M. F. Mansfield

“ One need not rise, for his chamber, if it is on the water side, faces the east. It is incomparable to anything to be seen elsewhere. It is as if one were in mid-ocean. The Normandy coast, not so very far distant, is silhouetted against the sky as the refulgent sun breaks through the clouds and mists of early morning. Suddenly the sea reflects it with mirror-like brilliancy,—another day is born.
West of Avranches is Mortain, situated in the midst of the most picturesque country-side of the Cotentin. ”

“ ONE of the joys of France to-day, as indeed it ever has been, is travel by road. The rail has its advantages, but it also has its disadvantages, whereas the most luxurious traveller by road, even if he be snugly tucked away in a sixty-horse royal Mercédes, is nothing more than an itinerant vagabond, and France is the land above all others for the sport.
As an industry to be developed and fostered, France early recognized the automobile as a new world-force, and the powers that be were convinced that the way should be smoothed for those who would, with the poet Henley, sing the song of speed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At Lyons-le-Forêt, the little forest town of perhaps half a thousand inhabitants, one comes immediately into touch with a civilization strangely out of keeping with its idyllic setting. There is a hotel there with all the improvements of our own time: enamelled baths, running water, an automobile omnibus to the station, seven kilometres distant, ice for cold drinks, Scotch whisky, and many other luxuries which discount one’s enjoyment of real country travel. ”

“ Eastward toward the boundary of Normandy and Picardy, one passes Varengeville-sur-Mer, Sainte Marguerite and Quiberville, all delightful little seaside towns with a touch of the beau-monde in summer, and a dull, quiet, but none the less entrancing, life in winter, when the natives gossip about their last season’s visitors, and speculate as to what the harvest may be the coming year, meantime catching a few fish and going weekly to the nearest market-town. ”

“ The chief towns are Louviers, a busy cloth-manufacturing centre with an art treasure of the first rank in its beautifully flamboyant church; and Evreux with its bizarre cathedral, headquarters of the Department of the Eure; while northward and westward, by Conches and Beaumont-le-Roger to Caen and Bayeux, lies a wonderful country of picturesque and historic towns, such as Lisieux; Bernay, famous for its horse-fair; Falaise, the birthplace of William the Conqueror; and Dives, where he set sail for England’s shores,—names which will awaken memories of the past in a most vivid fashion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Mounting the heights of Ingouville, one sees unrolled at his feet, in an imposing panorama, the city of Havre to its uttermost confines, its port, its ten docks, its wharfs, its suburbs, the immense estuary of the Seine, Cape de la Hève, and the sea, with the white and brown sails of the ships and fishing-boats, and the parti-coloured funnels and hulls of big steamers. In thirty years the movement of ships in and out of the port has swelled from 2,600,000 tons to more than six million. ”

“ Throughout the open country in the Seine valley one may contemplate a succession of farmyards, orchards, and great brown and green patches of cultivated land which will make him envious of the genius of a Daubigny or a Millet.
The great walled farms of Normandy are ever a source of surprise to the stranger and of pride to the occupant, who, like enough, is the fifth of his line; for the peasant-proprietor is a power in the land to-day, as he has been since before the Revolution. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every one knows, or may be supposed to know, that the Breton is from Brittany, and the Gascon from Gascony; but how many among the untravelled can put their finger on that spot on the map of France where live the Cevenoles, the Tricastins, or Cauchois; or, for that matter, can locate with exactness the country of the Comminges, the Caux, or the Cotentin?
With France, more perhaps than any other nation on the globe, names of places have a great romantic and patriotic significance. ”

“ Occasionally, off the beaten track—while trying to discover that new route across France, or rather across Normandy from one river valley to another—we came upon a hill too stiff for us to surmount at the top speed. There is one in the Forêt du Rouvray near Grand Couronne, and another at La Thuit near Les Andelys; but in France such ungraded hills are few and far between. Even the dreaded Côte de Gaillon, of hill-climbing fame, paled before our machine, and we took it flying at twenty kilometres an hour. ”

“ In the matter of eating, Rouen, except in the little market-farmers’ tables d’hôte, has become corrupted and Parisian; but at Evreux, Louviers, Conches, and at Avranches and Bayeux, one eats only the native fare, and is not glutted with beefsteak, mutton-chops, and ham and eggs, and, worst of all, ham omelets, which every hotel in a large city in France seems to think is a specially palatable dish to English-speaking folk. ”

