The expense of all this vast equipment was of course considerable. It may convey nothing to many passers-by to know that Havre, in the last ten years, has spent some forty-one millions of francs on these improvements, whilst the Chamber of Commerce has been directly responsible for perhaps twenty-five millions more, all of which ought to be a sufficiently tangible and plausible endorsement that the work is being well done. When the work is complete the port of Havre will rival the greatest in the world in magnitude and convenience. The historical remains of Havre may not equal those of many other of the important cities of France, and the Rue de Paris and the café-bordered Place Gambetta may be poor substitutes, but, nevertheless, Havre’s past is historic, though the ancient Havre de Grâce has disappeared entirely.
It was here, in 1514, that Leroy, the commandant of Honfleur, carried out the orders of François I. to “excavate and construct a port suitable and convenient to receive, provide for, and equip large ships, not only of our own kingdom, but of our allies.” From this may be said to have grown the present great port. The name of the city itself grew out of a chapel founded a few years before by Louis XII. (1509).
Primarily François I. may have desired to make it a great home-port, but no less did he have in mind that here was a most suitable place to assemble his fleet, which some day he would put forth against England.
In 1545 he actually did get together nearly two hundred ships of all sorts and conditions of fighting capacity for a descent upon England at the Isle of Wight. The expedition was repulsed, and in return, in a few years’ time (1562), the port was occupied by an English garrison.
Henri IV., the great Cardinal Richelieu, and Colbert were responsible in no small measure for the great prosperity and strength which soon settled down upon the city, though by the end of the seventeenth century it dawned upon the English that here, at their very doors, was a maritime rival which looked as though it were to outdistance all others in the north of Europe.
As a precautionary measure, presumably, the English fleet made an attack upon the port, but they in their turn met as fierce a repulse as did the French in England under François I. Admiral Sir Sidney Smith, in a vain attempt to capture a French vessel close under the guns of the fortress, was captured and held a prisoner by the French in the old citadel built by Charles IX. It was here, too, by the way, that the crafty Mazarin imprisoned the Princes of Condé, Conti, and the Duc de Longueville. It is recorded, in the annals of the city, that in the year 1535 the greater part of the newer portions were swept away and large numbers of persons drowned, by an extraordinary tidal wave—the ancestor, perhaps, of those which periodically ascend the Seine, to the joy of the tourist and the incidental profit of the innkeepers at Caudebec.
Large numbers of persons were drowned, mostly farmers who had gathered in the town “pour la populer,” as the chronicle gives it.
In general, matters of artistic and archæological interest are wanting in this city of commercialism, of great hotels, and the hum and echo of the workaday world.
The Art Museum, to be sure, has examples of the masterpieces of Poussin and Carrache, and even a Rubens, a Murillo, and a Van Dyck, but, on the other hand, the public monuments of the city are not artistic.
Pilgrims to literary shrines should remember that Havre was the birthplace of Bernardin St. Pierre, whose “Paul and Virginia” is as immortal to the Frenchman as “Locksley Hall” to an Englishman. St. Pierre’s statue, by David d’Angers, as well as another of Casimir Delavigne, stands before the Art Museum. Another monument on the cliff above the city, to Lefevre Desnouettes, once and again comes into view as one strolls about. It is one of the most atrocious monuments ever erected to the memory of man.
Havre is splendid and elegant in its way, but it is not picturesque, except possibly in the low streets near the wharfs, frequented by sailors, which have a cosmopolitanism reminiscent of Marseilles, itself the most thoroughly cosmopolitan of all the ports of the world.
Here are strange, perhaps dangerous, cabarets, cafés-concerts, and questionable amusements of all sorts, where strange and uncouth customs shoulder each other in a veritable babel of tongues; mulattos from the Caribbean Sea, Maltese, Greeks, Lascars, Chinamen, and above all Portuguese, with an occasional English or American sailor down on his luck,—all are here. Calvados, and dirks, and sharp knives all play their part, and clearly the quayside of Havre is no place after dark.
From the heights of Ingouville, of Cape de la Hève, or of Graville, the illuminated effect of the city at night is wonderfully soft, picturesque, and beautiful, the houses of all ranks twinkling with lights, the streets and wharves luminous with orbs of electricity and the reds, greens, and whites of the semaphore, the ships beyond flashing out to each other signals and commands inexplicable to a landsman,—all blend wonderfully into what the great Whistler would have called a nocturne.
