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.

In 1763 the old Chapter had thought fit to deface the Gothic columns, and to have them colour-washed by a Milanese lime-washer, of a yellowish pink speckled with grey; then they had abandoned to the town-museum some magnificent pieces of Flemish tapestry that screened the inner circuit of the choir aisles, and had put in their place bas-reliefs in marble executed by the dreadful bungler who had crushed the altar under the gigantic group of the Virgin.  And mischance had helped.  In 1789 the Sansculottes were intending to destroy this mountainous Assumption, and some ill-starred idiot saved it by placing a cap of liberty on the Virgin’s head!

To think that some beautiful windows were knocked out in order to get a better light for this mass of lard!  If only there were the slightest hope of ever getting rid of it; but alas! all such hopes are vain.  Some years ago, when Monseigneur Regnault was Bishop, the idea was indeed suggested—­not of making away with this petrified lump of tallow, but at least of getting rid of the bas-reliefs.

Then the prelate—­who stuffed his ears with cotton for fear of taking cold—­set his face against it; and for reasons of equal importance, no doubt, the sacrilegious hideousness of this Assumption must be for ever endured, and the marble screens as well.

But though the interior of this choir was a disgrace, the groups round the ambulatory of the apse and the outer wall of the choir were well worth lingering over.

These figures under canopies and tabernacles carved by Jehan de Beauce began on the right by the south transept, went round the horse-shoe behind the altar, and ended at the north transept where the Black Virgin of the Pillar stands.

The subjects were the same as those treated in the small capitals of the royal doorway, outside the church, above the panegyric of the kings, saints, and queens.  They were taken from the Apocryphal legends, the Gospel of the Childhood of Mary, and the Protoevangelist James the Less.