Literature and Commerce

Rouen est ville bien marchande
C’est a cause de la mer grande
Et est ce semble sans doutance
Quasi la meilleure de France.

Ouy fameuse cite c’est toy qui prens la peine D’aller chercher bien loin l’ambre, la porcelaine, Le sucre, la muscade, et tant d’excellents vins.... ... Soye, oueate, tabac, draps de laine, poisson, Bois, bleds, sel, bescars, tout luy vient a foison.

Such popular festivals as that I have just described upon Ascension Day are of very ancient origin, even if they do not date back to that earliest “Fête aux Normands,” whose institution you will remember in 1070. Two years afterwards began the Confrérie de la Vierge to which Pierre Dare, Lieutenant-General for the King, gave fresh lustre when he was elected its Master in 1486. Though older poems (like that of Robert Wace) are connected with the Confrérie, to him is due the beginning of those “Palinods” sung in honour of the Virgin in the Church of St. Jean des Près, which were called the “Puy de Conception,” like the Puy d’Amour of the Provencal troubadours. The name probably originated in the refrain which ran through all the various metres allowed in the poems which were sent in for competition, as Pierre Grognet describes in 1533

“On y présente les rondeaulx
Beaulx pallinotz et chans royaulx
Et sappelle celle journée
La feste du Puy honoree.”

In these rhymes are preserved just those details of the people’s life for which we have been looking. Great events and mighty personages in the world outside are passed unnoticed. The important trivialities of the householder’s existence are the main theme of every verse. The Muse Normande of David Ferrand is a collection of such fragments of many “Concours des Palinods” from its beginning till his death in 1660. They are chiefly written in that “langue purinique où gros normand” which was the distinctive patois of the working classes, and especially of those “purins” or “ouvriers de la draperie” who dwelt in the parishes of Martainville, of St. Vivien, and St. Nicaise in the city. You may hear it to this day in the villages of Caux. Here the gossip of the populace is reproduced, and you read of the burdens laid upon the people, of the abundance of wine (which did away with any need for beer), of the rivalries of corporations, of the amusements of the town, the mysteries and Miracle Plays, the Basoche, and the rough practical joking of the populace.

One of the most important subjects, for our purpose, in all David Ferrand’s verse is that famous “Boise de Saint Nicaise,” round which a seventeenth-century war waged, more bitterly and fiercely disputed than half the contests which take up the pages of your sober royal histories. You must know that this “Boise de Saint Nicaise” was an enormous beam of wood, chained by iron bars and links to the church walls, where every evening the gossips used to gather in the cemetery and talk over the scandal of the parish, or regulate the proceedings of the town. Thrice in 220 years had Rouen been besieged, once by the English and twice by its own countrymen, and each time the virtues of the famous “boise” had saved it from pillage and desecration. Upon its black and shining length the disputes of every century had been heard and settled: masters had brought up their quarrels with the workmen, merchants had wrangled over sharp practice in their business, girls had been summoned to receive a lecture from the elders of the parish on the flightiness and immodesty of their behaviour. No parish had ever such a palladium of its dignity. And you can easily conceive the derision and contempt with which the mighty “boise” was treated by the boys of the rival and neighbouring parish of St. Godard, who used to sing

“Les habitants de Saint Nicaise
Ont lé coeur haut et fortune basse.”

This was a bad pun on the choeur, or choir, of the church that was too good for its worshippers. For there was a great contrast between the populations on each side of the dividing line. St. Godard was filled with magistrates and mighty men of law, who lived in sumptuous houses and carved their coats of arms upon their massive sideboards, who quoted Malherbe, and approved the early efforts of a young man called Corneille, and prided themselves upon the delicacy and scholarship of their speech. In St. Nicaise, on the contrary, you heard little save the “purinique,” or patois of the workmen; in narrow, dark, and twisting streets the drapers and weavers and dyers carried on their trades and earned their bread by the sweat of their brow. Their children had to work early for their living, and helped the business of their parents when still in the first years of their youth. No wonder these who “scorned delights and lived laborious days” laughed at the effeminacy of their neighbours, saying that

“Aux enfants de Saint Godard
L’esprit ne venait qu’ a trente ans.”

