"It is to-day a high-day of light and the Sun of Justice is visiting His Mother," he went on, as he walked to where the pillared thicket of the choir ended at the south transept, to look at the window known as Notre Dame de la belle Verrière, the figure, in blue, relieved against a mingled background of dead-leaf olive, brown, iris violet, 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 mediæval 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-carriers, the Porters and Rag-pickers, each gave one.
Pondering on these things, Durtal wandered round the ambulatory and paused in front of a small stone Virgin ensconced at the foot of the stairs leading up to the chapel of Saint Piat, constructed in the fourteenth century as a sort of outbuilding behind the apse. This Virgin, dating from the same period, had shrunk into the shade, effacing Herself, deferentially leaving the more important places to the senior Madonnas.
She carried an Infant playing with a bird, in allusion, no doubt, to the passage in the apocryphal Gospels of the Infancy, and of Thomas the Israelite, which shows us the Child Jesus amusing Himself by modelling birds out of clay, and giving them life by breathing upon them.
Then Durtal continued his walk through the chapels; stopping only to look at one which contained relics of opposite utility and double purpose: the shrines of Saint Piat and Saint Taurinus. The bones of the former saint were displayed to secure dry weather in times of rain, and
those of the second to invoke rain in times of drought. But what was far less comforting and more irritating even than this array of side-chapels, with their wretched adornment—with names that had been changed since their first dedication so that the tutelary protection earned by centuries of service had ceased to exist—was the choir, battered, dirty, degraded as if on purpose.