TOWER OF JOAN OF ARC, ROUEN.
The fisher’s hymn which Ernest Wynn gave the Club at its first meeting was asked for here by Master Lewis, and was procured. It is sung before the departure of ships and during great storms in the fishing season, being a part of the mass for seamen, or the messe d’equipage.
The Class left Étretat for Rouen.
“O Rouen! Rouen! it is here I must die, and here shall be my last resting-place!” said Joan of Arc at the stake. Rouen was hardly the resting-place of the heroic peasant girl, for her ashes were thrown into the Seine. But the thought of the stranger on coming to Rouen is less associated with its history under the sea-kings of the North, the Norman dukes and the English invaders, than with the hard fate and the public memorials of the simple shepherdess, who seems to have been called from her flocks to change the destiny of France.
THE MAID OF ORLEANS.
The Class entered Rouen after a series of short, zigzag journeys, partly in coaches and partly on foot, going leisurely from town to town through roads that presented to view continuous landscapes of shining orchards, ripening gardens, and resplendent poppy-fields; stopping at Amiens, the birthplace of Peter the Hermit, meeting here and there a ruin, and finding everywhere the connecting historical links between the present and the past.
At Amiens the Class was brought into the presence of a relic which greatly excited the boys’ wonder.
“This church,” said their guide, taking the Class to a side chapel of the cathedral, “contains a very rare relic,—a part of the head of John the Baptist!”