Rambles in Normandy

The earth used for the purpose was a thick brown loam into which straw had been kneaded, after which it was cut into cakes (though not baked, as are bricks) and built into walls by layers simply. The walls are sometimes two feet thick. All the houses need is a periodical coat of whitewash to become as good as new.

France has been commonly thought to be a non-meat-eating nation, but the consumption is steadily rising. Only so late as the reign of Louis-Philippe the consumption per capita was but twenty kilos, but thirty years later it had risen forty per cent.

Lest any one should think that the peasant of Normandy knows not how to eat, let him read Gustave Flaubert’s description of a wedding-breakfast, which, in part, runs as follows:

It has been a commonplace to revile French cooking for a long time, but the custom is going out of fashion.

Perhaps the English and American palate is becoming accustomed to a ragoût of mutton, rabbit garenne, or chicken chasseur, and it no longer looks “messy.” As a matter of fact, it is far more palatable than boiled fowl or the eternal boiled mutton of the average English country hotel.

There is the eternal chicken, of course, which is, however, better than eternal boiled mutton; there is a surprising frequency and variety of omelets, but they are excellent. There is always a stew of some sort, but it is not made of left-over scraps of some one else’s dinner, as is popularly supposed; and there is the roast with its salad, which is, of course, the principal dish. The crisp, green, and, above all, well-dressed salad is an infinitely better combination than best English beef and Yorkshire pudding or mutton and dumpling.

In France, too, there is always soup, which is always good—more than can be said for the feeble imitations of England and America. And there are no sticky cloying English puddings or abominable American pies to wind up with. A light, tasty cheese is served throughout Normandy, Petit Bondon, Cœur de la Crême, Pont l’Evêque, or Camembert, and a biscuit which one dips in his wine and munches thoughtfully, as he speculates as to what the price may be for all this, or how it can be done profitably at the price. The cost is not over three francs, and perhaps only two francs, fifty centimes, or even two francs.

Until recently Englishmen and Americans have had a great contempt for the out-of-door pleasures of the French, but matters have changed considerably during the past decade.

The sport of society is passed over here; horse-racing, golf, tennis, etc., and only such as form a part and parcel of the life of the common people is considered.

The French peasant can carry his whole family behind one horse in his light, high-wheeled cart; and, on any market-day, near a large town, you will see a cavalcade of country carts filled with a large proportion of the suburban population, all wending their way, for a dozen, fifteen, or twenty miles round about, to the market-town.

“As a nation,” says Hamerton, “the English are incomparably the finer, but the English industrial system of increasing the concentration in large towns is rapidly diminishing their collective superiority. The French generally are of small stature, so that a man of middle height in England is a tall man in France, and French soldiers in their summer fatigue blouses look to an Englishman like boys.”

THE art and architecture of Normandy with respect to religious edifices, and not less with regard to its feudal châteaux, is of a peculiar variety, quite apart from the other types seen in France.

The birth of Norman architecture, as it is commonly known, was undoubtedly an out-growth of the older Romanesque.

The Scandinavian conquest of Neustria left no arts or evidences of art that would demonstrate to the least degree that these peoples brought any innovations of building with them.

The Merovingian period itself has left but few remains which are characteristic of any development of artistic taste. Hence such monuments as exist of Merovingian or the prehistoric civilizations are very meagre, and comprise no structures of any magnitude.

The Romans built many defences in the region, particularly Limes, near Dieppe, and Chatelliers in the Department of the Orne. Generally the Roman defences in Lower Normandy were disposed in a double range of walls; and from these developed on a smaller scale the feudal château of later times.

Rollon and his companions had given a great impetus to the feudal régime in the duchy, and rival seigneurs built themselves strongholds, if possible, more formidable than those of their neighbours. By the ninth century this fortress-building gave way to establishments endowed with more comforts and luxuries of a domestic nature, but they continued to be fortified, as they were for a long time after.

The remains of the Châteaux of Arques, Domfront, Falaise (the birthplace of the Conqueror), Gisors, and Gaillard (the “daughter of a year” of Richard the Lion-hearted) were all wonders of their time.

Normandy had quite a representative share of both classes of these mediæval monuments, and their existing remains to-day are numerous and admirably cared for, ruins though many of them be.

