This work was at Amiens, and it, likewise, was the decoration of the outer aisle of a cathedral choir.
This story of the life of Saint Firmin, the first Bishop and patron saint of the city, and of the discovery and translation of his relics by Saint Salvo, was told in a series of groups that had been gilt and painted; then, to complete the circuit of the sanctuary, the life of the second patron of Amiens had been added, Saint John the Baptist; and in the scene of the Baptism of Christ a fair-haired angel was represented holding a napkin, an ingenuous and arch being, one of the most adorable seraphic faces ever carved or painted by Flemish art in France.
This legend of Saint Firmin was set forth, like that of the Birth of the Virgin at Chartres, in separate chapters of stone, surmounted in the same way with gothic canopies or tabernacles; and in the compartment where Saint Salvo, surrounded by the multitude, discerns the beams which radiate from a cloud to indicate the spot where the lost body of the Martyr had been buried, a man on his knees with clasped hands, seems to pant, uplifted in prayer, burning, projected by the leap of his soul, his face transfigured, turning a mere rustic into a saint in ecstasy, already dwelling in God far above the earth.
This worshipper was the masterpiece of the ambulatory at Amiens, as the sleeping Saint Joseph was of the bas-reliefs at Chartres.
"Take it for all in all," said Durtal to himself, "that work in the Picardy Cathedral is more explicit, more complete, more various, more eloquent even than that of the church in La Beauce.

Irrespective of the fact that the unknown image-maker who created it was as highly gifted as Soulas with acute observation, and persuasive and decided simple-mindedness and spirit, he had besides a peculiar and more noble vein of feeling.

And then his subjects were not restricted to the presentment of two or three personages; he frequently grouped a swarming crowd, in which each man, woman, or child differed in individual character and feature from every other, and was conspicuously marked by that unlikeness, so clear and living was the realism of each small figure! "After all," thought Durtal, looking once more at the choir aisles as he turned away, "though Soulas maybe inferior to the sculptor of Amiens, he is none the less a delightful artist and a true master, and his groups may console us for the ignominious work of Bridan and the atrocious decoration of the choir." He then went to kneel before the Black Virgin, and returning to the North transept near which She stands, he gazed once more in amazement at the incandescent flowers of the windows; again he was captivated and moved by the five pointed windows under the rose, in which, on each side of the Mauresque Saint Anna, stood David and Solomon, a forbidding pair, in a furnace of purple, and Melchizedec and Aaron with tawny complexions and hairy faces, with enormous colourless eyes standing out passionless in a blaze of daylight.
The radiating rose-window above them was not of the vast diameter of those in Notre Dame de Paris, nor of the incomparable elegance of the star-patterned rose at Amiens.

It was smaller and heavier, sparkling with flowers like saxifrages of flame, opening in the pierced wall.
Durtal turned on his heel to look at the South transept, where five great windows faced those on the North.

There he saw, blazing like torches on each side of the Virgin placed exactly opposite Saint Anna, the four Evangelists borne on the shoulders of the four greater Prophets--Saint Matthew on Isaiah, Saint Luke on Jeremiah, Saint John on Ezekiel, Saint Mark on Daniel--each stranger than the other, with their eyes like the lenses of opera-glasses, their hair in ripples, their beards like the up-torn roots of trees; excepting Saint John, who was always represented as a beardless youth in the Latin Mediaeval Church, to symbolize his virginity; but the most grotesque of these giants' was perhaps Saint Luke, who, perched on Jeremiah's back, gently scratches the prophet's head, as if he were a parrot, while turning woeful, meditative eyes up to Heaven.
Durtal went down the nave, darker than the choir; the pavement sloped gently to the door, for in the Middle Ages it was washed every morning after the departure of the crowds who slept on it; and he looked down, in the middle, on the labyrinth marked out on the ground in lines of white stone and ribbons of blue stone, twisting in a spiral, like a watch-spring.