In the upper division, again, the weighing of souls goes on in a magnificent composition; Saint Michael with wide-spread wings holds a large pair of scales and smiles as he caresses a little child with folded hands, while a goat-headed devil watches eagerly to seize him if the Archangel should turn away; and behind this lingering demon begins the dolorous procession of the outcast.  Nor have we here the infernal courtliness of the scene as represented at Chartres, the doubtful consideration of an evil spirit gently driving in a nun; it is brutality in all its horror, the lowest violence; the sometimes comic side of these struggles is not to be seen here.  At Bourges the myrmidons of the deep work and hit with a will.  A devil with a wild beast’s muzzle and a drunkard’s face in the middle of his fat stomach, is hammering the skull of a wretch who struggles, grinding his teeth, while the devil bites his legs with the end of his tail that bears a serpent’s head.  Another monster, with a crushed face and pendant breasts, a man’s face in his stomach and wings springing from his loins, has clasped a priest in his arms and is pitching him head foremost into a cauldron boiling over the flames from a dragon’s mouth blown up with bellows by two of the devil’s slaves.  And in this cauldron sit two figures symbolical of slander and lust, a monk and a woman writhing and weeping, for enormous toads are gnawing at the tongue of one and at the heart of the other.

On the other side of Saint Michael the scene is different; a chubby, smiling angel is playing with a child whom he has perched on one of his fellow-angels’ shoulders, and the infant delightedly waves a bough; behind him slowly marches a representative group of saints—­a woman, a king, a cenobite, conducted by Saint Peter towards a doorway leading to a sanctum where sits Abraham, an old man with a cloth spread over his knees full of little heads all rejoicing—­the souls that are saved.

And Durtal, as he recalled the features of Saint Michael and his angels, perceived that they were the brethren in art of the Saint Anne, Saint Joseph, and the angel of the great portal at Reims.  They were all of the same peculiar type—­a young and yet old countenance, a long sharp nose and pointed chin; only here, perhaps, a little rounder, a little less angular than at Reims.

This sort of family likeness gave support to a theory that the same sculptors or their pupils had worked on the carvings of those two cathedrals, but not at Chartres, where no similar type is to be seen; though a certain striking resemblance exists between other statues in the north porch and some figures, of a different class however, on the facade at Reims.

“Anyone of these hypotheses may be correct, though there is no chance of proving their truth, for we can discover no information with regard to the schools of art of the period,” said Durtal to himself, as he turned his attention to the left-hand bay of the south porch, dedicated to the martyrs.