By 1632 this feeling of rivalry and mutual distrust had been sharpened into positive hatred; for, of course, when the troubles of the Ligue had come, and St. Godard had declared for its old kings and saints, St. Nicaise had openly professed belief in Villars and Mayenne, and almost raised a chapel to the memory of Jacques Clement the assassin; and you may imagine the gibes of Royalist St. Godard when the tide of fortune turned against the rebel parish. Athens and Sparta were not more different, or more hostile. One day the smouldering fires broke into flame. It was the day of a procession when, at the very meeting line of the two parishes, the clergy of St. Godard, splendid in gold and embroidery, with a cross of gold before them, and behind them a line of ladies richly dressed and escorted by red-robed magistrates, were moving in procession, with the banner at their head presented by the Lady President of Gremonville, whereon the figure of the patron saint was embroidered upon crimson velvet hung round with cloth of gold. Consider the disdain of these fine ladies for the modest little gathering that walked, across the way, beneath a little banner of ordinary taffetas bearing a tiny effigy of St. Nicaise, worked in worn colours of old faded pink, and followed by a crowd of workmen clad in blouse and sabot and rough woollen caps. At a certain point the contrast became unbearable. The workmen, with a shout of fury, made a sudden rush upon that hateful new banner of St. Godard, tore it from the standard-bearer’s hands, and threw it in the muddy waters of the boundary-stream. How the two processions got home after that you may imagine for yourself. It says much for the control of the respective clergy that there were no open blows at once. But that night St. Nicaise was vulgarly merry, and St. Godard wrapped its wrongs in ominous and aristocratic silence. What the songs were that those workmen sang in the cemetery of St. Nicaise you can read in a queer little book written by one “Abbe Raillard” in 1557, an “Abbe des Conards,” who imitates Rabelais when he tries to be original, but is of far more value when he merely reproduces what he heard, to wit, “la fleur des plus ingenieux jeux chansons et menus flaiollements d’icelle jeunesse puerille, receuilly de plusieurs rues lieux et passages où il estoit repandu depuis la primitive recreation, aaze, jeunesse et adolescence Normande rouennoise.”

Here is a chorus which no doubt resounded on that night of victory over St. Godard

“Jay menge un oeuf
La lange dun boeuf
Quatre vingt moutons
Autant de chapons
Vingt cougnons de pain
Ancore ayge faim,”

or this, again

“Gloria patri ma mere a petri
Elle a faict une gallette
Houppegay, Houppegay j’ay bu du cidre Alotel (bis).”

Unfortunately, after having gone shouting to bed, the men of St. Nicaise slept sound without a thought of possible reprisals. But the young bloods “across the way” were all alert. Waiting till the change of guard at St. Hilaire should make that customary noise of clinking arms and tramping feet which every citizen would recognise and forget, sixty of the bravest champions crossed the Rubicon and advanced in the depth of the darkness to the cemetery of St. Nicaise. With heavy labour they broke up the sacred chains, detached the time-worn rivets, and dragged off the famous timber, the “Boise” of St. Nicaise, the palladium of the obnoxious parish. The next morning the gossips discovered to their stupefaction that there was no log to sit upon! Following a few traces that were left here and there, the horrified drapers and tanners found the smoking remnants of their cherished wood scattered in the square of St. Hilaire, surrounded by a laughing crowd of the children and young men of St. Godard. Vengeance was plotted on that very evening, and a smart skirmish took place up and down the streets of the aristocratic quarter, in which the victory of the velvet doublets only roused redoubled ardour in the men of smocks and leather aprons. The Palais de Justice and the majesty of the Law was obliged to intervene. The Duc de Longueville, Governor of the Province, tried to smooth over the crisis with the gift of a new and most enormous log; but nothing could replace the relic that was gone. At last the good priests of each parish set to work to heal the breach, and soundly damned each hardened sinner who attempted to break the good peace of the town with further quarrels. Messire Francois de Harlai, Archbishop of Rouen, aided their efforts, and at last the feud died down; but the event was never forgotten:

“Donc qu’o mette o calendrier
Qu’o dix huitiesme de Janvier
Fût pris et ravy notte BOISE
Boise dont j’etions pu jaloux
Et pu glorieux entre nous
Que Rouen n’est de Georg d’Amboise.”

