But it was not well to trust too much to the benign and genial aspect of this building, for the long rows of grotesque figures that were ranged above the doorways and the arcades belied the jovial security of the rest.

There they were, in high relief, in close array, grinning and jibing; a motley crowd of demented nuns and mad monks, of bewildered rustics and outlandish women; hobgoblins writhing with laughter, and hilarious devils; and in the midst of this mob of the reprobate a figure of a real woman, held by two demons tormenting her, stood out, leaning forward as if she wanted to throw herself down.  With haggard, dilated eye, and clasped hands, in terror she beseeches the passer-by, shows him the place of refuge, and cries to him to enter.  Involuntarily he pauses in amazement to look at that face, distorted with fear, pinched with anguish, struggling amid this pack of monsters, this vision of frenzied nightmare.  At once fierce and pitying, she threatens and entreats; and this image of one for ever excommunicate, cast out of the temple and left to all eternity on the threshold, is as haunting as the memory of suffering, as a nightmare of terror.

Nowhere, certainly, in the satanic menagerie of La Beauce, is there a statue of such startling and assertive art.

From another point of view—­that of the picture as a whole, and of the broad view taken of the subject, the Judgment of Souls at Notre Dame de Chartres is for beneath that of the cathedral at Bourges.

“That, indeed, is, I think, the most wonderful of all,” said Durtal to himself.  “The similar scenes at Reims and at Paris, with the gangs of sinners held in chains tugged by demons, and those of the same kind at Amiens, have none of them such breadth of scope.”

At Bourges, as in all works of this class in the Middle Ages, the dead are escaping from their sepulchres, and on the uppermost frieze, below a figure of Christ, with whom the Virgin and Saint John are interceding, Saint Michael is weighing souls; to the left devils are dragging away the wicked, and to the right angels are conducting the blessed.

The resurrection of the dead, as it is represented by the image-maker of Le Berry, is enough to set the noisy prudery of the Catholics neighing, for the figures are nude, and certain reticences, usually observed at any rate in the female form, are here omitted.  Men and women push up the lid of the tomb, stride across the edge, leap up, roll over pell mell, one above another; some ecstatically clasping their hands in prayer, their eyes fixed on heaven; others anxiously looking about them on all sides; others praying with terror, throwing up their arms; others, again, in dejected attitudes, beating their breasts in lamentable self-accusation; and yet others who are dazzled by the abrupt change from darkness to light, shaking their numbed limbs and trying to move.

The mad confusion of all these human beings, suddenly awakened, and brought like owls into the light of day, trembling with fear or with joy as they see and understand that the day of Judgment is come, is all expressed with a fulness, a spirit, a certainty of observation which leave the petty accuracy and mild energy of the Chartres sculptor far behind them.