Once and again one will hear the infinitely sad wail of a siren whistle on some vessel outward or inward bound, which will suggest the mutability of all things, and the strain and stress under which we live.
But on the whole, a midnight reverie on the heights above the old Havre de Grâce should awaken as pleasant emotions as the same view in broad day—perhaps more so.
The Seine, at its mouth, has as many whims as a stricken hare. Its channel turns about on itself in truly bewildering fashion, and what was this year deep water and a fairway, next year becomes, perhaps, dry land, or at least damp sand or swamp. In 1886 the channel followed somewhat the shore of the north bank from Tancarville to the sea, but by 1889 it had shifted to the south bank, and two years later seemed likely to engulf the ancient town of Honfleur, which was prosperous in the fifteenth century, before Havre was even thought of. Indeed its harbour is now so silted up that most of its commercial prosperity, though not its picturesqueness, has disappeared.
It is written in the books of travellers with tourist tickets that they may journey Paris-ward from Havre by Rouen either by boat or rail during the summer months. Many avail themselves of the alternative water route, and many do not. Those who do not miss a unique trip which is well worth the extra hours en route, though there is no very grand scenery until one comes well up with suburban Rouen, at, say, Molineux-La Bouille.
From the harbour at Havre runs the Tancarville Canal, which is a smooth, straight waterway which enables craft proceeding up river to avoid the shifting sands of the estuary and, at certain seasons of the year, to escape the tidal wave or mascaret.
As a waterway of the rank of the deep-sea canals of Holland, the Tancarville Canal looks, at first glance, wofully inefficient; but its almost constant use precludes any doubt as to its value.
It runs straight as the crow flies from Havre to Harfleur, and thence to Tancarville itself, where it joins the Seine, through the first lock, at the twenty-third kilometre mark from Havre.
The section of the Seine between Havre and Rouen forms what is known officially as the “Ninth Section,” though the application is properly given as one descends the stream, the section above, from Rouen to the mouth of the Oise, being known as the “Eighth Section.”
From the five hundred and sixty-third kilometre mark, at Havre, counting from Méry in the Department of the Aube, near Troyes, to Rouen, is 125 kilometres.
Up to the latter point, the rules of navigation as known upon the deep seas are applicable, and those which apply to the navigation of rivers, canals, lakes, and ponds of fresh water cease to apply.
The law on this subject is very explicit, and was promulgated in 1890, because of the lack of uniformity existing in the laws relating to navigation on French waterways. On the Seine the actual line of delimitation is at the curious, though not ungainly, Bridge du Transbordeur at Rouen.
The entire ninth section of the Seine is officially recognized as navigable for the whole of its 338 kilometres from Havre to the confluence of the Oise, its most important tributary below Paris.
Below Paris freight is carried largely by towboats. But there are some steam-carriers of curious design and build with a pair of twin stern-wheels revolving like a squirrel-cage, the pilot or helmsman perched upon a little platform between. These quaint craft carry from 150 to 280 tons of package freight, the péniches from 200 to 400 tons, and the barges perhaps as much as 650 tons. Recent improvements in dredging have given a depth of water which has of late allowed the development and use of a new type of steamer.
The steam-coasters carry a maximum of 750 tons at sea, from Havre to St. Brieuc or Morlaix, or to Dunkerque, and five hundred tons in the river.
Another sort of large barge has a carrying capacity of one thousand tons, on a significantly shallow draught, and finally, there are the steam-coasters, already mentioned, making the service between Paris and London, which are in reality ocean-going steamers, in spite of their collapsible masts and funnels.
Opposite Havre and connected by frequent boat journeys during the day is the most ancient port of Honfleur. One frequently enough reaches it via Havre, but, properly speaking, it belongs to that little group of coastwise cities and towns which stretches from the mouth of the Seine to the Cotentin.
Just above Havre on the Seine is the florid spire of the noble church of Harfleur,—not to be confounded with the now dormant port of Honfleur on the opposite bank,—one of the most imposingly placed spires in Normandy, if not in France.
Harfleur was besieged in 1415 by Henry V. of England, and fell after forty days, when sixteen hundred families were transported to England, “without having any belongings except the clothes they stood in and five sols each.”