“ Throughout the valley one receives emotions varying from those of sylvan and idyllic surroundings on the upper river, to those aroused by the busy little towns peopled with yarn-spinners and cloth-weavers of both sexes, who are supremely happy at their work, which lasts for a dozen hours each day.
The middle ages covered this contented valley of to-day with numberless fortresses, which are now scarcely recognizable even as ruins. The tower of Jean-Sans-Terre which remains at Radepont, together with the earlier work of Richard Cœur de Lion, is the exception. ”

“ Un pays aimé is a good friend, indeed, to whom one may turn in time of strife, and none other than Normandy—unless it be Brittany—has proved itself a more safe and pleasant land for travellers.
When one knows the country well he recognizes many things which it has in common with England. Its architecture, for one thing, bears a marked resemblance; for the Norman builders, who erected the magnificent ecclesiastical edifices in the Seine valley during the middle ages, were in no small way responsible for many similar works in England. ”

“ From the first span of this long bridge, one sees, up or down stream, a succession of groupings of poplars and locusts growing up from the river bank, a tiny orchard or two, the long, wooded alley of larches which forms the entrance to the private park on the Ile l’Homme, the curiously spired church of Notre Dame du Vaudreuil, a sluice, and a weir. There are innumerable “motives,” as artists love to call them, for a day’s, a week’s, or a month’s work of brush or pencil. ”

“ Its church and its few hundred houses lie mostly hidden from the railway by the screen of poplars on the long avenue leading from the station. Incidentally this adds additional attraction; and to-day there is nothing save the distant shriek of a locomotive to remind one its inhabitants are not living in another age. The river glides by as in olden times, and there is much boat and barge traffic. The town is not so especially decrepit, nor dirty, nor unwholesome; but it has a certain lackaday air of aversion to modernity which a town of its size seldom lacks in this part of France. ”

“ Cape Hague, the Hague lighthouse, and the Nez de Jobourg form a trinity of attractions for the traveller jaded with the stock sights of conventional watering-places.
It is but a short thirty kilometres from Cherbourg, en route to nowhere, unless one is heading for America, and is known to Frenchmen as the most isolated spot of all the mainland of France. “One must not look there,” they say, “for the wonders of art or civilization, for vegetation, the life of the casino, or the tables d’hôte of the towns.” ”

“ Normandy, where it borders upon the Seine, comes very near being the artists’ ideal sketching-ground. It has all the attributes of the open country, as well as great industrial centres with picturesque chimney-stacks, and possesses a part of the most charming seacoast of France. Etretat and Honfleur are famous, Caudebec-en-Caux, in a way, is one of the reputed paradises for artists, while Les Andelys, Giverny, and La Roche-Guyon are—well, spots which as soon as they shall become popular with tourists will lose much of their charm, which is to-day natural, simple, and characteristically local. ”

“ There is one real regret that will strike one with regard to the journeyings in the valley of the Seine. There is no way of making the trip by water above Rouen. From Havre to Rouen, one may journey in a day on a little steamer, a most enjoyable trip; and at Rouen one finds the little “fly-boats,”—reminiscent of the bateaux mouches of Paris,—which will take one for a half a dozen miles in either direction for astonishingly low fares. ”

“ The houses of Honfleur are, in general, less lofty and ornate than in many other regions of Normandy; but their narrow timbered fronts and irregular gables render them no less picturesque.
A half-dozen or more kilometres from Honfleur is a little stream, not marked on many maps, known as the Risle. On its banks, about the same distance from its juncture with the Seine, is Pont Audemer, another beautiful town, given over, however, to industrialism. Its tanneries and cider-presses give employment and sustenance to several thousand people. ”

“ Normandy is in many respects the ideal of a delightful tour for those who would not go further afield, or who wish to know still more of those conventional touring-grounds of which, truth to tell, but little is known by those tourists personally conducted in droves, who do a watering-place in the morning, take their lunch at some riverside shrine, and get to a cathedral town in time to nibble at its masterpiece before the hour of opening, which in Normandy, Rouen in particular, is early. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”