"How exquisite a forerunner of the Blessed Mother is this royal guardian of the threshold, this sovereign, inviting wanderers to come back to the Church, to enter the door over which She keeps watch, and which is itself one of the symbols of Her Son!" exclaimed Durtal, as he glanced at the opposite figures--such different women! one a nun rather than a queen, her head a little bowed; another, every inch a queen, holding hers aloft; the third saucy, though saintly, her neck neither bent nor assertive, holding herself in a natural attitude, and moderating the august mien of a sovereign by the humble, smiling expression of a saint. "And perhaps," said he to himself, "we may see in the first an image of the contemplative life, and in the second the embodied idea of the active life; while the third, like Ruth in the Scriptures, symbolizes both!" As to the other statues--prophets wearing the Jewish cap with ears, and kings holding missals or sceptres, they too are impossible to identify. One in the middle arch, divided from the so-called Berthe by a king, was more especially interesting to Durtal because it was like Verlaine. The statue had indeed thicker hair, but just as strange a head, a skull with curious bumps, a flattish face, a curling beard, and the same common but kindly look. Tradition gives this statue the name of St. Jude, and this resemblance is suggestive between the saint whom Christians most neglected, and who for several centuries found so few devotees that suddenly, one day, on the theory that he, less than the others, would have exhausted his credit with God, people took to imploring him for desperate cases, lost souls, and the poet so utterly ignored or so stupidly condemned by the very Catholics to whom he has given the only mystical verses produced since the Middle Ages. "They were ill-starred, one as a saint and the other as a poet," Durtal concluded, as he drew back to get a better view of the front. It was indeed incredible, with the chasing of silvery flowers wrought on the panes by frost; with its church-drapery, its lace rochets, its fine pierced work, as light as gossamer, running up to the level of the second storey, and forming a fretted frame for the great stone-carvings of the porch. And above that it rose in hermit-like sobriety, unadorned, Cyclopean, with the colossal eye of its dull rose-window between the two towers, one full of windows and richly wrought like the doorway, the other as bare as the facade above the porch. But after all, what absorbed and possessed Durtal's mind was still those statues of queens.