The superb spire of St. Martin’s Church dates from the fifteenth century and dominates the fifteenth and sixteenth-century houses at its base quite like an angel guardian. The sixteenth-century château of the Comte de Labédoyère is an imposing edifice in the style of Louis XIII.
To-day this old seaport of Harfleur—which, like Honfleur across the estuary, has lost its former pride and glory—is scarcely more than a suburb of Havre, a half-dozen kilometres distant.
On an isolated cliff on the Seine above Harfleur, one sees the two great towers of the Château of Tancarville. This fortress-château was first built in the eleventh or twelfth century, on the plan of a triangle, having at each of its angles a great tower, and, on the intervening walls on each side, intermediate towers to the number of seven.
Within the walls was the castle of the seigneurs of Tancarville, of which more or less fragmentary ruins still remain.
On the terrace masking the ruins is the new château, a cold, modern edifice which no one could possibly be in love with, but for the admirably imposing outlook from its windows.
Lillebonne, on the Seine midway between Rouen and Havre, is known to have the remains of one of the most northerly—if not the most northerly—Roman amphitheatre extant.
Supposedly this little Seine-side town was named for the great Roman and bore the name Juliabona, from which was derived its present nomenclature.
Numerous Roman antiques have been discovered here from time to time,—most of which are to be seen in the museum at Rouen,—which marks it as having been a city of importance, indeed only such ever had a great open-air theatre such as is indicated by the remains visible at Lillebonne to-day.
Lillebonne was also the capital of the Province of Caux, but fell into decadence after the invasions. The Norman William resuscitated the place and made it a strong fortification. Remains of his château, also restored in the thirteenth century by the Comtes d’Harcourt, who in turn possessed the town, are yet to be seen. For the most part the edifice is in fragments, but enough remains of the old walls,—now forming a terrace,—a crenelated low tower, a hexagonal tower, and a cylindrical donjon—with walls a dozen feet in thickness—to suggest that the town’s former importance under the Norman dukes was quite the equal of that of its Roman days.
Lillebonne has also a most interesting mediæval church, dating from the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.
At last one reaches Caudebec-en-Caux, a picturesque old town, with a most magnificent parish church and a little tree-bordered quay which is charming. But in season all is spoiled by the general attitude of lying in wait for unwary trippers and excursionists from London, which seems to have set its mark upon the inhabitants of this otherwise delightful stopping-place.
That great wonder of nature, the mascaret, is the great drawing-card of Caudebec, even more than the artistic pretensions of its flamboyant fifteenth-century church, with its wonderful spire, the old houses of the town, its famous market, and the quaint costumes of the Cauchoise women.
The great wave comes suddenly, as if the flood-gates were let loose, to a height of two or three metres above the normal surface of the water, and during May or June, when the mascaret is at its best, it is the chief magnet of attraction to scores of travellers who have timed their itineraries so as to witness this freak of nature.
The market-place of Caudebec is most delightfully situated, extending from the base of the old church to the tree-bordered quays, where also are the town’s two chief hotels, with delightful little balconies, on which one may dine and watch the throng below and the water-borne traffic of the Seine.
The banks of the Seine itself at Caudebec begin to rise and narrow, and the generally flat lowland aspect takes on more of the nature of wooded hills, with an occasional château or church peeping out from among the trees.
Next above Caudebec is one of the most celebrated abbeys in the north of France, St. Wandrille’s. It keeps company, or rather its ruin does, with those other grand remains of Jumièges and St. Georges de Boscherville, all of which lie within a twenty-mile square plot of ground on the two peninsulas made by the windings of the Seine just north of Rouen.
The cloister of St. Wandrille, which, in ruins, may yet be seen, was one of the most beautiful of the middle ages.
The founder of the abbey, in 648, was St. Wandrille, a disciple of St. Columba and a member of one of the most distinguished families of Austrasia. St. Wandrille exercised the most important functions at the court of Pepin, but subsequently retired to the monastery of Montfauçon in Champagne, ultimately to come to Normandy, where he founded the monastery of Fontenelle, or St. Wandrille, as it afterward became known.
In a little time the establishment came to a flourishing prosperity, with over three hundred monks.
St. Wandrille evangelized the entire Province de Caux and sent out many colonies of monks to carry on the work.
From the Abbey of Fontenelle came St. Lambert, Bishop of Lyons, St. Ansbart, the Bishop of Rouen, St. Gennade, and St. Agathon. In all, forty personages coming from the abbey were subsequently honoured in the French calendar by the title of saint.