In general, the Norman châteaux of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were little more than a rectangular or round donjon, surrounded by exterior works of relatively little strategic importance. They were always defended by a deep fosse, and by subterranean passages which would allow the defending forces to move under cover from one point to another; and in addition, they were frequently placed upon the summit of a hill or rocky promontory, as was the case at Les Andelys, La Roche-Guyon, Falaise, and Domfront.

The Norman influence of château-building spread widely. England, of course, followed speedily; but their keeps or donjons were more often rectangular and seldom circular.

In the Vendée at Ponzanges, at Beaugency, on the Loire at Montrichard, and at Loches, the Norman influence prevailed, but still the most complete and successful examples were confined to Norman soil.

By the end of the thirteenth century the feudality, more or less ruined by the Crusades, were no longer in a position to build great independent fortresses; and the château by the middle of the century following had been shorn of many of its former fortifying attributes and became merely the great luxurious habitation of the seigneurs who, in other days, would have made war, or been attacked on their own account.

Some sort of defences they always retained, at least until a much later date; a fortified gateway, perhaps, a crenelated battlement, partly for use and partly for decorative purposes, and a moat, though oftentimes it was a dry one from the absence of near-by water.

By the time the fifteenth century had dawned many of the old châteaux of Normandy had been repaired, restored, or rebuilt, and many new edifices were erected; but with the Renaissance a distinctly new type was created,—that of a palatial country-house, which to all intents and purposes may be classed generally as modern châteaux, even though they may have been built up from ancient foundations.

If one could trace the history of all the châteaux of France, or even of Normandy and Brittany, to which are attached facts of historical or romantic purport, or which are endowed with artistic tributes, or are picturesquely environed, the results would make a formidable and most interesting work.

In France by the end of the ninth century there were some twenty thousand châteaux, so recognized by their own individual names.

The châtelain, or feudal lord, was a veritable king in his own domain, with his standard, his court of justice, and his vassals; and, quite rightly, in many cases he said to his people, “I will defend you against the enemy, and give you the right of refuge behind the thick walls of my château; at the moment of danger the pont-levis will lower for you, your wives, and your children.”

Not every tenantless and ruined château or seigneurial manor of Normandy is a monument of greed and rapacity, and one need not conjure up a picture of other days, with peasants’ fields trampled and uptorn, and cattle and grain seized, in order to draw disparaging contrasts as compared with the times in which we live.

The history of feudalism is a long and lurid one in many respects; but there is much of the domestic life of the times which points again and again to the fact that the overlord and his serfs were not in far different relations than the king and his vassals, or the landlord and tenant of to-day.

When the Franks became masters of Gaul they were quite content to let the old system of administration still obtain, and to confide to some count the governorship of the cities. He was usually a person who was subservient to the governor of the district, who, on his part, deferred to the heads of the province and the kingdom.

The office was hereditary in most cases; and, as the possessors of benefices which were withheld from the masses, they at first demanded an allegiance which, in later times, came to be greatly abridged.

This was the beginning of the feudal system in France. It became complete when Charles the Bold consecrated the hereditary offices by the “Capitulaire de Kiersi-sur-Oise,” in 877.

Each seigneur reigned in his fief over his serfs and vassals; and he in turn was subordinate to the count or duke, a rank higher up, the count himself regulating his movements and actions according to the will of the king.

From the tenth to the fourteenth centuries France was divided into as many petty states as there were cantons or châteaux; and, so far as intercommunication for purposes of commerce were concerned, the only relations with the outside world were by the aid of great periodical fairs, such as were held at Beaucaire in Provence, the most celebrated of all, where the volume of trade was second only to that of Nijni-Novgorod in Russia. In the north this great fair found its counterparts at St. Denis, near Paris, and at Guibray, near Falaise in Normandy, which was next to Beaucaire in magnitude and importance. As to other outside communications, it developed largely along the line of raids and warlike incursions into neighbouring territory, as a result of jealousy and envy between the various seigneurs. The only other opportunities offered for the lower classes to mingle with the great world, beyond the feudal territory which claimed them for its own, was through the means of religious pilgrimages and the Crusades.

One then comes to the small nobility and their manor-houses, which were only less grand and luxurious in degree, not in kind. They were not fortified, save by an encircling wall, often of great height and thickness, which enclosed the whole domestic establishment and its home grounds. The manor-house of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries took frequent root in Normandy, and was often very splendid in its appointments and proportions.

