Theodore Andrea Cook

“ Upon the glowing ashes of Mantes he met his death-wound. Through burning streets he was borne to his burial. He was not only the strongest of the dukes of Normandy, he was also one of the world's greatest men, whose work was not only thorough at the moment, but effective for all time; whose purpose was fixed, and whose iron will none could gainsay. He rose above the coarse, laughter-loving, brutal, treacherous, Norman barons of his time, by the force of his own personal genius, and the acuteness of his own strong intellect. ”

“ BAYEUX TAPESTRY Meanwhile the rising clamour roused the sentinels of Rouen, and all the garrison made ready for attack, hurried to their posts, and waited steadfastly under arms until the dawn. As the light shone from the east they saw the rout and disorder of their enemies' camp, and loud jeers and laughter rose along the walls, and echo still in the rough verses of Dudo their historian. The Flemish had the advantage of an early start, and got clear away. The French had followed fast upon their heels, but the Germans had plunged in unwieldy panic into the labyrinth of the woods and fens. ”

“ If you look closely at the few carvings remaining on the churches of the tenth and eleventh centuries, you will understand the terror under which all men were crushed as the thousandth year drew nearer, which was believed to be the end of the world. Grimacing dumbly in their stiffened attitudes of fear, these thin anatomies implore with clenched uplifted hands, the death that shall save them from the misery of their life. A world so filled with ruins might well give up all hope on this side of the tomb. The revolt of the Norman peasants had been crushed in blood. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There arose not only a great contempt for the value of human life, but a gross familiarity with death.294 The poor man, dying in his unregarded thousands, clutched to his starved heart the one consolation that the rich could not escape contagion. To the judge upon his bench, to the queen in her palace, to the cardinal in his state, to the king at his high festival, to the very Pope himself, death came as unerringly as to the ploughman sweating in his furrow. And the rich made haste to enjoy the little time they had. ”

“ Ruined by punishment for a crime in which they had had no share, they saw the prosperity of others increased by the operations of an unjust law, a law that might have served the turn of a more barbarous people, but which was now far more the relic of an ancient ignorance than a symbol of modern enlightenment. In an age when the judicial combat of the old code had been abolished with the trial by fire, the changing customs and growing ideas of the people in the rest of Normandy were not likely to preserve a custom so inhuman as that which the Court of Rouen alone still exercised. ”

“ THE artist who first truly understood the rendering of light is also the workman whose shadows are the deepest in every scene he drew. If I were to leave you with an impression of the sixteenth century either in Rouen or elsewhere—that was composed of gorgeous ceremonial, of exquisite architecture, of superabundant energy and life, and of these only, you would neither appreciate the many influences which wrought upon the men and women of those days, nor estimate at their true worth the changing events, on which we now look back in the large perspective of so many generations. ”

“ From the walls above, a priest sometimes would lean down with a blessing, or draw up an infant newly born into all this misery, baptise it, and lower it again to die; but never a crumb of bread came out of starving Rouen. The Canon de Livet, whose stout heart no horror of the siege could break, was almost overcome at this last infamy of fate; and standing high upon the ramparts he cursed the English army, and pronounced the anathema of excommunication against its king.
The citizens made one more attempt to break through that inflexible ring of death. ”

“ And all the faithful of the earth should help them. It is a mistake to think that Normans alone conquered the land of Harold. From Flanders, from the Rhine, from Burgundy, Piedmont and Aquitaine, from all the northern coasts, an army of volunteers flocked to the standard of the Duke. And their leader went swiftly on to make preparations worthy of so great a host. While all the woods of Normandy are ringing to the axe, and all the shipwrights' yards are sounding to the hammer, we may pause and see what this mighty expedition means to Rouen. ”

“ Few travellers go there, yet it is well worth the while, for here are collected many relics of an age that has left few traces anywhere, and here can be filled up many gaps in that story of Rouen which you can never read completely in what is left of the old town. In the courtyard that faces the Rue de la République are several of the ancient gateways that have given way before the press of modern traffic, and a few façades of carved and timbered houses rest like empty masks against the wall, looking forlorn enough, yet better here than lost. ”