The structure itself, splendid and magnificent, and its church, above all, was only to be compared to the gems of its era.
Nothing, or nearly nothing, remains of all this splendour to-day; some fragmentary piers and arches, or a bit of wall set shrine-like in the midst of the wooded valley on the right bank of the Seine, tell the story, but they tell it well.
There is a record of an old bénitier or holy-water font here which had engraven upon its rim the following admonition:
“He who takes the holy water without having immersed the hand, does a thing dishonest, and must demand a pardon from his God.”
It does not exist to-day, but the precept seems to be one which might find a useful place in twentieth-century churches.
Just above St. Wandrille is Duclair, a market-town of mean enough pretensions as to population except on market-days. On those occasions its principal streets and tiny place are encumbered with many varieties of live stock, from sucking pigs to crowing hens. For an automobile to pass through its restricted streets and not decapitate something (a fowl costs two francs, a duck five, and so on) would be a feat of skill indeed.
The town has no great artistic attractions, though its church is a queer composition of Norman fourteenth-century and Renaissance attributes. Beneath the steeple are also some ancient Gallo-Romain columns with sculptured capitals.
In the peninsula lying to the south of Duclair, where the river turns into one of those wonderful serpent-like bends, such as one used to see on the cashmere shawls of our grandmothers, are the remains of the ancient Abbey of Jumièges. Its two sombre towers, square at the base, but dwindling to an octagon, enflank an enormous shell, now dismantled and all but dismembered.
Jumièges was the most ancient monastery in Normandy. It was founded in the seventh century by St. Philibert, and had at one time nine hundred monks.
It endured for many centuries rich, powerful, and renowned; its abbots were beatified and many of them made bishops and archbishops. The Dukes of Normandy and the Kings of England and of France had the right to lodge there when passing in its neighbourhood.
The abbey declined with the reformatory ideas which went abroad through the Calvinists, who pillaged it of its riches.
Afterward a few monks were sheltered there, but these, too, were dispersed when the fabric finally suffered demolition during the Revolution.
The remains, with the fine surrounding gardens, are now the property of a Madame Lepel-Cointet, who herself inhabits one of the dependencies of the ancient monastery.
Lovers of French history will do well to recall the fact that Charles VII., and that paragon Agnes Sorel, frequently lodged here. It was at Jumièges, on the ninth of February, 1450, that the “gentille Agnes,” the beautiful mistress of Charles VII., died, some say of poison. She had the good fortune to merit far more approbation than most of the royal mistresses of France, and whether one pauses before the shrine of her birthplace at Fromenteau near Bourges, her tomb at Loches, or at Jumièges, their memories will unconsciously echo the following lines:
The “gentille Agnes” had a manor-house in the neighbourhood, but died within the walls of the monastery itself in 1450, to the monks of which she bequeathed her heart.
In the Art Museum is still to be seen the stone which originally covered this relic, as well as the stone tomb of Nicolas Léroux, the fifty-ninth abbé, one of the judges of Jeanne d’Arc.
From the country round about are exported considerable quantities of early summer fruits and vegetables to England, the soil and the climate of the Seine country being particularly suitable to the early advancement of garden-crops.
Before one finally draws up on Rouen and its down-river suburbs there is still another ecclesiastical monument, St. Georges de Boscherville,—the third great church of other times still remaining to tell its story. St. Georges de Boscherville was more fortunate than Jumièges or St. Wandrille as to its enduring qualities. Its abbey church is to-day one of those marvels which one continually comes across in the out-of-the-way places of France; admirably preserved, of wonderfully excellent design, and immense in size—as compared with the functions which it performs to-day. It is one of the architectural wonders of a region distinctly prolific in treasures of the kind. Its strong, Norman-arched nave and walls, its chapter-house, its portal, in fact the whole structure, is of that long-lived Romanesque-Norman variety of building which gave its name and style to the far-heralded Norman architecture. It is a monument to the genius of one man: its builder, Raoul de Tancarville, the chamberlain of William the Conqueror. He posed the crowning stone of the edifice in 1066, the year of the Norman invasion of England, in the domain of Boscherville, of which he was governor.
The abbey was first devoted to the canons regular of St. Augustin, but in 1114 it was occupied by monks of the order of St. Benoit.
