“Look at Amiens, again, with its colourless windows and crude daylight, its chapels enclosed behind tall railings, its silence rarely broken by prayer, its solitude.  There too is emptiness; and why I know not, but to me the place exhales a stale odour of Jansenism.  I am not at large there, and prayer is difficult; and yet the nave is magnificent, and the sculptures in the ambulatory, finer even than those of Chartres, may be pronounced unique.

“But here, too, the soul is absent.

“It is the same with the Cathedral of Laon—­bare, ice-bound, dead past hope; while some are in an intermediate state, dying, but not yet cold:  Reims, Rouen, Dijon, Tours, and Le Mans for instance; even in these there is some refreshment; and Bourges, with its five porches opening on a long perspective of aisles, and its vast deserted spaces; or Beauvais, a melancholy fragment, having no more than a head and arms flung out in despair like an appeal for ever ignored by Heaven, have still preserved some of the aroma of olden days.  Meditation is possible there; but nowhere, nowhere is there such comfort as there is here, nowhere is prayer so fervent as at Chartres!”

“Those are heaven-sent words!” cried Madame Bavoil.  “And you shall have a glass of old black currant liqueur for your pains!  Yes, indeed, he is quite right—­our friend is right,” she went on, addressing the priests, who laughed.  “Everywhere else, excepting at Notre Dame des Victoires in Paris and, more especially, Notre Dame de Fourviere at Lyon, when you go to meet Her, you wait and wait; and often enough She does not come.  Whereas in our Cathedral She receives you at once, just as She is.  And I have told him, told our friend, that he should attend the first morning Mass in the crypt, and he will see what a welcome our Mother gives her visitors.”

“Chartres is a marvellous place,” said the Abbe Gevresin, “with its two black Madonnas—­Notre Dame of the Pillar, above in the body of the church, and Notre Dame de Sous-Terre below, in the vault over which the basilica is built.  No other sanctuary, I believe, possesses the miraculous images of Mary, to say nothing of the antique relic known as the Shift or Tunic of the Virgin.”

“And what in your opinion constitutes the soul of Chartres?” asked the Abbe Plomb.

“Certainly not the souls of the citizens’ wives and the church servants that are poured out there,” replied Durtal.  “No, its vitality comes from the Sisterhoods, the peasant women, the pious schools, the pupils of the Seminary, and perhaps more especially from the children of the choir, who crowd to kiss the Pillar and kneel before the Black Virgin.  As for the devotion of the respectable classes!  It would scare away the angels!”

“With a few rare exceptions the fine flower of female Pharisaism is no doubt the outcome of that class,” said the Abbe Plomb, and he added in a half jesting, half sorrowful tone,—­

“And I, here at Chartres, am the distressful gardener of these souls!”