The Story of Rouen

by Theodore Andrea Cook

"Nul n'orra toute la dyablerie
Ny le caquet de la Pessonnerie."

Like everything else, it was under holy patronage, and fishwives prayed at the shrine of St. Julien l'Hospitalier, the saint whose story Flaubert, another child of Rouen, has so wonderfully told. The wags of the seventeenth century called these ladies "non angéliques mais harangériques"; but on fast-days every burgess and innkeeper and monk was glad enough to go to them; for was there not even an "Abbaye aux Harengs" no further off than Mantes, and what better present could the Archbishop think of sending to his friend the Archdeacon than 2000 salted herrings in a specially holy barrel?

All the sound of the chaffering and howling of prices has gone into silence long ago in the old Rue Harenguerie of to-day, and you will be glad to turn into more lively quarters by taking the corner to your left, eastwards, down the Rue des Charettes. It is lighted up every now and then by a break in the houses and a glimpse of the river to your right, though it is more of masts and sails than water you will see. As you walk along, the name of a street that turns northwards on your left hand should be familiar if you have followed me thus far; for it is called Jacques Lelieur, as is only right and proper, to commemorate the name and fame of one who did a great deal of good in the Rouen of his own day, and has made it much more interesting to ours. His house is No. 18 in the Rue Savonnerie, which continues the Rue des Charettes in the same direction, and you will know it by the tablet on the wall. It has two fine gables with excellent woodwork upon the street-façade; though showing slight traces here and there of restoration, it was well worth keeping in good order as the house of an artistic burgess of the sixteenth century who lived up to his position in the town.

To Jacques Lelieur we owe it that I am able to show you part of the most complete representation of a town in 1525 which is known to exist. For he drew the course of the various fountains and water-conduits in Rouen, not only in plan, but adding the elevation of the various houses, as may be seen on [map F] in [Chapter IX.], so that you may actually walk down every street and see what he saw three hundred and seventy years ago. All that part which was lucky enough to be comprised in his plan of the waterworks is accurately preserved in his naif and faithful drawings, in which the scaffoldings are put in as carefully as the finished buildings. The rows of gables that occur so often are not quite planed away into rectilinear dulness yet, as you may see along the Rue des Faux, or even Eau de Robec here and there. But the greater part of what he drew is only a melancholy memory, and the background of the old life of Rouen can only be recalled from his drawing now to frame some such sketch as the present one of the inhabitants who have vanished with it. The view of the town at the end of this chapter contains a little microscopic vignette in the centre showing the artist presenting his famous Livre des Fontaines to the civic dignitaries. It is on four long bands of parchment, of which the Hôtel de Ville carefully preserves one, and the fourth is in the City Library. The drawings are done in black ink, with the houses coloured a pale yellow, the roofs shown with red tiles or bluish slates, the grass touched with yellowish-green. Besides being a secretary and notary of the Royal Courts, Lelieur held office in the town as councillor, sheriff, and finally President of the General Assembly in the absence of the bailli and lieutenant in 1542. He was crowned for his poem in the famous poetic tourney of the Puy des Palinods de Rouen, and he owned two or three fine estates outside the town.

The object of our little pilgrimage is nearly reached now, and after you have admired the carvings on the front of No. 41, stop at the quaint dwelling marked 29. This is the Maison Caradas, and its position at a corner with the open space of the river beyond it enables you to see it well all round. The slope of the ground upwards, which I noticed in earlier chapters, is especially pronounced here, and shows how much embankment had to be done before the town was really rescued from the swamps and mud-flats of the Seine. The fashion of building each upper storey to overlap the one beneath is very evident here, and the effects I suggested in the last chapter may be vividly realised; as Regnier[69] puts it with his usual frankness:—

"Et du haut des maisons tomboit un tel dégout
Que les chiens altérés pouvoient boire debout."

This is one of the houses drawn in Lelieur's book at the corner of the Rue Tuile, with the Fontaine Lisieux near it, that is now merely a grotesque ruin of its former splendours. So much uncertainty is exhibited by the best local authorities as to the real owner of the Maison Caradas that I shall not pretend to solve the problem here. It is clear, however, that the word is a surname, or one of the by-names so common in the first years of the sixteenth century when this was built; and it is possible that it preserves one more suggestion of the connection between Rouen and Spain, and means "amiable," as in the phrase, "Bien o mal carado." For the root of the word is evidently in the Greek χάρις, and is found in the Gaelic "cara" (the friend or ally), and the Breton "Caradoc," who was the Caractacus of Roman days.

THE MAISON CARADAS IN THE RUE SAVONNERIE

If you will follow me a little further in the same direction, as the Rue de la Savonnerie becomes the Rue des Tapissiers, you will find the corner of the aged Rue du Hallage on your left marked by an ancient parrot in a decrepit cage. He has been living there for so long that he is certain to be there to blink at any new arrival in the next half century, and as you pass him you will remember the parrot who was discovered in Central America, full of years and knowledge, in a village where not a single inhabitant understood what the bird said. He had been found among the ruined houses of a people who had vanished utterly, and he had become the sole repository of syllables that have been never heard elsewhere. If anyone could really understand him, I have often fancied that this faded bag of feathers at the corner of the Rue du Hallage could use the most astonishing language about the things that he has seen, for he could hardly be in a better place in Rouen than this strange street that crawls beneath shadowed archways to the Marché aux Balais and the Rue de l'Épicerie. It takes its name from the Maison du Haulage, where the merchants paid town dues upon their goods, and a few steps further in the Rue des Tapissiers will bring you to the Halles themselves, to which you enter through a huge black archway that gapes upon the Place de la Basse Vieille Tour. Upon the left are some of those old "avant soliers" which you have seen in Jacques Lelieur's drawing of the Place du Vieux Marché, the covered causeways formed by projecting walls propped up by heavy timbers. There is much hideously vulgar modern decoration to spoil the full effect, but the main outlines of the old building are all there, and you may imagine what it looked like for yourself.