David Ferrand’s “patois” has preserved a good deal of the life and humour racy of the soil that gave Rouen her character, even after the sixteenth century was over. Something of the old life and its bravery lingered a little longer, and in the more pretentious Latin poems of Hercule Grisel you see how all these fêtes and jollities lasted on till well into the seventeenth century. The Fête St. Anne, when boys dressed as angels and girls as virgins ran about the streets; the St. Vivien, which was a great popular fair in Bois Guillaume and in the city; the Festin du Cochon, when Parliament was dined; the Pentecost, when birds and leaves and flowers were rained upon the congregation from the roof of the Cathedral; the Feast of the Farmers, in November, when the principal dish of roast goose was provided by a crowd of boys who had to kill the wretched bird by throwing sticks at it, as it fluttered helplessly at the end of a high pole; the Papegault, when the Cinquantaine, or Company of Arquebusiers, went a-shooting to settle who should be the Roi d’Oiseau, very much as it is described in Germany in the pages of Jean Paul Richter; the Jeu d’Anguille in May, when there was a jousting match upon the river like the water tournaments of Provence; the jollities of Easter Eve, when bands of children went about the streets shouting derision at the now dishonoured herring, and pitching barrels and fish-barrows into the river; the greatest and most impressive ceremony of all, the Levee de la Fierté, upon Ascension Day all these festivities made up a large part of the life of the real Rouennais of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which was so narrowed and restricted in itself that it took every opportunity of expanding into a common gaiety shared by all the neighbours and the countryside.

The river was a scene of far greater bustle and activity and picturesqueness than it is now. Like the Thames, the Seine lost half its beauty when the old watermen disappeared. The harbour of the sixteenth century was always full of movement: sailors were always spreading over the riverside streets into the countless inns and drinking-places; the river was full of boats going to and fro; the bank upon the farther side was the fashionable promenade of all the ladies of the town; the bridges were filled with idlers who had no better business than to look on. At the fête called the Gâteau des Rois all the ships were lit up in the port, and every tradesman in the town sent presents to his customers: the druggists gave gifts of liqueurs and condiments; the bakers brought cakes to every door; the chandlers brought the “chandelles des Rois” to every household. At the favourite meeting-places of Ponts de Robec, or the Parvis Notre Dame, or the Église St. Vivien, the housewives gathered to watch their husbands drink and gamble, or bought flowers from the open stalls, or chaffered with the apprentices who stood ready for the bargain. Meanwhile, from all the forests near, the children of the poor were coming in with bundles of the faggots they were allowed to gather free; at every large house parties were gathering, each guest with her special contribution to the common fund of sweetmeats and of fruit, some even had brought bottles of the famous mineral water sold at the Church of St. Paul, and the Confrérie de St. Cecile was hard-worked distributing its musicians broadcast to the many private gatherings that called for pipe and tabour. Then as the evening lowered, men told stories over the hearth of the girl who had seen three suns at once upon the morn of Holy Trinity from a neighbouring hill-top, or of the luck of their compere Jehan, whose boy, born on the day of the conversion of St. Paul, was safe for all his life from danger of poison or of snake-bite. All these customs and superstitions are reflected in Hercule Grisel’s Latin verses, which he begins with a needless apology

“Rotomagi patriae versu volo pandere mores,
Quis captum patriae damnet amore suae?”

No one will blame his patriotic love of every detail of the life around him; and though the Latin that he uses might well have been exchanged for his own language, it must be remembered that even when Malherbe and Corneille, Racine and Boileau, were writing French, the older language kept a firm hold on such men as de Thou, Descartes, Bossuet, Arnauld, and Nicole, who desired to appeal to European audiences. “Victurus Latium débet habere liber” was their motto; and by Jesuits and Oratorians, University dignitaries and ecclesiastics, lawyers and doctors, the same language was used as that in which Hercule Grisel has preserved the life of the town from 1615 to 1657.

The greatest name of seventeenth-century Rouen is Pierre Corneille, “ce vieux Romain parmi les francais” as Voltaire called him; and we may be grateful that after getting the second prize for Latin verses in the third class of the Jesuit College, he gave up stilted affectations for the vigorous phrases of his mother-tongue. Though his brother Thomas passes over the little episode in silence, his nephew Fontenelle lets us into a literary secret which reveals Corneille’s first love affair in Rouen. In the comedy of “Melite,” the heroine is Catherine the daughter of the Receveur des Aides, Eraste is the poet himself. In real life, Thomas du Pont, the Tircis of the play, supplanted his friend and married the lady. It was to another Rouen acquaintance that Corneille owed the advice to study Spanish plays, which resulted in his imitations of de Castro, and no doubt the many Spanish families then settled, for commercial reasons, in the Rue des Espagnols and elsewhere, helped to turn the young poet’s thoughts in the same direction. His evident knowledge of the details of legal procedure, when it cannot be ascribed to the natural Norman turn for lawsuits, is accounted for by his position as Avocat du Roi and one of the Admiralty Court (called the “Marble Table”) of Rouen. Though in the “Cid” his law is Spanish, and in “Horace” it is a paraphrase of Livy, yet Corneille was the first to realise that the speeches of lawyers, which were then little known to the general public, would form a very interesting scene upon the stage. His immediate success proved the worth of the idea. But that such success was possible at all is even more extraordinary than any particular form it may have taken. He created types for well-nigh every kind of dramatic literature in France, in the midst of his work as an advocate, among serious family troubles, through years of plague, of popular riots, of military occupations.