St. Georges de Boscherville is a grand church edifice, with a chapter-house. It could easily hold five thousand people, whereas the present population of the parish cannot be over a couple of hundred souls.
It is commonly accredited as one of the best preserved examples of Norman religious architecture extant. Over its doorway one may yet read this inscription to its founder.
| “A la pieuse munificence de Raoul de Tancarville, grand chambellan de Guillaume II. le Conquérant, duc de Normandie.” |
Toward Rouen the Seine describes a triple bend, its contours enveloped with high, wooded plateaus, of which the Roumare, Londe, and Rouvray forests are most charming, and are to the Norman capital what Fontainebleau and Rambouillet are to Paris.
Thickly set for many miles along the river-bank are villages and towns blending industrial and country pursuits in inextricable fashion, with here and there the luxurious villa of a wealthy manufacturer of Rouen peeping out from among the sheltering trees.
The Seine, both above and below Rouen, makes a series of snakelike curves which encircle a half-dozen or more forest-grown peninsulas, which appeal particularly to one who, judging only from the appearance of the dunes of the seacoast or the faintly outlined, tree-bordered roads which run tangently in various directions, had made up his mind that France is a barren, treeless land.
Back of St. Sauveur, but within full sight of a person standing on the water-front at Rouen, are the oak-clad hills which form the forest of Rouvray. The next peninsula contains the forest of Londe; and, across the river, on the same side with Rouen itself, is the forest peninsula of Roumare, which has for a neighbour another thumblike neck of land, on which is the forest of Jumièges and the ruins of its ancient abbey.
These taken together form the down-river environs of Rouen. The panorama along the banks of the Seine is a great treasure-house of natural beauties and historical relics.
There is a great deal of smoke near Rouen, but the chimneys from which it belches forth are, nevertheless, picturesque. Farther down the river are the busy manufacturing and ship-building towns of Petit and Grand Quévilly; while on the Rouen side at this point are a series of picturesque hamlets along the riverside road which extends for a score of miles around the flank of the peninsula to Duclair.
The foliage along the river-banks here, except for the high-grown forests behind, is much the same as elsewhere,—slim, light larches, with here and there a clump of low-lying willows and an undergrowth which runs to the water’s edge.
At Bouille-Molineux, the terminus of the ferry-boats from Rouen, is the famous monument to the French combatants who perished here in 1871; which reminds one of the bronze and marble effigies with which the Germans have decorated the Rhine. Here also is the suggestively named Maison Brulée, famed for its fried eels, which are really a delicacy as they are served in France.
The chief and only attraction of Petit Couronne is the home of Corneille, surely a literary shrine of the first rank, although frequently neglected by the tourist birds of passage who flock to the continent of Europe in summer. Why this should be so is inexplicable. It is scarce five miles from the Norman capital, and a plea is here made to hero-worshippers and lovers of literary landmarks for a better acquaintance.
The house dates from 1554, and was bought by the poet’s father in 1608, from whom Pierre inherited it in 1639. Two years after the poet’s death, in 1686, it was sold for 5,100 livres. The Department of the Lower Seine bought it in 1874 and transformed it into the Musée Corneillen, an art museum devoted to Corneille.
Within are many personal relics of the poet and a vast collection of contemporary works of art. Among the chief are a bust of Corneille after that in the Comédie-Française, some Louis XIII. chairs, portraits of the poet by Lebrun and Mignard, an engraving of Meissonier’s portrait retouched by himself, a statue by David d’Angers, and a manuscript letter bearing the signature “P. Corneille.”
The construction of the building is ingenious and peculiar. It is of the old timbered style, now grown so scarce, with an elaborately roofed garret.
The care with which such monuments are preserved is expressive of the fondness of the French for the memories of their great men; and, though it was wholly through local pride that the Musée Corneillen was established, it may well be considered a monument of national interest.
Petit Quévilly has a few memorials of other days which are perhaps of interest to the archæologist, if not to the general tourist: a chapel dedicated to St. Julien dating from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the somewhat scanty fragments of a hospital for lepers, founded in 1183 by Henry II. of England, some ruins of an ancient cloister, and an old Carthusian convent of the seventeenth century, which has since been turned into a factory.
Grand Quévilly still preserves the Château of Montmorency, built in the eighteenth century, when ornamental domestic architecture fell far below the height it had reached two centuries before. The château is beautifully situated in the midst of a fine park. Here, too, is the farm of Grand Aulnay, belonging to the hospital at Rouen, a gift to the old foundation by Richard Cœur de Lion in 1197.
