CHAPTER XIII
Life
"Les gens de Rouen sont honnêtes,
Grans entrepreneurs d'edifices
De theatres et artifices
Es entrees des grans seigneurs,
Roy prelatz et aultres greigneurs."
THOUGH Henri Quatre could not get through the gates of Rouen while the town remained faithful to the League, and considered him a heretic, the sturdy citizens were ready enough to accept a king of their own religion, and when the "Vert Galant" made his first solemn entry into the place in 1596, they welcomed him as heartily as any of his predecessors. You will remember that there were Englishmen with him when he was trying to get into Rouen a few years before, and it was to Rouen again that the Earl of Shrewsbury and a brilliant suite brought the Queen of England's greeting to her cousin of France, and sent him the famous Order of the Garter. The Ambassador was most appropriately lodged in a very famous house in Rouen, which itself formed a remarkably complete memorial of the friendship between the same two thrones earlier in the century. The Maison Bourgtheroulde, at the corner of the Place de la Pucelle and the Rue du Panneret, contains indeed one of the best pictorial records that exists in Europe, not only of the meeting of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, but also of the decorations that were displayed there.
The house is a good example of the transition between "Gothic" domestic architecture and that of the Renaissance. Built about the same time as the Palais de Justice and the Bureau de Finances, it formed a part of that brilliant series of beautiful dwellings in which the early years of the sixteenth century at Rouen were so fruitful. Its exterior façade upon the Place de la Pucelle is so terribly changed and mutilated now, that unless you will refer to Lelieur's drawing, reproduced with [Chapter IX.], no view of its present condition can suggest to you the original design. Of that high roof with lofty crested windows, of the side-turret at the angle of the street, of the beautifully carved door, not a trace remains. The principal entrance built on the old Marché aux Veaux was placed between two heavy pillars, which had statues on them, and even before the traveller had passed inside, these suggested to him the motive which underlies the whole decoration of the house; for these are the two pillars which were on each side of the English King's pavilion at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Whereof the one, in the words of the English chronicler, was "intrayled with anticke works, the old god of wine called Bacchus birlyng the wine, which by the conduits in the erthe ran to all people plenteously with red, white, and claret wine, over whose head was written in letters of Romayn in gold, 'Faicte bonne chere qui vouldra.'" The other pillar was "of ancient Romayne work, borne with four lions of gold ... and on the summit of the said piller stood an image of the blynde God, Cupid, with his bowe and arrowes of love, by hys seeming, to stryke the yonge people to love." But these have gone, and so little is left of the beauty of the façade that it really will require some courage to believe what I have just said, and go through the wooden door in search of better fortune.
THE GALLERY OF THE MAISON BOURGTHEROULDE, SHOWING THE CARVINGS OF THE FIELD OF THE CLOTH OF GOLD, AND ABOVE THEM THE CARVINGS OF PETRARCH'S "TRIUMPH"
It was the town house of the family of Le Roux,[65] a name which already has artistic associations for any lover of the architecture of Rouen, though I have found no trace of relationship between the architect of the Cathedral façade, the Bureau de Finances, and the Palais de Justice, and the lawyers who built and decorated this "hôtel." Indeed I cannot imagine it would be likely that a man of so much originality and power both in architecture and in sculpture would have lent himself to the methods of decoration employed here, which, as you will see, are more appropriate to the accurately historical than to the freely artistic frame of mind. The man who made the fortune of the family was the second Guillaume Le Roux, husband of Jeanne Jubert de Vely, and one of the fifteen lay councillors called to the Perpetual Échiquier created by Louis XII. in 1499. He bought the estates of Tilly, Lucy, Sainte Beuve, and Bourgtheroulde, and built the "corps de logis" in the interior courtyard exactly opposite the entrance. He also began the wings on the north and west, but left the great southern gallery to be completed by his son Guillaume, "Abbé d'Aumale et du Val Richer," who held several benefices under the great Cardinal d'Amboise, and derived his chief claim to importance from having been employed by François I. in the negotiation of the celebrated Concordat which that king announced with so much solemnity on his entry into Rouen in 1517.
These two last facts may largely account for the decoration of the new wing the Abbé built in Rouen, and the carvings he added to the older walls; for they are mainly suggested by one of the most magnificent occurrences in the ostentatious reign of a king whose visit to the town had no doubt enhanced the importance of the Abbé in the eyes of his fellow-citizens. At any rate he was not likely to let them forget that the François whom he had helped in the matter of the Concordat was also the hero of the "Champ du Drap d'Or." Though the house may have been begun as early as 1486, when the second Guillaume Le Roux was married, it was not finished for some time afterwards, and we may put 1531 as the latest date, because the Phœnix of Eleanor of Austria shows beside the Salamander of her husband. Abbé Guillaume died in 1532, before which year the carvings must have been completed, and they evidently cannot have been begun before 1520, the date of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, which was their chief inspiration, so that the carvings certainly have the value of almost contemporaneous workmanship, and most probably the authority, either directly or indirectly, of an eye-witness. It may be as well to remember that to that gorgeous ceremony there was no possibility of any mere loafer, or any wandering unauthorised artist being admitted, because it is on record that everyone without a special permit was cleared out of the country in a circle of some four leagues; and it is not too much to imagine that even if one who had had a hand in the important negotiations of the Concordat four years before were not in the King's suite, he was at least in a position to see and profit by the work of the artists who accompanied François,[66] to record his splendours and to make the best use of all their opportunities.
Since 1820 the Maison Bourgtheroulde has practically been a unique example of the style of decoration for which it is famous. Before that year "La Grande Maison" existed at Grand-Andely, not far off, with much the same kind of ornament upon its Renaissance walls; but that has now vanished utterly, with the exception of some of the large statues which were bought at three francs the square foot by an Englishman,[67] and taken across the Channel to decorate a country-house. It will therefore be well worth while to consider in some detail what the Bourgtheroulde carvings are, and how they originated; for even if they do not appeal to us so much as the original and thoroughly local work of other Rouen sculptors, they have a value of their own that may be considered entirely apart from any æsthetic criticism of the sources of the carver's workmanship.