His house in the Rue Corneille, formerly the Rue de la Pie, is still preserved, though the front has been damaged by the widening of the street, and it is marked by a bust of the poet over the entrance. In the last few months it has been put up for auction, and it may be hoped that the town authorities have taken advantage of the opportunity to secure it from further mutilation. For it has been not merely the home of Pierre Corneille and his brother Thomas, but the meeting-place of several other men distinguished in French literature. In the summer of 1658, for instance, Moliere brought his travelling troupe to Rouen, and set up his theatre at the bottom of the Rue du Vieux Palais. There he played in “L’Etourdi” and “Le Dépit Amoureux,” which Corneille went to see, and tradition says that the most distinguished of her audience fell in love with du Parc, the pretty actress, from the spectators’ seats, not improbably on the occasion when his own play of “Nicomede” was being performed. It is certain at any rate that Moliere, who was then some thirty-six years old, visited Corneille, who was sixteen years his senior, and already famous in the wider world of literature. And it is at least curious that only after the six months during which his visits to the elder poet must have been both frequent and fruitful, did Jean Baptiste Poquelin become recognised as the Moliere of “Le Malade Imaginaire,” a play, which I confess I would rather hear to-day than anything Corneille ever wrote, even though Parisian audiences can still patriotically endure almost the whole series of his heroic dramas. This was not Moliere’s first visit to Rouen, where a peculiarly dark and dirty street preserves the memory of his light-hearted appearances. For there is his signature in the town registers of 1643, when he was only twenty-one, and as the date is November 3, the coincidence of time has tempted patriotic antiquarians to suggest that his first debut in public was at the famous Foire du Pardon. What Rouen looked like at this time you may see in the view, reproduced from Merian’s engraving of 1620, printed with this chapter.

Even if the language and ideas of Corneille’s plays do not touch a sympathetic chord in these days when the musketeers of Dumas and the bravery of Cyrano de Bergerac hold the stage on both sides of the Channel, it is impossible to refuse to Corneille a very high position in any estimate of French dramatic literature. With that estimate I am not here concerned, but in sketching the history of his birthplace, I may be permitted to suggest some of the influences which may be traced from it upon his work. And in addition to those already mentioned, I would especially refer to an occurrence some time previously, which left its undoubted marks upon the writing of Corneille, and may also serve to introduce you to yet another interesting figure in the tale of Rouen. For when he was only thirty-three, when he had won fame with the “Cid,” and had followed up his success by “Horace” and by “Cinna,” Corneille had the advantage of meeting a family of particular distinction.

In 1639 the father of Blaise Pascal was sent down to Rouen as an “Intendant du Roi.” Though but sixteen, the youth had already attracted the notice of the mathematical world by his treatise on conic sections. Even when only twelve the precocious boy had worked out the solutions of the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid unaided. While at Rouen he invented a calculating machine, and got a workman in the town to set it up. In 1646 he made his famous experiments on the vacuum before more than five hundred people, including half a dozen sceptical Jesuit fathers. Though his famous letters on the burning question of Jansenism were not written until 1656, after he had returned to Paris, yet the religious influence of the family must have been a strong one upon all their intimate friends, and it is hardly too much to suggest that under this influence Corneille wrote “Polyeucte” and “Theodore,” even if it be too great an extension of the idea to suggest that Racine’s “Esther” and “Athalie,” even Voltaire’s “Zaïre,” were also due to the same impressions.

