"The thirteenth century could not give a fitting presentment of that queen, whom we picture to ourselves as dressed with foolish magnificence, rocking on a camel across the desert at the head of a caravan under the blazing sky across the furnace of sand.

Her charms have appealed to writers, and not the smallest of them; Flaubert for one--this Queen Balkis, Mekida or Nicaule.

But in the '_Tentation de Saint Antoine_' she has failed to assume any form but that of a puerile and flimsy creature, a skipping and lisping puppet.

In fact, no one but Gustave Moreau, the painter of Salome, could represent the woman, a virgin and a courtesan, a casuist and a coquette.

He only could give life, under the flowered panoply of dress and the blazing gorget of jewels, to the crowned foreign face, with its smile as of an artless sphinx, come from so far to ask enigmas.
Such a woman is too complicated for the spirit and the ingenuous art of the Middle Ages.
"Indeed, the sculptured image is neither mysterious nor suggestive.