The tympanum again expressed the same purpose of parallelism, evidently intended by the master of the work.  This was also devoted to two miracle workers, to a correspondence in this respect of the north and the south.  It represented episodes in the lives of Saint Nicholas and Saint Martin:  Saint Nicholas furnishing a dowry for the daughters of a gentleman who was dying of hunger, and about to sell their honour, and the sepulchre of this archbishop exuding an oil of sovereign efficacy in the cure of diseases; Saint Martin giving half of his cloak to a beggar, and then beholding Christ wearing the garment.

The remainder of this porch was of secondary interest.  In the mouldings of the arches and in the pillars of the bays the ranks of the Confessors appeared again, the nine choirs of Angels, the parable of the wise and foolish Virgins, a replica of the four-and-twenty elders on the royal front, the Prophets of the Old Testament, the Virtues, the Vices, the Christian Virgins, and small statues of the Apostles, all more or less injured and more or less invisible.

This south porch, with its seven hundred and eighty-three statues and statuettes, spoken of by the guide-books as the most attractive of all, was to artists, on the contrary, the least absorbing; for, with the exception of the noble effigies of Saint Theodore and Saint George, the glorification of the others who dwell there was on the whole, from the artistic point of view, very inferior in interest to the sculpture on the twelfth-century west front, or even to that of the north porch—­that complete embodiment of the Two Testaments—­where the sculpture, if more barbarous, was less placid and cold.

And Durtal came to this conclusion:  “The exterior of the cathedral of Chartres may be summed up in three words:  Latvia, hyperdulia, and dulia. Latria, the worship of Our Lord, on the west front; Hyperdulia, the worship of the Blessed Virgin, in the north porch; Dulia, the worship of the Saints, in the south porch.

“For although the Redeemer is magnified in this south portal in His character of Supreme Judge, He seems to make way for the Saints.  And this is quite intelligible, since He is enthroned there for two purposes, and His true palace, His real throne, is in the triumphal tympanum of the royal doorway in the west front.”

Before quitting this side of the building, as he glanced once more at the ranks of the Elect, Durtal stopped in front of Saint Clement and Saint Gregory.

Saint Clement, whose extraordinary death almost casts his life into oblivion—­a life exclusively occupied in harrowing souls.  Durtal recalled the narrative of Voragine.  After being exiled to the Chersonesus, in the reign of Trajan, Clement was cast into the sea with an anchor tied to his neck, while the assembled Christians kneeling on the strand besought Heaven to restore his body.  Then the sea withdrew three miles, and the faithful went dry-shod to a chapel which the angels had just erected beneath the waters, where the body of the saint was found reposing, lying on a tomb; and for many centuries the sea retired every year for a week, to allow pilgrims to visit his remains.