It is pleasant to imagine that cultured circle, conversing over the troubles of the time or arguing on literary and scientific subjects. There were two girls in the Pascal family, the pretty Gilberte, who very soon married a young councillor of Rouen at twenty-one, and Jacqueline, five years her junior, who won the prize at the Puy des Palonods, and had the honour of an ode from Corneille on her literary success. There was Berthe Corneille too, the mother of Fontenelle, and though Thomas was but young, he may well have had his share in a friendship which must have been very attractive to his older brother. This house of theirs in the Rue Corneille was not the only one in which Pierre wrote his tragedies. Indeed, I imagine it was more the town-lodgings of his legal father, and only used by the sons when business kept them near the Law-courts. In the country outside, at Petit-Couronne south of the Seine, Corneille did nearly all his best work; and in estimating that work it is well to remember that he was not merely born at Rouen, but that he lived and wrote there till he was fifty-six.

The Pascals left Rouen in 1648 during the disturbances of the Fronde. They had come there in even more troublous times, for the riots called the “Revolte des Va-nu-Pieds” had only just been quelled before their arrival. The salt-tax had already created strong discontent in Southern Normandy, and in August 1639 a tax on the dyers roused the men of the Rue Eau de Robec into such hot rebellion, that they killed the King’s officer and burnt the tax-gatherer’s house. In the same street to-day, which must be but little changed, you may still imagine the furious assemblages by those black dye-stained waters that flow muddily beneath their multitude of bridges from the Place des Ponts de Robec to the eastern confines of the town. Chancellor Seguier was sent down with several thousand infantry and 1200 horse, called the “Fleaux de Dieu,” and kept the gallows as busy as at any Black Assizes for some three months.

One sad result of all this was that many of the festivities described in the earlier pages of this chapter never came off at all in 1640. “En ceste année,” says the local chronicler sadly, “il n’y a point eu d’estrennes, ny chante ‘Le Roy Boit.’ En la maison de Ville n’y eust point de gasteau party, ni lé lendemain a disner.” And the loss of the famous “Fête des Rois” at the Hotel de Ville was something more than ordinarily unfortunate. For it was celebrated each year with much pomposity, to the sound of all the carillons of the town ringing lustily while every member of the Council “tirait lé roi de la fève,” and the lucky winner of the Bean, after being presented with a wax basket of artificial fruit (for the sixteenth century is over now), at once gave his comrades an enormous feast, at which the toast of the evening was received with loud cries of “Le Roy Boit.” Nor was this the only festivity indulged in by the City Fathers. The “Feu St. Jean” was solemnly lit by the senior sheriff, to the sound of pipe and tabour. The “Bûche de Noel,” or Yule log, was burnt in the Grande Salle. Here the different members of the Estates of Normandy were feasted, here the civic cérémonials were conducted with many presents, speeches, and “toasts.” And the industries of the town seemed to flourish, in spite of the miseries suffered under Richelieu. Trade spread to England, Spain, Africa, Florida, Brazil; even with Canada a brisk bartering of furs went on, and in 1627 the baptism is registered in the Cathedral, early in December, of Amantacha, a native of Canada, who was “held at the font” by Madame de Villars, and the Duc de Longueville, to be blessed by Monseigneur Francois de Harlay. Half a century later, it was from Rouen that René Cavalier de la Salle set out to explore the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico; and by a Rouen diplomat, Ménager, was drawn up in 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht, against which modern British inhabitants of Newfoundland are complaining so bitterly in 1898.

But for Englishmen a far more interesting fact in seventeenth-century Rouen is that Lord Clarendon died at N Rue Damiette on December 7, 1674. The house is standing still, behind a garden that is shut off from the street by high gates, and is not open to the public, though by a fortunate accident I was enabled to see it in the August of 1897. It is known as the Hotel d’Aligre, and as the property of Mademoiselle Le Verdier is almost unchanged since the great exile lived in it two centuries ago. There are three windows on the ground floor and a basement. Between the two windows of the first floor is a medallion held by two figures. On each side of the circular pediment is a little “Mansard” window in the roof, and on the pediment itself are two statues. The windows are all decorated with carved flowers and wreaths, and the cornice beneath the eaves is prettily ornamented. This is the main façade looking out on the interior court. The garden front has less decoration, but is an extremely elegant example of the simple town house of the period. Among the shrubs the fountain for which Lord Clarendon especially asked still plays in its old stone basin, and beyond the trees is the Cemetery of St. Maclou.

