CATHEDRAL CITIES
OF FRANCE

BY
HERBERT MARSHALL, R.W.S.
AND
HESTER MARSHALL
WITH SIXTY ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
BY HERBERT MARSHALL, R.W.S.

TORONTO
THE MUSSON BOOK CO., Limited
1907

COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
Published September, 1907

NOTE

The following chapters are the result of notes put together during summers spent in France in the course of the last five years. They are not intended to mark out any particular geographical scheme, though considered as isolated suggestions they may possibly prove useful to the intending traveller; nor do they aim at covering all the Cathedral cities of France.

The authors are indebted for much valuable help from the following books: Viollet-le-Duc’s “Dictionnaire de l’Architecture”; Mr. Phené Spiers’s “Architecture East and West”; Mr. Francis Bond’s “Gothic Architecture in England”; Mr. Henry James’s “Little Tour in France”; Mr. Cecil Headlam’s “Story of Chartres”; Freeman’s “History of the Norman Conquest” and “Sketches of French Travel”; Dr. Whewell’s “Notes on a Tour in Picardy and Normandy”; M. Guilhermy’s “Itineraire archéologique de Paris”; M. Hoffbauer’s “Paris à travers les ages”; M. Enlart’s “Architecture Réligieuse”; Mr. Walter Lonergan’s “Historic Churches of Paris”; the “Chronicles” of Froissart and Monstrelet; and to the letters in The Times of its war correspondent, 1870 and 1871.

H. M. M. and H. M.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

A FRENCH CATHEDRAL CITY

HERE are in France to-day three distinct classes of cities—one might even add, of cathedral cities—and as the bishopric is a dignity far more usual in France than in England, “cathedral” may serve for the present as a term inclusive of many towns.

Firstly, there is the town whose local importance has remained unchanged through a succession of centuries and an eventful history, which has added a modern importance to that bequeathed to it by Time. Such towns are Le Mans, Angers, Amiens and Rouen. Secondly, we find the towns whose glory has departed, but who still preserve the outward semblance of that glory, though they remind us in passing through them of a body without a spirit, of an empty house, whose inhabitants are long dead and have left behind them only the echoes of their past footsteps. These towns are a picturesque group, and if we go back upon the centuries, we shall find in them the centre of much that has made history for our modern eyes to read. Look at Chartres and Bayeux, and Lâon and Troyes, for embodiments of this type. And lastly, there are the cities which exactly reverse the foregoing state of affairs, and owe their growth to the kindly fostering of a later age—an age which has learnt wisdom more quickly than its predecessors, and has learnt, moreover, to love the whirr of engines and the busy paths of commerce more than the safe keeping of ancient monuments and the reading of history in the worn greyness of their stones. Among these we may count Havre; but of this class it is more difficult to find examples in France, although in England the north country is thick with such mushroom cities.

The history of the growth of one Gaulish town may easily serve for that of another: later days decided its continued importance or its gradual decay, as the case might be; and, as Freeman points out in his essay upon French and English towns, “the map of Roman Gaul survives, with but few and those simple changes in the ecclesiastical map of France down to the great Revolution.” Thus the history of these cities affected themselves alone and not, to any great extent, the lands in which they stood. It is a salient testimony to the lasting influence of ancient Gaul that in most town-names some trace can be found of the old name, either of the tribe which inhabited it, or of the territory belonging to that tribe; and even under the Roman rule the Gallic forms did not entirely disappear. Later, when the Franks came from the East, one would suppose that they had names of their own for the conquered cities; but if this were the case, these names have not come down to us—all of which goes to show that the Frankish dominion, though it lasted on, and gave to the land her ablest dynasty of kings, had no real rooted influence in the country, and that France, as relating to ancient Gaul, is a formal and almost an empty title.

The Gallic cities owed their origin in the earliest times, naturally, to their situation. The roving tribes, looking for a settlement, would choose a camping ground either on a rocky hill, where they could safely entrench themselves against a possible enemy, or on an island in the midst of a river or marsh, where the surrounding fens would be an efficient safeguard; and it speaks well for their choice, that when the Romans came, skilled in the knowledge of war, offensive and defensive, they did not destroy the settlements of the conquered tribes, but rebuilt and fortified them according to the inimitable pattern of Rome, not effacing but improving what was already to hand. Instead of the rude Gallic huts, stately palaces rose up, with their marble baths; aqueducts threw a succession of arches to the nearest water source, theatres sloped up the hill-side, bridges crossed the river, and where the grottoes of the Druidic or other primitive faiths had been, rose the columns and friezes of splendid temples to Jupiter and Diana and Apollo. Certainly it was a change for the better; and the appearance of many of these towns under the Cæsars was probably much more imposing, though perhaps less picturesque, than that which they presented in mediæval days. In the later Roman era a new element introduces itself. From the early Christian Church at Rome come missionary saints; not saints in those days, but often the poorest and meanest of the brethren, charged with a message to Gaul—Hilary, Martin, Dionysius, and the others. Fierce conflicts follow, persecutions, burnings, martyrdoms—Dionysius bears witness at Lutetia, Savinian and Potentian at Sens—and at last the first church arises within the city, poor and meagre very often in comparison with the huge pagan temples which it replaces, but loved and venerated by the faithful few, and, best of all, the origin of the grand cathedrals which are now the glory of France. “The votaries of the new creed found a home within the walls of their seats of worship such as the votaries of the elder creed had never found within theirs. And around the church arose the dwellings of the bishop and his clergy, a class of men destined to play no small part in the history of the land.” In the Christian city, then, we can begin to trace the beginnings of the mediæval city. Other foundations sprang up in time within the walls—a baptistery was built, as at Aix and Poitiers, to meet the needs of the flocks of converts; other churches perpetuated the memory of some saint; among the river meadows some royal or saintly founder saw a fitting spot for a convent, and the abbey church arose, with its cloisters, dormitories and refectories, and all the other fair buildings in which the early brothers took such a loving pride. Then the bishop himself, with his dignity growing as the Christian faith advanced, must be housed as befitted a deputy of the Holy See; and forthwith sprang up those lordly évêchés which even now serve to remind us of their ancient beauty, though in some cases the civil arm has taken them over, and converted them into hôtels de ville. Then came the barbarian inroads, first of Vandals, Huns, Franks and the rest, next of Normans. These attacked, but could not destroy, or even permanently harm, the position of the city; and when the invaders had either gone their way or settled down in the land, new elements of strength and importance were added to the township: castles and strongholds were built up for the great men who had taken possession of the chief cities, and the great civil or feudal power of the dukes and counts began to exercise its jurisdiction side by side with the old-established influence of the Church. Then, as was notably the case at Le Mans and Troyes, the growing commercial importance of a town would force a communal charter from the seigneur; a burgher quarter would rise, quite as important as the quarter of the nobles and the clergy, and thus the city would become trebly strengthened, except, indeed, when, as was sometimes the case, one power resented the fancied encroachments of the other and made war upon its neighbours.

This power within itself was undoubtedly all to the advantage of the city; but it was fatal to the unity of the kingdom, since it cut France up into a mass of separate states, any one of which could, on the occasion of a quarrel with the sovereign—and these quarrels were rather the rule than the exception—fortify itself by means of its count, its castle and its city walls, and defy the royal forces at its pleasure. While cathedral cities in England were drawing closer and closer to the king as their head, and thereby sinking their own strength in the unity of the Crown, those in France were striving at a power apart from the Crown, or, rather, striving to maintain a power which the Crown had never yet been able to incorporate with itself. Thus a city of France has a much more varied, a much more individual history than has the sister city in England; a story less bound up as part of the great whole of the history of the French kingdom, more concentrated within its own walls, and therefore more tangible, if it be desired to study it irrespective of that whole history. This, then, is the story of its growth from almost pre-historic days. Whether, as an individual city, it flourished after the Middle Ages had fortified and strengthened it, or whether it fell into a state of quiet, picturesque and peaceful decay, depended of course upon particular circumstances, but enough remains to make of the general history of the French city a fascinating though almost inexhaustible study, only surpassed by the study of each town in its separate case.

Wars and revolutions have done their best to destroy what Time had kindly tried to preserve for our delight; nevertheless, a cathedral town in France of to-day is a very pleasant place, and offers exceptional opportunity for the study of French life in almost every aspect. Our business here, however, is with the cathedrals and the historical side of the town, rather than with the lighter points of view; and such things as every traveller will encounter in the course of his journeys, the crowd outside the cafés, the weekly markets, the festivals, civil and ecclesiastical, the quaint ways and speech of the peasant folk and the contretemps of hotel life have not only been described before, times without number, but are such as will be fairly obvious to the average observer, and, if he has never travelled before, will come all the more as a pleasant surprise if he is left to find them out for himself. If, as is more likely to be the case in this enlightened age, he is an experienced traveller, he will know them all by heart, and perhaps be inclined to cavil at having them set before him once again in a light which could not pretend to any novelty.

BOULOGNE TO AMIENS

OULOGNE is perhaps too near the starting point to arrest the outward-bound traveller; he ranks it with Calais, Dieppe, and Havre, as a place to be passed through as quickly as possible; and the splendid train service to Paris naturally makes him hesitate to break his journey at Boulogne. The general tendency in England is to despise the French railway service, and some guide-books even now tell us that the average speed of a French express is from thirty-five to forty-five miles an hour, also that the trains invariably pass each other on the left-hand side. As a matter of fact, all the main lines follow the same rule of the road which obtains in England, and as to average speed, the run from Calais to Paris equals, if it does not exceed, that of any long-distance train-service in our own country, covering the distance of 185 miles at the rate of fifty-six miles an hour.

As a seaport and fishing centre, Boulogne is one of the most interesting and important towns in France; and its fishing-boats sail out in great numbers to the North Sea for the cod fishery along the north coast of Scotland. When the herring fishing begins, Boulogne adds its contingent to the fleets of Cornwall, to the luggers of the West Coast, and to the cobbles of Whitby; and on the eve of the departure to the fishing-ground, the fisherman’s quarter, known as La Beurière, is alive with the orgies of its sailor population. Dancing takes place on the quays, and short entertainments are held in an improvised theatre, while the rich brown-ochre sails of the splendid luggers and smacks are stretched from deck to deck, forming an awning under which the owners and captains meet together with their friends to wish success to the undertaking of those who “go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters.”

Boulogne has the reputation of being the most Anglicised of French towns, and was in years gone by often associated with the seamy side of society. Many a stranger found here a convenient refuge, and Mr. Deuceace and other of Thackeray’s heroes enjoyed the sea breezes of Boulogne after the mental strain of somewhat questionable financial manœuvres.

The city walls, restored in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, date back to 1231, and were built on the foundations of the ancient town of Bononia, generally identified with the Roman Gesoriacum, though not on very reliable authority. From its position on the high grassy cliffs of Picardy, guarding the little river Liane and looking out over the waves to the white line of the English shore, Boulogne in other days had an importance quite distinct from that which we now assign to it. The Viking sailing down the English Channel saw it as one of the outposts of a new and fair land open to the conquest of fire and sword, and in his primitive fashion of asserting the mastery, destroyed the city on the cliff. Later on, these ravages were made good under the rule of Rolf, the “Ganger,” by this time master of Neustria; the city was restored and became the head of a countship, which dignity it retained until late in the fifteenth century, when Louis XI. cast envious eyes upon it, and by a stroke of craft approaching near to genius, united it to the crown of France, declaring the Blessed Virgin to be patroness of the town and himself her humble vassal, holding it under her suzerainty, which no man in France dared to deny. Henry VIII. laid siege to Boulogne in 1544 and gained it for England; but the day of English prestige in France had gone by, and her right of possession was of very short duration, for in the next reign Boulogne was given back to France, and Calais alone remained to England of the spoils of the Hundred Years’ War.

Above the present town rises the monument known as the “Colonne de la Grande Armée,” a memorial of the first Napoleon’s encampment at Boulogne in 1804, and of his magnificent preparations for the invasion of England. In the Château, which dates from the thirteenth century and is now used as barracks, Napoleon III. was confined after his abortive descent upon the town in 1840. It was the second of these desperate attempts to dethrone the “constitutional king” Louis Philippe and reinstate the Imperial dynasty. The expedition to Strasburg four years before had at least been attended by this much success, that the young aspirant was enthusiastically welcomed by the military portion of the population; but the descent upon Boulogne, planned at the time when the body of the first Emperor was being brought from St. Helena to Paris, was a failure from first to last. The little band of conspirators, about fifty in number, with their tame eagle—a symbol of the Imperial power—landed at the port, but found no adherents, and within a few hours of their landing were under arrest. Napoleon himself underwent trial before the Chamber of Peers, and after a short imprisonment, as we have seen, in the Château, was sent to the castle of Ham-sur-Somme.

Three out of the four original gates of the ancient city still remain, notably the Porte Gayole, the rooms in whose flanking towers were at one time used as prisons. In the room above the gateway were formerly held the meetings of the Guyale, a réunion of ancient associations of merchants—what would now be called a chamber of commerce—and from this the gate-house was called Porte Gayole.

Of the cathedral at Boulogne it is difficult to speak with any enthusiasm. It stands as a memorial of the Renaissance work of that period which we should call early Victorian; but like so many modern churches, it possesses an ancient crypt, part of which belongs to the twelfth century, showing that the foundations at least are those of a Gothic church, which was probably destroyed during the Revolution.

On the journey to Amiens the train passes through Abbeville on the Somme, a place some sixty years ago sacred to geologists, who, led by the distinguished Boucher de Perthes, Prestwick and Evans, extracted from the river bed and neighbouring peat and undisturbed gravels, not only remains of beaver, bear, &c., but also innumerable hand-fashioned flints and stone hatchets, and made the valley of the Somme up to Amiens and St. Acheul classic ground to the antiquary and an object of pilgrimage to the student of pre-historic man.

In the early days of the Frank kings this quiet little town upon the Somme had acquired enough importance for fortification, and its city walls were built by Hugh Capet. Later on, after Peter the Hermit had lifted up his voice in Europe, and every man who called himself a true warrior turned his face eastward to Palestine, Abbeville was destined to play her part in the affairs of the great world outside her walls, and to share in the fortunes of that company of men whose watchword was “Jerusalem.” In the first two Crusades, when the crusading spirit was as yet ardent and pure and had not degenerated into a desire for plunder and rapine, the leaders met within the gates of Abbeville before setting out to the Holy Land.

One can well imagine the stir their presence made within the quiet precincts of the little town, the excitement of the townfolk, the eager crowding of the youth of the place around the standards of these great chiefs, Godfrey de Bouillon, destined to become king of Jerusalem; dark, passionate Robert of Normandy, son of the Conqueror; Hugh of Vermandois, brother to the King of France; Stephen of Blois; Raymond of Toulouse; Robert of Flanders, he who was called the “Sword and Lance of the Christians”; and, lastly, Tancred the chivalrous, the very embodiment of the spirit of the crusaders—and a “very perfect, gentle knight.”

For nearly two hundred years the English ruled Abbeville. When, in 1272, Eleanor of Castile was married to Prince Edward, afterwards Edward I., the town was included in the estates which she brought to England as her dowry; and being near the sea coast, and consequently within easy reach of England, its new lords were able to retain their hold upon the city even after the disastrous close of the Hundred Years’ War had given almost every English conquest back to France. Towards the end of the fifteenth century it fell into the hands of the Burgundian party, but the French crown finally reclaimed it in 1477. Since that time it has twice seen an international alliance concluded within its gates. In 1514, Anne of Brittany, the wife of Louis XII.—“Pater Patria”—died without having an heir in the direct line, and her husband, unwilling that the crown should go to François d’Angoulême, determined to take another wife, and made advances to Henry VIII. for the hand of his beautiful sister, Mary Tudor; and after the negotiations were completed, they were married at Abbeville. As far as Louis’s purpose went, however, the marriage was a failure, as the King died a few months later, and the Duc d’Angoulême, his son-in-law, ascended his throne as François I^er. To his reign belongs the second alliance in the history of Abbeville, the pact signed between the King of France and Cardinal Wolsey, on behalf of Henry VIII., against the common enemy, Charles V.—a figure so commanding, so infinitely greater than his contemporaries, that beside him the brilliancy of François, the gallantry of Henry, and the pomp and magnificence of his favourite Wolsey, seemed entirely eclipsed, and the three men appear almost as puppets, unstable and vacillating, now the closest of friends, and now the bitterest of enemies.

Abbeville still maintains many of the old picturesque landmarks which made it a favourite sketching ground for Prout and for Ruskin. The market-place is surrounded by a number of houses with high pitched gables, coloured in various tints of white, grey and pale green. Some beautiful drawings by Ruskin, executed in pencil and tint, which have lately been exhibited to the public, bear testimony to its picturesqueness, of which a great deal still remains in the side streets and along the river front.

The church of St. Wolfran is late Flamboyant, and is looked upon by Ruskin as “a wonderful proof of the fearlessness of a living architecture,” for, say what one will of it, that Flamboyant of France, however morbid, was as vivid and intense in its imagination as ever any phase of mortal mind. The nave consists of bays having a high clerestory and a triforium screened by rich sixteenth century carving. The ribs of the vaulting fall sheer down without imposts or break of any kind. The low chancel and eastern termination of the church are unworthy of the splendid carving of the western façade.

The approach to Amiens offers no coup d’œil of clustering towers or spires such as an English or Norman cathedral city usually gives us, and the Cathedral itself is hidden as we pass into the heart of the town along the Rue des Trois Cailloux, a street which is said to follow the alignment of the old city walls. Ruskin advises the traveller, however short his time may be, to devote it, not to the contemplation of arches and piers and coloured glass, but to the woodwork of the chancel, which he considers the most beautiful carpenter’s work of the Flamboyant period. Note should be taken of two windows in the Chapel of the Cardinal de la Grange, built about 1375. These are very interesting as foreshadowing in their detail that style of architecture—the Flamboyant—which obtained in France in the fifteenth century and was contemporaneous with the English Perpendicular.

The two western towers look little more than heavily built buttresses, and as towers are not very appropriate in design, being not square, but oblong in plan. They rise little above the ridge line of the nave, whose crossing with the transepts is marked by a beautiful flèche, which Ruskin, however, describes as “merely the caprice of a village carpenter.” As he further declares, the Cathedral of Amiens is “in dignity inferior to Chartres, in sublimity to Beauvais, in decorative splendour to Rheims, and in loveliness of figure sculpture to Bourges,” yet it fully deserves the name given to it by Viollet-le-Duc—“The Parthenon of Gothic architecture.”

The height of the nave and aisles is, according to Mr. Francis Bond in his book “Gothic Architecture in England,” respectively nearly three times their span, and the vastness of the fenestration is very striking, particularly in the clerestory, through whose lower mouldings the triforium is negotiated, thus dividing each bay into two storeys, clerestory and pier arch, instead of into three, clerestory triforium and pier arch. This gives the effect after which the French architect strove: one vast blaze of light and colour through the upper windows, coming not only from the clerestory, but from the glazed triforium also; the magnificent deep blue glass typifying the splendour of the heavens. On the other hand, in a sunny clime, builders cared less for light, and preferred the effect of a blind triforium which throws the choir below into gloomy and mysterious shadow. Thus we see that upon the design of the triforium depends to a very great extent the effect of the light and shade of the interior of a great church.

Once, being personally conducted by the dean over one of the cathedrals of the west of England, the writer was suddenly called upon to give the derivation of “triforium.” The word is applied to the ambulatory or passage, screened by an arcade, which runs between the pier arches and clerestory windows, and is considered to refer to the three openings, or spaces, trinæ fores, into which the arcading was sometimes divided. It probably has nothing to do with openings in multiples of three, nor with a Latinised form of “thoroughfare,” as suggested in Parker’s Glossary, although the main idea is that of a passage running round the inside of a church, either as at Westminster, in the form of an ambulatory chamber, or of a gallery pierced through the main walls, from whence the structure can be inspected without the trouble of using ladders or erecting scaffolding. M. Enlart in his “Manuel d’Archéologie Française,” derives the word from a French adjective “trifore,” or “trifoire,” through the Latin “transforatus,” a passage pierced through the thickness of the wall; and this idea of a passage-way is certainly suggested by an old writer, Gervase, who, in his description of the new Cathedral of Canterbury, rebuilt after the fire, alludes to the increased number of passages round the church under the word “triforia.” “Ibi triforium unum, hic duo in choro, et in alâ ecclesiæ tercium.”