By this time the traveller up the Seine is well in sight and sound of Rouen’s chimney-stacks, and the roaring traffic of its quays and streets.
At Croisset, on the banks of the Seine three kilometres below Rouen, is a literary shrine which is little known. It is the home of Gustave Flaubert. Maupassant, De Goncourt, Daudet, and Zola frequently met there for luncheon with the author of “Madame Bovary.”
When Flaubert died the house was for a long time deserted; but a committee has recently been formed to preserve its associations, as was done for the home of Corneille at Grand Couronne, on the opposite bank of the river.
“Truly a fair estate, here beside this great river up and down which the masts of ships pass before one, ...” wrote Edmond de Goncourt in 1830.
It was an appropriate home for a man of letters; for in the eighteenth century it housed a colony of Benedictines, and is destined to become one of those haunts of literary people, of which there are so many throughout France. All who go to Rouen should make a pilgrimage to the home of Flaubert.
No one who knows Rouen, the city of the Northmen, the Conqueror, and of Jeanne d’Arc, will for a moment contest its right to be ranked as one of the liveliest, if not one of the biggest seaports of the world. One marvels at the size and number of deep-sea ships at its wharfs. Here you will see colliers from Sunderland and Wales, of great depth and beam; lumber ships from Norway, of equally sturdy girth; and occasionally a full-rigged ship which has been towed up from Havre, where perhaps it has unloaded a part of its South Sea cargo. Across the Pont Corneille, just off the quay which separates the Grand Cours from the river, is the harbour of the great canal-boats which carry coal from Newcastle and Sunderland to Paris and the upper Seine, the Eure, and their branches, between the city of great churches and the metropolis of Paris. They are huge craft, built as if they were expected to cross the ocean. There are none as large as they, except their sister ships of Holland which ply on the lower reaches of the Maas and Neder Rijn or the great trunk-line canals. All other barges, canal-boats, and lighters pale before the splendour and magnitude of these great coal-carrying craft, which form a fleet of a hundred or more at a time tied up in their harbour in Rouen.
Besides these, there are the local bateaux mouches, which ply up and down to near-by suburbs, much as they do in Paris, as well as a more splendid craft which carries passengers on alternate days from Rouen to Havre. Last, but not least, the spider-like Pont Transbordeur is visible from every direction as evidence of progress.
Rouen, moreover, is about the only city of France which has its water-front flanked by first-class cafés. From the Pont Corneille, down-stream to the Pont Transbordeur, is one long succession of wicker chairs and marble-topped tables, where on a summer’s afternoon there is as much gaiety and splendour of life to be seen as on the most crowded of the boulevards of Paris.
There is this distinction, however. Instead of the tables being crowded with boulevardiers and their female companions of more or less vulgar raiment, they are occupied by substantial merchants and men of affairs, officers of the army, and, on Sundays and holidays, by many of their families, to say nothing of the numerous tourists both English and American.
All of this is in strong contrast to the workaday aspect of the ships which lie along the wharfs, and the long trucks and drays of wine-casks which form their cargo.
The Douane, the Bourse, the Grande Poste, and the Cours Boïeldieu, with its most excellent bronze statue of the composer, all combine to give an air of great prosperity to all Rouen.
The tourist in general, as well as the antiquarian and the artist, often overlook these components which make for the well-being of a great centre of population. But they are of vital interest to the genuine travel-lover, and indicate in an unmistakable way the real social and economic aspects of its life.
A capital city Rouen always was. May she continue to flourish as one of the artistic capitals of France, if not of Europe. She is truly the city of the best Gothic art. Nowhere else, indeed, can one see so complete an exposition of the development of this architectural style as in Rouen, with its three great and famous churches, its half-dozen half-demolished and desecrated ones, its court-house, and old-time buildings.
Again the art of the Renaissance is here seen in its very best domestic application, in the old timbered and stone shop fronts and houses, in the Hôtel Bourgtheroulde, or the Tour de la Grosse Horloge, and the Porte Guillaume Lion, almost unknown to the hurried traveller.
The magnitude of the harbour of Rouen and of Quévilly as a ship-building centre is comparatively unknown to most strangers.