The château of to-day, as one finds it in France, that is, the strictly modern edifice, which often bears the high-sounding name of château, is nothing more than a country-house of a small manufacturer or merchant; who, after thirty or forty years of a strenuous life, has married off his daughters and sons, and wishes to settle down in the country, and surround himself and his wife with the comforts of life and amid a glamour which, he fancies, somewhat approaches the splendour of the olden times.

This was the start made which culminated in the Hôtel Bourgtheroulde and the Palais de Justice at Rouen.

If the notable examples of early Renaissance in Normandy are not so numerous as elsewhere, they are certainly as beautiful, and reflect great credit upon their designers.

Throughout the Caux, in Normandy, there are innumerable seventeenth and eighteenth century châteaux. They do not rise to the splendour of the great Renaissance edifices of the Loire, neither in point of grandeur, excellence of their artistic embellishment, nor in their historical reminiscence. They are not so very large; their architecture is in general a great fall from that of the Renaissance beauties of the preceding centuries, and only infrequently were their associations intimately related with the court.

THE religious architecture of Normandy, from the tenth century onward, with regard to abbeys, cathedrals, and parish churches alike, was so abundant and splendid as to merit the naming of the style as Norman.

The monkish builders of these early days, following in the wake of the Conqueror, went throughout the length and breadth of Britain, sowing the seed that was to develop the Anglo-Norman variety which, truth to tell, differs in many instances not at all from the parent style, seen at its best in such great edifices as the abbey churches of Jumièges and St. Georges de Boscherville, near Rouen.

Normandy did not fall under the sway of the ogival or Gothic style, which had established itself in the Ile de France and Picardy, until quite a hundred years after it made its appearance there (1150).

The capitals were richly decorated, but seldom, if ever, in the style imported by the Romans from the Greek, and the geometrical, and zigzag, and lozenge decorations of the walls were, if bizarre, a departure from anything heretofore seen. Seldom, if ever, were plant-forms made use of, and statuary and effigies were, in the beginning, excessively rare.

Frequently in the early Norman churches there was no ambulatory to the choir, and the easterly termination took the form of a flat chevet rather than that of the trefoil or fan-like arrangement which had to some extent obtained in the pure Romanesque type, and was undergoing a high development through the interpolation of the flying buttress or arc-boutant in the newly innovated Gothic of the Ile de France.

From the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries the distinct Norman style developed rapidly before it was entirely crowded out by the onrushing wave of Gothic. In its rudimentary forms it is found as early as the ninth century, and some details lingered even after the wholesale advent of Gothic, but practically its reign was but three hundred years.

At the end of the third ovigal period, when the Gothic was losing its individuality of character elsewhere in France, it was still flourishing in Normandy, and produced such marvellous examples as the south façade of Notre Dame de Louviers, the porch front at Alençon, and St. Maclou at Rouen, to say nothing of the more elaborate façade of Rouen’s cathedral.

In the Department of Manche one encounters frequent village churches with massive rectangular central towers after the manner of the large parish church in England, and once and again one comes upon a squared-off east end, such as is so greatly in vogue in England, and so infrequently seen in France,—the great parish church of Notre Dame at Grand Andelys, on the Seine, being one of the most notable Norman examples.

During the reign of Charles VII. and Louis XI. there was a great building revival wherein the principles of the Renaissance—brought from Italy, doubtless, by the nobles in the train of Charles VII.—flourished to the exclusion of any other style.

The great château of the Archbishops of Rouen at Gaillon was a notable example of the other class, also the Hôtel Bourgtheroulde at Rouen, and such smaller works as the tomb of the Cardinals of Amboise in Rouen’s cathedral, and the Hôtel d’Escoville at Caen.

It is commonly thought that the beauties of the Renaissance in the lower Seine valley came as a result of the influence of the Cardinals of Amboise, who built the great château at Gaillon. So far as religious edifices went, it was mostly with respect to interpolated details or restorations that the style took on any very great proportions, though the evidences that one sees in the cathedral at Evreux and in the great hybrid church at Gisors are by no means slight in bulk.

THREE great gateways to Paris, from England’s shores, lie through Normandy: via Cherbourg and the Cotentin, via Dieppe and the Pays de Caux, and via Havre and the Seine valley, by the old Norman capital of Rouen.

All three routes traverse a lovely country, but it is probable that the one by the great silent highway of the Seine is the most picturesque and historically interesting of its length in the whole world.