On the north side of the Cathedral flows the Somme, and there is perhaps no better means of realising the great height and mass of the building than by walking along the river banks, whence we see the old houses, great and small, rise tier above tier under the quiet grey outline of this “giant in repose.”

In an extract from his private diary Ruskin gives the following description of this walk along the river, showing it in an aspect at once squalid and picturesque: “Amiens, May 11th.—I had a happy walk here this afternoon, down among the branching currents of the Somme: it divides into five or six, shallow, green, and not over-wholesome; some quite narrow and foul, running beneath clusters of fearful houses, reeling masses of rotten timber; and a few mere stumps of pollard willow sticking out of the banks of soft mud, only retained in shape of bank by being shored up with timbers; and boats like paper boats, nearly as thin at least, for the costermongers to paddle about in among the weeds, the water soaking through the lath bottoms, and floating the dead leaves from the vegetable baskets with which they were loaded. Miserable little back yards, opening to the water, with steep stone steps down to it, and little platforms for the ducks; and separate duck staircases, composed of a sloping board with cross bits of wood leading to the ducks’ doors; and sometimes a flower-pot or two on them, or even a flower—one group, of wall-flowers and geraniums, curiously vivid, being seen against the darkness of a dyer’s backyard, who had been dyeing black, and all was black in his yard but the flowers, and they fiery and pure; the water by no means so, but still working its way steadily over the weeds, until it narrowed into a current strong enough to turn two or three windmills, one working against the side of an old Flamboyant Gothic church, whose richly traceried buttresses sloped down into the filthy stream; all exquisitely picturesque, and no less miserable. We delight in seeing the figures in these boats, pushing them about the bits of blue water, in Prout’s drawings; but as I looked to-day at the unhealthy face and melancholy mien of the man in the boat pushing his load of peat along the ditch, and of the people, men as well as women, who sat spinning gloomily at the cottage doors, I could not help feeling how many persons must pay for my picturesque subject and happy walk.”

In his “Miscellaneous Studies” Walter Pater says: “The builders of the Church seem to have projected no very noticeable towers; though it is conventional to regret their absence, especially with visitors from England, where indeed cathedral and other towers are apt to be good and really make their mark.... The great western towers are lost in the west front, the grandest, perhaps the earliest, of its species—three profound sculptured portals; a double gallery above, the upper gallery carrying colossal images of twenty-two kings of the house of Judah, ancestors of our Lady; then the great rose; above it the singers’ gallery, half marking the gable of the nave, and uniting at their topmost storeys the twin, but not exactly equal or similar towers, oddly oblong in plan as if meant to carry pyramids or spires. In most cases, those early Pointed churches are entangled, here and there, by the construction of the old round-arched style, the heavy, Norman or other, Romanesque chapel or aisle, side by side, though in strange contrast, with the soaring new Gothic nave or transept. But the older manner of the round arch, the plein-cintre, Amiens has nowhere or almost nowhere, a trace. The Pointed style, fully pronounced, but in all the purity of its first period, found here its completest expression.”

LÂON, RHEIMS AND SOISSONS

E passed Lâon in the dark,” is a confession frequently made by travellers. The Geneva express used to stop here for dinner, and during the brief interval allowed for coffee and cigarettes many a traveller has gazed up at the great buttressed hill, silhouetted against a twilight sky, and wondered what manner of place it might be, half-fortress, half-church, rising some three hundred and fifty feet out of the plain with its crest of towers and houses.

If Paris is the type of the island cities of Gaul, surely Lâon may be called the type of the hill cities. “Lâon is the very pride of that class of town which out of Gaulish hill-forts grew into Roman and mediæval cities. None stands so proudly on its height; none has kept its ancient character so little changed to our own day. The town still keeps itself within the walls which fence in the hill-top, and whatever there is of suburb has grown up at the foot, apart from the ancient city.”

Geologically, Lâon is a limestone island in the denuded plain of Soissonais and Béarnais, and was a Celtic stronghold, as its name, a contraction of Laudunum, shows, dun standing for a hill fortress. The town resembles in plan a blunt crescent, one horn of which is occupied by the cathedral and citadel. An electric railway connects the upper with the lower town, and a street from the market-place leads through the Parvis to the very beautiful west façade of the church. Cathedral, strictly speaking, it is no longer, for at Lâon we have another of those instances, always somewhat melancholy, of a deserted bishopstool. Here it is almost more pathetic, when we remember that the Bishop of Lâon was second in importance only to the Archbishop of Rheims himself, and, going back to the days of William Longsword, we find Lâon not only a bishopric, but a capital town—one of the great trio of cities which ruled northern France and fought amongst themselves for the chief mastery. There was the Duke of Paris in his capital; there was the Duke of the Normans, an outsider who by force of arms had settled at Rouen, and was a source of continual trembling to the Parisian duchy; and there was the King of the Franks on the hill-top at Lâon, nominally suzerain of both the others, but really in daily fear lest one or other, or both, should swoop down and storm his hill-fortress and add the royal city of Lâon to lands which in those days went to any man who could get possession of them.

Tradition says that St. Béat, who lived towards the close of the third century, gathered his faithful together in a small chapel hewn out of the rock, over which was built later on the cathedral church of Notre Dame. This church, according to M. Daboval, seems to have been still in existence in the fifth century, and was even then of sufficient importance to attract thither many scholars who wished to study the Holy Scriptures. In the twelfth century the cathedral, Bishop’s palace, and many other churches were burnt down, owing to communal troubles during the bishopric of Gaudry. The present cathedral has one specially distinctive feature: the east end, instead of being apsidal, follows the English type of a square termination. There are other churches in the neighbourhood built on a similar plan, which suggests the possibility of English architects having been engaged in their construction. Lâon is, however, in one important feature, a variant from the common arrangement in English churches of the eastern wall. It has there a great circular window only, instead of the immense wall of glass usually adopted in this country. The bays of the aisles are four-storied, in pairs, with alternating piers, and of great beauty, the ribs of the vaulting springing from clusters of light shafts. There is a large ambulatory over the aisles, “which are built up in two stories, both of them vaulted, and the upper vaulted aisle giving valuable abutment to the clerestory wall.” This internal arrangement appears to have been in favour with the architects of the early French Gothic style.

The twenty-eight side chapels are enclosed by some very lovely screens of a later date, which, being erected during the latter part of the sixteenth century, and of Renaissance design, are considered by the ultra-Gothic mind to clash with the rest of the cathedral. Nevertheless they are very beautiful in proportion and appropriateness, reticent in design, and admirable in execution.

Viollet-le-Duc, in his review of the cathedral of Lâon, says that it has a certain ring of democracy and is not of that religious aspect that attaches to Chartres, Amiens, or Rheims. From the distance it has more the appearance of a château than of a church: its nave is low when compared with other Gothic naves, and its general outside appearance shows evidence of something brutal and savage; and as far as its colossal sculptures of animals, oxen and horses, which appear to guard the upper parts of the towers, are concerned, they combine to give an impression more of terror than of a religious sentiment. One does not feel, as one regards Notre Dame de Lâon, the stamp of an advanced civilisation, as at Paris or at Amiens. Everything is rude and rough; it is the monument of a people enterprising and energetic and full of great virility. They are the same men as are seen building elsewhere in the neighbourhood—a race of giants.

As we approach Rheims from Paris, Lâon, or Soissons, there is very little sign of the vineyards which one associates with the champagne country. The “vine-clad” hills lie to the south in the Epernay district. Here to the north of the city we see only well-watered, well-timbered country, lush meadow-lands, and even market-gardens, reminding us more of the upper reaches of the Thames valley than of a wine-growing country.

Rheims chiefly recommends itself to the English mind as the place where the kings of France were crowned. It would seem also as though the fact of being crowned at Rheims was a patent of royalty, so to speak, to the kings themselves, since, as Freeman remarks, their rights were never disputed after their anointing with the sainte ampoule. “Every king of the French crowned at Rheims,” he says, “has been at once a Frenchman by birth and the undisputed heir of the founder of the dynasty. Hugh and his son Robert, neither of them born to royalty, were crowned, the one at Noyon, the other at Orléans. Henry the Fourth, the one king whose right was disputed, was crowned at Chartres.”

Like Soissons, like Lâon, like Bourges even, Rheims has carried down to modern times the remains of that prestige which must always attach to a royal city, even though the royalty have long ago departed from it. It moreover brings us once again to the story of Joan the Maid. It is the scene of her mission’s fulfilment, of France’s triumph, of the beginning of that monarchy which Louis XI. established in its complete form and which the later Bourbons wrecked; and here, when the crown is safe on her king’s head and Charles VII. has his own again, does Joan ask her reward—permission to return to her flocks in the fields of Domrémy. And but that this boon was too simple to grant, Joan’s story might have ended with this, her greatest triumph, instead of in the market-place at Rouen.

After the relief of Orléans, Joan had captured Jargeau and Beaugency, and defeated the English in a great fight at Patay, in which Talbot, the English leader, was taken prisoner. Having cleared these last obstacles from Charles’s path, she now set forth to tell him that all was ready and to persuade him to make all speed to Rheims. Speed, however, was what the Dauphin either could not or would not make; and it is always the most unsatisfactory part of the history of Joan the Maid that when she had pressed on, scarcely resting by night or day, to win back his kingdom for him, Charles seemed in no hurry to enter upon his honours, but preferred dawdling with his favourites in Touraine; and it was with the greatest difficulty that he was persuaded to ride to Rheims with Joan. Selfish indulgence, foolish favouritism, petty jealousies—were such things as these to stand in the path from which the Maid had swept all other barriers? Joan, however, was resolute. In hopes of rousing him she withdrew her army into the country, and this retreat had the desired effect. Charles the Laggard allowed himself to be brought into Rheims, and on July 17 Joan, banner in hand, stood by his side in the cathedral while the Archbishop anointed him with the holy oil and crowned him Charles VII. of France. Here, so far as Rheims is concerned, the story of Joan is at an end.

Two papal councils were held at Rheims, in the days when the Gallican Church was rising to its highest power, though it had not yet gone so far as to resent the yoke of the Papacy. Pope Leo IX. in 1049 entered the city in full state to consecrate for Abbot Heremas his newly-built monastery of Saint Remi, and followed up the consecration by convoking a vast synod composed of nearly every prelate in Europe, archbishops, bishops, abbots, clergy, and laity from every quarter, who sat at Rheims for six days; but their business seems to have been connected only with the usual canonical laws. The later council, which took place in 1119 and was presided over by Calixtus, appears to have occupied itself chiefly with quarrels between Henry of England and Louis of France on matters not even ecclesiastical. It further confirmed the Truce of God which had been imposed at Caen sixty years before, and patched up a peace between the two kings, after an interview between Henry and Calixtus at Gisors, in which the English king took care to make his case good before the Pope and to represent that all his incursions upon the territory of Louis had been made solely from religious motives.

Rheims boasts as one of its early bishops the saint Remigius, who in the fifth century baptised Clovis here with great pomp, and who received from heaven, as the legend has it, a flask of oil wherewith to anoint his king before admitting him into the Church, with the stern injunction, “Burn now that which thou hast worshipped and worship that which thou hast burnt.” This flask was preserved as one of the Church’s most precious relics until the general devastation at the time of the Revolution, when it was broken to pieces by a fanatic. At the time of the consecration of Charles X. it reappeared in a mysterious fashion, and is now shown in the Trésor of the cathedral with various other relics.

It is a sad fact to record that the most beautiful cathedral façade ever built is now almost entirely hidden by scaffolding necessary for the restoration of the building; and, judging by the appearance of the timbering and the paucity of workmen, it is not yesterday that the work was commenced, nor is it by to-morrow that it will be completed.

In the early part of the thirteenth century Robert de Coucy was entrusted with the rebuilding of the cathedral after the complete destruction of the early church by fire. He built it on a simple plan of a vast choir, no transepts, and a rather narrow nave. “Cet édifice a toute la force de la Cathédral de Chartres, sans en avoir la lourdeur; il réunit enfin les veritables conditions de la beauté dans les arts, la puissance et la grace; il est d’ailleurs construit en beaux materiaux, savamment appareillés, et l’on retrouve dans toutes ses parties un soin et une recherche fort rares à une epoque où l’on batissait avec une grande rapidité et souvent avec des ressources insuffisantes.”—Viollet-le-Duc. The beautiful portals, “deep and cavernous,” record by their thousand sculptures, in a clear and impressive manner, the creation of the world, the whole history of the Old Testament, the life of our Saviour and the redemption of mankind, and convey to all who pass by this great object-lesson of their faith. The tympana of these porches are glazed instead of being filled in with stone. This was done to guard against the possible breaking of the doorway lintel, which, if large, might very well give way under the weight of the superincumbent mass of stone.

Mr. Bond, referring to the deeply recessed porches of the French cathedrals—which, if we exclude the Galilees, find few analogues in the English churches—considers them as lineal descendants of the ancient narthex. “As a rule we did not care to develop the western doorways. The reason may be that our churches are all comparatively low; to give west doorways, therefore, any considerable elevation would be at the expense of the western windows. We needed western light badly in our English naves, especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and preferred to develop the western window at the expense of the western doorway, reaching in the end such a façade as that of St. George’s, Windsor.”

The bays of the nave consist of large clerestory windows filled with glorious deep blue glass, a small triforium and stilted pier arches; a very short chancel of only two bays and chevet hardly gives room for the priests and choristers, the sacrarium is therefore lengthened westwards and projects into the transepts.

To the south of the Cathedral lies the interesting Abbey Church of St. Remi, built in the eleventh century. Many of the French cathedral towns are fortunate in the possession of either an abbey or collegiate church, which existed some two or three centuries before the cathedral itself was built. At Nevers is the church of St. Etienne, at Evreux St. Taurin, at Tours St. Martin. At Angers and other places the old Romanesque basilicas are still to be found. Rheims has for its parent church the basilica of St. Remi. The western towers are Romanesque, and one of them has been left more or less unrestored; the interior has all the impressiveness of the basilica design; the pier arcades and triforium of the nave elevation occupy the whole space up to the springing of the barrel vault, and pilasters are carried down to the pier capitals, where they rest on quaint corbels of very early design. Like churches constructed in the early days, St. Remi has double aisles on either side of the nave; the choir is brought westwards to overlap the nave arches, an arrangement often found in short chancelled churches; the east end is periapsidal in plan, and the windows are filled with fine blue glass. Ferguson does not give France the credit of having many fine Romanesque churches sufficient to satisfy the splendid tastes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but he makes an exception in the case of St. Remi, and declares it to be “a vast and noble basilica of the early part of the eleventh century, presenting considerable points of similarity to those of Burgundy.”

Rheims has enjoyed for a long time popularity amongst travellers. As far back as a hundred and twenty years ago a writer, describing the town and its hotel accommodation, says: “The streets are almost all broad, strait and well built, equal in that respect to any I have seen; and the inn, the Hôtel de Moulinet, is so large and well served as not to check the emotions raised by agreeable objects, by giving an impulse to contrary vibrations in the bosom of the traveller, which at inns in France is too often the case.... We have about half a dozen real English dishes that exceed anything in my opinion to be met with in France; by English dishes I mean a turbot and lobster sauce, ham and chicken, a haunch of venison, turkey and oysters, and after these there is an end of an English table. It is an idle prejudice to class roast beef among them, for there is not better beef in the world than at Paris.... The French are cleaner in their persons, and the English in their houses.”

To look at Soissons to-day, with its pleasant walks and modern houses, few people would guess it to have played an important part in the history of north-eastern France. Yet that pleasant, modern appearance is itself a proof of what the town endured in earlier days. So fierce was the struggle it had for existence, that the old Soissons has almost worn itself out, and, seen from the outside at least, a new and prosperous town would seem to have taken its place. It might well be called the city of sieges, for few towns have suffered more in this respect. From Roman days down to the Franco-Prussian war the place has seemed good and desirable from soldiers and conquerors, and has had to pay penalty for its splendid position on the Aisne. Both Cæsar and Napoleon recognised its importance as a military station, though a stretch of eighteen hundred years divided the Soissons of one general to the Soissons of the other. Like Lâon, it was for some time a royal seat; and it was here that Clovis the Frank defeated Syagrius, “Romanorum Rex,” in 486, and turned a Roman into a Frankish kingdom, in which Soissons was for some time the capital. It was in the Abbey of St. Médard, which, except for some subterranean buildings, is now destroyed, that Louis le Débonnair was twice imprisoned by his unnatural children; and on the walls of one of these dungeons have been found some verses, apparently a description of the unfortunate prisoner, but dating only from the fifteenth century.

During the “Hundred Days” Soissons was twice taken and twice retaken in the course of a month. Blücher laid siege to the town in 1814, and but for a sudden surrender on the part of the governor, which gave it into his hands for the time, it would probably have been annihilated by Napoleon, who, as matters turned out, had not time to come up with the Prussian Army. In 1870 another Prussian force entered the town under the Duke of Mecklenburg, after a siege which closes the roll of Soissons’ struggles.

On both occasions of our visiting Soissons, we came away with the feeling that the interior of the Cathedral of Notre Dame was even more impressive than that of Rheims. It is, indeed, a worthy rival to its neighbouring sister church; the beautiful proportions of the nave, the simplicity and purity of the carved capitals, the splendid glass, render it one of the most beautiful cathedrals of France. There is a lovely little chapel in the salle capitulaire at the west end, approached by a cloister, early Gothic in design, with its vaulting supported by two graceful columns, which reminds one of some of the chapter houses of our English cathedrals.

In the Place du Cloitre is a doorway into the Cathedral, with a graceful pediment enclosing a high-springing Gothic tympanum, which is glazed. The mouldings of the arch have alternating crocketted courses, and the capitals are carved to represent vine leaves and grapes. It is not easy to understand why so beautiful a porch should occupy so obscure a position, unless it were in the early days some special entrance for the bishops or for the canons.

On the south side there is a Transition, semicircular chapel or apse, with a roof lower than that of the rest of the Cathedral. A low clerestory, with three lights, and a small triforium, whose base rakes with the main triforium of the church, form the upper members of the elevation. Below there is a graceful three-arched ambulatory, large and open, spreading backwards over a vaulted chapel. The main arches, simple and delicate in design, complete the whole bay.

Soissons was laid out on a plan which recalls the plan of Noyon. Its south transept, as at Noyon, dating from the end of the twelfth century, is rounded and flanked by a circular chapel. Although it is doubtful whether the Cathedral of Soissons was built in the latter part of the twelfth century, or only commenced at that time, it is certain that the nave and choir have the distinct appearance of thirteenth-century design. During this period, however, a kind of uncertainty existed in the planning of the religious edifices. These were constructed on a vast scale, and emancipated themselves from the restricted Romanesque design in obedience to the religious movement which declared itself during the reigns of Louis le Jeune and Philippe Auguste, but the cathedral type had not yet been created. The requirements of the nascent ceremonial were not yet fulfilled.

The once magnificent and now ruined Abbey of St. Jean des Vignes is situated on the hill facing the entrance to the town from the station. The west end only remains, surmounted by two towers with spires. “These are a great ornament to the town, and were spared at the entreaty of the citizens when the ruthless democrats destroyed the rest. The towers and the portal are probably of the thirteenth century, the spires more modern.” They were much damaged in the Franco-Prussian war, when the town was bombarded.

