The body was conveyed at the cost of a private citizen on its journey to Caen. Some say that his youngest son Henry followed it to Caen, but it seems hardly likely, for in that case there would have been no need for a subject to defray the expenses, as he undoubtedly did. The corpse was taken to the church in the abbey of St Etienne—the abbey that, so light-heartedly years before, William had erected in penance for his marriage. Yet the mischances were not at an end. As the procession passed along the narrow street, a cry arose that the town was on fire. Down went the bier, and off went the crowd in search of this new sensation. It was not until the fire was quenched that the funeral was resumed. As they prepared with all due solemnity to lower the body into the grave, one stepped forward, crying, “I adjure ye that ye inter not William in the spot where ye are about to lay him. He shall not commit trespass on what is my right, for the greater part of this church is my right and of my fee, and I have no greater right in any of my lands.... By force he took it from me, and never afterwards offered to do me right.” He who had never dared to rebuke William publicly for “offering that which cost him nothing,” after his death was very bold. “All marvelled that this great king, who had conquered so much, and won so many cities and so many castles, could not call so much land his own as his body might lie within after death.”
The claimant was appeased by money, and after a further mishap too terrible to relate, those who had fulfilled their duty left the body of the king.
But even then his dust was not suffered to rest in peace, for in 1562 his tomb was broken into by the Huguenots, and again by the mob in 1793, and the remains disturbed. All that was preserved was a thigh-bone, a mighty bone, showing by its measurements the size and strength of the man, and this was reburied, and now lies before the altar, where a long inscription records the burial-place. It is the same as the original epitaph, though new cut:
“Hic Sepultus est invictissimus Guillelemus Conquestor Normanniae Dux, et Anglae Rex Hujus ce domus conditor qui obiit Anno MLXXXVII.”
CHAPTER IV
A MEDIÆVAL CITY
Rouen is surrounded by high hills, and can be seen lying on the margin of the river in the aspect of a toy city. In this there lies one great advantage, namely, that she is not easy to forget. Perhaps the remembrance of any place is sharpened more by having seen it whole than by any other circumstance. If this be impossible, one’s mental pictures are often blurred or only partial. Into what, for instance, does the remembrance of Caen resolve itself? Fragmentary peeps, or at best, the view from the railway, where the town is seen on edge, a thin line, above which spires rise irregularly. At the mention of the word Rouen, on the contrary, what a vision leaps up in the mind, a wonderful glittering picture of spires and bridges, of shining water, and piled house-roofs, of islands and tall chimneys!
France has an excellent plan of tucking away her chimneys and other unsightly commercial accessories on one side of a river, leaving her residential quarter free from smoke; so it is here. To southward, in the Faubourg or suburb of St Sever, lie the working quarters, with all the smoke—which, however, never seems so smoky as in England—the noise and din of men who manufacture. On the islands, as in an intermediate quarter, are the houses of the workmen, and on the northern shore is the grand old city.
We have spoken previously of the difficulty of putting on paper the soul, character, entity—call it what you will—of a country, and the same thing holds good of a city; but in the case of such a city as Rouen, how is the difficulty increased! There is one obvious note, however, which must strike anyone at once, and that is that the town is French, not Norman—thoroughly French; and the difference between it and the towns further westward, if not so marked as in the days when little Richard of Normandy was sent to be educated at Bayeux, is still noticeable. The modern houses are, of course, severely French, the people in the streets are French, the shops are French, and the whole tone of the life is French altogether.