The Story of Rouen

by Theodore Andrea Cook

There are very few other places to which I can point you as witnesses of her tragedy. But, besides that chapel you have already visited, there is in the same district, between the north side of the Cathedral and the Rue de la Chaine, a whole labyrinth of twisting streets wherein lived the ecclesiastics who plotted her death.[53]

In the Rue St. Nicolas (which turns eastward after the Cathedral Parvis from the Rue des Carmes) there is a small open square just opposite the opening of the Rue Croix de Fer; within the walls of a house there are still preserved a few ruined stones of the Church of St. Nicolas le Paincteur, at the end of a courtyard. If you go round into the Place des Carmes, it is still possible to trace (at Nos. 27 and 31) some old vaults beneath the soil, by the ventilation holes just above the pavement. Close to this Church of St. Nicolas was the house of Jean Rubé, Canon of Rouen, with whom lodged Pierre Cauchon when he came to preside over the trial. It was there that, with Nicolas Loyseleur and others, those sinister discussions went on between every public examination of the prisoner. And in the house that rose above those vaults lived Loyseleur himself. The present façade has been so altered since 1818 that only in the interior courtyard (if M. Laurent, Mayor of Rouen in 1897, and M. Sarrasin, the historian of Jeanne d'Arc, are kind enough to allow it) can you realise the age of the building. The thick walls and deep-set windows leave no doubt of the age of their construction. The vaults beneath are still more extraordinary relics of antiquity, with their massive round arches and double sets of substructures. The house itself was most probably given to the Cathedral in those days by the Duke of Bedford, who had already done much in the same direction; and it was therefore very appropriately allotted as a lodging to that one of the canons who was helping the English most effectually in their iniquitous task.

After the canons left the main block of Cathedral-buildings to go into lodgings in this quarter so near at hand, they still kept their oven, their granary, and their common cellar in the Cour d'Albane. This quiet little quadrangle is one of the prettiest nooks of old Rouen, and I am fortunate enough to be able to show in the drawing on [p. 218] how well worth while it is to find the entrance to it just north of the Tour St. Romain in the angle of the Rue des Quatre Vents. It was probably first built for cloisters and a cemetery, and afterwards used merely as a "deambulatorium." But the bakery of the chapterhouse, which remained here for so long, was always renowned for the purity and goodness of its bread, and loaves from it were often presented to distinguished visitors on occasions when the civic authorities were obliged either to rise to jewellery or to descend to nuts. The "Salle Capitulaire," now being restored from M. Sauvageot's designs, used also to open on the cloister, and in it the canons transacted their temporal and spiritual business, including their famous choice for the Fierte St. Romain, and their trials of ecclesiastical prisoners. Crimes of "outsiders" committed within the Cathedral limits were tried by a special tribunal in the Porter's Lodge, and he guarded the prisoners in the dungeon beneath the Tour St. Romain. Another more interesting duty of the same official was to care, during daytime, for the dogs who were loosed in the Cathedral at night to keep out sacrilegious robbers, a custom which lasted down to 1760. But the Cour d'Albane took its name from the founder of that school for choir-boys with which it is most intimately associated now. Pierre de Colmieu, the Archbishop from 1236 to 1245, was also Cardinal d'Albano, and from him was named the institution he endowed to educate three priests, three deacons, and four subdeacons. Paid singers were unknown at that time; the services were long and pompous, and it took some time to learn them, so these men, all over twenty-one, were chosen as much for their ability to read and sing as for their good conduct. They benefited again in 1401 by the bequests of Jacques Cavé, who is buried beneath the Tour de Beurre. There were seven of these singers in 1440, and it was one of Jeanne d'Arc's judges, Gilles Deschamps, who left money to provide the little choir-boys with the red caps they wear to this day to keep their little shaved heads from the cold. In 1459 painters and sculptors were allowed to exhibit some of their work in this beautiful courtyard, "if it was decent"; and every year the canons and the clerks lit in this open space the "Feu de la St. Jean," and even planted their pious Maypole.

But the memories of this quarter are not exhausted yet. Turn down into the Rue St. Romain. From No. 8 to No. 14 are the old canons' lodgings, where more of Jeanne's judges lived, and especially Canon Guillaume le Désert, who survived the trial longer than any of his companions. Near No. 28 is the Rue des Chanoines. Close by, at the "Écu de France," lived Jehan Salvart, the architect who built the palace for Henry V. near Mal s'y Frotte. Within his house a workman saw, it is recorded, the iron cage made by Étienne Castille, in which Jeanne was chained by hands and feet and neck. At the tavern called "Maison de Pierre"[54] Manchon, the clerk of the court, used to take his wine of an afternoon. On the side next the Cathedral were the ecclesiastical prisons, whose deepest dungeon was beneath the Tour St. Romain. Just opposite the screen of the Portail des Libraires is No. 74, a strange old house, carved with two bishops on the beams of the first floor, and three more upon the brackets above. The door may well be original, and the whole house is as old as the fifteenth century. On the other side again, and just in face of the opening of the Rue Croix de Fer, is the "Maison Jeanne d'Arc," which has no right to that name beyond the possibility of her having seen it. For this strange remnant of Gothic woodwork that juts out above the pavement is no doubt contemporaneous with the trial that we are following out now. In August 1897 the Municipal Council announced its determination to pull it down. The Journal de Rouen, which deserves well of every honest lover of antiquity, at once published a letter from M. Paul Dubosc, in which that zealous writer pointed out the unnecessary vandalism of the proposal; Englishmen in Rouen at the time were not afraid to add their protests even in an alien tongue; when I left it last year it had, at least, been standing long enough for Miss James to draw it (see [p. 206]) on the left hand side of an illustration that gives a very good idea of the Rouen of the fifteenth century. The little Renaissance doorway in the distance, at the angle of the Rue des Quatre Vents, is an entrance to the Cour des Comptes, which at the same date had just been freed from ruined encumbrances, and its lovely courtyard opened to the Rue des Carmes on the other side (see [p. 288]).

