Part 3

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

1. ST. STEPHEN, CAEN, E. Frontispiece

2. FALAISE CASTLE 12

3. ST. GERVASE, FALAISE, S.W. 16

4. COUTANCES CATHEDRAL, CENTRAL TOWER 24

5. INTERIOR OF COUTANCES CATHEDRAL 28

6. CAPITALS IN BAYEUX CATHEDRAL 29

7. ABBEY OF FÉCAMP, N.E. 43

8. LIMAY CHURCH, TOWER, S.E. 53

9. DOMFRONT CASTLE 56

10. EU CHURCH, S.E. 57

11. VALOGNES CHURCH, N.E. 69

12. ABBEY OF LESSAY, S.W. 72

13. NOTRE-DAME, SAINT-LO, S.E. 83

14. ST. NICOLAS, COUTANCES, INTERIOR 88

15. LE MANS CATHEDRAL, N.W. 205

16. INTERIOR OF LE MANS CATHEDRAL 208

17. ST. MARTIN-IN-THE-VALE, CHARTRES 210

18. APSE OF LA COUTURE, LE MANS 210

19. NOTRE-DAME-DU-PRÉ, LE MANS, N.E. 221

20. SAINTE-SUSANNE, KEEP 235

SKETCHES OF TRAVEL IN NORMANDY AND MAINE

NORMANDY

1861

Before foreign travelling had become either quite so easy or quite so fashionable as it is now, the part of France most commonly explored by English tourists was Normandy. Antiquarian inquirers, in particular, hardly went anywhere else, and we suspect that with many of them a tour in France, as Mr. Petit says, still means merely a tour in Normandy. The mere holiday tourist, on the other hand, now more commonly goes somewhere else--either to the Pyrenees or to those parts of France which form the road to Switzerland and Italy. The capital of the province, of course, is familiar to everybody; two of the chief roads to Paris lie through it. But Rouen, noble city as it is, does not fairly represent Normandy. Its buildings are, with small exceptions, later than the French conquest, and, as having so long been a capital, and now being a great manufacturing town, its population has always been very mixed. There are few cities more delightful to examine than Rouen, but for the true Normandy you must go elsewhere. The true Normandy is to be found further West. Its capital, we suppose we must say, is Caen; but its really typical and central city is Bayeux. The difference is more than nine hundred years old. In the second generation after the province became Normandy at all, Rouen had again become a French city. William Longsword, Rollo's son, sent his son to Bayeux to learn Danish. There the old Northern tongue, and, we fancy, the old Northern religion too, still flourished, while at Rouen nobody spoke anything but French.

A tour in Normandy has an interest of its own, but the nature of that interest is of a kind which does not make Normandy a desirable choice for a first visit to France. We will suppose that a traveller, as a traveller should, has learned the art of travel in his own land. Let him go next to some country which will be utterly strange to him--as we are talking of France, say Aquitaine or Provence. He will there find everything different from what he is used to--buildings, food, habits, dress, as unlike England as may be. If he tries to talk to the natives he will perhaps make them understand his Langue d'oil; but he will find that his Parisian grammar and dictionary will go but a very little way towards making him understand their Lingua d'oc. Now, Normandy and England, of course, have many points of difference, and doubtless a man who goes at once into Normandy from England will be mainly struck by the points of difference. But let a man go through Southern Gaul first, and visit Normandy afterwards, and he will be struck, not with the points of difference, but with the points of likeness. Buildings, men, beasts, everything will at once remind him of his own country. We hold that this is a very sufficient reason for visiting the more distant province first. Otherwise the very important phenomenon of the strong likeness between Normandy and England will not be taken in as it ought to be.

Go from France proper into Normandy and you at once feel that everything is palpably better. Men, women, horses, cows, all are on a grander and better scale. If we say that the food, too, is better, we speak it with fear and trembling, as food is, above all things, a matter of taste. From the point of view of a fashionable cook, no doubt the Norman diet is the worse, for whence should the fashionable cook come except from the land with which Normandy has to be compared? But certain it is that a man with an old-fashioned Teutonic stomach--a man who would have liked to dine off roast meat with Charles the Great or to breakfast off beef-steaks with Queen Elizabeth--will find Norman diet, if not exactly answering to his ideal, yet coming far nearer to it than the politer repasts of Paris. Rouen, of course, has been corrupted for nine centuries, but at Evreux, and in Thor's own city of Bayeux, John Bull may find good meat and good vegetables, and plenty of them to boot. Then look at those strong, well-fed horses--what a contrast to the poor, half-starved, flogged, over-worked beasts which usurp the name further south! Look at those goodly cows, fed in good pastures, and yielding milk thrice a day; they claim no sort of sisterhood with the poverty-stricken animals which, south of the Loire, have to do the horse's work as well as their own. Look at the land itself. An Englishman feels quite at home as he looks upon green fields, and, in the Bessin district, sees those fields actually divided by hedges. If the visitor chance not only to be an Englishman but a West-Saxon, he will feel yet more at home at seeing a land where the apple-tree takes the place of the vine, and where his host asks special payment for wine, but supplies "zider" for nothing. But above all things, look at the men. Those broad shoulders and open countenances seem to have got on the wrong side of the Channel. You are almost surprised at hearing anything but your own tongue come out of their mouths. It seems strange to hear such lips talking French; but it is something to think that it is at least not the French of Louis the Great or of Louis Napoleon, but the tongue of the men who first dictated the Great Charter, and who wrung its final confirmation from the greatest of England's later kings.