The real port of Rouen, that part of the Seine flanked by imposing warehouses and luxurious quays, shows more plainly than in any other inland town or city of France the spectacle of modern activity which comes from commercial association with the cities of other lands. It was built at a great expense; and to-day allows access to ships drawing as much as twenty-four feet of water and of a burden of six thousand tons. The shipping of the port amounts to over two million tons a year.
From Havre to Rouen the depth of the Seine varies from 6.0 to 7.5 metres and it is unobstructed by locks or bridges.
Just above the entrance to the Tancarville Canal, where rises the Aiguille de Pierre Gant, and less loftily the ruined towers of the thirteenth-century Château of Tancarville, is a bend in the river which offered the guardians of the safety thereof an opportunity to install a wonderful lighthouse, which at night is weirdly kaleidoscopic in its functions, to say the least. Here it is that salt-water navigation practically ends, and the coast pilot turns over his great cargo steamer, bound perhaps from Norway, America, or the Antipodes, to Rouen, to the tenderer mercies of the river pilot. The pilot station is at Quillebeuf, a quaint old town on the left bank. Quillebeuf is the port of the lower Seine; but, though its active history goes back to the thirteenth century, and it was one time known as Henricopolis, because it was one of the first cities of Normandy to acknowledge the French king, there is little of interest in its streets and quays except for the painter of long-shore marines.
ROUEN is truly celebrated for its art; but above all it interests the tourist by reason of the multiplicity and accessibility of its sights.
One can well call it to mind by these lines of Victor Hugo’s:
All the city’s monumental glories cannot be described here. The most that is attempted is the record of various rambles here and there in nooks and corners often not covered by the general traveller; practically leaving Rouen’s magnificent cathedral, its great churches and their appointments, its architectural monuments such as the Palais de Justice, to the guide-books of convention.
Time was, though difficult of belief now, when Rouen was called by an eighteenth-century traveller “an ugly, stinking, close, and ill-built town.” To-day no provincial city of France is more visited by tourists of every degree of wealth than the ancient Norman capital, and certainly none is more liked.
Its general aspect is that of a city of modern appointments and ancient architectural treasures, and its municipal governors are keenly alive to all that makes for the betterment of life within the city limits.
In spite of all this, some of its back streets and alleys are badly cared for, even to-day; and the condition of nodding, leaning, old timbered houses which artists love, does not by any means tend to purify the atmosphere.
There are some things in regard to which the French are still behind the times. Their streets are not in the immaculate condition of cleanliness in which they ought to be. There is always some sort of municipal scavengering, but often this does not reach to the far corners, and often individual effort itself, in the poorer quarters, does not go beyond sweeping refuse into the gutter or some byway. This is perhaps no more true of Rouen than of Amiens, of Lyons, or of Marseilles; but, nevertheless, there is a great opportunity for a new effort with respect to some of the older quarters, such as the streets running immediately back of the Church of St. Maclou.
That “Rouen is dearer than Paris” is a saying which has come to us from a century-old traveller; and there is certainly some truth in it.
The history of Rouen’s bridges is most interesting. To-day there are but three, and only two of them are of the conventional order. The celebrated Pont Transbordeur, while being essentially practical, is a weird exotic, not entitled to be classed with those masterpieces in stone built throughout France in the middle ages, many of which exist even to-day.
The first bridge at Rouen was probably not built before the year 1000, and the first document which makes mention of any bridge here is an acte de donation of Richard II. in favour of the Abbey of Jumièges, dated at Fécamp in 1024. Therein was conceded to the monks at Jumièges, the right to fish from Pont de l’Arche up to the Pont de Rouen. At this time the Pont de Rouen was a stone structure. A bridge of boats replaced this early stone bridge, and was considered one of the marvels of its time.
The monks, it seems, were always endowed with certain talents for bridge-building; and like the brothers of the bridge of St. Bénézet’s day at Avignon, took a certain guardianship over travellers by road who were obliged to make use of these conveniences. The monks established shelters near the bridges, or even on them in some instances, as in the case of the establishment kept up by “Les Frères du Pont” at Avignon.
It was an Augustinian monk, Père Nicolas, who had furnished the plans for this bridge of boats at Rouen. In 1630 it was begun, but five years later it was, in part, carried away by a flood, which misfortune induced the authorities to rebuild it with improvements, permitting certain sections to be opened to allow the passage of floating ice. However, it met with disaster again and again,—in 1669, in 1741, 1777, and 1799. To-day, besides the Pont Transbordeur, Rouen’s bridges are the Pont Corneille, named for the great dramatist, and the Pont Boïeldieu, named for his brother in arts—this time for a great music master.