ROUEN

OUEN is a town with two faces, ancient and modern, and the face which it apparently considers the most becoming is the modern one. The ancient, historic face, which the town wore when Joan of Arc rode through, is hidden away as though it were out of fashion, and it is to be found, not in the broad streets, but in lanes, courts and alleys, where the way grows narrow and the houses meet overhead. Rouen, the chef-lieu of a department and fourth on the list of French ports, finds more important business on hand than dreaming itself back into the past, and, sacrificing the old life to the new, or, rather, building up a new life round the old, has made of itself a busy, thriving commercial town on the banks of that river up which the beak-headed ships of Rolf the Ganger sailed a thousand years ago to destroy and to conquer. But the town’s history is only put aside, not forgotten; indeed, there is too much of it to forget. The records of Rouen go back before the Roman era in Gaul; the Romans found it as Ratuma or Ratumacos, and then, Romanising the name, as they did everything else, made it into Rotomagus. Even in these early days it was a capital city, the headquarters of the Veliocassian tribe, though not of primary importance. Later, by the end of the third century A. D., we find it the chief city of the province Lugdunensis Secunda, and presently an archiepiscopal see, with an archbishop (now of course a saint) to guide it in matters spiritual.

Saint Mellon and his successors made a goodly record for about five centuries. They were a thoroughgoing race, these early bishops of Rouen, with the zeal of the Christian Fathers fresh upon them, and their very names have a strong, vigorous sound: Avitian, Victrix, Godard, Prétextat, Romain, Ouen, of whom the memory yet remains to Rouen in the names of church, street and tower. After this long line of bishops came a bad time for Rouen. These were the days when the lands to the south-west seemed good and pleasant to the Vikings, the fierce Northmen who in after days were to give their names to Normandy. England had already been over-run with them; first by Jutes and Saxons, then by the fiercer Danes, who in their turn pushed out the Saxons. Only a few miles south of England was another land just as fair, with a river easily navigable even to the great Northern ships, and thriving towns, rich and full of booty for Northern plunderers. Rouen, peaceful and prosperous, was yet dangerously near the sea, and the year 841 saw the dreaded prow of Oger the Dane coming slowly up the Seine, scattering to right and left all lesser craft, while the terrible war song, which England already knew and feared, rose and fell upon the wind. This was only the beginning. Long fiery years followed, years of ravages, bloodshed and burning, when human laws were in abeyance and the only rule was that of might. Thirty-five years after Oger’s invasion came the famous Rolf the Ganger, who laid waste the land anew, until, in 912, Charles the Simple was forced to treat with him at Saint Clair-sur-Epte and to cede to him the duchy of Neustria or Normandy. Rolf then embraced Christianity, and, with the land in his possession, seemed determined to show the despised Franks how a Northman could govern. In point of fact the dukedom, as handed over by Charles, was practically represented by Rouen alone; that is, Rouen apart from the Bessin and the Côtentin, and all the adjacent lands which we now include under the name of Normandy. Further, it did not really belong to Charles. Neustria was part of the great duchy of Paris, and the cession of it to Rolf cut off Paris from all access to the sea. But that Duke Robert had the sense to hold his tongue, probably from fear of losing Paris as well, there might have been serious results. As it was, Northern France fell into three divisions—the royal city of Lâon, the duchy of Paris, and the settlement of Rolf at Rouen. In these three cities centres most of the subsequent history of Normandy.

As for what Rolf actually did for Rouen, that remains to be seen rather from the after state of affairs. “The founder of the Rouen colony,” Freeman says, “is a great man who must be content to be judged in the main by the results of his actions.” Rolf is not in the least a vague or shadowy personality, but it is noticeable how he has grown to us out of a great tangle of myths and very little fact. All we have to go upon is the not very authentic Roman de Rou, a few Norse legends, and sundry brief allusions by later French writers, who class him, together with all the Rouennais, under the contemptuous term Pirate. It was a well-ordered, strong, self-dependent colony that he handed down to the long line of his successors. These carried on bravely the traditions of their founder and brought up a hardy race of fighters, although Rouen itself was never thoroughly Teutonic, never at least since the very early days of Rolf’s colony. The religion, the language, and many of the customs of the French at Lâon were grafted on to the Northmen of Rouen by their leader, and thus the town stood as much apart from the rest of Neustria as from the Franks themselves. After the death of Rolf and of his successor, William Longsword, Louis from beyond Sea, of the race of Charlemagne, ruled at Lâon, and cast envious eyes on Normandy, even occupying Rouen for some time during the minority of Richard the Fearless. But although Rouen was ultimately to become a town of France, the time was not yet, and for the present her destiny was averted by an outsider—Harold, King of Denmark, curiously surnamed Blue-tooth. He determined to resist the encroachments of Louis, and finally made him prisoner in the city where he had hoped to establish another capital.

The Norman dukes only deteriorated as rulers when they joined to their domain the crown of England, won by the hardiest and strongest of them all. We remember the passionate, self-willed Robert, son of the Conqueror, and John, called Lackland, that disgrace to the English throne, the worst and likewise the last Norman duke, for the French king, Philippe Auguste, confiscated Normandy, together with other English possessions, and joined it to the crown of France, taking possession of Rouen after a siege in 1204. From this point the history of Rouen becomes the history of a French and not of a Norman town. As a reward for its submission, Philippe Auguste presented the town with a castle, of which one tower (the Tour Jeanne d’Arc) alone remains standing. Two centuries later, Rouen was in danger from the English. Henry V., during his brilliant campaign in northern France, was not likely to leave to itself such an important place. In 1419 he set up his cannon outside the walls, and proceeded to blockade the town, which opened its gates to him after a six months’ siege. Here he also built a castle, which, in the hopefulness born of youth and victory, he intended to use as a royal residence when all France should be at rest under his firm rule. But before the conquest was completed, before he had time to think about any residence other than his camp, came that last fatal sickness at Vincennes, and the castle, which seemed, like all his victories, so sure and so lasting, has been swept off the face of the earth. The years after Henry’s death, however, were significant ones for Rouen, now in English hands, and in 1431 we come to the great point in its history, the trial and burning of Joan of Arc in the market-place.

Captured near Compiègne, Joan had been sent to Rouen by the bishop of Beauvais. This was in March. The girl was examined fifteen or sixteen times, a wearying repetition of question and answer, often going round and round in a circle and never advancing any further. Joan’s replies were simple but firm. She persisted in her divine mission, and when asked whether she was in a state of grace or of sin replied, “If I am not in a state of grace, I hope God will make me so. How can I be in much sin while the saints will visit me?” In May matters were delayed by her illness, which was so serious that it seemed for a time as though her enemies were to be defeated by death; but on her recovery learned doctors were sent to her in prison to persuade her of her wrong attitude of mind. Later came a warning from Cauchon, the bishop of Beauvais, to the effect that he was about to have her brought forth and made the object of a public sermon, after which, if she would recant, her safety would be assured. Worn out with her trials, the poor girl declared her submission and signed a recantation, for she saw that the end could not but come soon. A penance of perpetual imprisonment was then imposed upon her, and she submitted passively to the injunctions laid upon her; but at her final abjuration she seemed to be overcome by a sudden access of penitence towards the saints, and resumed her old attitude of determination, declaring that all she had said in submission was said in fear of being burned at the stake, of which she had a very natural horror. After this her fate was sealed. Cauchon handed her over to the secular arm, and a few hours later she was led to the stake in the old market-place. It is needless to dwell upon this last scene, because it is one of the stock dramatic occurrences in our history books, which nearly always represent Joan of Arc as suffering trial, torment and death, for the sake of her country with almost unnatural fortitude; but, on the other hand, the more one reads about her, the more clear it becomes that the heroism of the Maid of Orléans, though none the less heroic, was a heroism of the simplest order, born of a pure heart, a steady, straightforward faith in her mission, and only wavering at the last from a very human and girlish horror of so infamous and dreadful a death. And as for her judges, needlessly cruel though they were, yet, as one writer points out, they were almost bound to condemn their prisoner. To try her for sorcery and to burn her as a witch seems of course to our modern eyes not merely horrible, but absurd. Cauchon and his followers, however, did not live in an enlightened age; in their day the “Black Art” was a thing to be dreaded above all others, and death seemed a light thing in comparison with the putting down the power of the Evil One. Others besides Joan of Arc, for generations before and generations after, had died at the stake for reputed practice of magic; and in the case of the Maid, “to acquit her would have been to accept her celestial mission and place her, with some modern French historians, by the side, nay, in the place, of the Messiah.” The trial and burning of Joan cannot be looked upon by the light of a modern world; they are of their time, and that time was, above all things, a superstitious one. And only after her death did France realise what the Domrémy peasant girl had done for her country. The French monarchy, as Louis XI. established it, is perhaps the best monument to her memory. After, and as some say because of, Joan’s death English prestige in Rouen began steadily to decline. Two years afterwards, in 1433, came the death of John, Duke of Bedford, brother of Henry V., perhaps the only man left with anything of Henry’s strength and singleness of purpose. Rouen held out against two attempts at recapture on the part of Charles VII., but in 1449 Somerset was forced to capitulate to a strong expedition, and the English left the town for ever.

By the middle of the next century we find Rouen in the thick of religious troubles. In 1562 it was for six months in Huguenot hands, six months of warfare, oppression and persecution of all Romanists within the walls, with worse to follow; for when the Royalists recaptured the town they repaid the Huguenots in their own coin, and revenged the Catholic massacres with a terrible revenge. After this the Army of the League held Rouen until, in 1596, Henry IV. of France effected an entrance into the town.

Nowadays the first view of Rouen is a smoky, dreary little station, surrounded by cochers and porters in linen blouses; but Arthur Young, an agriculturist of the eighteenth century, visited the old city during his travels, before the days of the “iron way,” and he was more fortunate in what he saw from his diligence: “The first view of Rouen is sudden and striking; but the road doubling, in order to turn more gently down the hill, presents from an elbow the finest view of a town I have ever seen; the whole city, with all its churches and convents, and its cathedral proudly rising in the midst, fills the vale. The river presents one reach crossed by the bridge, and then, dividing into two fine channels, forms a large island covered with wood; the rest of the vale, full of verdure and cultivation, of gardens and habitations, finish the scene, in perfect unison with the great city that forms the capital feature.” To get this view to-day one must climb the long, dusty hill to the convent of Bon Secours, or rather, half-way only, since the city, river and meadows, show their beauties just as well from a lower point, and the modern convent and church upon the hilltop are not worth a further climb.

From the main street of the town the Cathedral is reached by the Rue de la Grosse Horloge, which leads underneath the archway of the belfry. The Tour St. Romain rises at the end of the street like a tall white guide, and here, suddenly, we find ourselves face to face with the west façade of Notre Dame. The remark made by an American traveller, that he found Rome very much out of repair, is appropriate to many of the French cathedrals. Scheduled as historic monuments, they receive annually a dole from the Government towards maintenance and restoration, but so miserable is this contribution, and so inadequate to the possibility of early completion of the work, that a generation may pass away before the scaffolding is finally removed. The west portal of Rouen is half covered by a forest of timbering. Rheims suffers even more, and the same may be said for Notre Dame at Evreux, St. Urbain at Troyes, and many other cathedrals. Such glimpses, however, as we get of the west front of Rouen show us its glory. Ruskin writing of it says: “It is the most exquisite piece of pure Flamboyant work existing. There is not one cusp, one finial, that is useless, not a stroke of the chisel is in vain; the grace and luxuriance of it all are visible—sensible, rather, even to the uninquiring eye; and all its minuteness does not diminish the majesty, while it increases the mystery of the noble and unbroken vault.”

Of the origin of this Flamboyant style a distinguished French writer, M. Enlart, in a paper lately read before the Archæological Institute of Great Britain, has asserted that it is to be found not in France, but in England; and specialising the west front of Rouen, he further states that, in the arrangement of its large bay enclosing the rose window and flanked by tiers of statues, it recalls absolutely the façades, earlier in date, of the cathedrals of Wells, Salisbury and Lichfield.

With one or two exceptions, viz., St. Urbain at Troyes and a chapel in Amiens Cathedral, the Flamboyant style did not appear in France until the last quarter of the fourteenth century, and when it had once taken root, it maintained its integrity until the Renaissance, having the same characteristics from one end of the country to the other. It was not the evolution of any previous French style, but it derived its origin, as above stated, from a style which existed in England a century before. Roughly speaking, the features which distinguish the Flamboyant are, first, the ogee arch which is typical of the style, then special systems of vaulting, and flowing tracery of windows, forms of arches, “anse de panier,” &c., arch mouldings dying into piers without impost or capital, and generally a love of vegetal and undulating decoration. This “decorative caprice” reigned in France in the fifteenth century at a time when the Perpendicular style became universal in England and had completely driven out the ogee arch.

The occupation of the greater part of France by the English in the Hundred Years’ War would naturally result in an English influence being noticeable in its buildings, the contact of nations producing an exchange of art as of commerce. The Flamboyant may therefore be said to be the by-product of the Hundred Years’ War.

There is documentary evidence that both at Rouen and at Evreux the foreign occupation did not interfere with the work going on at the cathedrals; indeed, at Rouen, two canons of York were received with the greatest courtesy by the chapter, and contributions were made by the English towards the completion of the Cathedral. The domination of the English was no hindrance to the progress of art in France, and as soon as the latter had freed itself and realised its national unity, its architects applied themselves heart and soul to the development of this style which was “borrowed from the enemy.”

A long list can be made of buildings where the ogee arch and other typical features obtained in England, from the end of the thirteenth to the latter part of the fourteenth century, during which time no parallels existed in France. One of the most ancient examples is Queen Eleanor’s Cross at Northampton (1291-1294), where Flamboyant features show themselves.

The tomb of William de la Merche at Wells (1302), Aymer de Valence at Westminster (1323), and many other early fourteenth-century examples, furnished by almost every cathedral, testify to the prevalence of the passion for the ogee motive of decoration. These are given in detail by M. Enlart as irrefragable proofs of the English origin of the Flamboyant style.

The interior of the Cathedral of Rouen is considered by Mr. Bond to be curiously Romanesque in plan. Its nave bays are four-storied, an upper and lower pier arch with small triforium and clerestory. The upper pier arch might also be regarded as a triforium, for a passage-way runs along the sill of the arch and is continued behind the main piers on an elegant group of shafted corbels. These were originally intended to support a vault of a lower aisle. The east end is more dignified and has simpler factors, clerestory, triforium and pier arch. The glass is magnificent, dating from the thirteenth century.

South of the Cathedral a narrow street leads eventually to the river by way of the halles, the Place Haute-Vieille-Tour and its sister of the Basse-Vieille-Tour. The first square is a large open place, fenced round with solid stone buildings, and having on its south side the Chapelle de la Fierte Saint-Romain. With this monument, on which a flight of steps leads up to a Renaissance chapel of six stages, is connected a curious privilège and legend, both of which have of course been recorded before, but which are interesting enough to bear repetition. The charter for this privilege was accorded to the chapter of Rouen Cathedral by King Dagobert—he who founded the Abbey of Saint Denis. Each year, on Ascension Day, the archbishop was empowered to release a man condemned to death; and therefore every Ascension Day the good folk of Rouen flocked into the streets to watch the procession of the Fierte Saint-Romain. First came the solemn visit of the arm of the Church to the arm of the Law, with the annual formal proclamation of the privilege. Then every prison in the city must be searched, and every prisoner put on oath and examined as to the cause of his imprisonment. Finally the election of the favoured prisoner was put to the vote by the chapter, his name sent to the Palais de Justice, and the paper duly signed and sealed, after which the “messe du prisonnier” was celebrated in the Salle des Pas-Perdus; and finally, the prisoner himself was called before his lords, secular and spiritual, and formally examined; he then confessed to the chaplain of Saint-Romain, his fetters were removed, and he followed the archbishop to the Place Haute-Vieille-Tour, where, in the Chapelle de la Fierte, a solemn service made him once more a free man. A solemn and magnificent procession then bore him, crowned with flowers, to the great thanksgiving Mass, after which he was free to go whither he would. No less curious is the legend connected with the ceremony. It is said that while Romain was bishop of Rouen a terrible dragon laid waste all the land and devoured the inhabitants.

No one dared to approach this monster, who was known as the Gargoyle, until Saint Romain, armed only with his sanctity, set out to subdue it, accompanied by a condemned criminal—the prototype of those who were released on Holy Thursday—when the Gargoyle at once submitted and, with the episcopal stole round its neck, was led by the prisoner to the water’s edge. The sequel does not reflect much credit upon the bishop—at least, it seems rather of the nature of meanness to conjure the beast into good nature and then to push it, all unawares, into the river to drown. At the head of the Portail de la Calende, the north porch of the Cathedral, stands the figure of Saint Romain, and under his feet, with the stole round its neck, is the Gargoyle, craning its head round to look into the face of the bishop with the expression of a very hideous but very faithful dog—a most disarming expression if it be meant to represent that worn by the Gargoyle before it was sent to its death! In memory of this occurrence, the standard of the dragon was borne in the processions at the privilège—banners similar to those of the dragons at Bayeux and Salisbury. The legend, however, appears to be of later date than the festival, which is mentioned certainly as early as the twelfth century, and continued to delight the Rouennais as late as 1790.

The Abbey Church of St. Ouen is placed at the head of the collegiate churches of France so far as its beauty and perfection of architecture is concerned. In its proportion of nave, transepts and choir it is considered to outshine Cologne, its great rival and contemporary. The vast area of clerestory and glazed triforium recalls the interior arrangement of Amiens. The triforium passage is worked between the lower mullions of the windows, which are duplicated; but, as is pointed out by Mr. Bond, care was taken that the inner and the outer tracery of the windows should be different in pattern. Freeman says: “St. Ouen goes further to unite the two forms of excellence”—external outline and internal height—“than any other church, French or English,” and states that “St. Ouen is the loftiest church in the world that has a real central tower.”

This central lantern is, according to Ferguson, a very noble feature and appropriate to its position; unhappily it does not enjoy the admiration of all writers: Ruskin condemns the false buttresses of the tower, which he describes as merely a hollow crown, and declares that it needs no more buttressing than does a basket.

The third church of Rouen is that of St. Maclou. Its most noticeable feature is the west end, which terminates in a very beautiful porch of pentagonal form, and might be taken as another example of the rich Flamboyant ornament seen in the western façade of the Cathedral. The church itself is a complete specimen of its period, and dates from the latter half of the fifteenth century.

On the north side of the church, in the Rue Martainville, is the Aître de St. Maclou, an old parish cemetery of the fifteenth century. There is a small quadrangle, an old disused stone well with an iron crucifix in the centre, and round all runs a cloister with two low stories, timbered in black and white, with the famous “Danse Macabre” carved on the lower beams. It is now used as a school for the poor children of Rouen, and on working days is full of life—the life of a growing generation going on side by side with the relics of a dead and half-forgotten past, for the quaint seriousness of an old fifteenth-century builder has traced upon the lintel a constant reminder of death and the grave—skulls, bones, spades, and here and there a grim skeleton Death bearing away a human figure in his arms. Many of the most beautiful figures are headless, not from the ravages of a symbolic Death, but from those of a very real and equally unsparing hand—the hand of the Revolution.

During the Franco-Prussian War Rouen had unhappily to record its own chapter of reverses, when the French determined to dislodge Manteuffel. Faidherbe’s army, together with the army of the Havre and General Roy’s army of the South, had planned out an admirable scheme, which, however, was lacking in one essential, actual execution. Manteuffel was to be routed and driven out of Rouen. The Prussians were equally confident of success, and it is said that Manteuffel ordered his train to take him to Amiens to be ready next day at twelve o’clock, by which time he felt sure that he would have disposed of the enemy.

“The battle began before daylight, the pursuit lasted until after dark and was resumed on the following morning; but the victory was virtually gained when the first blow was struck, or, rather, the first shot fired. Here and there, on the road along which they were driven, or on the wooded heights by which the road is in many places commanded, they made a desperate resistance, but it was throughout a question, in regard to the French, of the rate of retreat, never a question of retreat and advance.”