If the Seine be truly a great highway—the main street—of that elongated metropolis which extends from the Ile de la Cité, at Paris, to Havre, it is equally true that the roadways along either bank become its footpaths or sidewalks, and that the parallel highroads, running along either side not far from the river-bank, are as busy with wheeled traffic as any other of the great national roads of France.

“The valley,” say the geographers, “is monotonous up to Paris, varied to Rouen, and picturesque to Havre.” Deep-sea navigation is possible from its mouth to Paris, and above all as far as to Rouen, to which point great ships come and go with the same regularity that would obtain in a seacoast port. The tide of the ocean rises and falls as high up as Pont de l’Arche, where the first dam and lock are built.

The affluents of the Seine below Paris are the Oise, its principal tributary, which has its birth in the distant Ardennes in Belgium; the Epte, a “pure water” stream which flows through a charming valley, from Forges-les-Eaux to Giverny near Vernon; the Andelle, less important, but a wonderfully picturesque little river, which joins the parent stream near Pont de l’Arche. The Eure also comes to its confluence with the Seine at the same point, and the Risle, which rises near La Perche, after 140 kilometres, finally reaches the sea through the Seine at Quillebeuf.

There is a little village on the banks of the Seine below Vernon, where everything save the grand old ruin near by dates from the time, a dozen or more years ago, when a well-known American millionaire stopped there in his long, low-built steam-yacht, and requisitioned all the resources of the town’s not very ample supplies in provender for himself and his “suite,” as the native will tell you. The party did not remain long—over one night only, and for the petit déjeuner the next day—but they must have strewn their pathway with gold, for the memory of the event still lingers.

The great highway of the Seine which connects the capital of France with the capital of Normandy forms, for the most part of its course below Paris, a broad, silvery band, which winds its way around numerous small islands until it comes well up to Rouen, when for fifty or more kilometres—as marked by the broad, white, and plainly visible stones along its banks—it flows through deep-cut cliffs of chalk crowned with greensward.

Below Rouen, after La Bouille is passed, the banks flatten out, until at Caudebec they take on quite a low-country aspect, from whence the Seine makes its way to the sea through the shifting sand-bars at its mouth.

For forty kilometres above Havre the estuary is a broad, lagoon-like expanse which looks little enough like a channel to the sea, though the country round about is not wholly flat, at least not in the distance.

Etretat, practically equidistant eastward, offers much the same attractions, with this difference: it has, or had a half-century ago, a great vogue among artists. Its sea and sky and chalk cliffs are still there, all, it would seem, in a more superlative degree than elsewhere along the coast, but casinos, de luxe hotels, and “five o’clocks” have eliminated all the idyllic foreground, or at least thrust it paradoxically into the distance.

There are a dozen or more similar seashore resorts in the immediate neighbourhood, but when one turns the prow of his motor-boat upstream, or starts his automobile on the road which follows either bank of the Seine for the greater part of the distance from sea to source, he enters immediately upon associations of history and romance that are linked with an unbreakable silvery thread, which never allows one to forget or ignore the fact of its presence or the part it has played in the past.

It was Napoleon, as first consul, who said that in time to come, Havre, Rouen, and Paris would be one and the same city, and the Seine would be the grand highway.

There is generally to be found lying at the Quai de la Hôtel de Ville, at Paris, a dumpy-looking little steamboat, with stubby masts and a collapsible funnel, which, when all is in order and shipshape, has quite the look of a deep-sea craft. In a way it performs much the same functions, for the passage of some twenty hours from Tower Bridge on London’s river to the entrance to the Seine at Havre is more often than not of a boisterousness quite the equal of the far-away briny deep itself.

In addition, the progress of the ages has multiplied the earth-roads along its banks, and the boats upon its bosom, and the iron rails which connect it with the uttermost corners of the land, bind and protect its permanent value as a great highway of trade.

One other aspect to-day, of which the majority of English-speaking folk know but little, is that the river is greatly given over, on certain occasions and on all fête-days, to sports.

The oarsman has come in the last half-century in great numbers, and in all the large centres on the banks of the Seine he is found, as often as occasion permits, in his racing boat, or shell, a name he has adopted from the English vocabulary. He may not go about his sport as scientifically as his American or English brother, but he is quite as enthusiastic.