Above the Ile Brouilly, the Western Railroad crosses the Seine on an iron structure held aloft on stone piers. The newest of Rouen’s bridges is the unique and essentially practical Pont Transbordeur, opposite the Boulevard Cauchoise, not a wholly beautiful structure, though certainly a marvel of interest to the stranger.
It belongs to the workaday world of docks and shipping, and is nothing but a mass of wire rope and suspended car, or cradle, like that of a travelling crane; but it was economical to build, and is equally so to run, and it serves the purposes of those whose business takes them among the shipping of the really great port of Rouen.
At any rate this marvel is no less beautiful than the Tower Bridge on London’s river, which serves the same purpose.
After all, the standard of beauty by which one judges the things of this world is a variable one, and the same person may decry the ugliness of the Pont Transbordeur at Rouen, and yet think a full-rigged ship beautiful. As a matter of fact they are each a collection of struts and ties, and each is best adapted to the end in view; so the standard of judgment becomes a more or less artificial one, based simply on what we have been accustomed to see.
Not every visitor to Rouen searches out the delightful Hôtel Bourgtheroulde, one of the most brilliant Renaissance domestic establishments yet enduring in Normandy. It was built at great expense in the earliest years of the sixteenth century by Messire Guillaume Leroux, the seigneur of Bourgtheroulde. The exterior to-day shows little of luxury, but its interior court has the finely preserved decoration of other days, still left for us to marvel at. A series of bas-reliefs representing the triumphs of Petrarch and the famous interview of the “Field of the Cloth of Gold” are the chief of these admirable works of art.
In the desire to absorb all of the momentous historical attractions of Rouen one is apt to overlook a certain literary shrine, hidden away behind the old market.
In the Rue Pierre Corneille is the house where the father of the two poets by the name of Corneille lived. One reads upon a tablet placed upon the house:
“Ici étaient la maison
où sont nés les deux Corneilles
Pierre le 6 juin 1606, Thomas le 24 Août 1625.”
One of Rouen’s great attractions for many is Notre Dame de Bon Secours. As a place of pious pilgrimage its virtues may be all that are claimed for it, but as an artistic religious expression of an artistic and devout people it is about as low and vulgar a one as it is possible to see. No pagan ever erected a temple so hideous; and the church itself is set about by a burial-ground wherein are as offensive, ill-assorted a lot of tombstones as ever spoiled one of nature’s masterpieces. It is a masterpiece of landscape,—the winding Seine, the busy city of Rouen with its church towers and its bridges, and the forests of Rouvray, La Londe, and Roumare.
In addition there are curio shops for the sale of “objets du vertu et du piété,” the quality of which would be a disgrace to a fifth-rate watering-place.
A huge bell, too great to be hung in the tower of the modern Gothic Church of Our Lady, protrudes into the foreground surrounded by a clumsy iron cage. A placard requests the public not to throw pieces of stone at the bell, though why this should be necessary it is hard to say.
Another sort of a pagan temple, in triplicate, is supposed to commemorate the memory of Jeanne d’Arc; but it fails utterly to attract, and is merely to be counted as another of the side-shows of this splendid natural landscape, now utterly spoiled.
The simple marble square in Rouen’s old market-place, which presents only the plain statement that “on this spot, tied to the stake, was burned alive Jeanne d’Arc,” etc., is much more satisfactory.
An old-time traveller has said: “The first view of Rouen is sudden and striking.” He had come by road from Gisors. “The road again doubled in order to turn more gently down the hill, and presents the finest view of a town I have ever seen. The city, with all its churches and convents, and its cathedral proudly rising in the midst, fills the whole vale.”
The scene from the height of Bon Secours, where the great national highway from Paris drops down on Rouen, is in no way different to-day, and indeed it is doubtful if there be a finer view of a town in all the world than that same prospect.
What is the finest view in the world will, doubtless, always be a question for dispute; but those who have seen wide-spread Rouen, from the road which winds around to the back of Bon Secours,—not from the plateau or terrace of the church, or the Jeanne d’Arc monument,—have often reversed their previous judgments.