He had lived, during his exile, in Montpelier, Moulins, and Évreux, and at last he moved nearer to England and wrote pathetically asking to be recalled. Seven years, his letter says, was the term of God’s displeasure, yet for more than seven had he borne the displeasure of the King. A longer life no man could grant him, he asked only that death might not come to him in a foreign land, but in England near his children. His prayer was not granted, and in 1674 the archives of the Hotel de Ville in Rouen record that the King of France had allowed “Monsieur lé Comte de Clarendon, Chancelier de l’Angleterre” to live where he pleased within the kingdom by consent of His Majesty of Great Britain. The house now leased by Monsieur lé Comte (goes on this sad little record) used to have a small lake in the garden, and Monsieur desired that water might again be directed into it. The request was granted that same month at a meeting held in the Town Hall.

The first mention of a building on this spot is in the Town Records of October 1448, when it is called “Hostel des Presses de la Rue de la Miette,” a name for the street which seems to show that this “Damiette” is at any rate not of eastern origin. The word “Presses” is connected with the story of Rouen trade by the fact that it commemorates the presses set up for pressing and finishing cloth by one of that family of Dufour who did so much towards the decoration of their parish church of St. Maclou. The house that is standing now was built (though without its later seventeenth-century ornaments) by Guillaume lé Fieu, who had been treasurer of the Stables of Catherine de Medicis, or “Receveur de l’Ecurie de la Reine” in 1558, and the Archives of the Department now possess, by the gift of later occupants of the house, a very interesting manuscript of his accounts for a year in this capacity. By the untiring diligence of M. Ch. de Beaurepaire these have been analysed, and his paper describing them, though too detailed to be reproduced here, is of the highest importance for any writer attempting to describe the habits of a queen whose abilities as a horsewoman were so highly praised by Brantome. Guillaume lé Fieu had evidently considerable financial abilities, for we find him promoted, later on, to be “Receveur General de la Généralité de Rouen,” and finally “Maitre Ordinaire de la Chambre des Comptes de Normandie,” so that he is also connected with the two beautiful buildings, so different in style and date, which were described in Chapter XI.

In N Rue Damiette he died in 1584, having scarcely completed the house before his daughter married one of the King’s secretaries. In January 1646, an old lease shows that the house was owned by Henry Dambray, “Conseiller au Parlement,” and it was by him let for a year to Lord Clarendon. It was called the Hotel de Senneville until the Revolution, when it became the property of the families of Pommereux and d’Alligre. Though Lord Clarendon was first buried in Rouen, when his grand-daughters (through the marriage of the Duke of York, brother of Charles II., with his elder daughter) became Queens of England, his remains were transported from Rouen to Westminster Abbey, where they now are.

The last scene by which this tale of Rouen was connected with the history of France was when Captain Valdory held the town against Henri IV. And in leaving for a moment more domestic details of the city’s story, I can suggest the transition no better than by telling you of another literary claim which Rouen archaeologists will not permit a visitor to forget, the authorship of the famous “Satyre Menippee,” which did as much as any political pamphlet could ever do to reveal to the people the true character of the Ligue, and to restore their affection to that King Henri whom for so long they had refused within their gates. This immortal piece of sarcasm and good sense was written after the Etats de la Ligue of January 1593. De Thou said, “lé premier auteur de l’écrit est, croit-on, un prêtre du pays de Normandie, homme de bien....” And the edition of 1677 gives his name as “Monsieur LeRoy, chanoine de Rouen, qui avoit este aumosnier du Cardinal de Bourbon.” In the portions before each harangue, he mentions the tapestry in Rouen Cathedral, the Revolte de la Harelle, the Foire St. Romain, and other details, with an accuracy and affection which betray the citizen. He went blind in 1620, and died in penury in 1627.

The troubles of the League had barely died away before the agitation of the Fronde began, and after the Fronde princes had been arrested in January 1650, the Duchesse de Longueville tried to continue the rôle of her husband, though his party had fairly been laughed out of Rouen. Her own attempts were thwarted by Mazarin, who brought the little Louis XIV., then only twelve years old, to Rouen for fifteen days in February 1650. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes repaid this hospitality in somewhat untoward fashion, for it reduced the population of the town by 20,000 souls (of whom many carried their trade to England or the Low Countries), and commerce almost disappeared. “Men live,” cried St. Simon, “on the grass of the field in Normandy.”

Yet the exhaustless vitality of the town was not easily tapped. In 1723 Voltaire found nothing to complain of, and in the Rue aux Juifs the first edition of his “Henriade” was printed by Robert Viret. In 1731 he came back, and in the Rue du Bec, or the Rue Ganterie, had many pleasant conversations with M. de Bourgtheroulde, M. de Fresquienne, and others, but he left his little sting behind him as usual, and it remains so true that I must reproduce it here, on the theme “Vous n’avez point de mai en Normandie.”

