martyrdom,—or, more properly, the murder—of the Maid of Orleans, who saved her country from the English, cannot be forgotten by the visitor to Rouen. There are still houses standing near the cathedral which were there in her day, and were the lodgings of some of her heartless judges; there is still the great pile of Notre Dame, standing much as it stood in her day, although the later Flamboyant work, including the Tour de Beurre, had not then appeared; and there still remains one solitary tower of the castle of Rouen in which Jeanne was confined. The tower was never her prison, but in the ground floor she was intimidated by being shown instruments of torture. The visitor can enter this chamber, which was the scene of that callous brutality to a most innocent maiden, who, encouraged by her implicit belief in the vision of her saints, bore herself throughout with a fortitude and heroism which baffled and enraged her inquisitors.

It is a pity that the tower has been over-restored, and that the walls are hung with wreaths of artificial flowers. There is also a statue of the maid and many prints hung on the walls, but their interest is not commensurate with the subtraction from the grimness of the tower which they cause.

When Jeanne d’Arc was finally condemned to be burnt, the stake was set up in the Vieux-Marché, and the exact spot is now marked by a large stone, bearing the inscription, ‘Jeanne d’Arc, 30 Mai, 1431.’ The heroic girl was taken to the spot in a car with a confessor and others, and escorted by English soldiers. With the awful piles of faggots ready for kindling, the girl’s agony was dragged out with a sermon, and after her sentence was read there is no wonder that she wept bitterly. To Bishop Cauchon, whose heart must have been of flint, she said, while they set the wood on fire: ‘It is you who have brought me to this death.’ A Dominican priest who stood near gives the following account of her death:

‘As I was near her at the end, the poor woman besought and humbly begged me to go into the church near by and bring her the cross, to hold it upright on high before her eyes until the moment of death, so that the cross on which God was hanging might be in life continually before her eyes. Being in the flames, she ceased not to call in a loud voice the Holy Name of Jesus, imploring and invoking without ceasing the aid of the Saints in Paradise; again, what is more, in giving up the ghost and bending her head, she uttered the name of Jesus as a sign that she was fervent in the faith of God, just as we read of St. Ignatius and of many other Martyrs.’

Another witness—Maître Jean Massieu, a priest—says:

‘With great devotion she asked to have a cross; and, hearing this, an Englishman who was there present made a little cross of wood with the ends of a stick, which he gave her, and devoutly she received and kissed it.... With her last word in dying, she cried with a loud voice “Jesus!”’

The Palais de Justice (small gratuity to the concierge) is in the Rue Jeanne d’Arc, with the main front facing the Rue aux Juifs. The central portion dates from 1499 to 1515, and was designed by Le Roux, who was also the brilliant architect of the western portal of the cathedral and the tomb of the Cardinals d’Amboise. The interior is rather disappointing. The great hall, formerly used for the Parliament or Échiquier of Normandy, is now a criminal court, and its panelled and gilded oak ceiling is flat and ineffective in spite of its pendent bosses. The fine Salle des Pas-Perdus in the west wing has a gallery at each end and the marble table of the tribunal.

The Rue de la Grosse Horloge contains a picturesque sixteenth-century archway, bearing a great blue and gold clock, and alongside it is the belfry, commenced in 1389. The visitor who cares for vivid impressions of the past should stroll through this street at 9 p.m., and hear the great bell La Rouvel ring the curfew, raising as it does so the same mellowed tones that have vibrated the air since the Middle Ages.

LEAVING ROUEN

The memory of those sounds is a precious one, and on the next morning, when the car carries one away, it remains among the many things in the mind that are not left behind.