Next to this domestic scene, and the Adoration of the Shepherds and Angels, came the Circumcision of Jesus, with a white paper apron pasted on by some low jester; then the Adoration of the Magi; and Jehan de Soulas and the pupils of his studio had finished the work on their side.  They were succeeded by inferior craftsmen, Francois Marchant of Orleans, and Nicolas Guybert of Chartres; and after them art went on sinking lower and lower, down to one Sieur Boudin, who had dared to sign his miserable puppets, down to the stupid conventionality of Jean de Dieu, Legros, Tuby, and Mazieres, to the cold and pagan work of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  But there was an improvement in the eight last groups opposite the Virgin of the Pillar—­some simple figures carved by the pupils of Soulas; these, however, were to some extent wasted, since they stood in the shadow, and it was almost impossible to judge of them in that half-dead light.

In reviewing this ambulatory, in parts so pleasing and in others so unseemly, Durtal could not help recalling the details of a similar but more complete work—­one that had not been wrought in succeeding ages and disfigured by discrepancies of talent and date.  This work was at Amiens, and it, likewise, was the decoration of the outer aisle of a cathedral choir.

This story of the life of Saint Firmin, the first Bishop and patron saint of the city, and of the discovery and translation of his relics by Saint Salvo, was told in a series of groups that had been gilt and painted; then, to complete the circuit of the sanctuary, the life of the second patron of Amiens had been added, Saint John the Baptist; and in the scene of the Baptism of Christ a fair-haired angel was represented holding a napkin, an ingenuous and arch being, one of the most adorable seraphic faces ever carved or painted by Flemish art in France.

This legend of Saint Firmin was set forth, like that of the Birth of the Virgin at Chartres, in separate chapters of stone, surmounted in the same way with gothic canopies or tabernacles; and in the compartment where Saint Salvo, surrounded by the multitude, discerns the beams which radiate from a cloud to indicate the spot where the lost body of the Martyr had been buried, a man on his knees with clasped hands, seems to pant, uplifted in prayer, burning, projected by the leap of his soul, his face transfigured, turning a mere rustic into a saint in ecstasy, already dwelling in God far above the earth.

This worshipper was the masterpiece of the ambulatory at Amiens, as the sleeping Saint Joseph was of the bas-reliefs at Chartres.

“Take it for all in all,” said Durtal to himself, “that work in the Picardy Cathedral is more explicit, more complete, more various, more eloquent even than that of the church in La Beauce.  Irrespective of the fact that the unknown image-maker who created it was as highly gifted as Soulas with acute observation, and persuasive and decided simple-mindedness and spirit, he had besides a peculiar and more noble vein of feeling.  And then his subjects were not restricted to the presentment of two or three personages; he frequently grouped a swarming crowd, in which each man, woman, or child differed in individual character and feature from every other, and was conspicuously marked by that unlikeness, so clear and living was the realism of each small figure!