"In fact, the bell is the Church's herald, its outer voice, as the priest is its inward voice," Durtal concluded.
While meditating in this wise, he had reached the cathedral, and for the hundredth time stood to admire those powerful abutments throwing out, with the strong curve of a projectile, flying buttresses like spoked wheels, and, as usual, he was amazed by the flight of the parabola, the grace of the trajectory, the sober strength of those curved supports. "Still," said he to himself, as he studied the parapet raised above them, bordering the roof of the nave, "the architect who was content to stamp out those trefoil arches, as if they were punched in that stone parapet, was less happily inspired than certain other master-masons or stone-workers who enclosed the little gutter-path they made round church roofs with scriptural or symbolical images. Such an one was he who built the cathedral at Troyes, where the top parapet is carved alternately into fleur de lys and Saint Peter's keys; and he who at Caudebec sculptured the edge into gothic letters of a delightfully decorative character, spelling a hymn to the Virgin, thus crowning the church with a garland of prayer, wreathing its head with a white chaplet of aspiration."
Durtal left the north side of the cathedral, went past the royal door and round the corner of the old tower. With one hand he held on his hat, and with the other grasped the
skirts of his coat, which flapped about his legs. The storm blew permanently on this spot. There might be not a breath of air anywhere else in the town, but here, at this corner, winter and summer, there was always a blast that caught cloaks and skirts and lashed the face with icy thongs.
"That perhaps is the reason why the statues of the neighbouring north door, which are so incessantly scourged by the wind, stand in such shivering attitudes with narrow and tightly-drawn raiment, their arms and legs held close," thought Durtal, with a smile. "And is it not the same with that strange figure dwelling in companionship with a sow spinning—though it is not in fact a sow, but a hog—and an ass playing on a hurdy-gurdy on the storm-beaten wall of the old tower?"
These two animals, whose careless herd he seems to be, represent in their merry guise the old popular sayings: Ne sus Minerveum, and Asinus ad lyram, which may be freely rendered by "Every man to his trade," and "Never force a talent;" for we should but be as inept as a pig trying to be wise or an ass trying to strike the lyre.
But this angel with a nimbus, standing barefoot under a canopy, supporting a sun-dial against his breast, what does he mean, what is he doing?
A descendant of the royal women of the north porch, for he is like them in his slender shape, sheathed in a clinging robe with string-like pleats, he looks over our heads, and we wonder whether he is very impure or very chaste.
The upper part of the face is innocent, the hair cropped round the head; the face is beardless and the expression monastic, but between the nose and mouth there is a broad slope, and the lips, parting in a straight gash, wear a smile, which as we look seems just a little impudent, just a little vulgar, and we wonder what manner of angel this may be.
There is in this figure something of the recalcitrant seminarist, and also something of the virtuous postulant. If the sculptor took a young Brother for his model, he certainly did not choose a docile novice, such as he who no doubt served for the study of Joseph standing under the north door; he must have worked from one of the religious Gyrovagoi who so tormented St. Benedict. A strange figure is this angel, who has a father at Laon, behind the cathedral, and who