“ The young girls from the country feel it most and fly from it the quickest, coming in to sell their eggs and chickens, with their woollen petticoats and gaily coloured headdress, or meeting some lover of the town at a dark corner in the narrow, damp, ill-ventilated streets. Here and there a silent figure clad in blue stalks from one house to another and leaves the mark of a great white cross upon the fast-shut door or shutters, for within there is the Plague. ”

“ 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 viiimeets. ”

“ Behind them, further to the north and east, drifted a piratical band of roaming warriors, who for the next five centuries press and harry the boundaries of the kingdoms, Visigoths and Ostrogoths, Saxons, Danes, and Scandinavians, of whom we shall hear more later.
The Christian bishops were the shield after Rome fell, between the trembling conquered races and the first wave of conquering barbarian invasion. The strength of their faith we have seen already in the crypt of St. Gervais. This little altar, and the tiny shrine of St. Godard watched infant Rouen from beyond its walls. ”

“ Thrice in 220 years had Rouen been besieged, once by the English and twice by its own countrymen, and each time the virtues of the famous "boise" had saved it from pillage and desecration. Upon its black and shining length the disputes of every century had been heard and settled: masters had brought up their quarrels with the workmen, merchants had wrangled over sharp practice in their business, girls had been summoned to receive a lecture from the elders of the parish on the flightiness and immodesty of their behaviour. ”

“ IF the Norman capital that Philip Augustus added to the royal domain of France was not particularly rich, as I have shown, in architectural beauty, it possessed something more enduring even than stone, more THE ARMS OF FRANCE vital than any school of architecture, something also far more precious as an indication of coming prosperity and strength; and this was the beginning of the independence and wealth of the citizens of Rouen, as symbolised by the beginning of their Commune. This spirit of independence, and bold assertion of consecrated privilege, was not limited to the laymen. ”

“ Every building has a character of its own, a personality apart from other houses in the street, and nearly all are gay with paint and gilding, and instinct with a natural feeling for artistic decoration that was only appreciated at its true worth after the Huguenot iconoclasts had wrecked it.
Amid all this life and colour death and the taint of death are ever present, for every church is little better than a charnel-house, and in the crowded city nearly eighty cemeteries are packed with dead. Magnificent processions of princes and of great prelates march through the town by day ”

“ Once used as a magazine of shops of every kind, sometimes a lost home for decrepit carriages, sometimes a drying-house for laundry-women, these exquisite ruins of Renaissance architecture have at last been rescued by the civic authorities, if not from evident decay, at any rate from further mutilation. The tower alone—but one among so many in Rouen—would be the proudest possession of many a larger English town. ”

“ Our smaller doings are recorded in the perishable print of fading paper, and we have no care to stamp what little we have left of character upon our buildings. No one, at least it may be fervently hoped, will try in the future to reconstruct the ideals or the life of the Victorian Era from its architecture. Yet we are the heirs of all that is noblest in that greatest of all arts; and if you would test that, you need only look at any mediæval French Cathedral with a seeing eye. ”

“ The streets and houses shrink into a narrower limit, bounded by a line of bastions, with crenelated towers at intervals, and eight gates each with its watch-tower and drawbridge and portcullis.
Above the battlemented walls, the airy spires and mighty pyramids of the City of Churches rise from thirty-five parishes, and from four and thirty monasteries. Three donjon keeps dominate the town. Upon the St. Catherine's Mount a fortress holds the hill, and above it rise the towers of the Abbey of St. Trinité du Mont. Within every church the monuments and carvings are still fresh and unmutilated. ”

“ From every parish church for miles round the ringers, waiting for the "bourdon's" note, sent out a joyful peal in chorus, and every villager drank bumpers to the prisoner's health. Himself, a little dazed we may imagine with this sudden tumult in the streets and in his heart too at deliverance from death, he marched along with the arquebusiers beside him, through a cheering crowd towards the old Halles. There the authority of the law let go its grip, and he was handed over to the chaplain and the deputies of the Confrèrie St. Romain, who took him to an inner room. ”

