The churches at Falaise should not pass unnoticed; but we will not weary the reader with any detailed description. Artists will especially delight in the view of a fourteenth-century church close to the castle, with its chancel with creepers growing over it, and peeping out between the stones; and historians will be interested in the laconic inscription on its walls, 'rebuilt in 1438, a year of war, death, plague, and famine.' If such artists as Brewer, or Burgess, would only come here and give us drawings of these streets (of one especially, taking in the cathedral at the end, with its stone walls built over by shops, as at Pont Audemer), they would be very interesting to Englishmen. Antiquaries will regret to learn that in the year 1869, the west end of a church is obliterated, as in the next illustration; that the shop of one 'M. Guille, peruquier,' reposes against the window, and that two other, quite modern, buildings lean against its walls. An old Norman arch is carved immediately above the window we have sketched, and completes the picture.
It is, of course, not very easy to sketch undisturbed in the streets of Falaise; and both in the churches and in the castle the showman is perpetually treading on the traveller's heels. Everywhere we turn, in the neighbourhood of the castle, we are reminded of historic deeds of valour, and of deadly fights in the middle ages; and every day that we remain in the town, we are reminded (by the crowds of farmers, horsedealers, and others, who are busy at the great fair held here twice a year) of our own, by comparison, very trifling business at Falaise. We are making a drawing of the great rocks near the castle, and of the valley below, every step of which is made famous by the memory of the Conqueror; when our studies are disturbed, not by tourists but by natives of the town; once by a farmer to see his good horses, which indeed he had, at the stables at the 'hotel of the beautiful Star,' where there were at least fifty standing for sale; and once, by a small boy, who carries a tray full of little yellow books called 'La Lanterne de Falaise,' with a picture on the cover of the castle tower, and a huge lantern slung from the battlements! We purchase a copy, to get rid of the last intruder, and find it to be a 'Revue, satirique et humouristique,' treating of divers matters, including 'faits atroces et chiens perdus'!
Now without being accused of misanthropy, we may remark that there are times and places when an Englishman would rather be 'let alone,' and that the precincts of Falaise are certainly of them. These century-wide contrasts and concussions, jar so terribly sometimes, that we are half-inclined to ask with M. de Tocqueville, whether we do not seem to be on the eve of a new Byzantine era, in which 'little men shall discuss and ape the deeds which great men did in their forefathers' days.'[39] The refrain in this nineteenth century is, 'still the showman, still the spectator,' until we become almost tired of the song. 'Here some noble act was achieved—there some valiant man perished.' Every nook and corner of the place tells the same story; until we are tempted to enquire 'What are we doing (or are fit and capable of doing personally, on an emergency, in the matter of fighting,) to compare with the achievements of these Norman men of all ranks of life?'
But not only in Normandy, it is the same wherever we go: as far as our own personal part in heroic actions is concerned, we live in an atmosphere of unreality; we read of great deeds rather than achieve them, we make shows of the works of our ancestors, we take pence (readily) over the graves of our kinsmen, and live, as it seems to us, rather unworthily, in the past.
With our nineteenth-century inventions, we could, it is true, mow down these castle heights in half an hour, and we might well be proud of the achievement as a nation; but our warfare is at best but poor mercenary work, the heart of the nation—the life and courage of its people—are not in it.[40] We civilians, are too much protected, and most of us do not know how to fight. Like the Athenians, we are supposed to be cultivating the arts of peace, but, as we endeavoured to show at Caen, if judged by our monuments, we are making no great mark in our generation. Perhaps this is a question rather wide of our subject, but let us at least contend for one thing, viz.:—that if the mission of the present generation is not to wield battle-axes, but rather to fight social battles, say for the amelioration of the unhappy part of the population; and if it is our fortune to be protected the while, by a staff of policemen, and by strong laws against crime—that we should not neglect, at the same time, to cultivate and preserve the personal valour that is in us, by the use of arms. It may be that the day is shortly coming (our engineers predict that we shall soon have hand-to-hand fighting again), when every individual amongst us will have to put his courage to the proof; and if this should ever happen, it will certainly not diminish our interest in the construction and arrangement of these mediæval castles, or in the battles that have been fought beneath their walls.
CHAPTER IX.
ROUEN.
At a corner of the market-place at Rouen, there stood, but a few years ago, one of the most picturesque houses in all Normandy, and with a story (if we are to believe the old chroniclers) as pathetic as any in history.