“Its funds?—­are, humanly speaking, nothing, based on trust in Providence, for it has altogether, for the maintenance of eighty pupils, nothing but the pay earned by these children for various duties in the Cathedral, and the profits from a little monthly magazine called ’The Voice of the Virgin,’ and finally and chiefly the charity of the faithful.  All this does not amount to a very substantial income; and yet, to this day, money has never been lacking.”

The Abbe rose and went to the window.

“Oh, the rain will not cease,” said Durtal.  “I am very much afraid, Monsieur l’Abbe, that we cannot examine the Cathedral porches to-day.”

“There is no hurry.  Before going into the details of Notre Dame, would it not be well to contemplate it as a whole, and let its general purpose soak into the mind before studying each page of its parts?

“Everything lies contained in that building,” he went on, waving his hand to designate the church; “the scriptures, theology, the history of the human race, set forth in broad outline.  Thanks to the science of symbolism a pile of stones may be a macrocosm.

“I repeat it, everything exists within this structure, even our material and moral life, our virtues and our vices.  The architect takes us up at the creation of Adam to carry us on to the end of time.  Notre Dame of Chartres is the most colossal depository existing of heaven and earth, of God and man.  Each of its images is a word; all those groups are phrases—­the difficulty is to read them.”

“But it can be done?”

“Undoubtedly.  That there may be some contradictions in our interpretations I admit, but still the palimpsest can be deciphered.  The key needed is a knowledge of symbolism.”

And seeing that Durtal was listening to him with interest, the Abbe came back to his seat, and said,—­

“What is a symbol?  According to Littre it is a ’figure or image used as a sign of something else;’ and we Catholics narrow the definition by saying with Hugues de Saint Victor that a symbol is an allegorical representation of a Christian principle under a tangible image.

“Now symbolism has existed ever since the beginning of the world.  Every religion adopted it, and in ours it came into being with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the first chapter of Genesis, while it still is in full splendour in the last chapter of the Apocalypse.

“The Old Testament is an anticipatory figure of all the New Testament tells us.  The Mosaic dispensation contains, as in an allegory, what the Christian religion shows us in reality; the history of the People of God, its principal personages, its sayings and doings, the very accessories round about it, are a series of images; everything came to the Hebrews under a figure, Saint Paul tells us.  Our Lord took the trouble to remind His disciples of this on various occasions, and He Himself, when addressing the multitude, almost always spoke in parables as a means of conveying one thing by an illustration from another.