Rouen is rich in such pictures, not the pictures painted by human hands and representing imaginary scenes, but living pictures which, though lacking the cinematograph, have nevertheless remained indelibly fixed in the great drama of history. The earliest of all is the vision of a dying man, royal in position and by nature a king, alone, forlorn, and stripped of every vestige of glory.
From the day when he had been a boy amid the turbulence of a headless court, had heard men whisper this and that, and look aside at himself with significance, he had ever stood out by virtue of some compelling power, which, even while he was still undeveloped, drew the force from the strong and made it a weapon on his behalf. Yet now, perhaps, those weary eyes, fast closing, saw more plainly than ever before. The dominions he had gained were but as the shuffling of a pack of cards in a game, his clemency, his loyalty of life, outweighed all the deeds that men called great.
He was only sixty, but his life had begun so young that it seemed long since that first wild dash at Val-ès-dunes, where he had settled himself on the ducal throne and given the outward sign of his mettle, to the day when, soured by the loss of the wife who had been to him the true mate, lonely, in grim dignity, he had irritably replied to the coarse jest of the King of France by a red-hot retort which had cost him his life.
Now there stands a modern church on the site of the abbey of St Gervais, in which William then lay. It stands a little away from the din of tempestuous Rouen, and beneath it is the oldest crypt in France, the crypt of St Mellon. Dimly through the dying Conqueror’s brain scenes would flit; in them he himself would be always the most prominent, the principal figure; and now an end——
Hark! what was that? The tones of the bell in the Cathedral of Rouen were wafted across in at the heavy unglazed window; it was the call for prime, at six in the morning, and as the slow strokes fell on his ear William recognised in them another call; he offered up a prayer, and died.
Yet, by a strange mischance, those who would have honoured the mighty dead were not present. The pious Anselm had been summoned from Bec; but travelling was slow, the prior was ill, and he had not arrived. William the Conqueror’s best-beloved and ever favourite son had hasted to seize on that inheritance which his father had hardly dared to leave him, except provisionally; Henry had disappeared on a similar errand, though some say he returned in time to accompany the body on its last journey; between Robert and his father no love had lain, and Robert was missing.
A living dog is better than a dead lion; and living dogs there were at hand. Within an hour of his death, the Conqueror’s body had been stripped of all that was valuable, even the hangings of tapestry in the chamber had been seized, and the craven souls who had trembled at the flicker of the king’s eyelash in life handled him contemptuously in death.
AN HOTEL COURTYARD, ROUEN
A whole day he lay there, alone and untended. Then the news spread abroad, and bishops and barons gathered together. The body was placed on a bier, suitably draped, and with a great procession was carried to Caen, as had been commanded, passing down the Seine in its route. And to Caen we must follow it for the last terrible scenes of that drama, for it is with Rouen only we are now concerned.