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Contents

The Story of Rouen

by Theodore Andrea Cook

Illustrated by Helen M.
James and Jane E. Cook

London: J.M. Dent & Co.
Aldine House, 29 and 30 Bedford Street
Covent Garden, W.C. 1899

All rights reserved

PREFACE

"Est enim benignum et plenum ingenui pudoris fateri per quos profeceris."

THE story of a town must differ from the history of a nation in that it is concerned not with large issues but with familiar and domestic details. A nation has no individuality. No single phrase can fairly sum up the characteristics of a people. But a town is like one face picked out of a crowd, a face that shows not merely the experience of our human span, but the traces of centuries that go backward into unrecorded time. In all this slow development a character that is individual and inseparable is gradually formed. That character never fades. It is to be found first in the geographical laws of permanent or slowly changed surroundings, and secondly in the outward aspect of the dwellings built by man, for his personal comfort or for the good of the material community, or for his spiritual needs.

To these three kinds of architecture I have attached this story of Rouen, because even in its remotest syllables there are some traces left that are still visible; and these traces increase as the story approaches modern times. While moats and ramparts still sever a city from its surrounding territory, the space within the walls preserves many of those sharply defined characteristics which grow fainter when town and country merge one into the other; the modern suburb gradually destroys the personality both of what it sprang from and of what it meets. Up to the beginning of the sixteenth century I have been more careful to explain the scattered relics of an earlier time than during the years when Rouen was filled with exquisite examples of the builder's art. After that century there is so little of distinction, and so much of average merit, that my story languishes beneath a load of bricks and mortar.

Each chapter in this book which describes an advance in time or a different phase of life and feeling will be found to be connected with the buildings that are either contemporaneous with that phase or most suggestive of it. I have thus been able to mention all the important architectural features of the town without disturbing a fairly even chronological development of the tale, in the hope that this method will appeal not only to the traveller who needs guidance and explanation in the place he visits, but also to the reader who prefers to hear my story by his own fireside. Working, then, with this double audience in my mind, I have used to a very large extent, in my description of the people's life, the documents they have left behind themselves, so that the best expression may be given of the vital fact that a town is built and fashioned and inspired not by a few great men, but by the many persistent citizens who dwell in it, working their will from age to age without shadow of changing.

One such manuscript, the work of many hands and many centuries, I must particularly mention. It is the record kept by the Cathedral Chapterhouse, from 1210 to 1790, of the prisoners pardoned by the Privilege of St. Romain's Shrine. Forbidden, for reasons of health, to investigate these ancient parchments for myself, I have been fortunate enough to find them all printed by the care of M. A. Floquet, to whom the judicial history of Rouen owes so much. To his industry and to that of M. Charles de Beaurepaire I owe all the more astonishing and unknown details which are derived from original authorities scarcely yet appreciated at their full value. Both were scholars in the École des Chartes, the only school of accurate historical instruction in the world; and for any possibility of using fruitfully the mass of details they have brought to light I am indebted to my initiation by M. and Madame James Darmesteter into the same principles of organised research. The list of Authorities in the Appendix will show rather more fully a debt to M. de Beaurepaire which can never be adequately acknowledged.

My stay in Rouen was rendered more profitable and more pleasant by the kindness of yet others of its citizens. To M. Georges Dubosc; to M. le Marquis de Melandri; to M. Lafont who, as is but right in Armand Carrel's birthplace, presides over the oldest and best French provincial newspaper; to M. Edmond Lebel, Director of the Museum; to M. Noël, the librarian, I would here express my heartiest gratitude. To M. Beaurain I am under an especial obligation. Not only did he carefully trace for me the madrigal, set in its modern dress by the kindly skill of Mr Fuller Maitland, which English readers may now hear for the first time since 1550; but he chose out of the vast store at his command the portrait of Corneille by Lasne, and the View of Rouen in 1620 by Mérian. These were photographed by M. Lambin of 47 Rue de la République, with whom I left a list of those typical carvings in wood and stone of which visitors to Rouen would be likely to desire some accurate and permanent record.

