He assigns equal importance to a small figure half hidden in the moulding of an arch and to the large statues in the foreground supporting the picture in relief of Our Lord and His Mother.

Indeed, it might be said that these are the very figures he overlooks; and, in the same way, he takes no account of the western doors, which he could not force into his scheme.
"This archaeologist's ideas, in fact, cannot be maintained.

He subordinates leading features to accessory details, and ends in a kind of rationalism entirely opposed to the mysticism of the period.

He investigates the Middle Ages by levelling down the divine idea to the lowest earthly meaning, and referring to man what is intended to apply to God.

The prayer of sculpture, chanted by the ages of faith, becomes, in the introduction to his work, nothing more than an encyclopaedia of industrial and moral teaching.
"Let us look closer at all this," Durtal went on, and he went out to smoke a cigarette on the Place.