It is not however the clock, the arch, and belfry that constitute this one of the most quaint and picturesque corners in Rouen, though they all add to it. There is also a fountain, begun in 1250, and decorated with a large stone bas-relief in the reign of Louis XV. There is a tiny house of carved woodwork that looks as if it were glued to the wall behind. There are many other quaint houses near at hand, and if one had to choose a sample of the old city one could not do better than select this bit. Take it as we may see it any day from the western side. There is the heavy arch, with its sombre shadows beneath its broad curve; there is the wonderful glittering clock, which may perhaps catch the rays of the declining sun. Rising high at the corner is the solid tower with its cupola. We may people this background with figures to fancy. A group of loungers there is sure to be, the men in caps and a few of them in blouses, though the blouse is not so ubiquitous in the town as in the country; perhaps a neat little shopwoman comes tripping by, with her hair screwed up on the top of her head in a glossy tight knot; an old country-woman passes her, wearing a close-fitting coif-like cap, and bearing on her shoulders a wooden frame from which are suspended baskets of ripe strawberries. Then out of the darkness of the arch, starting dazzlingly into the sunshine, there comes a lithe slim figure, robed from head to foot in a sheet of white muslin: it is a young girl returning from her First Communion. The loitering vendors with barrows stop to look at her, and the tourists from England, of whom there are sure to be two or three, for the Hotel du Nord is just the other side of the archway, turn to stare also. Such is a slight sketch of the best-known corner in Rouen.
But besides her mighty Cathedral, her wonderful churches, her street vistas, and her quaint corners, Rouen has much to show. We have not yet touched on her Renaissance palaces, and her historical memories, to say nothing of the twenty-six other fountains with which she is credited, and her busy quays.
To take the Renaissance houses first. There is a magnificent “hotel,” standing in a part lying west of the Rue Jeanne d’Arc, which has also a little group of associations of its own. Here, where the great iron-bound markets stand, Joan of Arc was burnt to death, after which her ashes were cast into the river. In these days when the thought of the public hanging of a notorious criminal turns us faint and sick, we can hardly, even in imagination, fancy a great crowd gathered to watch the agonising torture and death of an innocent young girl.
It was thought for long that Joan was burnt in the open space near by the Place de la Pucelle, and here stands a grotesquely hideous statue of her, the very epitome of all it should not be; but it is now fairly certain that the place of her last agony was on the site of the market. Facing the statue is the entrance gate of the beautiful house of which we have spoken, the Hotel Bourgtheroulde, now the “Bureaux du Comptoir d’Escompte.” The house was begun in 1486 by Guillaume le Roux, Lord of Bourgtheroulde, and was decorated by the most famous of the Renaissance architects, Jean Goujon, to whom almost as impossible an amount of work is attributed as to Grinling Gibbons. The decoration in the courtyard is a splendid example of the period, and can hardly be overpraised. Under the five broad windows on the left hand, run large panels, with scenes of the meeting between François, King of France, and Henry, King of England; for the mansion was not finished until 1532, a date when that meeting was still one of the greatest of political events. Above the windows the artist has given his fancy full rein, and in the symbolical scenes and strange beasts we find a representation of the “Triumphs” of Petrarch. All the uprights and lintels of the windows are richly carved. In the corner is a hexagonal tower, and in this the carving is in marvellously sharp and clear preservation, treated with a certain flatness of the most prominent surface, difficult to describe, but very effective and original; the scenes are pastoral. There are two splendid windows on the frontage beyond, rising into high, pierced pediments, with pinnacles and tracery, and on this side also is exquisite carving.
The Earl of Shrewsbury was lodged in this house when he came as Ambassador from Elizabeth to invest Henri IV. with the Order of the Garter.
Another magnificent example of Renaissance work in Rouen is the Palais de Justice, begun in 1499, on the site of the Jewry. It was meant to be partly the Exchequer and partly the Exchange. Unfortunately, the worst end—the west end, which is of eighteenth-century sham Gothic, unmistakably so, even to the merest novice in architecture—is that most frequently seen, as it faces the open space in the great Rue Jeanne d’Arc, whereas the really fine court has to be sought for down a side street.
Lying northward, hidden away by houses beyond the Solferino Garden, not far from the great buildings of the Musée and the Library, is a solitary relic, namely, the round tower called Tour Jeanne d’Arc. It is not very attractive in appearance, being a solid cylindrical mass of masonry capped by projecting wooden battlements and a conical slate roof, both of which were added in restoration. The battlements are interesting, as they are of the ancient sort, formed to protect the defenders, who poured down boiling lead or showered stones upon their attackers.
It was not in this tower, however, that Joan was kept a prisoner from December 26, 1430, to May 30, 1431, but in another which stood near the top of the present Rue Jeanne d’Arc. Both of these towers belonged to the great castle begun by Philip Augustus in 1205, when he had at last snatched Normandy from England, and was feverishly anxious about the safety of his new dominions. Before beginning his own castle, he destroyed all that remained of the old castle built by the Norman dukes, and now his own has followed the same fate, and has vanished, excepting the Tour Jeanne d’Arc, an interesting relic, dating far further back than most of the ancient buildings we have seen.
Joan was brought to the tower, still standing, on the 9th of May, for an examination before her accusers, and the torturer was held in readiness to prompt her replies did she fail in answering. The very room in which she stood is here to be seen; though it was in the chapel of the archbishop, near the Cathedral, that her death-warrant was signed. When Joan was in Rouen the oldest of the timber houses must have been fresh and new, the Palais de Justice and Hotel Bourgtheroulde had not been begun. The oldest parts of St Ouen stood, and St Maclou was incomplete. Could Joan but have looked on into the future and have seen the finest street in Rouen called after her name, have known that her memory was regarded as that of heroine and martyr, how astonished she would have been.
The thought of Joan and the various scenes in which she played a central part, conjures up many other historical memories also.