced, repeating special
prayers during the hour they spent in doing so, and thus performing an
imaginary pilgrimage to the Holy Land to earn indulgences.

When he was out in the square once more, he turned back to take in the
splendid effect of th