We have in our museums some definite architectural suggestions as to the style of these models.  There are in Blackstone Hall in the Chicago Art Institute several great Romanesque and Gothic portals, pillars, and statues that might tell directly upon certain settings of our Jeanne d’Arc pageant.  They are from Notre Dame du Port at Clermont-Ferrand, the Abbey church of St. Gilles, the Abbey of Charlieu, the Cathedral of Amiens, Notre Dame at Paris, the Cathedral of Bordeaux, and the Cathedral of Rheims.  Perhaps the object I care for most in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, is the complete model of Notre Dame, Paris, by M. Joly.  Why was this model of Notre Dame made with such exquisite pains?  Certainly not as a matter of mere information or cultivation.  I venture the first right these things have to be taken care of in museums is to stimulate to new creative effort.

I went to look over the Chicago collection with a friend and poet Arthur Davison Ficke.  He said something to this effect:  “The first thing I see when I look at these fragments is the whole cathedral in all its original proportions.  Then I behold the mediaeval marketplace hunched against the building, burying the foundations, the life of man growing rank and weedlike around it.  Then I see the bishop coming from the door with his impressive train.  But a crusade may go by on the way to the Holy Land.  A crusade may come home battered and in rags.  I get the sense of life, as of a rapid in a river flowing round a great rock.”

The cathedral stands for the age-long meditation of the ascetics in the midst of battling tribes.  This brooding architecture has a blood-brotherhood with the meditating, saint-seeing Jeanne d’Arc.

There is in the Metropolitan Museum a large and famous canvas painted by the dying Bastien-Lepage;—­Jeanne Listening to the Voices.  It is a picture of which the technicians and the poets are equally enamored.  The tale of Jeanne d’Arc could be told, carrying this particular peasant girl through the story.  And for a piece of architectural pageantry akin to the photoplay ballroom scene already described, yet far above it, there is nothing more apt for our purpose than the painting by Boutet de Monvel filling the space at the top of the stair at the Chicago Art Institute.  Though the Bastien-Lepage is a large painting, this is many times the size.  It shows Joan’s visit at the court of Chinon.  It is big without being empty.  It conveys a glitter which expresses one of the things that is meant by the phrase:  Splendor Photoplay.  But for moving picture purposes it is the Bastien-Lepage Joan that should appear here, set in dramatic contrast to the Boutet de Monvel Court.  Two valuable neighbors to whom I have read this chapter suggest that the whole Boutet de Monvel illustrated child’s book about our heroine could be used on this grand scale, for a background.