EVREUX AND LISIEUX

E left Rouen by a “quick” train, that is, one which occupied itself in stopping at every wayside station that caught its fancy. However, this mattered little, as the road to Evreux runs through the most enchanting country, and we had plenty of time to admire it. Wonderful woods stretch over the slope of the hills and widen out into valleys scattered with old timbered farm-houses, and here and there a château, seen amongst the trees of its propriété; little poplar-shaded rivers run through the fields, decked in holiday garlands of loosestrife and meadowsweet and unmolested by any eager pêcheur, whether boy with string and bent pin, or more “compleat angler” with rod and line. The Seine, divested of barge and steam tug, greets one by glimpses now and then; and after leaving the tunnel before Elbœuf, it bursts suddenly into view—a wide sweep of river, with the busy little town by its side. Then the valley closes in all at once, and we run under the shadow of chalk cliffs with steep scarped faces and deep caverns, into whose blackness we may almost peer from the carriage window. Lastly comes a run up on to high ground again; and there below, shut in by hills, with three towers rising from its low roofs, is Evreux. The railway takes a great curve from one side of the town to the other before running into the station, so that the place passes in review before one; and it is an impressive review, seen as we first saw it, in the light of a summer sundown, a purple haze, “mystic, wonderful,” hanging like a veil over the little town.

Besides the Cathedral and the bishop’s palace, Evreux possesses little that strikes one as being either very old or very new; a cheerful, clean mediocrity prevails all through the town, which, nevertheless, dates back to very early times. Remains of a Roman settlement have been discovered some little distance away, at Vieil Evreux, then known as Mediolanum Aulercolum, and afterwards as Eburovices, whence is derived the modern name of Evreux. A bishopric was founded at Evreux by St. Taurin, during the great movement towards Christianity in the fourth century; later, Clovis destroyed the Roman encampment and founded a town of his own, which in its turn was burnt and pillaged by the Northmen in the ninth century. After this it probably shared the bounty of its former scourge, Duke Rolf, and became part of the Norman duchy and a Naboth’s vineyard to Count Thibaut of Chartres, who did actually take possession of it in 962, though Richard the Fearless must have reclaimed the town, as he presented the “Comté d’Evreux,” which was to pass later into the family of Montfort l’Amaury, to one of his younger sons. Henry I. set fire to Evreux for some mysterious reason, but with the full consent of the bishop, who must have had peculiar ideas on the subject of his pastoral duties; and in the reign of Cœur-de-Lion John Lackland gave it up to the French Crown, and afterwards, filled with remorse, or more probably with alarm, at the news that his brother was returning from Palestine and might demand what had become of Evreux, ordered a general massacre of the French garrison quartered there and ran away himself, leaving his wretched English subjects to bear the brunt of the French king’s wrath when the story should come to his knowledge.

After several vicissitudes of this kind, Evreux was in 1404 finally joined to the Crown of France, though it still seems to have been tossed about in the most confusing way, and we hear of it as belonging now to France, now to Navarre, then sold to the Darnley Stuarts and back again to France; and so on until Napoleon, having divorced Josephine, presented her out of his imperial bounty with a part of the Comté d’Evreux as a compensation for her trials. The modern town, however, has not at all the air of having been the plaything of kings and states. The only noticeable traces of its ancient warfare are the machicolated walls of the bishop’s palace, and the moat below, running between the palace and the Boulevard Chambaudin. The moat is now filled up by a kitchen-garden—a striking example of how peace has succeeded war in Evreux—but it is easy to imagine how it must have looked in the old days; the dark, still water, the steep walls rising up to their turrets, the treacherous machicolations, apparently ornamental but in reality only too useful, and above it all the grey towers of Notre Dame.

The interior of the Cathedral extends in date from the Romanesque to the Renaissance period. The nave bays offer examples of what is known as “skeleton construction”; they consist of a Romanesque pier arch (said to be the remaining work of Lanfranc) surmounted by a large clerestory and small glazed triforium; the clerestory wall, as Mr. Bond points out, is so shallow that it “ceases to exist quâ wall.” It is in some way analogous to the choir of Gloucester in its “attenuated construction.” The lights are filled in with glass, apparently of the late fifteenth century. As Whewell says, the transepts and part of the choir are most remarkable and most ancient examples of the Flamboyant style. The choir, burnt down in 1346, was restored in the second half of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries; the transept was finished about 1450. The English took possession of the town in 1418, but this did not in any way hinder the work from being carried on. In 1422 Tchan le Boy was made maître de l’œuvre, and to him is attributed the Lantern Tower, springing from a beautiful vaulted base. The vitrail of the Saintes Maries and its mouldings, probably designed by Le Boy, follows the English type.

Evreux is, according to Whewell, “a mixture of Flamboyant and Renaissance. The Flamboyant dies down gradually into Italian, especially in the series of wooden screens to the chapels round the choir, where every sort of mixture is noticeable.” In some of the glass and on the outside panels of the west doors the artists have attempted to show their knowledge of the newly-discovered science of perspective, but they pay little regard to the vanishing point. On the north side, the windows of the aisle, with high pediments cutting the balustrades, are very beautiful examples of the prevailing style. The western towers “are to be considered as Gothic conceptions expressed in classical phrases.”

In the far west of the town, at the end of the Rue Josephine, lies Saint Taurin, the second church of Evreux, in its quiet little square, screened by magnificent elm-trees, a square and solid-looking building, with a good deal of work that is very interesting and undoubtedly ancient. Originally the church formed part of a Benedictine Abbey founded in 1026; an ancient crypt remains, built, as purports to be the case with so many churches, round the tomb of the patron, Saint Taurin, who in the fourth century brought Christianity into the town, and whose story may be read in the fifteenth-century glass of the choir. His relics are preserved in a wonderful carved casket of the thirteenth century, which may be seen by the curious in the church treasury. In three bays of the south nave the vaulting ends in some curious stone carving in the form of grotesque heads, which belong to the sixteenth century.

“Once a cathedral, always a cathedral” was the theory which led us to Lisieux en route for Bayeux. It seemed almost as absurd that the great church of St. Pierre should not be counted a cathedral as that St. Etienne and the other churches of Caen should be churches and nothing more. In this respect, indeed, Lisieux takes precedence of Caen, for until the days of the Empire she had a bishopstool of her own, while Caen never actually possessed the dignity of an episcopal see.

Lisieux is one stage further on the high road between French Normandy and Norman Normandy, and is some way over the Norman border; at Rouen, at Evreux even, we were in France, but here all around us, as at Bayeux, are signs and tokens of a land more closely akin to our own, and we feel that we have at last reached Normandy proper. Lisieux, both for its Cathedral and for itself, is full of interest. The general impression is that of a bright little place with a great deal of life—the life of shop and market—to be seen on all sides, but none of the modern commercial spirit, such as dominates a place like Rouen. There is a very mediæval air about Lisieux, and the old houses, of which there are plenty, are to be found not in out-of-the-way alleys, but in the chief streets. The Grande Rue has one magnificent specimen, now a boot-maker’s shop, opposite the Rue du Paradis; down at the bottom of the hill, in the Rue de Caen, is a house where Charlotte Corday spent the night on the way to Paris to fulfil her terrible mission, and the Rue aux Fèvres, where one seems to have walked straight into the Middle Ages, contains the “Manoir de François I^er,” a beautiful sixteenth-century house, from whose name one would at least suppose that François once spent a night there, whereas he probably never went near the place, and its chief claim to the title lies in the abundance of carved salamanders on the splendid house-front, and even these are mixed up with apes and other grotesque creatures.

The Church of St. Jacques stands almost at the top of the hill, between the Rue St. Jacques and the Marché au Beurre, where most of the straggling streets converge. It was built in the last years of the fifteenth century, and is a fairly complete specimen of the French style of that period, standing upon a long, wide flight of steps, with a balustrade running completely round the building. The floor inside follows the slope of the hill, and slants upwards from west to east.

The church contains some half-effaced frescoes on the nave pillars, and a very curious old painting on wood, representing the miraculous translation of St. Ursin’s relics to Lisieux in 1055. This picture hangs in a chapel in the south aisle, dedicated to St. Antony of Padua, not in St. Ursin’s own chapel, which is on the other side of the nave.

Lisieux looks like a town with a history, and, like most French towns, goes back to Roman times, when it was known as Noviomagus or as Lexovii, from the Gallic tribe which had settled there. Rolf obtained it as part of his Norman duchy; Geoffrey Plantagenet and Stephen of Blois fought over it and between them reduced the town to a terrible state of famine, for which Henry II. of England tried to make amends by causing his own marriage with Eleanor of Poitou to take place in the Cathedral. Thomas à Becket took refuge at Lisieux on one occasion and left behind him some vestments, which are proudly displayed in the chapel of the Hospice.

During the Hundred Years’ War and the religious quarrels two centuries later, Lisieux shared the fate of other towns as regards sieges and conflagrations; but after this we hear little of its history, and may assume that it emerged from its trials much as we see it now—busy and peaceful once more, with leisure to turn again to the old-world town routine which makes the Lisieux of to-day.

The interior of St. Pierre, according to Whewell, “bears a great resemblance to Early English work, although the French square abacus is still to be found here. The round abacus is noticeable in the arcades under the windows of the choir, giving quite an English look to this portion of the church.” There is at the west end a large interior porch, which is referred to by most writers on architecture. The two towers vary in their openings, one having lancet lights and the other small round-headed windows. The nave is large, consisting of eight bays, and built, it is said, about 1160. The tympana of the choir triforium arches are filled with plate tracery, quatrefoil and cusped. The most beautiful interior elevation, however, is that of the north wall of the transept. Here the three large upper lights remind one of the well-known “Five Sisters” at York. The lower double-light window is deeply recessed, with elegant clusters of engaged shafts supporting the graceful mouldings round the opening. The transept also possesses an eastern aisle, which is said to be a rarity in France.

The church itself is unfortunately situated in a corner of the Place, and a large building which abuts on its north-west tower detracts considerably from its beauty and importance. The south transept door opens into the Rue du Paradis—a name which one is glad to see preserved in the neighbourhood of French cathedrals. It may refer to a garden or close which has been absorbed by surrounding buildings, or to a closed-in porch, the upper stories of which have been used either as libraries, or as lodgings for chantry-priests.

BAYEUX

E read of Bayeux—before going there—as a place where many went but few stayed, because of the towns behind and before; memories of Caen and Lisieux, expectations of Coutances and Saint-Lô, which dimmed the modest light of little Bayeux. It is curious, however, that this should be the case, when we remember how important was the position it held in the history of mediæval Normandy. It was the chief town of the country known as the Bessin, a district lying immediately to the west of Rolf’s duchy at Rouen, and the conquest of which was the next stage on his westward road. One interesting point here is that the inhabitants of the Bessin, even as far back as the later days of the Roman Empire, were not Celts but Saxons—men of the same race as Rolf, who took possession of Bayeux in 924, and established there a Danish settlement, which, as Freeman says, was always a thorn in the side of the Celts, and provoked many attacks from its Breton neighbours. Saxon and Dane made common cause against the enemies both to the east and to the west; and thus at Bayeux there grew up a strong Teutonic colony, without the Frankish element which, as we have seen, worked such changes at Rouen. The old Norse religion obtained here long after eastern Normandy had become Christian; and the Bayeux colony bore much more affinity to the Danish settlements in England than to that at Rouen, the nucleus of Normandy, which was hardly Norman at all, whereas, as Freeman remarks, “the acquisition of Bayeux gave Normandy all that created and preserved the genuine Norman character.” For this reason William Longsword chose that his son, Richard the Fearless, should be brought up at Bayeux rather than at Rouen—so that, living amongst his own people, he might in time come to be not only Duke of Normandy, but also Duke of the Normans.

The Bessin still preserves this ancient distinction, and both country and inhabitants bear a great resemblance to those of England. Bayeux itself is a quiet country town, built up one low hill and down another—a town of long streets and grey-shuttered houses, possessing three principal interests—the Cathedral, the Seminary Chapel and the Tapestry. It is also the birthplace of Alain Chartier, minstrel and court-poet to Charles VII., and author of that curious document, the “Curiale,” whose best praise lies in the fact that it was one of the earliest books selected for publication by Caxton. It is a brilliant and vivid picture of the court life of the time; and the story says of Maître Alain that he intended it as an answer to a letter from his brother Jean, enquiring whether he, too, could not find fame at court. Certainly it looks as if the favoured brother wished to keep to himself the good things of life, for although he paints in brilliant colours, Alain does not spare the follies and vices of court life, and one cannot help feeling that his object was to put the more obscure Jean “off the scent.”

Little is known of the circumstances either of Chartier’s birth or his death, though of his actual life several records exist. He is known to have been one of the most brilliant men of letters of his time, probably rivalled only by Charles d’Orléans, and—since a court minstrel is always a picturesque figure—he has come down to our times surrounded by a certain halo of romance. His many writings, both in prose and verse, are very little known to modern readers, though he had many disciples among the men of his own time, and his “Bréviaire des Nobles” was considered such a standard for courtly manners that it was apportioned out, so Jean de Masles tells us, into daily passages for the youth of the court—that court of which Chartier knew every turn, every corner, every glittering folly and every dark intrigue—to learn by heart. A modern statue in his native town at the end of the Rue Général de Daïs shows him in furred cap and flowing robe, a pen in one hand, and in the other a sheaf of papers from which he is apparently declaiming some gay rondel or pathetic ballad.

His house in the Rue des Bouchers is also shown, with an inscription to the effect that he was born there with his two brothers, Jean and Guillaume; but it has now become a very small and dingy shop, and one goes away with a feeling that a link with the past has been broken. But although Chartier’s house would scarcely be singled out as an ancient landmark, one or two there are in the quiet grey line of the Bayeux streets that seem to belong to a better time, a time when watchmen walked the streets by night and armed men clattered down them by day: and among these stands out the really beautiful gabled specimen at the corner of the Rue St. Martin. Here cross-timbers, black and white, tall gables and lattice windows call for our admiration on our road to the Cathedral; and nearer the great church itself is the sixteenth-century Maison du Gouverneur, and another “Maison d’Adam.” It is curious how often street and house names in France reverted in this way to our common origin. In countless places do we find Maisons d’Adam (Eve sometimes has a share in the patronage of the house), with their figures of Adam, Eve and the Serpent; sometimes, as at Rouen, a whole street bears the name of the Père Adam. It would be interesting to know if this is a cropping up of the Revolutionary êgalité—a wooden form of

“When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?”

If so, the idea is certainly before its time, since many of these houses and streets were built, and presumably named, when the Revolution was as yet in its cradle.

The Lanterne des Morts, a quaint structure with a quaint title, raises a perforated cone on the south-west of the Cathedral. This mediæval lamp-post had it name from the fact that it was lighted whenever a funeral procession passed through the town; and it must certainly have added to the impressiveness of the scene, especially when, as was often the case in old days, the burial took place in the dead of night, and this red glowing beacon towered above the low roofs like a great funeral torch as the chanting of the monks broke the stillness, and the sombre figures with their burden moved into the church.

Returning to the three principal attractions of Bayeux noticed above, the Cathedral—the only church of importance—falls naturally into the first place. Entering by one of the five beautiful gabled doorways, one stands on a platform above the level of the nave floor. The standpoint being thus raised, the length of the church is apparently enhanced. There is a church in Rome and another at Modena where this coup d’œil is effected by the street level being some twenty or thirty steps above the nave.

The bays of the nave, especially in their lower compartments, are very remarkable. Above the twelfth-century round-headed pier arches, and reaching to the very small triforium balustrade, the whole wall face is decorated with beautiful diaper carving. This surface decoration is to be found in Westminster Abbey, but not in the same varied richness as on the walls and spandrils at Bayeux. On one of the bays the old corbels which carried the organ in the thirteenth century still remain. The clerestory windows are beautiful in proportion and constructed in double planes. The spandrils and tracery of the choir arches show examples of early plate tracery.

In the treasury one of the most interesting pieces of furniture is a large armoire containing church vestments, and another example of early joinery is to be found in the fine door in the south aisle. Here huge planks, some eighteen feet in length, are fastened together by iron bands and hinges, without framework of any kind. The two western towers, together with the crypt, are said to be the only parts remaining of the old church of Odo, brother of the Conqueror.

We made two unsuccessful attempts to obtain entrance to the Seminary Chapel; but as it is said to be a very beautiful specimen of early Gothic, the short description given by Whewell may perhaps act as an incentive to other visitors, and spur them on to greater importunity than we used. He considers it to be “the most elegant and complete example of the Early English style. The details resemble those of the Temple Church in London, in the shafts, capitals, vaulting, &c. The arrangement of the east end is remarkable, uniting as it does in a considerable degree the effect of the polygonal apse and of the east windows, having diverging vaulting but with eastern lights.”

At the present day it is upon the Tapestry that Bayeux bases its chief claim to notoriety, and the first feeling is one of surprise if not of disappointment on finding that it can hardly be reckoned as tapestry at all. This impression, however, soon disappears when we come to consider the interest and importance of the work, not merely as a local but also as an historic monument. Many and fierce have been the controversies as to its origin—all the more so from the fact that it was not brought to light until (speaking relatively) within recent times, so that little can be gained from history or tradition, or, indeed, from anything beyond the internal evidence. The form of the Tapestry is well known to all visitors of Bayeux (and without going so far afield, a very accurate copy may be seen at the South Kensington Museum)—a long, narrow piece of linen, embroidered in crewel work of five different colours, setting forth the conquest of England by Duke William. In 1724 M. Lancelot found a copy of some of the scenes among the papers of the Intendant of Normandy, and concluding after a close investigation that everything pointed to the work being contemporary with the events depicted, communicated his discovery to the Académie Française. Montfaucon carried on the investigation, and finally discovered the original of Lancelot’s copy in a length of tapestry which was hung round the Cathedral at Bayeux on great festivals. The early authorities seem to have entertained no doubt of its being contemporary, but later accounts set forth theories so widely different from one another, and in some cases so flatly contradictory, that it is impossible to enter into them within a very limited space. Following the authority of Freeman, who treats the subject in a very complete manner in his “History of the Norman Conquest” (vol. iii. Appendix, note A), we may assume that the “Toilette du Duc Guillaume,” as it is called in an ecclesiastical inventory at Bayeux of the fifteenth century, is contemporary with the history of the Conqueror, but is more likely to have been connected with Odo than with Queen Matilda. This theory is supported by the prominence given in the various scenes to “Turold, Vital, and Wadard, ” who are mentioned in Domesday Book as vassals of the bishop, but are in themselves quite unimportant, which would suggest that the original interest of the Tapestry was intended to be a purely local one, for the Bishop of Bayeux alone. Freeman thinks it possible that the work may have been done in England. When Napoleon became First Consul he sent for the tapestry from Bayeux, and displayed it in the Louvre as an incentive to Frenchmen to conquer England as Duke William had conquered it some seven centuries before. After this it returned to Bayeux, and was formerly shown to the curious visitor rolled on a windlass; but later days have treated it more reverently, and it is now preserved under glass in a condition of colour and texture which, considering its age and its adventures, it little short of marvellous.

