"It is very true! And pretty results have come of this infection of decency!" Durtal burst out laughing as he thought of the cathedral at Chartres. "Here," said he to himself, "we reach the climax; pious imbecility can go no further. Among the subjects in sculpture in the ambulatory of the choir there is a group representing the Circumcision, Saint Joseph holding the Infant while the Virgin has a napkin ready and the High Priest is preparing to operate. And there has been a priest so modest, a divine so decorous as to regard this scene as licentious and to paste a piece of paper over the Child's nakedness! "The indecency of God, the obscenity of a new-born Babe is too much! "Bah!" said he. "The time has slipped away in all this meditation, and the Abbe will be waiting." He ran quickly downstairs and hurried across to the cathedral, where the Abbe Plomb was pacing to and fro in front of the northern porch, reciting his Breviary. "The side where sinners and demons are figured is especially that of the Virgin, who saves those and crushes these," said the Abbe. "The northern porch of a church is usually the most lively of all; here, however, the Satanic incidents are on the southern side, because they form part of the Last Judgment represented over the south door. Otherwise Chartres, unlike her sister cathedrals, would have no scenes of that kind." "Then the rule in the thirteenth century was to place the Virgin in the northern portion?" "Yes. To the men of that time the north meant the gloom of winter, the dejection of darkness, the misery of cold; the ice-bound chant of the winds was to them the very blast of evil; to the north was the home of the devil, the hell of nature, as the south was its Eden." "But that is absurd!" cried Durtal, "the greatest blunder ever introduced into the symbolism of the elements. The medieval sages were mistaken, for snow is pure and cold is chastity. It is the sun, on the contrary, that is the active agent in developing the germs of rottenness, the ferment of vice! "They forget that the third Psalm of Compline speaks of the hot hour of noon as the most harassing and dangerous of all; they must have overlooked the horrors of sweat and unwholesome heat, the risks of relaxed nerves, of loosened dresses, all the abominations of leaden clouds and hard blue skies! "There are diabolical effluvia in the storm, and in weather when the air stirs like the vapours from a furnace, rousing evil instincts and bringing about us the raging swarm of evil angels."