This same old house was a canon's residence, and the property of the Chapter of the Cathedral before the Revolution. Some furniture-dealers bought it at the general sale of ecclesiastical effects. In 1893 it was sold to the State for 36,000 francs by Mr Dumont, to whom the Civil Tribunal had awarded it. The loss to the Rue St. Romain would be a serious one, if the house were finally pulled down. A fatal passion for "alignement" has Haussmannised Rouen quite enough already, and to strip the Cathedral bare of all appendages would be to forget the main object of mediæval architecture in France. I have pointed out elsewhere that it was owing to a more settled state of society that the English Cathedral rose from the turf of a broad quiet close, as at Salisbury. In France the houses of the Cathedral towns crowded close round the walls that were their temporal safety as well as their spiritual salvation. The Parvis of Notre Dame is a creation of modern Paris. Many a church in Provence still shows by the machicolations and loopholes on its walls and towers that it could have played the fortress with a good grace whenever necessary. And it was no doubt because a French cathedral rose above the clustered houses round its base that its lines of architecture spring so boldly to the sky, and that its detailed carving within easy vision was so close and excellent.

This old Rue St. Romain may have received its name from the Hôtel St. Romain mentioned in it in 1466. In any case the name of the city's patron saint could hardly have been given to a more characteristic thoroughfare. By 1423 it seems to have been called the Rue Féronnerie, which is interesting, because the workers in metal (whose trade is preserved in their old quarter of the Rue Dinanderie) were not natives of Rouen, but all came from Lorraine, and especially from Urville, a town within a few leagues of Domrémy. So that Jean Moreau, a maker of copper flagons in the Rue Écuyère, was especially chosen by Pierre Cauchon to go to his native place and make inquiries as to the truth of Jeanne d'Arc's statement about her birth and upbringing.

The next place in Rouen that actually saw Jeanne herself was the open space round the rising nave of St. Ouen, then called the Cemetery, where we have already watched the farcical royalty of the Révolte de la Harelle ([p. 152]). In thus tracing her footsteps, where we may still find them, I shall be showing you what little is left of the Rouen of the English occupation. Few of the towers and spires that rise now above the roofs of Rouen were standing then. "Rouvel" indeed was in the Town-Belfry, but uttered never a sound in his captivity. Of the Cathedral the Tour de Beurre did not exist, the Tour St. Romain was scarce two-thirds its present height, the western façade was far simpler and smaller. St. Maclou was not completed when Jeanne d'Arc died, nor the Palais de Justice begun. Of St. Ouen only the eastern end of the nave, the apse and the choir, with the far older Tour aux Clercs beside them, were being built; neither its central crown nor its rose windows yet existed. The French architect chosen by the English was at this time Alexander de Berneval, who had carried on the work of Jean de Bayeux and his son, the architects from 1378 to 1421. And you may still see where Jacques Theroulde (for Antoine Bohier) carried on the work which Berneval's son left unfinished in 1441.

From their scaffolding round the uncompleted arches the architect and his apprentices must have had a good view, on the Thursday after Pentecost in 1431, of those other scaffoldings erected in the Cemetery below them, on one of which sat Pierre Cauchon with the Cardinal of Winchester, while on the other stood Jeanne d'Arc. The ceremony, called the Abjuration, was a last attempt to frighten Jeanne into confessing that her "Voices" had deceived her, and her mission was untrue. It succeeded only because of her physical weakness, and in forty-eight hours her moral courage repudiated it entirely. Proceedings began by a long sermon from Guillaume Erard, a celebrated preacher. When he called the King of France "heretic and schismatic" she interrupted him at once to contradict. When he commanded her own submission to the Church, she replied that she was ready to answer to God and to the Pope for all, and that for all she was herself alone responsible. This was a confusing reply for her judges, when made before the great concourse of people who had assembled to witness this young girl's examination. They could only retort that the ecclesiastics there present were the representatives both of God and of the Pope, and that she must submit to them. They then ordered her "to abjure" publicly the various things of which she was accused. She did not understand what was required of her. Erard exclaimed that she must "abjure" or be burnt at once. At last he began to read her sentence of condemnation. Then, though she was conscious of no evil, she at last said, "I submit myself to the Church." They hastened to read over the twelve articles of accusation already given, and the poor girl agreed to them, promising never to sin again and to submit herself to the justice of the Church. Massieu read to her a formula "of some eight lines," according to his testimony afterwards.