Side by side with that of the Conqueror, the other memory which Bayeux calls up is undoubtedly that of the greatest bishop the little city ever knew, who governed it during half a century of Normandy’s most stirring history. Odo’s life-story stands out among those of the men of his time, indeed, much as does the life-story of his half-brother, Duke William. In an age when bishops wielded sword as well as mace, he outstripped his contemporaries not only in ecclesiastical power, but in the highest of temporal ambitions. Like Wolsey, he aimed at being Pope above all his other goals. In the meantime Odo despised no stepping-stones to power. He became Bishop of Bayeux in 1048; fought with William at Senlac, “in full armour by the side of his brother and sovereign, as eager and ready as William himself to plunge in wherever in the fight danger should press most nearly,” and in the following year, when fear of foreign invasions called the new king back to Normandy, he was left in joint command of England with Fitz-Osbern, and given the title of Earl of Kent. Thus we see that Odo had two distinct provinces—a secular one in England, a spiritual one in Normandy—and his rule seems to have differed according to the province in which he found himself. As Earl of Kent, the native chroniclers declare he was harsh, oppressive and tyrannical; his followers were lawless, and were dreaded through his territory. The chroniclers of Bayeux, however, show him up as a munificent prelate, generous in giving, a patron of “learning and good conversation, ” and, above all, a benefactor to his see in that he rebuilt the church where his flock worshipped, and where the crypt and part of the western towers still bear witness of his work. William of Poitiers, the chronicler of all that William did, extends his panegyrics to Odo, and declares that he was appreciated and beloved both in Normandy and England. But this probably results, Freeman points out, from the immense admiration of William the chronicler for William the duke, which would probably—so partial were historians in those days—lead him to believe that not only was the Conqueror impeccable, but his lieutenants also.

Caen follows as a natural corollary to Bayeux, and once one has embarked upon a journey in the Bessin and Calvados districts, it seems almost invidious to stay in one town without paying a visit to the others, both being so intimately bound up with the story of the Conqueror.

The churches of Caen have never had any pretence to episcopal dignity, and it is curious that this city, richer in great churches than any town in Normandy, should never have been raised to a bishopric, more especially considering the number of cathedral towns which beside such a city as this rank as hardly more than large villages, and yet which, because they possess one church of importance, must take precedence of Caen and other bishopless cities. Apart from its ecclesiastical dignity, however, Caen should be visited because it is a town both ancient and beautiful, and in memory of the great duke, who, English sovereign though he was, yet seems to come before us much more vividly in Normandy than in England. It was the Conqueror who made Caen—perhaps not as it is to-day, but at any rate as it was in the Middle Ages. Caen, or Cadomum as the Normans found it, was a tiny parish lying on the outskirts of the Bessin district, burnt probably by the first Norman invaders, and likewise included in Rolf’s conquests, but of too little importance either to be harmed by the one or benefited by the other. Then arose the discussion about William’s marriage with Matilda, the dispensation granted by the Pope for their breach of canonical law and the conditions under which William might keep his wife—that the duke and the duchess should each build an abbey church and foundation within the town of Caen, that of William to serve for men, that of Matilda for women; and forthwith the little town became a centre of attraction, alive with workmen, visited no doubt from time to time by the duke and duchess themselves in order that they might see how the work was going forward. The Abbaye aux Dames was the first to be consecrated. Matilda wished to hurry on the work, probably, as one writer says, from feminine impatience to complete her task. The church finished under her auspices, however, was too quickly erected to be more than a fragment, “simply so much as was necessary for the devotions of the sisterhood, ” and its real completion belongs to a day later than the time of Matilda, though her original plan was in all probability carried out to the end. William, however, took his time over the building of his church, and watched it to the finish. It was consecrated, with the exception of the two western towers, by Lanfranc in 1077, and stands to-day, in its strength, simplicity and majesty, a fitting and lasting memorial of the man who ruled England and Normandy and kept them with hand of iron.

“The church of William, vast in scale, bold and simple in its design, disdaining ornament, but never sinking into rudeness, is indeed a church worthy of its founder. The minster of Matilda, far richer even in its earliest parts, smaller in size, more delicate in workmanship, has nothing of the simplicity and grandeur and sense of proportion which marks the work of her husband. The one is the expression in stone of the imperial will of the conquering duke; the other breathes the true spirit of his loving and faithful duchess.”

The foundation of the two great abbeys soon led to a growing population outside their walls. Houses were built around the Trinité on the hilltop and around Saint Etienne in the plain; various trades sprang up, we may suppose, within the town; and a castle—always a patent of nobility to any town—was built on the hill, where William might lodge during his visits to Caen. These visits became more and more frequent until Caen was elevated almost to the rank of a royal residence; and even when Duke William became King of England, he found nothing in his new kingdom so pleasant as the little city under the hill. He built walls all round the town; he conceded to the inhabitants commercial privileges such as were enjoyed by Rouen and other large cities, together with the right of holding fairs, though the fairs of Caen never attained such celebrity as did those at Troyes; and finally, it was through the streets of Caen that his funeral train passed, bearing the Conqueror to his long rest in the church which he had built in the city which he had loved.

“The death of a king in those days came near to a break-up of all civil society. Till a new king was chosen and crowned, there was no longer a power in the land to protect or to chastise. All bonds were loosed; all public authority was in abeyance; each man had to look to his own as best he might.” Thus is described the state of feudal England and feudal Normandy after the death of the Conqueror at Rouen. A state of the utmost confusion prevailed; and apparently quite as an afterthought, masses were offered for the soul of him who so lately had kept all in so strict an order. This confusion was not the outcome of any personal disrespect to the dead king; it was simply a reaction consequent on the removal of the one great headstone, the one great reliance of the realms on both sides of the Channel. In the meantime the body of William was borne to Caen to await burial. A Norman knight of the name of Herlwin took upon himself the task of ordering funeral rites proper to the degree of such a man, since neither kinsfolk nor servants seemed willing to stir a finger. Once at Caen, however, the Conqueror’s faithful followers received their dead master with all the honour and respect which they had shown to him while living. The procession started in full pomp towards Saint Stephen’s and was met by the Abbot Gilbert, his clergy, and a number of laymen. The monks fell into file, the solemn chant arose; but suddenly the orderly progress was arrested by an event as startling as any in the lifetime of the great man they were burying. As the crowds filled the streets, a fire broke out in one of the houses; and as in the Middle Ages fires were easier to kindle and harder to quench than in later days, the flames spread along from house to house, till it seemed as though a sheet of fire were pursuing the Conqueror to his grave. Soon only the monks remained of the great company that had set out from the monastery, and they went on apparently as though nothing had happened, whilst the clergy, the lay helpers and the rest of the crowd dispersed to save their belongings from destruction, the dead man forgotten in the very real and living present need. “$1 $2 ”

At Saint Stephen’s were waiting a goodly company of bishops, Lanfranc of Canterbury, Odo of Bayeux, William’s brother; Gilbert of Evreux, the preacher; and Gilbert of Lisieux, learned in medicine; with Geoffroy de Montbray, bishop of Coutances; and the saintly pupil of Lanfranc, Anselm of Bec. The scene which followed is an interesting one. The funeral mass was sung, the body being borne along the nave and chancel up to the altar; then Gilbert of Lisieux spoke the funeral oration, setting forth, as was the custom, the tale of William’s battles and conquests, of his glory in war and his firm rule in peace, of his defence of the Church and his zeal against her enemies. “Pray, O people, that his sins may be forgiven before God, and if he had sinned against you in anything, forgive him that also yourselves.” At the close of the oration all heads turned towards Ascelin, the son of Arthur, as he stood forth, and forbade the body to be buried in land which the Conqueror had wrested from his father. “I ... claim the land; I challenge it as mine before all men, and in the name of God I forbid that the body of the robber be covered with my mould, or that he be buried within the bounds of mine inheritance.” Certainly here seemed some just impediment. An inquiry, necessarily brief because of the time and place, was held, and Ascelin’s witness proved true; and then and there a sum was paid down to the claimant. Thus the great abbey which he had built was not lawfully his own until the day of his burial.

Another memory of the Conqueror in Caen remains in the Truce of God which he imposed upon the Seigneurs of Normandy. Comparing this “Trenga Dei” with the Crusades, Freeman says: “The call to the Crusade fell in with every temper of the times; the proclamation of the Truce of God fell in with only one, and that its least powerful side. Good and bad men alike were led by widely different motives to rush to the Holy War. The men who endeavoured to obey the Truce of God must often have found themselves the helpless victims of those who despised it.” The Truce was preached first in Aquitaine in 1054, and Normandy was almost the last country to receive it. When it reached the north of France it was in a somewhat different form to that in which it had started. The early preachers began by denouncing all private warfare; but even in an age quickly fired by enthusiasm for a new movement, and more especially for a religious movement, obedience to this decree was found to be impossible. Men had hated one another too long to leap suddenly into a state of perpetual love; and the decree was modified, imposing abstention from private quarrels from Wednesday evening to Monday morning in each week. Even this seemed at first too much for the Norman spirit—“the luxury of destruction was dear to the Norman mind”—but the preaching of Bishops Richard and Hagano at length took effect, and at Caen, in 1042, was convoked the famous Council which was formally to receive the Truce, and command its observance all through the land.

Since then more than eight centuries have gone by; and yet to-day no place seems to breathe forth the spirit of the great duke as does Caen. In the castle on the cliffs at Falaise he was born, at Rouen was his seat and capital, at Bayeux his victories are preserved in a lasting memorial; but at Caen he lived and lies buried, at Caen he built houses and churches and city walls, and at Caen we may still think of him, not as the usurper of Harold’s throne, not as the oppressor of Hereward the Saxon and the stern, uncompromising lord of the English, but as the hero of the Normans, a figure more commanding even than the pioneer Rolf, and one whose best praise lies in those memories of “le Conquérant” that still haunt the Normandy of to-day.

After William’s death the history of Caen is practically the history of every town in Northern France. He had provided it with a commerce of its own, so that it might be strengthened from within, and he had fortified it against assault from without; it fell into English hands, like its neighbour cities, both under Edward III. and Henry V.; it was ravaged by the terrible “Black Death” in the fourteenth century, and harassed by the League wars and stirred up by the revolt of the “Nu-pieds” under Louis XIII.

Finally, we find the Girondist party flying from the “Convention” at Paris and setting up an insurrection in the provinces, making Caen their headquarters; and one more page from the awful book of the Revolution shows us Charlotte Corday setting out from Caen, grim, ungirlish, filled only with her dreadful purpose, down the long, white road to Paris—which to her meant Marat.

SAINT-LÔ AND COUTANCES

N very early days there was in Northern Gaul a little city on a hill-top, with a river running below, and this city was called Briovira, after the name of the river Vire. But in Christian times a certain bishop of Coutances, a native of Briovira, extended his pastoral protection to his birthplace, and called it by his own name, Laudus, or Lô, by which it is known to this day, although the bishopstool has no longer a place there. Saint-Lô does not strike one, either at first sight or afterwards, as being a cathedral city. The first view, from the railway, is a very rural one, and from an artist’s point of view the place is more or less ideal, possessing as it does two important qualifications of a “paintable” town—it has a river, and it stands on a hill. Only the outskirts of Saint-Lô lie about the waterside; the real town is higher up on the steep frowning cliff, and the Rue Torteron straggles across the bridge and up the hill, and finally, by means of a steep little alley, leads out into the Place Ferrier, where stands the Cathedral. Here, too, the Saturday market is held, and then the hill-top, usually quiet and deserted, blossoms into life, and the Rue Torteron is all a-clatter with farmers’ carts and the scurry of sabots. The western half of the market-place is known as the “Place des Beaux-Regards,” and from it, as its name testifies, stretches a wide view of the river, fields, and wooded hills beyond; here, also, is the fountain, crowned by Leduc’s graceful bronze peasant-girl, with water-vessel poised easily over her shoulder.

Saint-Lô was a Huguenot stronghold during the wars of the League, and the cliff-face still retains a fragment of the old defences, the Tour Beauregard, an ivy-covered ruin clinging to the rock, which probably served as a watch-tower in times when the meadows of the Vire were not so peaceful as they are to-day.

The year 1575 saw the siege which the little town counts among the great events of its history, when Colombières, the Huguenot, held out so bravely against the Catholic army. Colombières had marched into Saint-Lô some months before in order to place a garrison there in case of assault, and the townspeople welcomed him almost as a protecting angel. In the next year the enemy’s forces marched up to the Vire under Matignon, and demanded the surrender of the garrison. Colombières sent back a defiant message in answer, and the enemy’s guns were soon thundering about the rocks above the river. Saint-Lô happens to be guarded by water on three sides—on two by tributary streams, on the third by the Vire itself, and this western side is further strengthened by the steep precipice, falling sheer down to what is now the Basse Ville. Matignon determined to take a bold line and attack the Tour Beauregard as well as the Tour de la Rose, which stood in a more approachable part. All day the artillery played upon the cliff-face, and all day Colombières cheered on his men to the defence, when a breach at the Tour Beauregard had considerably detracted from their strongest position. At last the gallant leader, springing upon the ramparts, braved the enemy’s fire, and fell dead before their eyes rather than suffer the indignity of surrender. When his inspiring presence was gone from their midst the Huguenots seemed to lose heart; their defence wavered, their fire became less fierce, and at the end the Catholics stormed the rock and poured into the market-place.

It is interesting to note that during the siege, as at an earlier one at Beauvais, the women of the town signalised themselves by the good service they rendered, though it was certainly service of a blood-thirsty order, since it consisted in pouring down the terrible streams of boiling pitch and lead upon the heads of the besiegers; a mode of defence, however, very often resorted to by those who did not use firearms.

Traces of Huguenot days can still be seen in the west front of the Cathedral, which has evidently been defaced by some fanatical hand. The irregularity of its porches gives to this façade a curious one-sided appearance, that on the north having a round arch and the central and southern arches being pointed. The two towers are of different periods. In the seventeenth century, when the Cathedral was rebuilt, the perforated stone spires were added, the architect finding his inspiration in those at Bayeux and Caen. The best view of these is from the Ville Basse, where they come remarkably well into the picture, standing high above the grey roofs.

Here the Cathedral-church is, as usual, the centre of all that there is of antiquity in the town. There is one especially beautiful timber house, known as the Maison Dieu, some little distance from the west front; north and south of the church are various narrow streets—the Rue de la Porte Dollée runs over the stream of the same name, and under a curious old gateway tower; the Rue Henri Amiard leads to the precincts of the Cathedral, the south flank and its outward trend being well seen from here; but there is nothing very tangible in the way of antiquity, and one has an impression that when the bishop departed from Saint-Lô he must have taken with him the soul of the place.

Notre Dame de Saint-Lô has a very unusual and original plan, widening towards the east and adding another aisle to the north and south ambulatories. On the north side is its chief curiosity, an outdoor pulpit, built at the end of the fifteenth century and probably used by Huguenot preachers, to whom a sermon was a sermon, whether preached under a vaulted roof or the open sky. What strikes one most about the interior of the church is its want of light. The nave is absolutely unlighted, having neither triforium nor clerestory, and the aisles have only one tier of large windows, whose glass is old and very fine, though in most cases pieced together; the nave piers are massive, with a cluster of three shafts; those of the choir are quite simple, and have one noticeable feature, the absence of capitals, the vault mouldings dying away into the pier.

Like Saint-Lô, Coutances is a city built on a hill, and has therefore a peculiar charm all its own. The steep hill rises very impressively from the rolling country below, showing the Cathedral on the height, the towers of St. Pierre and the grey houses and apple orchards on the lower slope. As a town it has more to say for itself than Saint-Lô; small though it is, in respect of the part it has played in the history of its surroundings it can hold its own with many larger towns. Coutances on its granite rock is the watch-tower of the flat marshy Côtentin. It looks out to sea on the one side and over its subject towns on the other; it has seen the sun flash on the winged helmets of the Danes, on the spears of Englishmen of Agincourt, on the grim figures of the Huguenot leaders in the days of the League, as each in their day marched over the plains to Coutances for the sake of plunder, conquest and religion. Even in Roman times it was of importance; the Gauls called it Cosedia of the Unelli, but towards the end of the third century Constantius Chlorus fortified the town and called it after his name, which it bears at the present day—Constantius—Constance—Coutances.

The son and successor of this Constantius was Constantine the Great, from whose reign dates the spread of Christianity over Western Europe; and the Côtentin, as an old saying goes, now found itself divided between Saint Martin and Sainte Maria. Churches were built all over the land; bishops—every one a saint in these early days—followed the light of St. Augustine in England, and journeyed about the country making conversions and working miracles.

In the fifth century Coutances received its first great church, the basilica of St. Eureptiolus, built, according to local tradition, upon the foundations of a pagan temple. Later on, Norman invaders did their best to undo the good work of the Christian bishops, and we hear that the bishops of Coutances in particular were compelled to take refuge in Rouen for a century and a half, until the peninsula finally passed into the hands of William Longsword in 931, and for a time the churches had peace.

The barons of the Côtentin played a considerable part in the Norman Conquest of England, being among William’s most loyal supporters. Taillefer, the famous warrior at the battle of Senlac, the seigneurs of Pommeraye, Blainville, Pierrepont, all kept up the honour of Coutances in the lands across the water, as well as Bishop de Montbray, who, like Odo of Bayeux, held the office of a bishop in his own country and of a feudal lord in England. History has it on record that he held no less than two hundred and eighty fiefs in the conquered country, besides the lands which belonged to his ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the Côtentin. After the death of the Conqueror various pretenders to the dukedom of Normandy arose, and Coutances suffered from the local wars, falling into the hands of Fulk of Anjou and being retaken by Henry I., and to complete the harassed state of the Côtentin a dreadful famine spread over the district and reduced the town to a state of the utmost misery. In 1203 it was joined to France with the rest of Normandy; but this practically meant an entire renunciation of its freedom. Philip Augustus and Louis IX. confiscated its seigneurial rights and set a French governor to rule over the country instead of the Norman lords, though the latter king probably made up, in the eyes of the people of Coutances, for these encroachments by paying a visit to their town, which honour is remembered by them to-day not only as an act of royal condescension but of saintly beneficence.

In the wars of Edward III. and Henry V. Coutances had its share. Standing in the western corner of Normandy, the town came at the end of a long line of strongholds which one after the other had surrendered to the English assault. Valognes fell, then the Ponts d’Ouve, then Carentan and Saint-Lô. Next Edward turned off towards Caen and followed on to Crécy; so that it seemed at first as though Coutances would escape altogether. However, the treachery of one of the neighbouring lords was to attempt what the enemy had left undone. In 1358 there lived in the château of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte a certain Geoffrey d’Harcourt, surnamed Le Boiteux, whose nephew had been treacherously murdered at Rouen. D’Harcourt resolved to revenge the crime upon the city of Coutances. He got together an army with the help of the King of Navarre, and drew up his troops outside the town, with heavy machines for battery; and he had succeeded in forcing a breach, when the royal army, arriving at an opportune moment, upset his schemes and sent him back to his château of Saint-Sauveur. In the latter part of the war, however, this good fortune left the city. After his victory at Agincourt the English king marched westward to subdue the towns in the far corner of Normandy, and Coutances fell into his hands in 1418, remaining under the same rule until the Constable de Richemont drove out the English in 1449; and it is said that to all those of the inhabitants who had remained faithful to his cause Charles VII. made reparation for all the spoliation they had suffered at the hands of the English. This may, of course, have emanated from that prince’s indolent good nature, which did not object to granting a favour where it was not too much trouble; but considering the utter laziness of Charles it seems unlikely that he should have troubled himself to this extent in the cause of a little city in the west, far away from Paris, when he was occupied with the new experience of being king in fact as well as name.

The League Wars were the next to touch Coutances. Bricqueville-Colombières, who, as we saw, was to meet a soldier’s death upon the walls of Saint Lô some years later, took possession of the town in the name of the Protestants in 1561, and as the standards of both armies were followed by crowds of half-savage, ignorant peasants, thirsty for plunder of any sort, Coutances found itself overrun as it had been by a tribe of wild beasts. Men, women and children were massacred without quarter, churches and houses were rifled and, worse than all, the beautiful Cathedral of de Montbray suffered a like fate and was despoiled of sculpture, carving, statues and sainted relics, the bishop and clergy being struck down before they could attempt to quell these barbarian inroads. This scene was repeated two years later, when Colombières burnt part of the town, and again in 1566. After such treatment, it is hardly to be wondered at that the inhabitants of Coutances declared for the League, in spite of the fact that this disobedience caused the temporary removal of both their civil and seigneurial rights, the one passing to Saint-Lô and the other to Granville.