“Vos climats ont produit d’assez rares merveilles
C’est lé pays des grands talents
Des Fontenelle des Corneilles
Mais ce ne fût jamais l’asile du printemps.”

As the eighteenth century progressed, commercial prosperity returned with extraordinary rapidity, and the town shows every sign of making an intelligent use of its opportunities. A mission is sent to Smyrna and Adrianople to learn the textile methods of the East; dyers in the Rue Eau de Robec are busier than ever; the Quartier Cauchoise is set apart for industrial work, for silk and wools and linens; there is a great storehouse for grain, a huge “Halle des Toiles”; a Bourse for business men. In 1723 a new “Romaine,” or Custom-House, was built, which involved the destruction of the Porte Haranguerie and the Porte de la Viconte, and upon its triangular pediment was placed Coustou’s beautiful carving of “Commerce,” of which I reproduce a drawing in these pages. After the Revolution the “Tribunal des Douanes” was held in the Maison Bourgtheroulde, until in 1838 the present “Douane” was built by Isabelle, and Coustou’s relief was set beneath its rotunda inside. The various fortunes of the Custom-House of Rouen have been described by M. Georges Dubosc, another of those patriotic antiquarian writers, in whom Rouen is richer than any provincial town I know. His large volume on the architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gives so complete and accurate a list that I am fortunately relieved from any discussion of a period with which I must confess an uninstructed want of sympathy. But I owe it to his insight that the beautiful courtyard (illustrated in this chapter) in the Rue Petit Salut (now N Rue Ampere) was not put down as sixteenth century in my notes, a date to which I was inclined by the fine open staircase and doorway on the right of the courtyard. On its left is an undoubted Renaissance pillar, probably taken from its original position in another place, and high above you rises a gabled window with carved sides.

The only historical event I have been tempted to connect with this spot is the entry of Louis d’Orléans in 1452, who is said to have lodged in the “Hotel d’Estellan, Rue Petit Salut.” But the house is worth visiting if only to speculate on the dungeon windows in the corner of the little street outside, and to look up the Impasse Petit Salut a little further on, where the Tour de Beurre rises with an extraordinary effect of solitary beauty above the twisted roof trees into the sky.

By the time of Louis XV. it becomes somewhat difficult to find the interesting men of this or any other French city; you must look for them in the anti-chambers of the Duc de Choiseul, in the robing-rooms of the Pompadour or the Du Barry. In 1774 Rouen saw the typical sight of the Duchesse de Vauguyon reviewing her husband’s troops. When Louis XV. passed through the town, and the Pompadour was seen smiling by his side, the citizens’ reception of the doubtful honour was a very cold one. And when Louis XVI. paid his call of ceremony upon the Mayor, a still more melancholy presage broke the harmony of the peal that welcomed him from the Cathedral belfry, for the great bell Georges d’Amboise which weighed 36,000 pounds, and had rung in every century since the great minister of Louis XII. gave him to the town cracked suddenly, and was never heard again. He has a successor now, but his own metal was used for quite another purpose. When the Revolution broke out, the bronze that had served to call the faithful from all the countryside to prayer was melted into cannon and roundshot that were to send the Royalists to heaven by much quicker methods.

Rouen passed comparatively lightly through the Reign of Terror. Only 322 persons were guillotined in the whole of Normandy, and the local justices beheaded nearly as many in suppressing the disorders that followed the general disorganisation of society. Even on the 1st of November 1793 we hear of the first night of Boieldieu’s “La Belle Coupable” performed at the Theatre de la Montagne. And though Thouret is sent up as Deputy to Paris (and afterwards to draw up the Constitution), though the irascible Marquis d’Herbouville is always making a disturbance, though the “Carabots” revolt and break out into pillage, it is only when “Anarchists” from Paris come down to trouble them that the good folk of Rouen “draw the line.” In fact, they hanged the over-zealous Bourdier and Jourdain upon the quay just by the bridge.

