Chapter XIX
BAYEUX, CAEN, AND ROUEN
We had barely hesitated at Bayeux on the way to Cherbourg, but now we stopped there for the night. Bayeux, which is about sixty miles from Cherbourg, was intimately associated with the life of William the Conqueror, and is to-day the home of the famous Bayeux tapestry, a piece of linen two hundred and thirty feet long and eighteen inches wide, on which is embroidered in colored wools the story of William's conquest of England.
William's queen, Matilda, is supposed to have designed this marvelous pictorial document, and even executed it, though probably with the assistance of her ladies. Completed in the eleventh century, it would seem to have been stored in the Bayeux cathedral, where it lay scarcely remembered for a period of more than six hundred years. Then attention was called to its artistic and historic value, and it became still more widely known when Napoleon brought it to Paris and exhibited it at the Louvre to stir the French to another conquest of England. Now it is back in Bayeux, and has a special room in the museum there, and a special glass case, so arranged that you can walk around it and see each of its fifty-eight tableaux.
It was the closing hour when we got to the Bayeux museum, but the guardian gave us plenty of time to walk around and look at all the marvelous procession of horses and men whose outlines have remained firm and whose colors have stayed fresh for more than eight hundred years.
Matilda was ahead of her time in art. She was a futurist—anybody can see that who has been to one of the later exhibitions. But she was exactly abreast in the matter of history. It is likely that she embroidered the events as they were reported to her, and her records are above price to-day. I suppose she sat in a beautiful room with her maids about her, all engaged at the great work, and I hope she looked as handsome as she looks in the fine painting of her which hangs above the case containing her masterpiece.
There is something fine and stirring about Matilda's tapestry. No matter if Harold does seem to be having an attack of pleurisy when he is only putting on his armor, or if the horses appear to have detachable legs. Matilda's horses and men can get up plenty of swift action on occasion, and the events certainly do move. Tradition has it that the untimely death of the queen left the tapestry unfinished, for which reason William's coronation does not appear. I am glad we stopped at Bayeux. I would rather have seen Matilda's faithfully embroidered conquest than a whole gallery full of old masters.
Next day at Caen we visited her grave. It stands in a church which she herself founded in expiation of some fancied sin connected with her marriage. Her remains have never been disturbed. We also visited the tomb of the Conqueror, on the other side of the city at the church of St. Étienne. But the Conqueror's bones are not there now; they were scattered by the Huguenots in 1562.
We enjoyed Caen. We wandered about among its ancient churches and still more ancient streets. At one church a wedding was going on, and Narcissa and I lingered a little to assist. One does not get invited to a Normandy wedding every day, especially in the old town where William I organized his rabble to invade England. No doubt this bride and groom were descendants of some of William's wild rascals, but they looked very mild and handsome and modern to us. Narcissa and I attended quite a variety of ceremonials in the course of our travels: christenings, catechisms, song services, high mass, funerals—there was nearly always something going on in those big churches, and the chantings and intonings, and the candles, and the incense, and the processions and genuflections, and the robes of the priests and the costumes of the assemblages all interested us.