“Here I am, as usual, imagining plots and schemes, looking for things that never existed, and discerning motives where perhaps there are none.  And even if there were!  Is it not for my benefit that these good friends are laying their heads together?

“I have only to hear and obey.  Now to have done with this and return to the Bestiary; for I want to finish this work before I go.”  And posting himself in front of the cathedral, he studied the south porch, which had most of zoological mysticism and devilries.

But he did not find the monstrosities of his fancy.  At Chartres the Vices and Virtues were not symbolized by more or less chimerical creatures, but by human faces.  After careful search he discovered on some of the pillars of the middle doorway the Vices embodied in small carved groups:  Lust, as a woman fondling a young man; Drunkenness as a boor about to hit a bishop; Discord by a husband quarrelling with his wife, while an empty bottle and a broken distaff lie near them.

By way of infernal monsters, the utmost he could discern,—­and that by dislocating his neck—­were two dragons in the right-hand bay, one exorcised by a monk and the other bridled by a Saint with his stole.

Of divine beasts he could distinguish in the row of Virtues certain female figures with symbolical creatures by their side:  Docility accompanied by an ox; Chastity by a phoenix; Charity by a sheep; Meekness by a lamb; Fortitude by a lion; Temperance by a camel.  Why should the phoenix here typify Chastity, for it is not used generally in that sense in the Bird-books of the Middle Ages?

Somewhat disconcerted by the poverty of the fauna of Chartres, he comforted himself by a study of this southern porch; it was a match for that on the north, and repeated, with a variant, the subject of the west front—­the glorification of Christ, but in His function as the Supreme Judge, and in the person of His Saints.

This front, begun in the time of Philip Augustus, and built at the cost of the Comte de Dreux and his wife Alice of Brittany, was not completed till the time of Philippe le Bel.  It was divided, like the other two, into three portions:  a central door with a tympanum in a pointed arch bearing the presentment of the Last Judgment; one on the left devoted to the Martyrs, and one on the right dedicated to the Confessors.

The central bay suggested the form of a boat set on end, its prow in the air; its deeply spreading sides contained in their niches six Apostles on each, and in the middle, between the doors, stood a single statue of Christ.

This statue, like that at Amiens, was famous; every guidebook sings the praises of the regular features, the calm expression of the face; in reality the countenance is particularly fatuous and cold, beautiful but lifeless.  How inferior to that of the twelfth century, the expressive and living God seated between the symbols of the Tetramorph in the tympanum of the royal front.