In the reign of Louis XIII. Richelieu imposed upon the inhabitants of Normandy the hateful tax known as the Gabelle, and by this means stirred up the revolt of the “Nu-pieds.” Coutances shared in several of the subsequent disorders. One Poupinel, charged with a commission from the Parliament of Rouen, was murdered in the streets of Avranches; and the tax-gatherer at Coutances, fearing a like fate, armed all his followers in the event of a possible disturbance. The worthy man’s extra precaution, however, proved to do more harm than good; his servants in their excess of zeal saw an enemy in every harmless farmer come to do his marketing in the town, and a deadly weapon in every ashen stick, and the pitch of excitement grew so high that when the bell of Saint Pierre began to ring for a christening, they took it for the warning peal of the tocsin, and rushed out into the streets with loud cries, brandishing their weapons and assaulting in their excitement every innocent burgher whom they met.

As was but natural, this unprovoked attack roused the dormant spirit of revolt among the people; Nicolle, the unfortunate tax-gatherer, found out his mistake too late; the “Nu-pieds,” under their chief, Le Sauvage, burnt down his house and murdered his brother; and for a few days, until the popular fury had quieted down, Coutances was thrown into a state of revolution. The terrible disturbances of the next century, however, did not work much havoc here. Only twenty-three persons in all were sent to the guillotine from Coutances during the Terror, and most of these, we are told, were burghers and not aristocrats, and the victims of private vengeance rather than of public fury.

Coutances had a good many notable bishops. There was Eureptiolus, mentioned above; there were Laudus, the founder of Saint-Lô; and Robert of Lisieux, who built his church on the foundations of the old basilica; and Geoffroy de Montbray, whose best life-work was given to finishing what Robert had begun; Hugues de Morville, who restored the Cathedral in the thirteenth century; and energetic, tenacious Geoffroy Herbert, who was possessed with a perfect mania for building, in and out of Coutances, and to whom the town owes the church of St. Pierre.

The Cathedral at Coutances was founded by the widow of Richard the Fearless in 1030, and completed towards the end of the century by Geoffroy de Montbray, William the Conqueror’s fighting bishop. After the union of Normandy to France it was rebuilt, and the work of restoration extended into the fifteenth century. Entering by the north porch one is struck by the beauty of the doorway, whose overhanging mouldings and shafts are designed with great elegance and freedom. The English type of capital, with round abacus and vigorous foliation, reminds one of the cathedrals of Salisbury and Lincoln; and the tympanum with its sadly-mutilated figures is carried on a corbel table of great beauty. The interior elevation of the bays is composed of three features—pier arches, a fine triforium with quatrefoil balustrade, and a rather small clerestory with a passage-way crossing its base. There is a great deal of exquisite glass in the cathedral, especially in the transepts. In the choir the love of high clerestories, admitting as much light as possible to the chancel, to the almost complete extinction of the triforium, shows itself here as in many other churches already noticed. The upper windows are in two planes, with a light shaft supporting the interior arches.

In the ambulatory there is what looks like a blind stone bay, corbelled out and resting on the capitals of the columns. Probably this is a staircase leading to the upper passages of the triforium and clerestory. The lantern, which is octagon in plan, has three tiers of arches, the over-hanging sides being supported by a simple pendentive with very slight mouldings.

Beyond the Place du Parvis, where the Cathedral stands, is the Musée, once the house of Quesnel Morinière, who at his death left to the town both house and garden. The latter is now converted into a Jardin Public, which every French town, however small, seems to possess; and sitting or walking amidst its shady alleys and green lawns, with catalpas and orange trees in full bloom overhead, one feels very kindly disposed towards the good citizen who planted them and left this possession for the enjoyment of his fellows.

During our stay at Coutances one incident took place which may be interesting as showing how mediæval customs still survive in these little towns. In the middle of the night we were roused from sleep by the blast of a bugle in the street below. This was presently followed by a roll of drums and shouts of “Au feu! au feu!” The deep-toned bell of St. Nicolas then took up the alarm and echoed out far and wide its warning notes. In a moment the town was awake. Heads peered out at every window, and the street was soon alive with the tread of hurrying feet; café and cabaret furnished their contingent to the excited crowd, and even children were brought out of their beds to gaze down the blazing street. The gregarious and sympathetic Frenchman can never allow any event to take place, be it funeral, festival or fire, without calling all his friends to assist at it; and the general turn-out into the streets reminds one of the thousands of Londoners who left their beds to celebrate the relief of Mafeking.

LE MANS

ACH land and city,” says Freeman, “has its special characteristics which distinguish it from others. One is famous for its church and its bishops, another for its commonwealth, another for its princes. Le Mans has the special privilege of being alike famous for all three.” At Le Mans, church, counts and commune have each made a separate mark upon the roll of French history. The communal power gave the town strength within itself; the counts of Maine, whose line dates back to the time of Hugh Capet, made of it a mighty feudal possession; and the great church above the Sarthe, whose traditions have been handed down even from Saint Martin of Tours, stood apart on its hill-crest and watched over the city.

As was usually the case in these powerful cities the commune was the last element to arise at Le Mans; before its appearance we find both Church and State fully established on the hill. Julian built his church under the rule of Trajan; Defensor, the local ruler, lived in his palace side by side with the great missionary bishop who had converted him to Christianity; and after him came the line of counts who seem to have been always at war either with Normandy on the one side or with Anjou on the other. Considering these two powerful neighbours, it is wonderful what a prestige Maine did succeed in establishing, by the help of her bishops, and also by the help of the strong fortress which was her capital city. But in the reign of the prince from Liguria, Azo, to whom Maine had descended in an indirect line, a third factor thrust itself into the growing fabric of the city. It may have been the example of Italian states which the coming of an Italian ruler had brought before the Cenomannians more forcibly; it may have been the encroachments of the Countess Gersendis, regent in the absence of her husband; but from whatever cause, it was certain that memories of the municipal rights of ancient Gaul were being kindled amongst the people—murmurs were heard of a time when, under the Roman yoke, a prince did not signify a tyrant—and presently the Cenomannian burghers took the law into their own hands and met together to declare their freedom and—a testimony of their strength—compelled Geoffrey of Mayenne and all the surrounding princes to swear their civic oath. Thus was founded the earliest commune in Gaul, and when, soon afterwards, the Conqueror subdued Le Mans and the whole state of Maine, the city still retained its newly won privileges, William binding himself over to respect and observe the customs pertaining to the same, the ancient “justices” of the city. A threefold history of this kind leads one naturally to look for a threefold interest within the town itself; yet this is lacking in the city of to-day—its past glories lie rather in tradition and association than in anything more tangible. The church still stands upon the hill, but it stands alone. Almost every trace of feudal prince and ancient commune has been swept away, and the old Le Mans has become a city of solid white-painted buildings and clean, sunny places. By the river-side and near the Cathedral a few old houses and crooked alleys still remain, and here too may be seen fragments of the old city walls, built by Roman forethought in the third and fourth centuries. These ramparts have stood the town in good stead. From its position and importance, Le Mans has always been coveted by the enemy, and since the days of Clovis down to the war with Prussia it has known the tread of besieging hosts at its gates. The Normans had it under the Conqueror, and lost it under his son, Duke Robert; during the Hundred Years’ War it was besieged five times; the Huguenots took it during the wars of the League; after the fall of the Bourbon monarchy it was seized in desperation by the Royalists of La Vendée, but retaken by Marceau; and nearer our own day comes the terrible “week of battles” in January, 1871, during which the Prussians occupied Le Mans and defeated the army of the Loire so severely as to destroy all hope of relieving Paris.

“In the second half of the campaign, in the contest against France ... both belligerents kept the same goal before their eyes—Paris: the one in order to dictate peace from within the walls of the conquered capital, the other in order to gain that victory which would give to the war the long and eagerly-desired change of fortune.” During the winter of 1870 the army of the Loire had set out to reach Paris from Orléans; but a succession of defeats drove it back to the Loire, from whence it was to retreat upon Le Mans. Pursuit did not follow at once. The Prussian Army, under Prince Frederick Charles, waited between Orléans and Vendôme until the New Year, when an advance was ordered, and the three divisions of the army marched upon Le Mans by their respective roads. Passing Vendôme, which was the scene of a sharp engagement with the enemy, they crossed the country between the Loire and the Sarthe with some difficulty; bad weather had made the roads almost impassable, and the district was cut up into vineyards, farmsteads and small valleys. “The invader rarely gets a general view of the country even from elevated positions; he must renounce any plan of acting with large displayed masses, especially in the case of artillery; the action of cavalry is restricted to the roads, and the whole burden of the contest falls exclusively on the infantry.” Fighting their way through the scattered French forces two divisions managed to come within ten miles of Le Mans by January 9, and on the next day the battle began. The Prussian watchword was “Forward with all speed,” and such speed did they make that at the end of three days they had advanced upon the French in their strong position, keeping always to the maxim, “Stand firm in the centre and act on the offensive at the two wings.”

“On January 11, the French army of the West was completely defeated near Le Mans by the German Second Army, under Prince Frederick Charles and the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, and Le Mans was immediately occupied.” Such was the announcement in The Times newspaper on the morning of January 13, 1871.

General Chanzy, who was in command of the French army of the West, courted defeat by advancing upon Paris, and by his retreat upon Le Mans invited the Germans to occupy it. Prince Frederick Charles, leaving Orléans and passing Beaugency and Vendôme, arrived at the latter place in time to see Chanzy repulsed, but not in time to cut off the French army, which was now in full retreat towards Paris. A series of rear-guard engagements followed as the Prussians drove the French before them towards Le Mans. The storming of Changé was the last of the many battles around Le Mans. It lies in a hollow with hills curving round it on two sides, the north and west, and on these hills the French had taken up their position. They had, apparently, no desire to advance and clear away the Germans who were attacking them, laboriously marching through snow and the thick woods which covered the position. The attacking force ran from tree to tree and sought whatever shelter was available, making frequent charges whenever an occasion offered itself. Notwithstanding their pertinacity they failed to carry the heights, and were for some time in danger of suffering a severe repulse, as the reserves on whom they relied had not yet come up, but were pounding their way along the frozen roads from La Chartre to Le Mans. The troops bivouacked in the snow on the night of the 11th, and when the frosty sun rose on the morning of the 12th the French outposts had been withdrawn and retired upon Le Mans. By this time the Tenth Corps had joined the attacking force, and after heavy fighting in the streets and squares the town was won in the evening, and on the following day Prince Frederick Charles established there his headquarters.

General Chanzy in his defence of Le Mans accomplished all that courage and gallantry in his dire situation could suggest; he disputed the country inch by inch before the advancing armies of the Duke of Mecklenburg and Von der Tann, but he was unable with his raw levies, with recruits undrilled, unshod and unofficered, to withstand the furious onslaught of the enemy. Such is the short tribute paid to the French general by The Times correspondent with the Prussian Army.

The Cathedral of Saint-Julien sits astride a great rock overlooking the Place des Jacobins—a square wide enough for once to allow of an adequate view of the great church on its eastern side. It stands so high that the want of a central tower is felt less than would be the case at a lower level. The only tower of any pretensions is over the south transept—originally the north transept possessed one also—but even this is rather inefficient. It is advisable to enter the Cathedral by the west door rather than by the south porch, so as to prevent the uninteresting west wall of the nave from becoming a factor of one’s first impression. From this point it is the choir that first arrests our attention; we pass on through the lower, simpler nave and through the great soaring chancel arch that to look upon makes us giddy, to the blaze of deep-coloured glass and the magnificent chevet of stilted arches placed close together and looking from their great height much narrower than they really are. The same idea of height and light prevails in the transepts, for by this time the French architect had begun to gauge the emotional effect of tremendous height, and to dare greater things than his predecessors had ever dreamed; while the same insatiable desire for light that we saw in the choir at Amiens has possessed the builder of Saint Julien, and led him to make his transepts nearly all window—especially the northern one, which has a triforium lighted by beautiful fifteenth-century glass—and to put a double ambulatory round the choir, both lighted by that marvellous jewelled glass.

The Romanesque nave was restored in the twelfth century, but this restoration was apparently a replacement of a great deal of old work, with only slight modifications of the original inspiration. A large door, decorated with sculpture and bearing a strong analogy to the Portail Royal of Chartres, was opened in the middle of the south aisle. Further changes were made in the early part of the thirteenth century, when the ancient apses were destroyed, and the admirable choir, as we now see it, was built—“a masterpiece of effect”—with its encircling chapels radiating like the petals of a flower. The vaulting approaches in construction the “cupola inspiration”; but here, as at Angers and Poitiers, it is an example of only the last traces which remain to us of the domical design.

Besides the Cathedral there are two churches worthy of note—Notre Dame de la Coûture, in the eastern quarter of the town, amongst the shops and markets; and Notre Dame (sometimes called St. Julien) du Pré, across the river in the far west. The latter church, in spite of having been a good deal restored, is extremely interesting. In the nave hangs a little printed history, which tells us that the church was founded by the first bishop of Le Mans, Saint Julian, sent as a missionary by Saint Peter. In honour of his great master Julian built a basilica, which was enlarged by Saint Innocent in the sixth century and restored about 1050. In the fifteenth century both church and monastery suffered from fire; two centuries later the pious Benedictines made some alterations, but during the Revolution the church was sacked and burnt, and the crypt, together with the tombs of Saint Julian and Saint Hadouin, entirely destroyed. The task of restoration was left to the faithful in the nineteenth century. In spite of the modern work, however, the church contains a great deal that is very interesting and undoubtedly ancient. The nave pillars especially, with their carved capitals, are worth individual notice. In those of the north aisle, from west to east, we find portrayed:

No. 1. Animals caught in a thicket, turning their heads over their shoulders to free themselves from the branches. Notice here how the volute at the corner has suggested to the sculptor a human face.

No. 2. Leaves and curiously twisted arabesques.

No. 3. The same in a simpler form.

No. 4. Volutes and grotesque heads at the angles.

No. 5. [South aisle, east to west] gives a kind of rope-work, with volutes and human-headed dragons.

No. 6. Is much the same as No. 3.

No. 7. Flat applique leaves, volutes and ball-flowers; and in

No. 8. We return to the wild animals. Both aisles are arcaded on their outer walls; on the north we find arches ornamented with ball-flowers, on the south an arcade of some interest, as showing the immense variety of design in its capitals—dragons, fir-cones, arabesques, and, strangest of all, winged lions, with a most Assyrian air. Apart from the capitals, the architecture of the church is quite simple, and whoever rehandled it has done so much in keeping with the old work. The windows are round-headed: the clerestory consists of single lights, and the triforium is a blind arcade.

Notre Dame de la Coûture—the name originally referred to the Cultura Dei—is an old Benedictine foundation, dating from the sixth century, but destroyed during the Revolution; the church, however, remains, with most of the old work intact, the two square fourteenth-century towers rising in quaint contrast to the modern buildings around them. Between the towers a remarkable Last Judgment confronts the visitor from the west doorway. The central figure, Justice, weighs a sinner in the balance, and apparently finds him wanting, if one may judge by the angle of the scales and the expectantly gleeful attitude of a devil amongst the “goats” on the left hand. Of the interior, the choir is the oldest part, and here we find eleventh-century work, especially in the crypt, which contains the tomb of the founder, Saint Bertrand, and shows the rudely carved capitals and square-edged arches of an age before architects had blossomed out into beauty of sculpture and design. The same simplicity characterises the choir, which has four bays and a chevet of five-round arches, with massive piers, and the abacus square and voluted at the angles. The vaulting of the chevet is terminated by figures of saints, which rest upon the shafts of the clerestory windows. There is no triforium, its position being taken throughout the church by corbel tables in the form of human and animal faces. The nave consists of a single wide body without aisles, and set in the blank wall are three large bays of relieving arches, their space being filled in with curious old tapestry, in which appears a medley of Biblical subjects, pastoral and hunting scenes, and Chinese pagodas.

This quiet little church was in the very centre of the furious street fighting which followed the first rush into the city of the Prussian troops, and fulfilled its sacred mission of giving shelter to the wounded and comfort to the dying who lay stretched in the neighbouring streets of the town. “We entered,” says the war correspondent of The Times, “the picturesque old church of Notre Dame de la Coûture, interesting from its quaint mixed architecture, its old choir and vaulted walls, and were told by the meek-looking priest who sadly showed us over it, and was busy cleaning it as we entered, that no fewer than six hundred wounded had passed the night in it.”

ANGERS

F Le Mans marks the first stage from Normandy upon the southward road, Angers may certainly be counted as another stepping-stone to the lands of the Loire—another landmark in our own history—another city upon a hill, and yet differing from all the hill cities before it. We are now in what Freeman calls “before all things the land and the city of counts,” the city which gave to history the name of Fulk the Black, warrior and pilgrim and enemy of Odo of Chartres; of Geoffrey the Hammer, who strove with the Conqueror at Domfront and Alençon; of René the minstrel and of Margaret his daughter, who carried to England the spirit of the old Angevin line, and fought with the strength of two for the inheritance of her husband, meek, scholarly Henry of Windsor, for whom the shield of faith had more significance than the shield of the warrior.

The house of Anjou cannot but have an interest to an Englishman, since it is the parent stock of our longest dynasty. Long before it came through Normandy into contact with England it held its own, however, in Gaul, Roman and Frankish. The Andecavi, who settled on the Maine, were an important tribe, and their city was of equal importance. In 464 the Saxons wandered down from Normandy and overran Anjou, but their occupation was merely temporary, and left no traces in city or people, as did the Saxon colonies at Bayeux and in England; and when this one cloud has cleared off, an open field is left for the history of the counts. Now the Counts of Anjou may be said to stand very near the head of the list of all the rulers in France at this early time—a long list, which numbers many important names, Hughs and Roberts of Paris, Williams and Richards of Normandy, Thibauts of Champagne—yet against whose feats of arms and feats of policy the Angevins can measure theirs almost one by one. “The restless spirit of the race showed itself sometimes for good and sometimes for evil, but there was no Count of Anjou who could be called a fool, a coward, or a fainéant.”

The first count, Ingelgar, received his dominion from Charles the Bald, in about 870. After him comes Fulk the Red, who enlarged his father’s borders beyond the river; Fulk the Good, the scholar who defended his learning with the well-known proverb, “An unlettered king is but a crownéd ass,” a saying which spread beyond his own realm and found favour at the court of England; and the warlike Geoffrey of the Grey Tunic, who repelled the Breton and Aquitanian incursions and fought in Frankish and German wars besides. Geoffrey it was who gave to the line the famous Fulk the Black, the first count who appears to any great extent in French history—the history, that is, of France proper, at that time apart from the great duchies on her boundaries. His wars with Odo filled a great part of his reign, and brought him down as far as the Loire, where, through the alliance of a count of Périgueux, Tours became his for a short time; also Saumur, after the victory of Pontlevois. On two occasions he turned pilgrim; and he is also found at Rome, applying to the Pope for consecration of his new monastery near Loches, which Hugh of Tours, whose see Fulk had robbed, refused to consecrate unless the stolen lands were restored. Naturally the Gallican Church resented this destruction of their privileges; the full wrath of the episcopate was pronounced against the recreant count, and a legend adds that in further punishment a wind came from heaven and blew down his newly-built church. How this uncanonical behaviour must have vexed the shades of Fulk the pious! Fulk Nerra was followed by Geoffrey, self-christened the Hammer. He rebelled against his father during his lifetime, but after his death continued the war with Chartres, and actually got possession of Tours, the one city for which every Angevin strove. Count Thibaut was formally deprived of the city by royal command, and it was handed over to Geoffrey, under the favour, the superstitious chroniclers make haste to add, of Saint Martin. Notwithstanding this royal grant, Henry, the Frank king, seems to have been perpetually at war with Geoffrey, and even to have called in feudal service of the Norman duke to aid him against the Angevin count. William himself was no friend to Anjou. The mastery over Maine was a bone of contention to the two great powers on its north and south borders; and when Geoffrey obtained the guardianship of little Count Hugh, and came into immediate contact with Normandy, a definite struggle arose. Geoffrey aimed at the two outposts of William’s territory, Alençon and Domfront. Alençon, through the treachery of its lord, surrendered to him; Domfront was also disaffected, and for a moment it seemed as though the land of the great Norman were to be invaded by his southern neighbour. But William was prepared for any emergency. He marched straight to Domfront, where Geoffrey had already stationed his troops, and laid siege to it. He remained before the town for some time before news came of the advance of Geoffrey himself; and when the Count at last arrived, he sent word of his readiness to give battle. But when the morning broke upon the Norman host, drawn up before the fortress all expectant of a battle with the Angevins, lo! no enemy was to be seen. Geoffrey, whose surname of Hammer by no means maligned his prudence, had thought better of the scheme in the night, and retired with all his men. The Norman writers, of course, set this down to cowardice. But one would like to hear the other side of the story. “Here, and throughout the war, the lions stand in need of a painter, or rather their painters suddenly refuse to do their duty. We have no Angevin account of the siege of Domfront to set against our evidently highly coloured Norman picture.”

