“And on the whole,” thought Durtal, “in spite of the discrepancies in some of its texts, the cathedral is legible.

“It contains a rendering of the Old and New Testaments; it also engrafts on the sacred Scriptures the Apocryphal traditions relating to the Virgin and St. Joseph, the lives of the saints preserved in the Golden Legend of Jacopo da Voragine and the special biographies of the aspiring recluses of the diocese of Chartres.  It is a vast encyclopaedia of mediaeval learning as concerning God, the Virgin, and the Elect.

“Didron is almost justified in saying that it is a compendium of those great encyclopaedias composed in the thirteenth century; only the theory that he bases on this truthful observation wanders off and becomes faulty as soon as he tries to work it out.

“He concludes, in fact, by conceiving of this cathedral as no more than a rendering of the Speculum Universale, the Mirror of the World of Vincent of Beauvais; above all, like that work, as an epitome of practical life and a record of the human race throughout the ages.  In point of fact,” said Durtal to himself, as he took the Christian Iconography of that writer down from the shelf, “in point of fact, according to him, our stone pages ought to follow in such succession that, beginning with the opening chapter on the north, they would end with the paragraphs on the south.  Then we should find the narrative in the following order:  First of all the genesis, the Biblical cosmogony, the creation of man and woman and Eden; and then, after the expulsion of the first pair, the tale of man’s redemption by suffering.

“‘Whereby,’ says he, ’the sculptor took occasion to teach the hinds of La Beauce how to work with their hands and their head.  Here, to the right of Adam’s Fall, he carves under the eyes and for the perpetual edification of all men, a calendar of stone with all the labours of the field, and then a catechism of industry, showing the works done in the town; finally, for the labours of the mind, a manual of the liberal arts.”

“Then, thus instructed, man lives on from generation to generation, until the end of the world, set forth in the images on the south side.

“This treasury of sculpture would thus include a compendium of the history of nature and of science, a glossary of morality and art, a biography of humanity, a panorama of the whole world.  Thus it would very really represent the Mirror of the World, and be an edition in stone of Vincent of Beauvais’ book.

“There is only one difficulty.  The Dominican’s Speculum Universale dates from many years later than the erection of this cathedral; also, in developing his theory, Didron does not take into account the perspective and relations of the statuary.  He assigns equal importance to a small figure half hidden in the moulding of an arch and to the large statues in the foreground supporting the picture in relief of Our Lord and His Mother.  Indeed, it might be said that these are the very figures he overlooks; and, in the same way, he takes no account of the western doors, which he could not force into his scheme.