To me Rouen is like no other city. The effect it makes on one is immediate, indescribable, bewildering. It speaks to one out of its vast antiquity. It has a thousand mediæval voices sounding solemnly in the ears of those who can recognise them; it has stories of adventure and daring; of bloodshed and tragedy; of calm stoicism and undeterred resolve; of plagues and burnings; that would fill many and many a thick volume. And it has its modern side, which flares blatantly and noisily across the other. The effect, for instance, of the modern electric tram in the midst of a city like Rouen is nothing less than extraordinary.
LA GROSSE HORLOGE, 1902
[Page 117.
We took "our ease at" an "inn," which faced one of the chief streets appropriated by this blustering modern mode of progression, and I shall never forget the effect it had on me. The persistent, reiterated strumming, as it were, with one finger on its one high note, as it came tearing along up the street every three minutes, hurriedly, fussily, with loose disjointed jolt, humming always with a deep whirr in its voice, (often the octave of its much-used high note), or anon singing up the scale, with a burr on every note, was the most absolute contrast to the Other Side of Rouen; the "other side" of the deep, quiet, wonderful past. The tram was like some enormous bee flying restlessly, tiresomely, out of one's reach with incessant buzz: a buzz which seemed, after a time, to have got literally inside one's head.
I defy anyone to find a more complete contrast in noise anywhere than could be found between the great, deep, ponderous boom of the many-a-decade-year-old bell of the Cathedral de Notre Dame and the fussy, flurried, treble ping-ping of the electric tram. It was a perfect representation of "Dignity and Impudence," as illustrated in sound.
The next evening I was reminded of this again while standing in the square facing the cathedral of Our Lady. A group of students strode cheerfully and briskly up the street under its shadow, which lay like a great, dark mass lined off by the moonlight, shining white on the cobbles. As they walked along, one of them struck into a song, which had, at the end of each stanza, a peculiarly inspiriting refrain, which was taken up in turns by students across the street, crossing it, and far ahead. When all this had died away, a passing fiacre, rolling over the stones, broke the silence again, and then the clocks began to strike the hour.
[From Collection of Mr Gustavus A. Sieveking.
CATHEDRAL NOTRE DAME.
ROUEN, 1842.