Secondly, Rouen is, as might be expected, a city of contrasts, the broad boulevards have cut deeply into her, but the change is superficial, not radical, she is still to all intents an ancient city,—a mediæval city to which a certain trimming of the latest fashion has been added. Electric trams run along the boulevards, but the parts between the boulevards remain mediæval. Let anyone who doubts it go to a topmost room in a block of buildings, say between the Rue Jeanne d’Arc and Rue de la Republique, and, craning his neck out, “see what he will see,”—a grotesque and curious medley of chimneys, leaning walls, slanting house-roofs, and old-fashioned projecting stories, mingled in an inextricable fashion. The crooked buildings seem to have grown on to one another and stuck there, in the manner of cowries and periwinkles on a rock. There is hardly a line exactly horizontal or perpendicular; it is difficult to tell where one house begins or the other ends; to pull down one would be to have all the others tumbling about one’s ears. High up are tiny platforms with doors opening on to them; the roofs are broken by many a quaint dormer window; the whole could only be swept away by a great fire, such as came to London in 1666. Then above and about these roofs and gables and angles rise wonderful towers containing some of the best work that man has done: the towers of the great Cathedral, or one of the famous churches.
OLD HOUSES, ROUEN
There are streets in Rouen which might have come straight from mediæval London. Such is the Rue St Romain, near the Cathedral. Here there are rows and rows of timber framed, heavily projecting houses with small quaint windows. In a courtyard beneath the very shadow of the Cathedral is a delightful row, with a carved stone parapet running across the frontage, and the oddest mixture of lines and angles and irregular windows ever seen out of a picture. In almost every side street may be found traces of the ancient city. In one corner there are grotesque figures carved on the supports of a house bowed out with age, in another we see suddenly a bit of stone carving, worn and defaced with continual rubbing, where the women of Rouen fill their cans at a fountain as their mothers and grandmothers have done before them. Here a low dark arch like a cathedral crypt is used as a small vegetable shop, and in it a pleasant blue-bloused man and comely woman pass their time contentedly though their heads nearly touch the roof; there an arcade betrays what has once been a chapel, but is now a yard filled with lumbering omnibuses. One of the most delicate and fanciful of frontages, belonging to an old house, was preserved at the time of the demolition which took place at the making of the Rue Jeanne d’Arc, and re-erected beside the Tower of St André, of which the body, by the way, was sheared off at the same epoch. It has often been overlooked, this pretty bit of work, which must have occupied a man’s time and thoughts and skill for many months, because it does not face the street, and is partly concealed by the church tower. A tiny bit of railed-in garden—that is to say, some gravel and a couple of seats—surround the tower, and even this wee spot has its “gardien” to accompany visitors to the summit, if they wish to ascend.
For its size, Rouen has singularly few of those open spaces of greenery, those charming public gardens, which, as a rule, form one of the best features of a French town. There is a little public garden to the east, and Solferino is certainly delightful with big shady trees and a neat bit of water; but it is small. There is also the garden to the east of St Ouen and the Hotel de Ville, but the combined area is not great. In the streets of Rouen, too, there are few trees. We see none of those bright bursts of greenery overhanging walls unexpectedly, and telling of quiet gardens within enclosing gates, that one finds frequently elsewhere; it is a towny town.
The chief jewel of Rouen is of course the Cathedral, which in its bewildering variety and transition of styles, has a character of its own sufficient to stamp it permanently on the memory. I confess that to me personally, variety has an infinite charm; I remember far more readily and with greater appreciation a building where the slow growth throughout ages has ensured variety, than one where absolute harmony proclaims its completion to the pattern of a plan. After all, nothing in nature is uniformly monotonous; we do not see an oak or an elm with boughs at precise angles on each side, and the trees, such as the poplar, which approach most nearly to uniformity, are by no means the most beautiful.
The strange unlikeness of the two towers, and the centre tower crowned by the iron flèche, is sufficient to ensure attention from the most casual observer. One of the western towers has fretwork windows, bossy pinnacles, and an octagonal coronet; and the other is much less beautiful, and has less decorative lines, terminating in the ugly, high, slate-roofed gable tower. Yet it is better than if it had conformed; the two together are perfect. The plainer one to the north is the Tour de St Romain, which dates from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, though with considerably more of the earlier date. The other is called the Tour de Beurre, because built from the produce of the sale of indulgences to eat butter in Lent. It bears its date, namely, the latter half of the fifteenth century, in every line of its decoration.
We wonder what the ancient church that stood on this site in the tenth century was like; massive and grand no doubt, carrying out in stone the character of its founder Rollo, who was baptised in it before its completion, receiving the name of Robert. The edifice was not finished for many generations, and when it was, a grand ceremony took place in which Rollo’s great descendant William figured. But a hundred and fifty years later, when Henry II. held Normandy and England, this church was destroyed by fire.
The rebuilding was begun very shortly afterwards, and the main part of the mighty fabric as we see it dates from then. The main part—but each succeeding century added something, stamping its hall mark on its style, so that one may say here is the work of the fourteenth century, here the fifteenth, here the sixteenth, and—in the iron flèche rising high and not ungracefully—here the nineteenth.
The decorated frontage with its three doors was considered by Ruskin the most exquisite piece of Flamboyant work existing. The intricacies of the detail are inexhaustible; and above the centre rises a fine wheel window of the type that mediæval craftsmen loved.