resenting the VIRGIN, and the other DIANE
DE POICTIERS:[52] they are little more than half the size of life. The
whole is in the very best style of the sculpture of the time of Francis I.
These precious specimens of art, as well as several other similar remains,
were carried away during the revolution, to a place of safety. The choir is
spacious, and well adapted to its purposes; but who does not grieve to see
the Archbishop's stall, once the most curious and costly, of the Gothic
order, and executed at the end of the XVth century, transformed into a
stately common-place canopy, supported by columns of chestnut-wood carved
in the Grecian style? The LIBRARY, which used to terminate the north
transept, is--not gone--but transferred. A fanciful stair-case, with an
appropriate inscription,[53] yet attest that it was formerly an appendage
to that part of the edifice.

Before I quit the subject of the cathedral, I must not fail to tell you
something relating to the rites performed therein. Let us quit therefore
the dead for the living. Of course we saw, here, a repetition of the
ceremonies observed at Dieppe; but previously to the feast of the
_Ascension_ we were also present at the confirmation of three hundred boys
and three hundred girls, each very neatly and appropriately dressed, in a
sort of sabbath attire, and each holding a lighted wax taper in the hand.
The girls were dressed in white, with white veils; and the rich lent veils
to those who had not the means of purchasing them. The cathedral,
especially about the choir, was crowded to excess. I hired a chair, stood
up, and gazed as earnestly as the rest. The interest excited among the
parents, and especially the mothers, was very striking. "Voila la
petite--qu'elle a l'air charmant!--le petit ange!"....A stir is made ...
they rise... and approach, in the most measured order, the rails of the
choir ... There they deposit their tapers. The priests, very numerous,
extinguish them as dexterously as they can; and the whole cathedral is
perfumed with the mixed scent of the wax and frankincense. The boys, on
approaching the altar, and giving up their tapers, kneel down; then shut
their eyes, open their mouths; and the priests deposit the consecrated
wafer upon their tongues. The procession now took a different direction.
They all went into the nave, where a sermon was preached to the young
people, expressly upon the occasion, by a Monsieur Quillebeuf, a canon of
the cathedral