But which?
As Hello very truly remarks, tears abound in the Scriptures, but laughter is so rare that Sarah's, when she could not help mocking at the angel who announced that she should bear a son in her old age, has remained on record.

So it is in vain that we inquire to what personage of the ancient books this queen's innocent joy may be ascribed.
"The truth is that she must remain a perennial mystery; she is an angelic, limpid creature, who has attained, no doubt, to the purest joy in the Lord; and withal so attractive, so helpful, that she leaves in us an impression of a healing gesture, the illusion of a blessing made visible to all who crave it.

Her right arm indeed is broken at the wrist, and her hand is gone; but we can fancy it there still when we look for it; as a shade, a reflection; it is very plainly seen in the slight fulness of the bosom, as though it were the palm; in the folds of the bodice, which distinctly show the four taper fingers and raised thumb to make the sign of the cross over us.
"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.
He finally thought no more of the rest, listened to nothing but the divine eloquence of their lean slenderness, regarding them only under the semblance of tall flower-stems deep in carved stone tubes and expanding into faces of ingenuous fragrance, of innocent perfume, while Christ, touched and saddened, blessing the world, seemed to bend from His throne above them to inhale the delicate aroma that rose from these up-soaring chalices full of soul.