MOTORING THROUGH THE GOLDEN AGE—PART I
BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE
It was some time in June when we found ourselves drifting about Normandy in our motor-car, and one peaceful evening we came to Bayeux and stopped there for the night. Bayeux, which is about sixty miles from Cherbourg, was intimately associated with the life of William the Conqueror, and is to-day the home of the famous Bayeux tapestry, a piece of linen two hundred and thirty feet long and eighteen inches wide, on which is embroidered in colored wool the story of William's conquest of England.
William's queen, Matilda, is supposed to have designed this marvelous pictorial document, and even executed it, though probably with the assistance of her ladies. Completed in the eleventh century, it would seem to have been stored in the Bayeux cathedral, where it lay, scarcely remembered, for a period of more than six hundred years. Then attention was called to its artistic and historic value, and it became still more widely known when Napoleon brought it to Paris and exhibited it at the Louvre. Now it is back in Bayeux, and has a special room in the museum there and a special glass case so arranged that you can walk around it and see each of its fifty-eight tableaux.
Matilda was ahead of her time in art. She was a futurist—anybody could see that who had been to one of the recent exhibitions. But she was exactly abreast in the matter of history. It is likely that she embroidered the events as they were reported to her, and her records are beyond price to-day. I suppose she sat in a beautiful room with her maids about her, all engaged at the great work, and I hope she looked as handsome as she looks in the fine painting that hangs above the case containing her masterpiece.
It was the closing hour when we got to the Bayeux museum, but the guardian generously gave us plenty of time to walk around and look at all the marvelous procession of horses and men, whose outlines have remained firm and whose colors have stayed fresh for more than eight hundred years. There is something fine and stirring about Matilda's tapestry. No matter if Harold does seem to be having an attack of pleurisy, when he is only putting on his armor, or if the horses appear to have detachable legs. I could see that the Joy, who is a judge of horses, did not think much of Queen Matilda's drawing, and their riders were not much better. Still, it was wonderful how they did seem to "go" in some of the battles, and they made that old story seem very real to us. Tradition has it that the untimely death of Matilda left the tapestry unfinished, for which reason William's coronation does not appear.
Next day, at Caen, we visited Matilda's tomb, in a church which she herself founded. Her remains have never been disturbed. We also visited the tomb of the Conqueror, on the other side of the city at the church of St. Etienne. But the Conqueror's bones are not there now; they were scattered by the Huguenots in 1562.
We enjoyed Caen. We wandered about among its ancient churches and still more ancient streets. At one church a wedding was going on, and Narcissa and I lingered a little, to assist. One does not get invited to a Normandy wedding every day, especially in the old town where William I organized his followers to invade England. No doubt this bride and groom were descendants of some of William's wild Normans, but they looked very mild and handsome and modern, to us.
Caen became an important city under William the Conqueror. Edward III of England captured and pillaged it about the middle of the fourteenth century, at which time it was larger than any city in England, except London. To-day, Caen has less than fifty thousand inhabitants, and is mainly interesting for its art treasures and its memories.