“And by this time,” said he, closing the portfolio, “I am far enough away from the original matter, and none the nearer to any article I can write for the Review.  A paper on the primitive German painters would, indeed, be quite in its line; yes, but what an undertaking!  I should have to work up my notes, and after dealing with Meister Wilhelm, Stephan Lochner, and Zeitblom, to speak of Bernhardt Strigel, an almost unknown painter, of Albert Duerer, Holbein, Martin Schongauer, Hans Balding, Burgkmayer, and I know not how many more.  I should have to account for whatever may have survived of orthodoxy in Germany after the Reformation; to mention, at any rate, from the Lutheran point of view, that extraordinary painter, Cranach, whose Adams are bearded Apollos of the complexion of a Red Indian, and his Eves slender, chubby-faced courtesans, with bullet heads, little shrimps’ eyes, lips moulded out of red pomatum, breasts like apples close under the neck, long, slim legs, elegantly formed, with the calf high up, and large, flat feet with thick ankles.

“Such a treatise would carry me too far.  It is amusing to dream over, but not to write.  I should do better to seek a less panoramic, a compacter subject.  But what?—­Well, I will see later,” he concluded, getting up, for Madame Mesurat jovially announced that dinner was ready.

CHAPTER XIII.

To change his weariness of the place, Durtal one sunny afternoon went to the further end of Chartres, to visit the ancient church of Saint Martin du Val.  It dated from the tenth century, and had served as the chapel by turns of a Benedictine House and of a Capuchin convent.  Restored without any too flagrant heresies, it was now included in the precincts of an Asylum, and was reached by crossing a yard where blind folk in white cotton caps sat nodding on benches in the shade of a few trees.

Its small, squat doorway and three little belfries, as if it had been built for a village of dwarfs, attested its Romanesque origin; and, as at Saint Radegonde at Poitiers and Notre Dame de la Couture at le Mans, the interior opened, under an altar very much raised above the ground, into a crypt lighted by loopholes borrowing their light from the ambulatory of the choir.  The capitals of the columns, coarsely carved, resembled the idols of Oceania; under the pavement and in the tombs lay many of the Bishops of Chartres, and newly-consecrated prelates were supposed to spend the first night of their arrival at the See in prayer before these tombs, so as to imbue themselves with the virtues of their predecessors and enlist their support.

“The Manes of these Bishops might very well have whispered to their present successor, Monseigneur des Mofflaines, some plan for purifying the House of the Virgin by turning out the vile musician who degrades the Sanctuary on Sundays to the level of a music hall!” sighed Durtal.  ’But, alas! nothing disturbs the inertia of that aged, and invalid shepherd, who is, indeed, never to be seen either in his garden, in the cathedral, or in the town.