Among those things in this little volume to which I desire special attention, as being unknown in England, and in some cases never reproduced before, I would mention, in addition to the music in Chapter XIII., the plan in Chapter IX. by Jacques Lelieur, who also drew the view of the whole town reproduced in Chapter XIII. This plan is the only instance of which I am aware which enables us to see a French town of 1525 exactly as it was, for by a queer but easily intelligible mixture of plan and elevation, the architect has drawn not merely the course of various streets but the façades of the houses on each side of them. And this leads me to my last, and perhaps my most striking debt, that to my illustrators; not only to my mother, who drew the arms of Rouen, from a design of 1550, for the first chapter, and Coustou's charming bas-relief of Commerce for the last, but more especially to Miss James; of her work I need say nothing; it is quite able to make its own appeal; but for her indefatigable desire to draw exactly what I wanted and to assist the whole scheme of the book I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude. Her drawings of the Crypte St. Gervais, of the Chapelle St. Julien, and of the Église St. Paul, will be as new as they are valuable to architectural readers; her picture of the Cour des Comptes, and of the old house in the Rue St. Romain were made under exceptional circumstances which may never recur again; and the view of the Chartreuse de la Rose is the first representation of the headquarters of our Henry V. in France which has ever, to my knowledge, been produced in England.

In conclusion I must express the earnest wish that the pages I have written about the carvings of the Maison Bourgtheroulde, and the illustrations accompanying them, will not have been published in vain. That the only authentic contemporaneous record of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, except the one picture at Hampton Court, should now be mouldering into decay in a French town is hardly creditable to those who can act with authority in valuable questions of historical art. If it be impossible to procure any good reproduction of these carvings for the pleasure and instruction of the public in our own National Galleries, a suggestion might at least be made that would secure their better preservation in the French house which they will soon cease to adorn.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

The illustrations marked with * are drawn by Jane E. Cook.

MAPS

THE ARMS OF ROUEN

CHAPTER I

THE three great rivers that flow from the heart of France to her three seas have each a character of their own. The grey and rapid current of the Rhone, swollen with the melting of the glacier-snows, rolls past the imperishable monuments of ancient Empire, and through the oliveyards and vineyards of Provence, falls into the blue waves of the southern sea. The sandy stream of Loire goes westward past the palaces of kings and the walled pleasure-gardens of Touraine, whispering of dead royalty. But the Seine pours out his black and toil-stained waters northward between rugged banks, hurrying from the capital of France to bear her cargoes through the Norman cliffs into the English Channel.

If Paris, Rouen, and Le Havre were but one town, whose central highway was this great river of the north, it would be at the vital spot, the very market-cross, that Rouen has sprung up and flourished through the centuries, at that dividing line where ships must stay that sail in from the sea, and cargo boats set out that ply the upper stream with commerce for the inland folk; and this geographical position has affected every generation of the city's growth and strength.

Rouen that is now "cheflieu du département de la Seine-Inférieure," was once the Norman stronghold which commanded all the basin of the river from the incoming of the stream of Eûre. The Seine and its tributaries have cut vast plâteaux some four hundred feet in height, through chalk and débris piled above the Jurassic bedrock that crops out here and there, as it does at Bray. On the right bank of the river, at the summit of a huge curve, the city lies between the valley of Darnétal, that is watered by Robec and his mate Aubette, and the valley of Bapaume. Upon this northern side the town is guarded from east to west by the hills of St. Hilaire, Mont Fortin, Mont aux Malades and Mont Riboudet, and from these the houses grow downwards to the water's edge. Upon the plateau above perch the villages of Mont-Saint-Aignan and of Bois-Guillaume. But between the valley of Darnétal and the Seine, is yet another natural buttress, the promontory on whose summit is Mont Ste. Catherine and the hamlet Bonsecours. From this magnificent height you may take the best view of the natural setting of the town. The western horizon is closed by the plateau of Canteleu and the forest of Roumare. To the south, within that strong bent elbow of the stream, the bridges bind to Rouen her faubourg of St. Sever with its communes of Sotteville and of Petit Quévilly; and the forest of Rouvray spreads its shadow to the meeting of the sky.

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The first Rothomagus, like the Rouen of to-day, was neither a hill city, for then it would have stood upon the Mont Ste. Catherine, nor an island city like ancient Paris, for the Ile St. Croix was too small. It was essentially a river city; and you may see at once the extraordinary natural strength of its position on the outside of the river's curve (see Map A), instead of on the inside which may have seemed more probable at first but would have left the town defenceless. Even to-day you can only get into Rouen, as into a town that has been battered and taken by assault, through the breach in her fortified lines. If you enter by the railway from Paris, from Havre, from Dieppe or from Fécamp, it is by subterranean tunnels only that approach is possible, and up a flight of steps that you make your first acquaintance with a "coin perdu" of the town, a corner without character, without size, without the least promise of the beauty that is hidden further off. Of all those great gates through which the mediæval city welcomed her dukes or sallied out against her enemies, but one is left, the Porte Guillaume Lion close by the quays, at the end of the Rue des Arpents, which is as faded and decrepit as its entrance.