It is interesting that no less a personage than Marat, then plain Dr Marat, had several Mémoires crowned by the Academy of Rouen, one of them on Mesmerism. Voltaire thought little of his capabilities then, but the “ami du peuple” left a gentle reputation in the town, and is even credited with having preserved an old illuminated manuscript under his mattress during some riots that threatened its safety. A more authenticated fact is that Charlotte Corday came from Caen, and popular tradition insists still that it was from the carving of Herodias on the façade of Rouen Cathedral (which the townsfolk call “La Marianne dansant,” for some unknown reason) that the suggestion came to her of saving the People from their Friend.

The great Napoleon first saw Rouen in its capacity as a trading centre. Its industry very soon recovered after the Revolution, and an actual “Exposition” was organised in the Tribunal de Commerce, which was inspected by Josephine and the First Consul Bonaparte. He returned as Emperor, and in 1840 the city solemnly received him for the last time, when his body was brought back from St. Helena and passed beneath the first bridge across the Seine at Rouen.

The kings who had been deposed with so much bloodshed and fanfaronade, reappeared as if nothing had happened when Louis Philippe laid the first stone for the pedestal of Corneille’s statue carved by David d’Angers. In 1871 that statue was all draped in black. The streets of Rouen, hung with funereal emblems, were all in the deepest mourning, every shop was closed and every window shuttered. Upon the plain of Sotteville a great army was manoeuvring to and fro to the sound of words of command in a strange tongue. General Manteuffel, the Duke of Mecklenburgh, and “Prince Fritz” had led the German army of invasion into Rouen, and from December till July they occupied the town and its surrounding villages. For the last time Rouen was in the hands of foreigners. But the traces of this catastrophe have absolutely disappeared. The ruin of the Revolution and the iconoclasm of the religious struggles have left far deeper marks; and Rouen, sacked by the English, and occupied by the Germans, suffered more injury at the hands of her own citizens, than either from Time or from any foreign foe.

In the last half of the eighteenth century it was that Rouen lost most of her mediaeval characteristics, under the levelling regime of Intendant de Crosne, whose one good work was the building of the boulevards. Hardly as much change was wrought when the great new streets of 1859 were cut that swept away the old infected quarters of the fifteenth century. The Revolution, that is responsible for the debasement of St. Laurent and St. Ouen, among many other atrocities, did most injury in abolishing those picturesque local bodies, like the “Cinquantaine” and the “Arquebusiers,” and substituting for them a meaningless “Garde Nationale.” Its efforts at “national” nomenclature were fortunately in most cases abortive.

The Rouen of to-day, though so much taken up with commerce, is not unworthy of her great traditions. A town that in art can show the names of Poussin, Jouvenet, and Gericault; and in letters, Gustave Flaubert, Maupassant, and Hector Malot, has not been left too far behind by older memories. But it is in the number of its citizens who have devoted themselves to the history and the archaeology of their own town, their “Ville Musee,” that Rouen has been especially blest. In Farin the historian, in M. de Caumont the archaeologist, in Langlois, de la Queriere, Deville, Pottier, Bouquet, Periaux; above all, in Floquet, the town can point to a band of chroniclers of which any city might be proud. To all of them I have been indebted. And no less does this sketch of their city’s story owe to those who are still living within its streets, and still ready to point the visitor to their greatest beauties: M. Charles de Beaurepaire, whose work in the Archives is of the highest value, and to whom I am indebted for nearly every reference to the records of the town; MM. Noel and Beaurain, who preside over the Library; M. Georges Dubosc, M. Jules Adeline, and many more.

Scarcely a year before these lines were written one more link between Rouen and the literature of the world was lost. In August 1896 died a “Professor of German” in the Lycee de Rouen, who had held her post since 1882. There had lived Camille Selden, in a quiet seclusion, from which she published the “Mémoires de la Mouche.” Universally beloved for her sweetness, her simplicity, her gentle nobility of soul, she was the unobtrusive friend of all the best spirits of the day. Upon her there seemed to have fallen some few mild rays from the genius of Heine, whom she loved so well. Her last days were spent in studying the correspondence of two great citizens of the town which sheltered her, Bouilhet and Flaubert.

My task is over; and I can but leave you now to discover for yourself the many details, which, for lack of space and leisure, I have perforce omitted. Yet in this “Story of Rouen” you will find, if you read it where it should be read, all the typical occurrences which have made the city what she is, strong in commerce, strong in traditions, strong above all in the memories of her sons.

“Strength is not won by miracle or rape.
It is the offspring of the modest years,
The gift of sire to son, thro’ these firm laws
Which we name Gods; which are the righteous cause,
The cause of man, and manhood’s ministers.”