These statues are the Eginetan marbles of French art; from them all modern French sculpture dates, or ought to date.  They are singularly interesting; as naif as the smile on the faces of the Greek warriors, but no more grotesque than they.  You will see Gothic grotesques in plenty, and you cannot mistake the two intentions; the twelfth century would sooner have tempted the tortures of every feudal dungeon in Europe than have put before the Virgin’s eyes any figure that could be conceived as displeasing to her.  These figures are full of feeling, and saturated with worship; but what is most to our purpose is the feminine side which they proclaim and insist upon.  Not only the number of the female figures, and their beauty, but also the singularly youthful beauty of several of the males; the superb robes they wear; the expression of their faces and their figures; the details of hair, stuffs, ornaments, jewels; the refinement and feminine taste of the whole, are enough to startle our interest if we recognize what meaning they had to the twelfth century.

These figures looked stiff and long and thin and ridiculous to enlightened citizens of the eighteenth century, but they were made to fit the architecture; if you want to know what an enthusiast thinks of them, listen to M. Huysmans’s “Cathedral.”  “Beyond a doubt, the most beautiful sculpture in the world is in this place.”  He can hardly find words to express his admiration for the queens, and particularly for the one on the right of the central doorway.  “Never in any period has a more expressive figure been thus wrought by the genius of man; it is the chef-d’oeuvre of infantile grace and holy candour ....  She is the elder sister of the Prodigal Son, the one of whom Saint Luke does not speak, but who, if she existed, would have pleaded the cause of the absent, and insisted, with the father, that he should kill the fatted calf at his son’s return.”  The idea is charming if you are the returning son, as many twelfth-century pilgrims must have thought themselves; but, in truth, the figure is that of a queen; an Eleanor of Guienne; her position there is due to her majesty, which bears witness to the celestial majesty of the Court in which she is only a lady-in-waiting:  and she is hardly more humanly fascinating than her brother, the youthful king at the Virgin’s right hand, who has nothing of the Prodigal Son, but who certainly has much of Lohengrin, or even—­almost—­Tristan.

The Abbe Bulteau has done his best to name these statues, but the names would be only in your way.  That the sculptor meant them for a Queen of Sheba or a King of Israel has little to do with their meaning in the twelfth century, when the people were much more likely to have named them after the queens and kings they knew.  The whole charm lies for us in the twelfth-century humanity of Mary and her Court; not in the scriptural names under which it was made orthodox.  Here, in this western portal, it stands as the crusaders of 1100-50 imagined it; but by walking round the church to the porch over the entrance to the north transept, you shall see it again as Blanche of Castile and Saint Louis imagined it, a hundred years later, so that you will know better whether the earthly attributes are exaggerated or untrue.