“Ah!  But this is something better than all the vocal flourishes of the choristers!” said Durtal to himself as he listened to the bells aroused from silence to shed the blessed drops of sound over the city.

He called to mind the meanings ascribed to bells by the early symbolists.  Durand of Mende compares the hardness of the metal to the power of the preacher, and thinks that the blows of the tongue against the side, aim at showing the orator that he should punish himself and correct his own vices before he blames those of others.  The wooden crossbeam to which the bell is suspended resembles in form the Cross of Christ, and the rope pulled by the ringer to set the bell going is allegorical of the knowledge of the Scripture which depends on the Cross itself.

According to Hugh of Saint Victor, the tongue of the bell is the sacerdotal tongue, which, striking on both sides of the body, declares the truth of both Testaments.  Finally, to others the bell itself is the mouth of the Liturgy, and the tongue its tongue.

“In fact, the bell is the Church’s herald, its outer voice, as the priest is its inward voice,” Durtal concluded.

While meditating in this wise, he had reached the cathedral, and for the hundredth time stood to admire those powerful abutments throwing out, with the strong curve of a projectile, flying buttresses like spoked wheels, and, as usual, he was amazed by the flight of the parabola, the grace of the trajectory, the sober strength of those curved supports.  “Still,” said he to himself, as he studied the parapet raised above them, bordering the roof of the nave, “the architect who was content to stamp out those trefoil arches, as if they were punched in that stone parapet, was less happily inspired than certain other master-masons or stone-workers who enclosed the little gutter-path they made round church roofs with scriptural or symbolical images.  Such an one was he who built the cathedral at Troyes, where the top parapet is carved alternately into fleur de lys and Saint Peter’s keys; and he who at Caudebec sculptured the edge into gothic letters of a delightfully decorative character, spelling a hymn to the Virgin, thus crowning the church with a garland of prayer, wreathing its head with a white chaplet of aspiration.”

Durtal left the north side of the cathedral, went past the royal door and round the corner of the old tower.  With one hand he held on his hat, and with the other grasped the skirts of his coat, which flapped about his legs.  The storm blew permanently on this spot.  There might be not a breath of air anywhere else in the town, but here, at this corner, winter and summer, there was always a blast that caught cloaks and skirts and lashed the face with icy thongs.

“That perhaps is the reason why the statues of the neighbouring north door, which are so incessantly scourged by the wind, stand in such shivering attitudes with narrow and tightly-drawn raiment, their arms and legs held close,” thought Durtal, with a smile.  “And is it not the same with that strange figure dwelling in companionship with a sow spinning—­though it is not in fact a sow, but a hog—­and an ass playing on a hurdy-gurdy on the storm-beaten wall of the old tower?”