The architect counts here for more than the colourist; but the colour, when you study it, suggests the same restraint.  Three great windows on the Virgin’s right, balanced by three more on her left, show the prophets and precursors of her Son; all architecturally support and exalt the Virgin, in her celestial atmosphere of blue, shot with red, calm in the certainty of heaven.  Any one who is prematurely curious to see the difference in treatment between different centuries should go down to the church of Saint Pierre in the lower town, and study there the methods of the Renaissance.  Then we can come back to study again the ways of the thirteenth century.  The Virgin will wait; she will not be angry; she knows her power; we all come back to her in the end.

Or the Renaissance, if one prefers, can wait equally well, while one kneels with the thirteenth century, and feels the little one still can feel of what it felt.  Technically these apsidal windows have not received much notice; the books rarely speak of them; travellers seldom look at them; and their height is such that even with the best glass, the quality of the work is beyond our power to judge.  We see, and the artists meant that we should see, only the great lines, the colour, and the Virgin.  The mass of suppliants before the choir look up to the light, clear blues and reds of this great space, and feel there the celestial peace and beauty of Mary’s nature and abode.  There is heaven! and Mary looks down from it, into her church, where she sees us on our knees, and knows each one of us by name.  There she actually is—­not in symbol or in fancy, but in person, descending on her errands of mercy and listening to each one of us, as her miracles prove, or satisfying our prayers merely by her presence which calms our excitement as that of a mother calms her child.  She is there as Queen, not merely as intercessor, and her power is such that to her the difference between us earthly beings is nothing.  Her quiet, masculine strength enchants us most.  Pierre Mauclerc and Philippe Hurepel and their men-at-arms are afraid of her, and the Bishop himself is never quite at his ease in her presence; but to peasants, and beggars, and people in trouble, this sense of her power and calm is better than active sympathy.  People who suffer beyond the formulas of expression—­who are crushed into silence, and beyond pain—­want no display of emotion—­no bleeding heart—­no weeping at the foot of the Cross—­no hysterics—­no phrases!  They want to see God, and to know that He is watching over His own.  How many women are there, in this mass of thirteenth century suppliants, who have lost children?  Probably nearly all, for the death rate is very high in the conditions of medieval life.  There are thousands of such women here, for it is precisely this class who come most; and probably every one of them has looked up to Mary in her great window, and has felt actual certainty, as though she saw with her own eyes—­there,