'With my lips I kneel, and with my heart,
I fall about thy feet and worship thee.'
A stream of eloquence followed—studied or spontaneous it mattered not—the congregation held their breath and listened to a story for the thousandth time repeated.
The preacher paused for a moment, and then with another burst of eloquence, he brought his hearers to the verge of a passion, which was (as it seemed to us) dangerously akin to human love and the worship of material beauty; then he lowered our understandings still more by the enumeration of 'works and miracles,' and ended with words of earnest exhortation, the burden of which might be shortly translated:—'Pray earnestly, and always, to Mary our mother, for all souls in purgatory; confess your sins unto us your high priests; give, give to the Church and to the poor, strive to lead better lives, look forward ever to the end; and bow down, oh! bow down, before the golden images [manufactured for us in the next street] which our Holy Mother the Church has set up.'
With a transition almost as startling as the first, the book is closed, the preacher has left the pulpit, the congregation (excepting a few in the side chapels) have dispersed; and Caen keeps holiday after the manner of all good Catholics, putting on its best attire, and disporting itself in somewhat rampant fashion.
Everybody visits everybody else to-day, and a fiacre is hardly to be obtained for the afternoon drive in Les Cours, the public promenade. We may go to the Jardin des Plantes, which we shall find crowded with country people, examining the beautiful exotic plants (of which there are several thousand); to the public Picture Gallery, established at the beginning of the present century, which contains pictures by Paul Veronese, Perugino, Poussin, and a number of works of the French school; and to the Museum of Antiquities, containing Roman remains, vases, coins, &c., discovered in the neighbourhood of Dives. There are also excursions to Bayeux, Honfleur, and Trouville for the day; and many tempting opportunities of visiting the neighbouring towns.
But we may be most amused by mixing with the crowd, or by listening to the performance on the Place royale of a company of foreign musicians—shabby and dingy in aspect, enthusiastic and poor—who had found their way here in time to entertain the trim holiday makers of Caen. They were of that ragged and unkempt order of slovenly brotherhood that the goddess of music claims for her own; let them call themselves 'wandering minstrels,' 'Arabs,' or what not (their collars were limp, and they rejoiced in smoke), they had certainly an ear for harmony, and a 'soul for music;' a talent in most of them, half cultivated and scarcely understood. A woman in a German, or Swiss, costume levied rapid contributions amongst the crowd, which seemed to prefer listening to this performance than to any other 'distraction,' not excepting the modern and exciting performance of velocipede races outside the town.
The streets are crowded all day with holiday people, and somewhat obstructed by the fashion of the inhabitants taking their meals in the street. We also, in the evening, dine at an open café (with a marble table and a pebble floor) amidst a clamour and confusion of voices, under the shadow of old eaves—with creepers and flowers twining round nearly every window, where the pigeons lurk and dive at stray morsels. The evening is calm and bright and the sky overhead a deep blue, but we are chattering, laughing, eating, and smoking, clinking glasses and shouting to waiters; we drown even the sound of the church clocks, and if it were not for the little flower girls with their 'deux sous, chaque' and their winning smiles, and for the children playing on the ground around us, we might soon forget our better natures in the din of this culinary pandemonium.
But we are in good company; three tall mugs of cider are on the next table to our own, a dark, stout figure, with shaven crown, is seated with his back to us—it is the preacher of the morning, who with two lay friends for companions, also keeps the feast.
DIVES.
Before leaving the neighbourhood of Caen, the antiquary and historically minded traveller will naturally turn aside and pay a visit to the town of Dives, about eighteen miles distant, near the sea shore to the north-east, on the right bank of the river Dives. It is interesting to us not only as an ancient Roman town, and as being the place of embarkation of the Conqueror's flotilla, from whence it drifted, with favourable winds, to St. Valery—but because it possesses the remains of one of the finest twelfth-century churches in Normandy. We find hardly any mention of this church in 'Murray,' and it stands almost deserted by the town which once surrounded it, and by the sea, on the shore of which it was originally built. At the present time there are not more than eight or nine hundred inhabitants, but we can judge by the size of the old covered market-place, and the extent of the boundaries of the town, that it must have been a seaport of considerable importance. Dives was once rich, but no longer bears out the meaning of its name; in comparison to the thriving town of Cabourg (which it joins), it is more like Lazarus sitting at the gate.