Old Continental Towns

by Walter M. Gallichan

Among other buildings of interest is the Palace of Justice, with a stately frontage.

In Rouen was born Corneille, and upon a bridge over the Seine you will find his statue. Fontenelle was also one of the illustrious natives of the city.

Readers of Gustave Flaubert will remember his pictures of the country around Rouen, in “Madame Bovary.” Charles Bovary was sent to school in the city. “His mother selected a room for him, on a fourth floor, overlooking the Eau-de-Robec, in the house of a dyer she was acquainted with.” It was in Yonville-L’Abbage, “a large village about twenty miles from Rouen,” that Charles and Emma Bovary settled after their marriage.

“The river which runs through it,” writes Flaubert, “seems to have imparted to it two distinct characters. On the right bank it is all grass-land, whilst on the left it is all arable. The meadow-land spreads at the foot of some high-lying ground until it meets the pastures of Bray on the other side; on the east the gently rising ground loses itself in the distance in fields of golden wheat. The water running through the grass-land divides the colours of the meadows and of the furrows by a white streak, and so the landscape looks like a great unfolded cloak, with a green velvet collar bordered with silver.”

Such is the country that the genius of Flaubert has peopled with his types of provincial character.

Municipal enterprise has “improved and beautified” Rouen in modern times. The new, broad thoroughfares are undoubtedly admirable, according to the standard of to-day; but the reconstruction of many streets has meant the destruction of a large number of those old gabled houses that delighted the travellers of sixty years ago. Fortunately, a few charming ancient corners remain, and the authorities of the city have preserved some of these weather-worn buildings as monuments of mediæval Rouen.

Jean Goujon, the most notable sculptor of his period, is associated with Rouen, but it has not been proved that he was a native of the city. Mystery surrounds the life of this genius. We do not even know the date of his birth. His sculpture is imaginative and powerful art, and he is very successful in presenting nude figures. It is supposed that Goujon was one of the victims of the Massacre of St Bartholomew.

A picture of the monastic life of Normandy, in the thirteenth century, has been drawn in the remarkable Regestrum Visitationum of Eude Rigaud, Archbishop of Rouen. This wonderful diary has over five hundred pages, and covers a period of about twenty years. In 1248, Rigaud was appointed Archbishop of Rouen by Innocent IV. He proved a zealot for reforms in the Church; he undertook periodic inspection of the monasteries and nunneries, and his journals contain much “sensational” reading. The archbishop records that the rule in many of the convents was exceedingly lax, and that fasts and penances were not duly observed. He found that a number of the clergy were addicted to tippling, and he made clerical drunkenness an offence punishable by the deprivation of a living. Incontinence was very common among the monks. In the convents, Rigaud discovered “great disorders.” But the archbishop relates that the offenders were so numerous that had he expelled them all, no priests would have been left in the diocese.

When wandering in the streets of Rouen, we remember that Saint-Amant was born here in 1594. The life of this wine-loving poet is full of rare adventure and colour. He was a scholar, wit, soldier, statesman, and man of business by turn. Saint-Amant visited England, went to Rome with the fleet, and afterwards to Spain. He also started a glass factory, and was for a period a diplomat in Poland. His career is a long romance.

Saint-Amant’s name in full was Marc Antoine de Gérard, Sieur de Saint Amant. The name by which he is best known was taken from the abbey of Saint-Amant. He was one of the greatest of good livers, with an unquenchable thirst, and an infinite capacity for absorbing liquor. It is said that he and his boon companions often sat for twenty-four hours over their bottles. In those days of tavern revelry, the poet was respected as a master of deep-drinking and a model for the bibulous.