At the angle of the south transept in front of the great south-east pier of the crossing is the famous statue of the =Virgin and Child=, which, in Notre Dame, occupies a place not unlike the far more famous and more venerable statue of S. Peter in the vast basilica which at Rome is dedicated to him. Mr. Belloc has used a photograph of it as the frontispiece to the volume quoted in the footnote, and he writes of it as follows: “But of all the additions to the interior of Notre Dame which popular fancy or the traditions of some crisis give it, none is more worthy of being known than that which alone survives of them, and which I have made the frontispiece of this book. It is not that the statue has--as so much of the fourteenth century can boast--a peculiar beauty; it is indeed (when seen from below, as it was meant to be) full of a delicacy that the time was adding to the severity of the thirteenth century; it has from that standpoint a very graceful gesture; the exaggeration of the forehead disappears, the features show the delicate and elusive smile that the fourteenth century always gave to its Madonnas, and there appears also in its general attitude the gentle inclination of courtesy and attention that was also a peculiar mark of a statuary which was just escaping the rigidity of Early Gothic. But its beauty, slight and ill-defined, is not, I repeat, the interest of the statue. It is because this image dates from the awakening of the capital to its position in France, because it is the symbol of Paris, that it rises up alone, as you may see it now, where the southern transept comes into the nave,[13] all lit with candles and standing out against the blue and the lilies. It is a kind of core and centre to the city, and is, as it were, the genius catching up the spirit of the wars, and giving the generation of the last siege and reconstruction, as it will give on in the future to others in newer trials, a figure in which all the personality of the place is stored up and remembered. It was made just at the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War, it received the devotion of Etienne Marcel, it heard the outcry that followed the defeat of Poictiers and the captivity of the king.” Mr. Belloc concludes: “It has been for these five hundred years and more the middle thing, carrying with full meaning the name ‘Our Lady of Paris,’ which seems to spread out from it to the Church, and to overhang like an influence the whole city, so that one might wonder sometimes as one looked at it whether it was not the figure of Paris itself one saw.” [Footnote 13: See p. 70.]