The Story of Rouen. Theodore Andrea Cook

A

      [Enlarge]

       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.

      MAP B

       MAP OF ROUEN

       SHEWING THE LINES OF THE MODERN BOULEVARDS

       (WHICH ARE THOSE OF THE WALLS BESIEGED BY KING HENRY V.)

       WITH THE CHIEF BUILDINGS AND

       MAIN STREETS OF THE CITY.

      [Enlarge]

       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