in her own palace; he wanted to please her; and he knew her tastes, even when she did not give him her personal orders.  To him, a dream would have been an order.  The salary of the twelfth-century artist was out of all relation with the percentage of a twentieth-century decorator.  The artist of 1200 was probably the last who cared little for the baron, not very much for the priest, and nothing for the public, unless he happened to be paid by the guild, and then he cared just to the extent of his hire, or, if he was himself a priest, not even for that.  His pay was mostly of a different kind, and was the same as that of the peasants who were hauling the stone from the quarry at Bercheres while he was firing his ovens.  His reward was to come when he should be promoted to decorate the Queen of Heaven’s palace in the New Jerusalem, and he served a mistress who knew better than he did what work was good and what was bad, and how to give him his right place.  Mary’s taste was infallible; her knowledge like her power had no limits; she knew men’s thoughts as well as acts, and could not be deceived.  Probably, even in our own time, an artist might find his imagination considerably stimulated and his work powerfully improved if he knew that anything short of his best would bring him to the gallows, with or without trial by jury; but in the twelfth century the gallows was a trifle; the Queen hardly considered it a punishment for an offence to her dignity.  The artist was vividly aware that Mary disposed of hell.

All this is written in full, on every stone and window of this apse, as legible as the legends to any one who cares to read.  The artists were doing their best, not to please a swarm of flat-eared peasants or slow-witted barons, but to satisfy Mary, the Queen of Heaven, to whom the Kings and Queens of France were coming constantly for help, and whose absolute power was almost the only restraint recognized by Emperor, Pope, and clown.  The colour-decoration is hers, and hers alone.  For her the lights are subdued, the tones softened, the subjects selected, the feminine taste preserved.  That other great ladies interested themselves in the matter, even down to its technical refinements, is more than likely; indeed, in the central apside chapel, suggesting the Auxerre grisaille that Viollet-le-Duc mentioned, is a grisaille which bears the arms of Castile and Queen Blanche; further on, three other grisailles bear also the famous castles, but this is by no means the strongest proof of feminine taste.  The difficulty would be rather to find a touch of certainly masculine taste in the whole apse.