Caen became an important city under William the Conqueror. Edward III of England captured and pillaged it about the middle of the fourteenth century, at which time it was larger than any city in England, except London. It was from Caen that Charlotte Corday set out to assassinate Marat. To-day Caen has less than fifty thousand inhabitants and is mainly interesting for its art treasures and its memories.
We left the Paris-Cherbourg road at Caen. Our program included Rouen, Amiens, and Beauvais, cathedral cities lying more to the northward. That night we lay at the little Norman village of Bourg-Achard, in an inn of the choicest sort, and next morning looked out of our windows on a busy cattle market, where men in clean blue smocks and women in neat black dresses and becoming headgear were tugging their beasts about, exhibiting them and discussing them—eating, meantime, large pieces of gingerbread and other convenient food. A near-by orchard was filled with these busy traders. At one place our street was lined with agricultural implements which on closer inspection proved to be of American manufacture. From Bourg-Achard to Rouen the distance seemed all too short—the road was so beautiful.
It was at Rouen that we started to trace backward the sacred footprints of Joan of Arc, saint and savior of France. For it is at Rouen that the pathway ends. When we had visited the great cathedral, whose fairy-like façade is one of the most beautiful in the world, we drove to a corner of the old Market Place, and stopped before a bronze tablet which tells that on this spot on a certain day in May, 1431 (it was the 29th), the only spotless soul in France, a young girl who had saved her country from an invading and conquering enemy, was burned at the stake. That was five hundred years ago, but time has not dulled the misery of the event, its memory of torture, its humiliation. All those centuries since, the nation that Joan saved has been trying to atone for her death. Streets have been named for her; statues have been set up for her in every church and in public squares, but as we read that sorrowful tablet I could not help thinking that all of those honors together are not worth a single instant of her fiendish torture when the flames had found her tender flesh. Cauchon, later Bishop of Beauvais, her persecutor, taunted his victim to the last. If the chapel of expiation he built later at Lisieux saved him, then chapels must indeed be held in high esteem by those who confer grace.
Nothing is there to-day that was there then, but one may imagine an open market place thronged with people, and the horrid structure of death on which stood Joan while they preached to her of her sins. Her sins! when she was the only one among them that was not pitch black, steeped to the hair in villainy. Cauchon himself finished the sermon by excommunicating her, cutting off the church's promise of salvation. On her head she wore a cap on which was printed: Heretic, Relapsed, Apostate, Idolater. Cauchon had spared nothing to make her anguish complete. It is curious that he allowed her to pray, but he did, and when she prayed—not for herself, but for the king who had deserted her—for his glory and triumph, Cauchon himself summoned the executioners, and they bound her to the stake with chains and lighted the fire.
There is little more to see of Joan in Rouen. The cathedral was there in her time, but she was never permitted to enter it. There is a wall which was a part of the chapel where she had her final hearing before her judges; there are some houses which she must have passed, and there is a tower which belonged to the castle in which she was confined, though it is not certain that it is Joan's tower. There is a small museum in it, and among its treasures we saw the manuscript article St. Joan of Arc, by Mark Twain, who, in his Personal Recollections, has left to the world the loveliest picture of that lovely life.
Chapter XX
WE COME TO GRIEF
It was our purpose to leave Rouen by the Amiens road, but when we got to it and looked up a hill that about halfway to the zenith arrived at the sky, we decided to take a road that led off toward Beauvais. We could have climbed that hill well enough, and I wished later we had done so. As it was, we ran along quite pleasantly during the afternoon, and attended evening services in an old church at Grandvilliers, a place that we had never heard of before, but where we found an inn as good as any in Normandy.
It is curious with what exactness Fate times its conclusions. If we had left Grandvilliers a few seconds earlier or later it would have made all the difference, or if I had not pulled up a moment to look at a lovely bit of brookside planted with poplars, or if I had driven the least bit slower or the least bit faster, during the first five miles, or—