“The French yearning to make everything new” has done its work in Angers, but though Fulk, Geoffrey, René, and the rest would be at a loss to recognise their old capital in the trim modern town, enough remains to show us what has been. No city standing as Angers does on rising ground above a wide river, with a mass of castle bastions sloping up the hill, could fail to have made history in its day. The modern town may be disposed of in a few words—it is clean and full of life, and altogether very far removed from the “black Angers” known to our ancestors. This mediæval and grim-sounding title, reminiscent of dungeons and tyrant princes, probably either meant that the ancient town was closely and squalidly built, or else referred to the dark slate with which the country abounds, and which might well have been used for building purposes all over the town, as we still see it in some houses by the river.

The attractive side of Angers is that facing the water, and the river is quite worthy of the town on its banks, though Mr. Henry James does censure the “perversity in a town lying near a great river, and yet not upon it.” It is true that Angers has not got as far as the Loire; but it has what is next best, a tributary of the great river—a wide placid flow, which makes no mean show here, spanned as it is by three fine bridges. Looking upstream from the lowest bridge one sees the old and the new together; the clean well-to-do water-front, pleasant boulevards, and a bright little quay with every house the pattern of its neighbour; and above this the black mass of the castle, whose solid hugeness makes the crowning towers of Saint Maurice look as if they were cut out of paper, so delicately and sharply defined are they against the sky. Down river there is a long and sunny path, broad green meadows and a stretch of country beyond, and little fishing boats dotted about on the water.

But what Angers has of the best is its castle, though it be “the work of intruding Kings,” Philip Augustus and Louis IX., and not of the Angevin counts. It is, indeed, more massive than picturesque—“it has no beauty, no grace, no detail, nothing that charms or detains you; it is simply very old and very big—so big and so old that this simple impression is enough, and it takes its place in your recollections as a perfect specimen of a superannuated stronghold.” The huge grim bastions, girded with iron bands as though to give added strength to their already giant-like solidity, and the deep moat, filled in old days by the waters of the Maine, stood there for a very real and terrible use, and even now are a splendid example of how men in the Middle Ages defended themselves against all comers. The very steepness and plainness of the vast walls prevented an enemy from gaining any foothold, even supposing him to have crossed the moat in safety. But this great house of defence now gives on to a modern boulevard; a kitchen-garden occupies the moat, and sends the scent of thyme and rosemary up through those loop-hole windows, whose most peaceful prospect of old was the black, silent water below, and whose usual occupants were armed men with cross-bows, or boiling lead, or something equally quieting to the unwary spirit attempting to scale those unscalable ramparts.

In the heart of the town is a very comfortable little inn at the sign of the “Cheval Blanc.” The house has a quiet and rather old-fashioned atmosphere, perhaps a relic of past days, as the inn itself has stood there since the sixteenth century, though the present building is quite modern. Another relic—though the term hardly suits such a hale and hearty person—is a delightful old waiter, who has been at the Cheval Blanc for forty years, and wears on his coat with the greatest pride a minute piece of tricolor—the recognition of thirty years’ service. Close to the Cheval Blanc is the Préfecture, and this contains a hidden treasure in the shape of an old cloister, which runs along one side of the court. This cloister was not discovered until 1836, but the remains themselves date from the twelfth century, and are of extraordinary interest, not merely from their antiquity, but also from the immense variety of subject sculpture which adorns them. There are several bays of round-headed arches, and from their capitals and mouldings dragons and toads, snakes and winged lions, glare and wriggle at the visitor in a grotesque medley. In some cases Scriptural subjects are represented—there is notably the murder of the Innocents, a marvellously preserved and realistic fresco, reminiscent both in treatment and colour scheme of some of the Bayeux tapestry; the killing of Goliath by David, and the presentation of his head to Saul; and inside a very modern council-room, a wonderful allegory representing the defeat of Vice by Virtue. The Lamb, enhaloed, is in the centre; beneath are two lions tearing apart a wild boar; and in the jambs are virtues, armed with shield and sword, trampling upon demon vices—men struggling with wild beasts—and adoring angels swinging censers. This is partly coloured, and the sculpture is very fine, great attention being given to detail.

Freeman declares the city of Angers to be the headquarters of the Angevin style of architecture, and quotes as a noticeable example of that style the Cathedral of St. Maurice, which differs at least as widely from that of the French churches as from that of Normandy. The object of the Angevin architect was breadth, and he has sacrificed both length and height to the attainment of his end. The view from the west doorway of St. Maurice shows a well-known example of what is termed the “hall plan”—a single wide nave, having choir and transepts, but without ambulatories or aisles. That the church originally had aisles, however, is evident from a plan of Saint Maurice given in Mr. Lethaby’s “Mediæval Art”; they were removed, it is assumed, in order to simplify the construction of the vault. The great relieving arches of the nave as it now stands are divided into three bays only. “In everything,” Freeman says, “the tendency is to have a few large members rather than many small ones. There is a certain boldness and simplicity about this kind of treatment; but there is also a certain bareness, and an Angevin church looks both lower and shorter than it really is.” The vaulting of the roof here follows the same sub-domical design as that of Notre Dame de la Coûture at Le Mans. The stained glass is perhaps the best feature of the church as far as actual beauty goes; some of it dates from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and both in nave and choir it is very fine, particularly in the windows of the apse and in the rose window of the north transept. The tapestry which hangs in the nave and transepts represents scenes from the Apocalypse, and is very fine Arras work of the fourteenth century.

TOURS AND BLOIS

O much has been said and written of the Loire country during the past fifty years that the modern writer has very little ground left to him, unless it be to avoid calling it the “Garden of France.” Yet over-written as it may be, Touraine has not lost any of the charm and romance which must always attach to a wide sunny land, watered by a great river, and “peopled”—one might almost say—by châteaux, every one of which has set its mark upon French history. Certainly there is something very delightful, because so unlike anything else in France, in the endless vista of grey-green levels—here and there a group of slim shivering poplars or a flash of sunlight upon the wide waters of the Loire, which winds in and out of the flats like a great lazy shining serpent—flying sometimes into a sudden rage and flooding the land, or subsiding sulkily amongst high banks and stretches of dry sand.

It is these moods and tempers of the great river that prevent any navigation upon its waters; other smaller rivers—the Seine, for instance, and our own Thames—are alive with craft of every kind; but here, on the great boundary stream between north and south, which seems made for a waterway to the sea, no busy steamers ply up and down with the tide—no barges and market boats disturb the calm of its wide reaches. There never was, for its size, such an erratic and useless river; yet we can afford to forgive it, for the sake of the land which it waters and the cities on its banks.

The impression one carries away from Tours is one of wideness, and brightness, and sunshine—shaded by one or two ancient corners. It is above all things a town really lived in and appreciated by its inhabitants, many of whom are English. Tours is, or used to be, a famous educational centre, and for the sake of education, or economy, or both, whole families have migrated there, besides the unmistakably English students who have been grafted on to a family to learn French. And the river-side shows, if not a strenuously busy, at least a very sociable side of the town life, especially in the summer evenings, when the Tourangeaux, native and adopted, leave the white houses and busy streets, and use their river bank for a pleasant walk.

It is curious how in France each step towards the south seems to be a step further in French history. First there is Normandy, the land of the early Northern warriors, with the fierce blood untamed in their veins; then Maine and Anjou, recalling the days of our own Plantagenet kings, and the close connection of France with England; while Touraine brings back to us the craft of Louis XI. and the magnificence of François I^er. Tours itself, however, has never been content to lie fallow for long; ever since some Roman emperor transported it from the right bank of the Loire to the left, and made it the capital of Lugdunensis Tertia, the town has had an important part assigned to it, and has played out that part to the full. Though in old days Tours was only half of the place, the cité, the bourg, built round the tomb and shrine of Saint Martin and first called by his name, was of equal if not greater importance, from the many pilgrimages to the resting-place of the great saint. This is easily understood when one considers in what veneration Saint Martin was held by the Gauls and their descendants. Saint Gatianus, the first bishop of Tours, began the good work in the third century, but to Martin is due the subsequent spread of Christianity, not only in Touraine but all over France, so that he really shares with Saint Denis the honour of patron saint. Born of pagan parents in Pannonia, Martin became a catechumen at ten years old, and five years later was forced, much against his will, to enter the army. After his final conversion and baptism, however, he left it to become the eager disciple and co-worker of Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers; and in 371 he was consecrated Bishop of Tours. The legend of Martin’s conversion is well known (at any rate it may be found commemorated in the painted windows of churches all over France)—how the young soldier stationed outside the gate of Amiens shared his cloak with a passing beggar, and how the following night Christ appeared to him in a vision, making known to the angels of Heaven this thing done to Himself as to one of “the least of these.”

After Martin’s death at Candes his relics were brought to Tours, and in the fifth century Saint Perpetuus built a splendid basilica round the shrine. This church became the nucleus of the bourg of Martinopolis, known to the Middle Ages as Châteauneuf. Side by side with the church a monastery sprang up, and in the reign of Charlemagne the famous scholar Alcuin became abbot and founded there his school of theology. Late in the tenth century the basilica was destroyed by fire; two centuries later saw the completion of its successor, but this again, after suffering many evils from Huguenot and Revolutionist hands, disappeared under the First Empire to make a passage-way for the Rue des Halles. Two towers—the church originally had five—now look mournfully at one another across the busy, narrow street: the Tour de l’Horloge, square and solid, with a leaded roof capped by a small eighteenth-century dome, and the taller Tour Charlemagne, so called for the rather insufficient reason that Charlemagne buried his third wife, Luitgarde, beneath its base. These are the sole relics of the ancient culte of Saint Martin; though to his memory in latter days a new basilica has reared itself on the other side of the street.

Until the days of the League, the kings of France always found an attraction in the sunny Touraine meadows, and occupied themselves a good deal with Tours itself. On the outskirts of the town is the village of Plessis-les-Tours, where stood the famous fortress of Louis XI., who lived, plotted and died within its walls; here also Louis XII. was proclaimed “father of his people,” and here Henri III. and the King of Navarre met together for a common defence against the League. To an Englishman the name naturally associates itself with Quentin Durward, and calls up a picture of the grim fortress so vividly described by Walter Scott, with its triple moat and high palisades, its dark walls and turreted gateways, defended by three hundred Scottish arches, and the donjon tower “which rose like a black Ethiopian giant, high into the air.” The castle of Plessis was in old days a terror to the countryside; the surrounding forest was a perfect network of man-traps, and the intruder, were he fortunate enough to avoid these, had no chance of escape from the arrows of the Scottish guard in their iron “swallows’ nests” upon the walls. Hardly less mysterious, indeed, is the central figure within these grim surroundings—Louis himself, whose character, with its strange mingling of guile and religious fervour, unfathomable craft and childish superstition, baffled the men of his own day as it has baffled posterity. He was feared by those who served him, and he was obeyed, because a terrible alternative awaited the disobedient; but he was neither loved nor understood. Of love, indeed, he had little need, and it was not his pleasure that men should understand him.

Very little, however, remains to-day of the “verger du roi Louis” to show that it was once the home of kings. It has gone the way of most of the “illusions ... in the good city of Tours with regard to Louis XI.,” and only a few fragments and “inconsequent lumps” share with some modern buildings the site of this royal prison of Plessis-les-Tours.

The western façade of Tours Cathedral, with its two small towers, is a noticeable example of the waning Gothic style. The detail is so “charmingly executed as almost to induce the belief, in spite of the fanciful extravagance which it displays, that the architects were approaching to something new and beautiful when the mania for classic detail overtook them.” Looking eastward from the west door one notices the northerly trend of the Cathedral’s axis, commencing from the transept arches. The choir spreads outward at its first bay, the side walls not following the alignment of the body of the church. The glass is both abundant and magnificent in the nave lights, and the enormous clerestory windows display it to the greatest possible advantage. Unfortunately, the fine rose window in the north transept is marred by the cutting across of a vertical pillar, inserted as a support to the crest of the arch. In both transepts the triforium arches present a curious and novel arrangement, the reason for which is not very apparent. The arches are in a double plane, but the openings are not directly one behind another.

The pier arches of the nave are plain, with simple panel-like spandrils, the piers themselves supporting a very large clerestory and glazed triforium. In the latter the heads of the arches are filled in with rich Flamboyant tracery, either in imitation of the fleur-de-lys, or with varieties of wheel tracery in double plane. The choir is much earlier than the nave, and its bays show a beautiful proportion and harmony in its members, the whole elevation being supported on clustered columns with stalk capitals and square abacus. In the apse the tracery is a slight variant from that of the choir; the arch-heads are here filled in with trefoil instead of quatrefoil tracery. On the north side of the Cathedral are the remains of some cloisters, joined to the main body by two flying buttresses.

To most travellers in France the town of Blois is associated with a château rather than with a cathedral; it is one of a group of towns known and visited for the historic piles which tower above their grey roofs—Amboise and Chambord, Langeais and Chenonceaux, Chaumont and Montrichard. We count Blois with these rather than with the towns famous for their churches, and the bishopstool comes rather as a surprise, or as a thing unconsidered. The Cathedral, built in the seventeenth century and dedicated to St. Louis, occupies a magnificent position, overhanging the grey water-front of the Loire in a fashion which seems to call for some nobler building. However, although built according to a curiously mixed design in bastard Gothic and Renaissance, there is a certain sense of proportion in the interior of the church, the vaulting being especially simple and broad in effect. The nave consists of nine bays, with a low clerestory, terminating in stone panels, which occupy the place usually assigned to the triforium, and are left in the rough with a view to subsequent enrichment by sculpture. The examples of adornment at the east end, however, make one feel that the church has been mercifully spared any further fantasies from the chisel of the Renaissance sculptor.

Far better is the Church of St. Nicolas, whose twin towers stand out dark and sharp midway between the water-front and the overhanging mass of the Château. It belongs to the tenth and eleventh centuries, and has not been much restored except by whitewash, which covers most of the interior, but allows a good deal of old work to be seen, especially in the north aisle, where, near the pulpit, we find round-headed windows very deeply splayed. The nave has five bays, and a blind triforium, consisting of an arcade of four small arches in each bay, the last two eastward having only three arches set in the blind wall. These last bays are much ruder than the others, especially on the south side. The clerestory has twin lights, with a rose in the head of the arch, as is seen in the Cathedral at Chartres. The transepts are good, and the little corbel-tables running the whole way round, form a series of those grotesque and curiously unecclesiastical faces of men and beasts which we find so often in early church sculpture. In this particular series a gridiron plays a prominent part, which is curious, as the church appears to have no connection with Saint Lawrence. Behind the choir is an old chapel dedicated to Saint Joseph, which has a Romanesque apse; and it is noticeable that in this part of the church the roof groining is simple—that is, without ribs. In the lantern, which is in the form of a cupola, each pendentive is terminated by the figure of a saint in its niche.

High above Saint Nicolas a steep flight of steps leads up to the great Château which has made history for the town below. The most striking view is from the other side, where the magnificent “aile François I^er” rises in imposing fashion above the high road; but the entrance is in the Louis XII. wing to the east, and here the beautiful inner court opens out a varied display of richness. The eastern wing itself contains the private apartments of Louis XII. and his wife, Anne de Bretagne—these are now converted into a local museum and picture gallery—and the lower storey is in the form of an arcade, with unrestored capitals of the fifteenth century. Facing this is the wing of “ruled lines and blank spaces,” constructed by Gaston d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIII., upon the foundations of a wing erected by his ancestor, the poet-duke Charles, whom Henry V. took prisoner at Agincourt, and whose son became Louis XII. The old castle of the Counts of Blois had been sold to the Orléans family by the last of the line in 1397, and the new possessors, each in his day, occupied themselves in restoring and embellishing it. So zealous indeed, in this respect, was Duke Gaston, that, had not fate intervened, not only the west wing but the entire building would have been pulled down to make way for his plans. Happily for posterity, this devastation never took place, and the François I^er wing, the chief treasure of the Château, is still preserved to us much as it was at the end of the sixteenth century, at which time Blois may be said to have reached the zenith of its fame in the history of France. The Château was then a royal residence, and the roll of its inhabitants forms a long list of illustrious names, foremost among which stand those of Catherine dé Medici and Charles IX., Henri III., and the King of Navarre, and the famous Henri de Guise, who met his death here through the suspicion and jealousy of the king, his cousin. In the Guise tragedy the chief interest of the Château appears to centre. Dark hints concerning “le Balafré” are thrown out during the progress through a succession of dim, empty rooms—council room and bed-chamber, oratory and private closet, some flooded with sunshine, others dark with the strange misty curtain that age will sometimes hang across an old chamber, and through whose thin veil one seems to see the shades of those old-time kings and queens, walking, plotting and praying as they did when the Château was alive with the tread of men. All this appears to lead up to the scene of the Guise murder, and as the guide reaches the royal bed-chamber and points through a doorway here and down a passage there, one seems to have reached the heart of the tragedy. There, in the long council-room, the Balafré stood, warming his hands by the fire, when the message came that the king awaited him in a cabinet at the far end of the wing; here, in an ante-room close by, Henri III. lifted the curtain and watched the enemy to his death; there in the dark, narrow passage—too narrow even to allow of his drawing sword—Guise found himself caught like a rat in a trap; here, in the king’s own chamber, he doubled back for safety, and met his death at the foot of the royal bed. It is all very thrilling and very real; and little as there is to love in Henri de Guise, one cannot but pity the man for the manner of his death; and there seems nothing but justice in the murder of the king himself a short time afterwards. This second tragedy took place outside the old dungeon, a gloomy round tower with cross-barred windows and a heavy iron door, behind which the Cardinal de Guise, brother of the Balafré, suffered imprisonment at the hands of his jealous cousin. In the centre of the dungeon floor is a trap door, which, considering the general atmosphere of the place, one naturally associates with an oubliette, but which more probably represented the head of a well, run up through the building in order that the inhabitants of the castle should not suffer from want of water in siege time.

It is curious to note that the historical description to which the visitor listens to-day as he follows his guide through those empty chambers at Blois is almost exactly the same as that given a hundred and twenty years ago. Arthur Young, travelling in France in 1787, paid a visit to Blois, and gives the following account of the Château and its history: “We viewed the castle for the historical monument it affords that has rendered it so famous. They show the room where the council assembled, and the chimney in it before which the Duke of Guise was standing when the king’s page came to demand his presence in the royal closet; the door he was entering when stabbed; the tapestry he was in the act of turning aside; the tower where his brother the cardinal suffered, with a hole in the floor into the dungeon of Louis XI., of which the guide tells many horrible stories, in the same tone, from having told them so often, in which the fellow in Westminster Abbey gives his monotonous history of the tombs.”

