BAYEUX, CAEN, AND ROUEN
We had barely hesitated at Bayeux on the way to Cherbourg, but now we
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 wools 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 to stir the French to another conquest of England. 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.
It was the closing hour when we got to the Bayeux museum, but the
guardian 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.
Matilda was ahead of her time in art. She was a futurist--anybody can
see that who has been to one of the later 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
above 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 of her which hangs above the
case containing her masterpiece.
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.
Matilda's horses and men can get up plenty of swift action on occasion,
and the events certainly do move. Tradition has it that the untimely
death of the queen left the tapestry unfinished, for which reason
William's coronation does not appear. I am glad we stopped at Bayeux. I
would rather have seen Matilda's faithfully embroidered conquest than a
whole gallery full of old masters.
Next day at Caen we visited her grave. It stands in a church which she
herself founded in expiation of some fancied sin connected with her
marriage. 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 rabble to invade England. No doubt this bride and groom
were descendants of some of William's wild rascals, but they looked very
mild and handsome and modern to us. Narcissa and I attended quite a
variety of ceremonials in the course of our travels: christenings,
catechisms, song services, high mass, funerals--there was nearly always
something going on in those big churches, and the chantings and
intonings, and the candles, and the incense, and the processions and
genuflections, and the robes of the priests and the costumes of the
assemblages all interested 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. It was from Caen that Charlotte Corday set out to assassinate
Marat. To-day Caen has less than fifty thousand inhabitants and is
mainly interesting for its art treasures and its memories.
We left the Paris-Cherbourg road at Caen. Our program included Rouen,
Amiens, and Beauvais, cathedral cities lying more to the northward.
That night we lay at the little Norman village of Bourg-Achard, in an
inn of the choicest sort, and next morning looked out of our windows on
a busy cattle market, where men in clean blue smocks and women in neat
black dresses and becoming headgear were tugging their beasts about,
exhibiting them and discussing them--eating, meantime, large pieces of
gingerbread and other convenient food. A near-by orchard was filled with
these busy traders. At one place our street was lined with agricultural
implements which on closer inspection proved to be of American
manufacture. From Bourg-Achard to Rouen the distance seemed all too
short--the road was so beautiful.
It was at Rouen that we started to trace backward the sacred footprints
of Joan of Arc, saint and savior of France. For it is at Rouen that the
pathway ends. When we had visited the great cathedral, whose fairy-like
facade is one of the most beautiful in the world, we drove to a corner
of the old Market Place, and stopped before a bronze tablet which tells
that on this spot on a certain day in May, 1431 (it was the 29th), the
only spotless soul in France, a young girl who had saved her country
from an invading and conquering enemy, was burned at the stake. That was
five hundred years ago, but time has not dulled the misery of the event,
its memory of torture, its humiliation. All those centuries since, the
nation that Joan saved has been trying to atone for her death. Streets
have been named for her; statues have been set up for her in every
church and in public squares, but as we read that sorrowful tablet I
could not help thinking that all of those honors together are not worth
a single instant of her fiendish torture when the flames had found her
tender flesh. Cauchon, later Bishop of Beauvais, her persecutor, taunted
his victim to the last. If the chapel of expiation he built later at
Lisieux saved him, then chapels must indeed be held in high esteem by
those who confer grace.
Nothing is there to-day that was there then, but one may imagine an open
market place thronged with people, and the horrid structure of death on
which stood Joan while they preached to her of her sins. Her sins! when
she was the only one among them that was not pitch black, steeped to the
hair in villainy. Cauchon himself finished the sermon by excommunicating
her, cutting off the church's promise of salvation. On her head she wore
a cap on which was printed: HERETIC, RELAPSED, APOSTATE, IDOLATER.
Cauchon had spared nothing to make her anguish complete. It is curious
that he allowed her to pray, but he did, and when she prayed--not for
herself, but for the king who had deserted her--for his glory and
triumph, Cauchon himself summoned the executioners, and they bound her
to the stake with chains and lighted the fire.
There is little more to see of Joan in Rouen. The cathedral was there in
her time, but she was never permitted to enter it. There is a wall which
was a part of the chapel where she had her final hearing before her
judges; there are some houses which she must have passed, and there is a
tower which belonged to the castle in which she was confined, though it
is not certain that it is Joan's tower. There is a small museum in it,
and among its treasures we saw the manuscript article _St. Joan of Arc_,
by Mark Twain, who, in his _Personal Recollections_, has left to the
world the loveliest picture of that lovely life.