“ In such new creations of the aged spirit as the French Renaissance Châteaux of Touraine, or Rouen's Hôtel Bourgtheroulde, they showed what vigour there was left, if only it had been permitted to remain original. Nor is there any hope of betterment in architecture, or any art, to-day, until something of the spirit has come back to us which made each citizen proud of the house he lived in, or of the House of God he helped to build, until the love of workmanship that built the old cathedrals has returned. ”

“ In a tumultuous and cheering crowd, the citizens poured towards the centre of their civic life, in the Rue de la Grosse Horloge; Robert Deschamps, the Mayor, was put to instant flight for daring to give halting counsels, and his private prisons were broken open. "No King can make the people," cried the mob, "but we are going to make a King," and forthwith they seized on poor honest Jehan le Gras, a quiet, seemly draper; they robed him in a cloak that had just served its turn in the last Mystery Play, and they bore him in raucous triumph to the open square before St.152 Ouen. ”

“ After being sacked when it was scarce completed, by the Protestants in 1562, it was turned into a museum by the Revolution, and in 1793 was used as a blacksmith's shop for making arms. Yet nothing can efface that first breathless sense of soaring height and beauty which impresses you on your first entrance as you look up to the great windows of the clerestory, with the saints upon their silvery glass, set between the long slender shafts of columns that spring straight from the ground, and leap upwards like a fountain clear and undivided to the keystone of the roof. ”

“ Now it was Death himself who clutched every man by the sleeve and hurried him into the over-crowded ever-hungry sepulchre. If this was one thought of the rich who thought at all, it was also the only consolation of the poor, and therefore no more appropriate carvings for the poor man's cemetery of St. Maclou could be imagined by the workman of the sixteenth century. ”

“ The work of Germain Pilon at the Louvre, and of the sculptor of the dead de Brézé in Rouen Cathedral, whether that were Pilon himself, or Jean Cousin, or Goujon, has none of the gentle regret that reverences what it has once loved in life. There is in it all the fierce desire for personified destruction, all the hideous mockery of the rich man levelled with the poorest in a common corruption, which inspired the "Danse Macabre" ”

“ All night had Otto stayed awake in sorrow and unrest. At last, with the rising of the sun he heard a burst of minstrelsy. Rouen was silent no longer; the songs of triumph and defiance burst from every parapet and tower, while the very birds (says the chronicler) seemed to join in the chorus of happiness all round the beaten camp. Then Otto rode moodily along the city walls and watched the waggons bringing in supplies across the bridge, and noted that the bridge-head at Ermondeville (St. Sever as it is to-day) , was weakly held, so he rode back determined to starve Rouen into submission. ”

“ From the earliest hour at the breaking of the dawn of Ascension Day, the whole of Rouen was thinking and talking of nothing else except the prisoner, and in every quarter of the city the interest in him took a different form. All the countryside of Vexin and of Caux had trooped into the town with women and children in their Sunday best. From the attic windows of the Rue de l'Épicerie girls in flapping white head-dresses leant across the road and screamed their good fortune to the neighbours opposite ”

“ THE cluster of old buildings which are beneath the shadow of the belfry are perhaps better known to strangers than any other piece of architecture in the town. It is the focal point of Rouen, the centre of its civic life, and if you are fortunate enough to live quite close to it, as I did, you will find yourself in the best place for starting on nearly every expedition that your fancy may dictate. ”

“ So the people filled their church with throngs of worshippers, with merry-making crowds, with vast audiences of the great mediæval Mystery Plays, with riotous assemblages sometimes not too decent, whose rough humour has been preserved for us in the thousand grotesque carvings of the time.
I have been at this length in explaining the building of the cathedrals, because it would be impossible for you, without some such suggestion of their origin, to realise the meaning of the carvings which cover the great north and south porches of the transept at Rouen. ”

“ Not all the churches of which Rouen is so full can boast even that measure of preservation which storm and time and the more devastating hands of man have spared to the three noblest of her religious monuments. Of St. André, for instance, only the tower remains, that stands alone above the Rue Jeanne d'Arc, like the Tour St. Jacques in Paris, as an admirable specimen of the later Gothic architecture. ”