To understand something of the origins of the town, it is far better to come there for the first time by the river, by the highway that has suffered least change since Rouen was a town at all. Yet the river itself is cribbed within far narrower bounds than when the first huts of savage fishermen were stuck upon the reed-beds of the marsh; for the town was first set upon islets that have long ago been absorbed into the mainland, and the waters of the Seine once washed the boatmen's landing stages at a spot that now bounds the Parvis of the Cathedral. Even now the Seine varies in breadth at this point from a hundred and thirty-five to two hundred and fifteen metres, with a depth of five metres on the quays at lowest tide. These tides are felt as far as twenty miles above the town. They vary in height from one metre to as much as three, and a tidal wave is formed that is one of the greatest dangers of the downstream navigation. Coming up from the sea is fairly easy in almost any kind of stout and steady craft, but it is difficult for all but the best steamers to get down without being delayed, and sometimes fairly stopped, by the great tidal wave at Caudebec or Quillebœuf. Only when the floods reduce their strength are the tides unable to turn the current of the stream; and flood water is not unusual in a country where the rain blows in so often from the Channel.

There is an average of a hundred and fifty rainy days each year, the late autumn being worst, for the clouds are attracted by the river, by the forests, and by the hills that stand round about the city. But the unhealthiness engendered by all this moisture is a thing of the past. An enlightened municipal authority has widened streets, planted broad boulevards, and cleansed the waterworks which Jacques Lelieur first sketched in the early years of the sixteenth century. And much as we may deplore the loss of picturesque surroundings, it was high time that some of the "Fumier du Moyen Age" should be shovelled out of sight. What existence meant in those Middle Ages we shall be better able to realise later on, and it will be possible as we pass through the streets of Rouen to see what little has been left of it; for the vandalism of ignorance has too often accompanied the innocent and hygienic efforts of the restorer, and undue Haussmanism has ruined many an inoffensive beauty past recall.

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As you look upon the modern town from the river, it is difficult to realise that the views of 1525, or of 1620, which I have reproduced in this book, can represent the same place. The old walls and battlements have disappeared, and all the ancient keeps save one. But though we cannot tell the towers of ancient Rothomagus, we can mark well her bulwarks, from the Church of St. Pierre du Chastel that stands in the Rue des Cordeliers (see Maps B and C) where was the first Castle of Rollo, to the Halles and the Chapelle de la Fierte St. Romain, where the names of Haute and Basse Vieille Tour recall the citadel of later dukes. Within her earliest walls was the site of the first Cathedral; outside them was built St. Ouen to the north-east, and the monastery of St. Gervais to the north-west where the Conqueror died. Above the town still rises the Tour Jeanne d'Arc, the donjon of the Castle of Bouvreuil, which showed that Normandy was no more an independent Duchy, but a part of the domains of Philip Augustus. This memory of bondage still remains; but of the home of her own dukes Rouen has not preserved one stone; nor of the English palace of King Henry the Fifth near "Mal s'y Frotte" is anything left in the Rue du Vieux Palais near the western quay.

The small compass of the first battlements set on the swamp grew, by the twelfth century, to the lines of the modern boulevards on the north and west, but at the Tour Jeanne d'Arc they turned east and southwards, round the apse of St. Ouen, down the Rue de l'Épée and the Rue du Ruisseau by way of the Rue des Espagnols to the Porte Guillaume Lion and the quay. The walls besieged by the English under Henry V. had expanded almost exactly to the lines of the present boulevards in all directions, for the town had spread up the stream of Robec in broad lines that converged past the Place du Boulingrin above, and the Place Martainville below, upon the Place St. Hilaire to the east (see map B).

From the Place Cauchoise on the north-west of the city of to-day two main streets pierce the town. The Rue Thiers passes the Museum, and comes out at the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, close to St. Ouen. The Rue Cauchoise leads straight into the Place du Vieux Marché where Jeanne d'Arc was burnt. From there begins the Rue de la Grosse Horloge, the central artery of old Rouen, in which is the town's focal point, the belfry with its fountain and its archway. The other end of this street comes out on the open space or Parvis before the west door of the Cathedral. If you will go still further eastward by way of the Rue St. Romain, past the Portail des Libraires, the most characteristic thoroughfare is from the Place des Ponts de Robec, not far south of St. Ouen, along the street called Eau de Robec to the boulevards. These are the main lines of lateral division.

