“Besides, what use is therein disputing the fact?  Merely looking at a sleeping vice is enough to wake it.”

And his thoughts went back to that warm crypt.  “Yes, no doubt, like all the buildings of the Romanesque period, it is symbolical of the Old Testament; but it is not simply gloomy and sad, for it is enveloping and comforting, warm and tender!  Admitting even that it is the figure in stone of the older Dispensation, would it not seem that it symbolizes it less as a whole, than as embodying more especially a select group of the Holy Women who prefigured the Virgin in the earlier Scriptures?  Is it not the expression in stone of those passages in which the illustrious women of the Bible are most conspicuous, who were, in a way, prophetic incarnations of the New Eve?

“Hence this crypt would reproduce the most consoling and the most heroic passages of the Sacred Book, for the Virgin is supreme in this underground sanctuary; it is Hers rather than the terrible Adonai’s, if one may dare say so.

“And again, She is a very singular Virgin, who has inevitably remained in harmony with Her surroundings:  a Virgin black and rugged, and stunted, like the rough-hewn shrine She inhabits.

“She is therefore, no doubt, the outcome of the same idea that conceived of Christ as black and ugly because He had assumed the burthen of all the sins of the world, the Christ of the first ages of the Church, who in His humility put on the vilest aspect.  In that case Mary would have conceived Her Son in Her own image; She too had chosen to be ugly and obscure, out of humility and loving-kindness, that She might the better console the disfigured and despised creatures whose image She had borrowed.”

And Durtal went on:—­

“What a crypt is this where, in the course of so many centuries, kings and queens have come to worship!

“Philip Augustus and Isabella of Hainault, Blanche of Castille and Saint Louis, Philippe de Valois, Jean le Bon, Charles V., Charles VI., Charles VII., Charles VIII. and Anne de Bretagne; then Francois I., Henri III. and Louise de Vaudemont, Catherine de’ Medici; Henri IV., who was crowned in this Cathedral, Anne of Austria, Louis XIV., Maria Leczinska, and so many others—­all the nobility of France; and Ferdinand of Spain, and Leon de Lusignan, the last King of Armenia, and Pierre de Courtenay, Emperor of Constantinople—­all kneeling like the poor folks of to-day, and like them beseeching Notre Dame de Sous-Terre.”

And what was more interesting still was that the Virgin had wrought many miracles on this spot.  She had saved children who had fallen into the well of the Strong Saints, had preserved the guardians who had charge of the relic of Her garment when the edifice was blazing above them, and had cured crowds, half maddened by the Burning plague in the Middle Ages, shedding Her benefits with a lavish hand.

Times were changed indeed, but fervent worshippers had knelt before the Image, had relinked the bonds broken in the course of years, had, so to speak, recaptured the Virgin in a net of prayer; and so, instead of departing, as She had done elsewhere, She had remained at Chartres.