CHARTRES

HARTRES,” says Mr. Henry James, “gives us an impression of extreme antiquity, but it is an antiquity that has gone down in the world.” It may be this very decadence that has kept Chartres within itself and prevented it from growing out into a large pretentious city. Many other places which rival it in age and association have either swept away all traces of their antiquity, or else preserved it in dignified contrast to the modern mushroom town. Chartres has done neither. It is scarcely more at the present day than a quaint country town with a very old-fashioned air, a place of steep, twisting streets and quiet little market-squares, the cathedral rising like a giant from the very midst of the houses. Round the town runs a boulevard, known as the Tour-de-Ville, and interesting for the fact that it follows the line of the mediæval defences—ramparts that kept many enemies at bay when Chartres was a power in the kingdom of France. Here and there parts of these defences are still standing, and one fragment in particular forms the foundations of an old convent. Another remnant of the old fighting days is the Porte Guillaume, one of the city gates, built when the march of the English forced every French town to keep itself under bolt and bar. Two round towers, embattled and machicolated, flank a low archway, and to complete the mediæval effect, the ancient fosse still remains before the gate, not grass-grown or choked with rubbish, but filled with a clear stream, just as it might have been in old days.

Autricum of the Carnutes held an important position in Gaul, ranking very near the great capital of the Senones. In pre-Christian times it was a famous Druidic centre; but with the advance of Christianity, Savinian and Potentian, the patron saints of Sens, extended their mission to Chartres, converted the inhabitants, and built their first church, according to tradition, upon a Druid grotto. Later on, the town passed into the possession of a line of counts, who were a very powerful factor in mediæval France. The first Theobald or Thibaut is said to have purchased his domain from the sea-king Hasting, who had penetrated beyond the coast and colonised the lands around the river Eure. His son and successor, Thibaut le Tricheur, lived in a state of constant war with Normandy, and seems to have been regarded as a kind of evil influence by the old Norman chroniclers, whose hero in Thibaut’s day was naturally their own Richard the Fearless. Another of the line was the famous Odo, whose ambition went beyond his own states of Chartres and Blois, and aimed at kingship in Burgundy and even in Italy. Through the greater part of his reign he carried on also the struggle with Normandy which had raged so fiercely in Thibaut’s time, besides the standing war with the Angevin line, represented by Fulk the Black. It was, as Freeman says, the fact of this common enemy in the house of Chartres which first brought Anjou and Normandy into direct contact and perhaps laid the foundations of Anjou’s subsequent connection with England. Chartres, like Nevers, was made a duchy under François I^er; later it passed into the Orléans family, whose nominal appanage it has remained ever since, the eldest son bearing to this day the title of “Duc de Chartres.” It is also interesting to notice that Henri de Navarre broke the long succession of coronations at Rheims by being crowned King of France in Chartres Cathedral, three years after the town had opened its gates to his army in 1591. Some three hundred years later another enemy appeared outside the walls, and once again Chartres found itself in the hands of a foreign power. Mr. Cecil Headlam, in his very interesting “Story of Chartres,” gives a description of the Prussian occupation, part of which may be quoted here as showing the foresight of the Mayor, who in this terrible time, when the whole French nation seemed utterly demoralised, thought rather of the safeguard of the city and its one great monument, than of the doubtful and dearly-won glory of a protracted defence.

“It was on Friday, September 30, 1870, that the Prussian soldiers appeared for the first time near Chartres. Three weeks later Châteaudun fell, after a desperate and heroic defence, for which that picturesque and ancient town paid the dear price of failure. Two days later the enemy marched in force upon Chartres. The tirailleurs and mobiles and troops of the National Guard, who endeavoured to defend the town, after vain marching and counter-marching, with the same generous ardour and utter ineffectiveness as had distinguished the movements of the other armies before the disasters of Wissembourg, Wörth and Sedan, returned exhausted. Without firing a shot they had been rendered incapable of fighting. Fighting in any case would have been useless. It was wisely decided to capitulate, and on the 21st the Mayor and Prefect of the Department drove out to Morancez to save the city and Cathedral, by surrendering them to General von Wittich, from the inevitable destruction of which Châteaudun had given them a terrible example. What they saw on their way of the French defence and the Prussian advance convinced civilians and military men alike that it was impossible to hope to defend Chartres.”

At the head of the Rue St. Jean, where it leads into the Place du Châtelet, one obtains the first and best view of the two beautiful spires at the west end of the Cathedral. The southern tower, dating back to the twelfth century and conceived in a style which harmonises with the broad and massive design of the whole building, is an example of what was contemplated as a finish to the other towers of the Cathedral. The northern tower, built in 1507 by Jean le Texier, well deserves its reputation as the most beautiful Gothic spire ever designed. “The one, fashioned by the Byzantine chisel, sprang into complete being in the heroic ages of faith in the days of war ... the other rose, after a long peace, under the hands of the still Christian architects of the Renaissance, when all dangers and difficulties had been surmounted.”

On contemplating the plan on which Chartres Cathedral was built one is struck with the enormous space which has been allotted to the choir. Here the new religious cult finds its earliest expression, greater provisions are made for its ceremonials, larger spaces are given both in choir and transepts for its gorgeous ritual than we find in Paris, Soissons or Lâon. Bishops, priests, deacons, choristers and serving-men needed a wider platform for the ministration of the sacred rites of the Church, and especially to this end was the Cathedral planned out. It is said that its construction was carried out with incredible rapidity in the desire to meet the pressing requirements of the people, who demanded that the Cathedral should be not only the house of prayer for the bishop and his canons, but essentially the mother church of the humblest of her worshippers.

The prevalence of a style, more or less uniform, with its main attributes harmonious and congruous, is the resultant of these forces working together. The completion of the Cathedral was carried out about 1240, and in 1250 were added the two porches at the entrance to the transepts. The sacristy was built in the thirteenth century, and a century later the little chapel of Saint Piat was attached to the eastern apse. The shortness of the nave is attributed to the desire to utilise the foundations of the old crypt for the choir and not to extend the building farther westward than the two existing towers. Between these two points, the walls of the crypt and the western towers, the nave had to be constructed and without any possibility of further extension.

No less than nine spires were originally designed and their towers actually commenced. What a magnificent effect would have been produced had they been completed! Standing on the high ground of the city, Chartres with its clustering pinnacles would have been one of the wonders of Christendom. The magnificent glass of the thirteenth century is so deep in tone that upon entering the building one is conscious of a darkness that can almost be felt, so much at variance with the effect of the interior of most large French Cathedrals.

The two porches placed outside the transept doors are the subject of a panegyric from the pen of Viollet-le-Duc. He considers them as the most beautiful and harmonious additions ever made to an existing building, and their architects proved themselves to be artists of the very first rank. No more beautiful specimen of a portal of the thirteenth century can elsewhere be found to exist; glorious and rejoicing in colour and in gold, and of surpassing sculpture and full of impressive and solemn statuary.

Near Chartres there are two small towns which might well be taken in a day’s excursion; both are connected with Chartres historically and both have a certain interest of their own certainly not devoid of attraction to one in search of antiquities. One is Châteaudun, whose fall during the war of 1870 was, as has been quoted above, the signal for the surrender of Chartres; the other is Vendôme, the township of the ancient feudal county. From Chartres it is Châteaudun that lies first in our road. It is a straight, neat little town—most of the streets cut one another at right angles—and the smoke of the Franco-Prussian war still seems to hover about the place; one of its chief memories, indeed, is the great fight in October, 1870, when a bare thousand franc-tireurs of the national guard kept the town for half a day against a Prussian army of ten times their strength, and the quiet market-square—now called the Place du 18 Octobre—was transformed into a battle-field. All the heroism that the day called forth, however, could not save the town from being sacked and burnt—the last of a long series of conflagrations, lasting from the sixth to the nineteenth century, that has won for the little town its cheerful, hopeful motto: “Extincta revivisco.” Certainly Châteaudun has risen from the flames with a fresh lease of its quiet life, but it has been completely modernised, and except for a few narrow alleys sloping down towards the river, which would seem to have escaped the general devastation, there is little that does not belong to to-day. This is, however, making an exception of the Château overlooking the Loire; a great exception, since at present all that there is to see in Châteaudun consists in this square pile on the brow of the hill; the rest, whatever it may once have been, is only a memory; and even the Château itself hardly seems a part of the town, since it is not until we have left the little white-painted streets behind that we realise its existence, and then it comes as a gigantic surprise; a huge, square, turreted mass, on its platform of rock, looking away over the rolling meadow lands, untroubled through all the years of siege and conflagration. Thibaut le Tricheur, Count of Champagne, built it in the tenth century; it was rebuilt in the twelfth century, and again by its seigneur, the famous “Bastard of Orléans,” one of the most devoted followers of Joan the Maid. Finally, under Louis XII., François d’Orléans-Longueville applied himself to fresh renovations, and built the splendid façade overhanging the Loire.

Considering that the Duc de Vendôme has always been a title of some importance in France since the early part of the sixteenth century, and the Comtes de Vendôme a power in the feudal world before that, one might feel rather surprised not to find the town itself presenting a more imposing aspect. Vendôme is a picturesque place, but it is more of a long straggling village than anything else, and it is only the ivied ruins on the cliff that take one back—with a stretch of imagination, it must be confessed—to the days of feudalism. Vendôme was originally, it is thought, a Gallic township under the name of Vindocinum; it was then fortified by the Romans, evangelised by Saint Bienheuré, and finally became the seat of a feudal count about the end of the tenth century. In 1030 was founded the abbey of La Trinité, whose church is one of the first “monuments” of Vendôme. It dates from the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries; the beautiful Transition façade is well worth notice, and so is the belfry tower, separated from the church and tapering up to a tall stone spire. Inside the church there are some fine choir stalls of the fifteenth century, of which the carving of the miséricordes is very interesting in its variety and quaintness of design.

The Loire at Vendôme divides into several small streams, and in walking through the town one appears continually to be crossing a succession of bridges and coming upon fresh pictures of clear green water fringed by low-roofed houses and dark lavoirs with their curtains of snowy linen. Outside the town the river winds smoothly away past the cool quiet of the public gardens, to join its tributaries and cut its silver channels through the distant water-meadows.

“The route lay along the plateau until the heights were reached which enclose the valley of the Loir; the road winds down to the river beside hanging woods, red with autumn leaves not yet fallen, and crowned with a ridge of firs. A corner is turned and Vendôme comes in sight, lying beneath the shelter of the old ruined castle on the hill. As the horsemen enter the town the people all come to the doors of their houses and gaze with every sign of interested curiosity. There is an anxious expression in their faces. They do not welcome, though they obey their visitors with alacrity. They bring forth bread and meat and wine, and lay the tables for breakfast, but good cheer they have none to give.”—The Times: “Prussian Occupation of Vendôme.”

ORLÉANS, BOURGES, AND NEVERS

HE thought that the name of the city itself is most likely to call up is that of the Maid who, born far away from Orléans, has taken its name as a kind of surname.... We have got into a way of thinking ... as if Orléans had its chief being as the city of the Maid.” Orléans certainly does share with Rouen the chief honours of association with Joan of Arc, the “Victrix Anglorum,” as she is described on a memorial tablet in the Cathedral, and the town is equally full of monuments to her memory, though the memory in this case is that of a great triumph, whereas at Rouen it marks the last stage, captivity and death.

Orléans was the key of central and southern France, and if the English once got possession of it they would certain overrun all the land south of the Loire; hence its importance to France as a stronghold. Joan set out from Blois late in April, 1429, in charge of a convoy of provisions for the beleaguered city, and arrived opposite the town, on the left bank of the Loire.

From November to the end of April the English had lain before the town, and, although the inhabitants were not actually starving, provisions were very scanty, and the bringing in of fresh supplies was practically an impossibility, since the usual means of approach, the bridge across the Loire, was blocked by the enemy, who occupied the outstanding fortress of Les Augustins at the bridge, and on the right bank. On the Orléans bank the English had built several strong bastilles, guarding the city and effectually preventing any communication by means of the western highways. The weak spot was on the east side, where the besiegers had one stronghold only, the fortress of Saint Loup; and from this point Dunois, the general-in-chief, and La Hire, the leader of Joan’s army, intended to effect an entrance; but the Maid herself, with that love of directness which characterises her whole career, desired to attack the English, not at their strongest, but at their weakest point. Both wind and stream were against their ferrying over to Saint Loup; and in the end Joan’s simple tenacity and childish belief in the counsel of her “voices” carried the day. The army was sent back to Blois, there to cross to the right bank and attack Orléans from the west, and meanwhile she herself, the wind having turned, crossed in a boat by night and entered the town with La Hire and Dunois. She was hailed by the people of Orléans as an angel of deliverance, and lodged in the house of the treasurer Boucher, near the Porte Regnart at the north-west angle of the city walls; and from this vantage point Joan watched the enemy’s movements, appearing from time to time upon the ramparts and bidding defiance to the English, who, as was perhaps natural, retorted by showering insults upon her. On May 4 she rode out in full state to meet her army which had arrived from Blois. Three days later the great fight began. All this time the English troops had scarcely moved a finger to hinder the French operations, but when the enemy crossed the river by a bridge of boats and made a feint of attacking the fortress on the left bank, retreating apparently in confusion, the English sallied forth after them, thus provoking a real attack upon the bridge fort. During the fray the girl-leader was wounded; never for a moment did she give in, but stood in the fosse grasping the white banner—sword she would not wield—and cheering on her companions; with the result that by nightfall the position was gained, the English were driven out, and Joan returned in triumph into Orléans by the bridge. The greater part of her victory was now accomplished. On the following day the French forces marched outside the walls of the town to meet the English line; but Talbot and his men had not reckoned with what they, in the superstition of their time, believed to be “a force not of this world,” and the morning light shone upon their helmets and spears in full retreat towards the north. France was saved, and a clear field was left for Charles the Dauphin—the gates of his kingdom were flung open wide, that he might enter in and possess it.

But the greatness of Orléans belongs to an earlier day, before Joan heard the voices in the Domrémy meadows, probably before Domrémy ever existed. It was Attila the Hun who indirectly brought the town up the ladder of fame. Aurelianum in the fifth century was a desirable stronghold, and as such, Attila spied it afar from his Asiatic plains, and set out to conquer, and, as one authority has it, to “vainly besiege” it, though Freeman inclines to the opinion that “the business of West Goth and Roman was, in the end, not to keep them (the Huns) out, but to drive them out.” However that may be, Attila was eventually forced to give up his project, and Aurelianum emerged from the struggle glorious and triumphant, to become the seat and stronghold of kings, and, until its union with Paris in 613, the capital of a separate kingdom. Since then it has been the scene of siege, martyrdom and persecution, down to the days of the Franco-Prussian war, when it finished an eventful history by a Prussian occupation in October, 1870, a sequel to the battles of Patay and Bonbay.

Orléans is beautifully placed on a hillside overlooking the Loire. With this physical advantage, and its long list of historical associations, one cannot help feeling that it might have done better for itself, and have become more than just a quiet, unobtrusive and rather dull city, with all its monuments easily attainable. The Cathedral is an example of the last lingering phase of Gothic architecture, and was rebuilt, so we are told—after its destruction by the Huguenots—during the interval between 1600 and 1829. The building as a mass has great merit, for the architects have made an effort to clothe it with dignity, and one feels that the church itself is conceived in a spirit to make it, certainly at a distance, not unworthy of the stronghold of Clovis and his successors.

The train which we took from Orléans to Bourges was slow enough to enable us to look out, almost as easily as from a voiture, at the richly wooded country. Here and there a small pyramidal church tower peeps out from the trees, but, as a rule, there is little sign of life in this pleasant country, and even the fields and the gorse-covered commons are bare of sheep and cattle. This train-d’omnibus, in discharge of its functions as a mail train, distributed letter-bags at every station. Here were waiting young girls acting as postmistresses, many of whom had come from a considerable distance, having ridden on bicycles, bare-headed, in the scorching sun, along dusty roads, to deliver up their heavy loads and to enjoy a chat with the travelling postman, who was evidently welcomed by them as bringing all the latest bits of gossip along the line.

About a mile away there is a very beautiful view of the town, and the general effect is a grey one. Roofs and houses—the latter perhaps originally built of yellow-white stone—have all weathered to a beautiful grey, and there is an air of mediævalism about the place. Bourges, indeed, like many other towns in France, goes back to early days for its greatness, and belongs far more to the past than to the present. The fifteenth century saw it at the height of its fame as a king’s residence; Charles VII., perhaps finding the more northerly towns too hot for him during the English occupation, took up his abode there and became for the time being “King of Bourges”; and Louis XI. founded a university in the town.

Here was born the famous Bourdaloue, and Boucher, the painter of Versailles before “le Déluge,” Boucher who was

“a Grasshopper, and painted—
Rose-water Raphael—en couleur de rose,
The crowned Caprice, whose sceptre, nowise sainted,
Swayed the light realms of ballets and bon-mots;
Ruled the dim boudoir’s demi-jour, or drove
Pink-ribboned flocks through some pink-flowered grove,”

and who now, his Grasshopper days ended, lies buried beside his mother in the Church of Saint Bonnet.

Perhaps the principal interest of old Bourges centres in the name of Jacques Cœur, the merchant prince, “a Vanderbilt or a Rothschild of the fifteenth century,” who in his days of prosperity built a great house on the hill-side where his native town stands. Cœur, we are told, founded the trade between France and the Levant; later he became Master of the Mint in Paris, and one of the Royal Commissioners to the Languedoc Parliament. He was three times sent on an embassy to foreign powers, notably to Pope Nicholas V. Charles VII., weak, unstable, and always in need of money, relied on him absolutely, but with the usual characteristics of a weak master, was one of the first to desert and despoil him of his wealth when occasion offered. The beginning of the end came through a disgraceful and apparently quite unfounded accusation against Cœur at the time of the death of the famous Agnes Sorel, whom he was accused of poisoning. Jacques was too prosperous not to have enemies, and these were, as usual, prompt to use every opportunity against him. The first steps taken, calumnies of all kind poured in to defame the man whom France had once delighted to honour, and the rest of his career is a strange mixture of exile, mysterious captivity, and equally mysterious escape, honourable reception in Rome, and friendship with the Pope; the last scene of all, perhaps the strangest and most foreign to all idea of a peaceful, prosperous merchant—for here we see him in command, not of a fleet of trading ships laden with merchandise, but of vessels of war sent against the Turks by Pope Calixtus III. Rumour has it that, far from dying in poverty and sorrow, Jacques Cœur, at the end of his life, had acquired greater riches than when at the zenith of his fame in France, but the fact remains that he died in exile, with a cloud over his memory which was not cleared away until many years after, when popular favour again smiled on his name, and he became, what he remains to this day, the citizen-hero of Bourges.

There is a very charming description—too long to quote here—in Mr. Henry James’ “Little Tour in France” of the house of Jacques Cœur; and one point of interest attaching to it is that it is built upon the old defences of the town, and at the back are many considerable remains of solid Roman bastions.

It is one of the most beautiful types of a fifteenth-century town-house that can possibly be imagined—a veritable remnant of the ancient prosperity of Bourges, of a time when such houses were no uncommon feature in the streets—when men who had made their fame and fortune loved to build for themselves a beautiful home in their native town, and enrich it with every conceivable ornament. Modern nouveaux riches indeed do the same, though perhaps not in their native place, where their memory as butcher or baker might, in their eyes, tell against them; but the difference between their “mansions” and the hotel of Jacques Cœur is the difference between an age when the Renaissance was in its early freshness and an age when it has suffered the degradations of many modern horrors in the style that is popularly designated “handsome.” No one looking upon the delicate sculptures, the wonderful wood carving, the courtyard with its cloister, the lovely porticos and galleries, can doubt the taste of the man who built and lived in this “maison pleine de mystères.”