From north to south the town is cut by the Rue Jeanne d'Arc; further eastwards, by the Rue des Carmes, which becomes the Rue Grand Pont; and by the Rue de la République, which passes clear from the Musée des Antiquités at the northern angle of the town to the Pont de Pierre Corneille on the river. The quays are crowded with a busy throng of workmen; on the stream are ships from every quarter of the world; great cranes are hoisting merchandise out of their holds and distributing it into the markets of the town, or into the barges for Paris and the Île-de-France. For this is the limit of the maritime Seine, and here, where the tide of ocean throbs upon her quays, it was but natural that the strength and commerce of Rouen should increase and multiply. "L'agneau de la ville a toujours la patte levée" says the old Norman proverb, and if you look at the lamb upon the arms of Rouen you will see her foot is raised in readiness for the travel that has been always the characteristic of her sons. From the days when northern rovers sailed here, when Guiscard's colonists went out to Sicily, when traders watched the wind for England, the citizens of Rouen have had their interests far afield.

But it is with the story of their home-town that I have now to do. And if it is to be told within the bounds of your patience and my opportunity, that story must be limited, if not by the old walls of the city, then by the shortest circuit of the suburbs round it. Nor need we lose much by this circumscribing of our purpose. The life of Normandy was concentrated in its capital. The slow march of events from the independence as a Duchy to the incorporation as a part of France has left footprints upon all the thoroughfares of the town. The development of mediæval Rothomagus into modern Rouen has stamped its traces on the stones of the city, as the falling tide leaves its own mark upon the timbers of a seaworn pier. It will be my business to point your steps to these traces of the past, and from the marks of what you see to build up one after another the centuries that have rolled over tide-worn Rouen. Let it be said at once that the "Old Rouen" you will first see is almost completely a French Renaissance city of the sixteenth century. Of older buildings you will find only slight and imperfect remnants, and as you pass monstrosities more modern you will involuntarily close your eyes. But the remnants are there, slight as they are; and they are worth your search for them, as we try together to reconstruct the ancient city of which they formed a part.

Rouen has in its turn been the most southerly city of a Norman Duke's possessions, then the central fortress of an Angevin Empire that stretched from Forth to Pyrenees, then a northern bulwark for the Kings of Paris against the opposing cliffs of England. It has sent out fleets upon the sea, and armies upon land. It has been independent of its neighbours, it has led them against a common foe, and it has undergone with them a national disaster. But no matter who were its rulers, or by what title it was officially described, or how it has been formally divided, eternal bars and doors have been set for its inhabitants by the mountains and the waters, eternal laws have been made for them by the clouds and the stars that cannot be altered. In the natural features that remain the same to-day, in the labourers of the soil, and in the toilers of the city, there has been the least change. For these are the "dim unconsidered populations" upon whom the real brunt of war falls, the units who compose the battalions, the pieces in the game who have little or no share in the stakes; who abide in their land always, blossoming as the trees in summer, enduring as the rocks in snow. Over this deep-rooted heart of humanity sweeps the living hail and thunder of the armies of the earth. These are the warp and first substance of the nations, divided not by dynasties but by climates, strong by unalterable privilege or weak by elemental fault, unchanged as Nature's self.

In the city of to-day, and in such thoroughfares as the Rue de l'Épicerie, you may look for a moment into that humbler and less spacious form of habitation in which the people and the workers lived their days, making up for the poverty of their own surroundings by the magnificence of that great Cathedral which rose above the low horizon of their roofs, and opened its doors to poor and rich alike. The buildings that have so long outlived their inhabitants may be taken as the background—like the permanent stone scenery in a Greek theatre—to the shifting kaleidoscope of many-coloured life in the old city.

In the place itself you will see scarcely a trace of the great personages whose names have glittered in its list of sieges, battles, massacres, pageants, and triumphal entries. The story of a town is not a drum-and-trumpet chronicle of the Kings and Queens. It is the tale of all those domestic and municipal details which from their very unimportance have well-nigh disappeared. To hear it you must follow me from the Crypte St. Gervais to the Cathedral, from the Hôtellerie des Bons Enfants to the Maison Bourgtheroulde, and it is to the voices of the people that I shall ask you to listen, and to the life of the people that I shall point you among the streets they lived in. Thus, and thus only, may you possibly realise the spirit of the place, that calls out first to every stranger in the bells that sound through the silence of his first night in a foreign town. These you shall know better soon in Rouen, by name even, "Rouvel" and "Cache-Ribaut," if you be worldly-minded, "Georges d'Amboise" and "Marie d'Estouteville" for your hours of prayer. Before you pass beyond their sound again, their ancient voices shall bring to you something of the centuries that had died when they were young, something of the individuality of the city above which they have been swinging for so long.

"Spirit of Place," writes the most charming of our living essayists:—