In his _Bible of Amiens_,[129] Ruskin gives enlightening interpretations of the quatrefoils adorning the wall under the big images at the western entrance. Little genre studies of agricultural life typify the seasons, and the vices and virtues are rendered with movement and subtlety. There is a connection between certain of the small bas-reliefs and the large statues standing above them. About 1288 they carved the images at the transept's southern portal. Fifty years had elapsed since the making of the western entrance, and already the early reverential awe had passed away. Our Lady is now shown as a radiant young matron whose smile is somewhat mannered, but to call the charming _vierge dorée_ "the soubrette of Picardy," as did Ruskin, is an absurd exaggeration. The apostles are no longer of the ideal type. They are mediæval schoolmen, debating some point of dialectics. Each century was to add to the sculpture of Amiens. André Beauneveu, an illustrious French-Flemish master, made buttress statues of Charles V and his sons, realistic portrait work. The king was one of the four Valois brothers who were, with the Avignon popes, the chief art patrons of the XIV century. As Amiens Cathedral suffered comparatively little during the two cataclysms which emptied the churches of France, it is still a museum of treasures. When, in 1562, the Huguenots, sword in hand, rushed into the church to shatter the altars, the town's tocsin sounded and the citizens assembled in such numbers that they saved their church. Again, during the Revolution, when brutal soldiery began to mutilate the choir screen's groups, the women of Amiens who lived about the cathedral lustily beat the vandals with chairs. Of course the Revolution set up here the usual altar with its living Goddess of Reason, Marat's bust was honored, and over the portal was inscribed the grandiloquent boast: "Fanaticism is destroyed: Truth triumphs." The tombs, bas-reliefs, and paintings were left intact, as well as the famous carved stalls finished in 1522. In the choir-screen sculpture of XVI-century Gothic the Renaissance had only just begun to appear. St. Firman's mission was related quaintly--no prudery shown in the scene of the baptism of Amiens' first Christians. The life of St. John the Baptist was set forth because crusaders had brought his relics to this church from Constantinople. The tourist guide enjoys leading his clients behind Amiens' sanctuary to show them a plump little cupid weeping a marble tear over the tomb of some good canon who founded a local orphanage. M. Durand remarks that for one who appreciates the magnificent bronze tombs of the bishop-builders, or the realistic late-Gothic groups of the choir screen, there are ten who are moved by that banal little _ange pleurant_.