Following again on the lines of Napoleon’s words, one appreciates that, if Havre, Paris, and Rouen have not yet become one, Rouen and Havre have come very near to it, for between the principal city of Normandy and the seaport city on La Manche—as the French prefer to call the English Channel—are a succession of villages and towns, one scarcely out of sight of the other, all swarming with industry and life, from the artists who throng Caudebec in summer to the peasants who, on a fête-day, crowd into the nearest centre of population to stare at townfolk and drink a particularly vile brand of the native cognac—calvados—known in parts of America as “applejack” or hard cider.

This is not fulsome praise, but enthusiasm merely, bred of intimate acquaintance.

One dreams of the time when Paris was but a tiny bourg: then Rouen was already a great city, having all the prerogatives of a capital. Indeed, capital she was, in effect, under the Romans, who made their way along the Seine and established their country along the banks of the majestic river.

On a certain occasion it was a great question with the author of this book as to whether a journey through the Seine valley in Normandy should be made by means of the novel and speedy motor-boat, or some other small water-craft, or by the better known motor-car.

A covered wagon, too, was thought of, with two small horses and a gipsy driver, but the thing had been done before, and it was not wholly with equanimity that we contemplated jolting over the many miles of the rough streets for which French towns are noted.

For more reasons than one the motor-boat would not do. So the decision ultimately came to the land automobile.

The towns and places of historic interest or romantic beauty, if not of the river itself, were on its banks or near them, and were properly enough always considered in connection with the Seine.

The itinerary of the Seine occupied the whole of one long, bright summer, and when one adds to this the numerous excursions out of the Seine valley proper into those of its watershed,—up the Eure to Anet, the Ept to Gisors, or the Andelle to Lyons-le-Forêt or beyond,—one rounds off a considerable number of miles or kilometres to one’s credit, besides accomplishing much more than could possibly be achieved were the journey attempted by boat.

Only one thing could have made our journey more delightful,—and that unfortunately was not possible,—the possession of a sort of amphibious automobile which, when occasion required, would take to water for a space,—we did take to water on one occasion, but the circumstance is too reminiscent of misery to recount here,—or to go one better, some sort of a machine constructed by the ingenuity of man which should travel by land, by water, or through the air; then bad stretches of pavé would truly be eliminated and all hills levelled. But this would indeed be in the millennium, and this book deals only with facts.

One enters the Seine from the sea at Havre by rounding a veritable graveyard of rocks. When we entered Havre on this occasion—the artist, the automobile, and the author, it was a dull, misty morning in May, and the hour, 5 A. M.

The process of disembarking an automobile under these conditions was complicated. With true British conservatism of tradition, the captain, his mate, quartermaster, and crew of engineers and stokers declared that the automobile could not be landed “until the tide served,”—and it was still going down.

Meantime the patron of the local garage, having been advised of our coming, was on the wharf thoroughly equipped to receive us. Accompanying this thoughtful individual was a rubicund, genial-looking gentleman who afterward proved to be the representative of the Département des Mines, who had come from Rouen sometime during the still hours of the night, to put us through our paces. Clambering the steeply pitched gangplank, the author—who in this case was also the chauffeur—interviewed the before-mentioned gentlemen, thinking meanwhile that it was more or less astonishing that they should have put in an appearance at such an early hour.

With the aid of the Automobile Club membership card, the custom-house was passed without difficulty or delay. The tanks were filled with naphtha, water, and oil, and forthwith the test was made—before the rubicund gentleman from Rouen—upon the outcome of which our certificate of fitness was to be granted or refused.

There was nothing formidable about the process, though we came to grief, or rather to a standstill, in the midst of a flock of sheep just around the corner, and, in returning, stopped only within the proverbial hair’s breadth of a flock of geese who had flutteringly escaped from a near-by market stall.

All this seemed to demonstrate a high and efficient degree of ability, and “un certificat de capacité pour la conduite des voitures automobiles à pétrole” was given us forthwith, and long before the hour of high water we were in full cry at the French legal limit for traversing the streets and boulevards of a large and populous city such as Havre.

The great strength and value of the port of Havre is that, as it stands to-day, it is modern.

When Napoleon, in his prophetic words, linked the city with Paris and Rouen, it had but twenty thousand souls. Fifty years later it had risen to thirty thousand, and more recently, since the efforts of the engineers Colbert and Vauban and the solicitations of statesmen have provided it with a grand port of entry, it maintains a steadily rising population above 130,000 souls, all practically dependent upon the commerce of the city for their support. As French cities go, this is an astonishing percentage of growth.