THE SEINE BELOW ROUEN
Havre is one of those neglected tourist points through which travellers
frantically rush _en route_ to--well, almost anywhere you like, Paris,
Switzerland, or the Riviera. It is, accordingly, not so well known as it
might otherwise be, a distinction it shares with Boulogne and Calais.
Havre is a typical example of the “large modern city.” It has not the
abounding wealth of historical association of Rouen. It is a city of new
houses and new streets, laid out after the geometric manner in favour in
America. But if the monuments of the past are rare, Havre is none the
less an attractive and gay city, and the inhabitants are justly proud of
their Rue de Paris and their Place Gambetta, which, truly, would dignify
the capital itself. But one’s admiration never loses the key-note. The
chief joy of Havre is its gigantic port, which controls the fifth part
of the commerce of France.
The great strength and value of the port of Havre is that, as it stands
to-day, it is modern.
When Napoleon, in his prophetic words, linked the city with Paris and
Rouen, it had but twenty thousand souls. Fifty years later it had risen
to thirty thousand, and more recently, since the efforts of the
engineers Colbert and Vauban and the solicitations of statesmen have
provided it with a grand port of entry, it maintains a steadily rising
population above 130,000 souls, all practically dependent upon the
commerce of the city for their support. As French cities go, this is an
astonishing percentage of growth.
Mounting the heights of Ingouville, one sees unrolled at his feet, in an
imposing panorama, the city of Havre to its uttermost confines, its
port, its ten docks, its wharfs, its suburbs, the immense estuary of the
Seine, Cape de la Hève, and the sea, with the white and brown sails of
the ships and fishing-boats, and the parti-coloured funnels and hulls of
big steamers. In thirty years the movement of ships in and out of the
port has swelled from 2,600,000 tons to more than six million. Of
passengers by sea, long voyages and short ones taken together, Havre,
within a single year, has embarked and disembarked a total of 550,000
persons. Think of this, ye who suppose France an effete and untravelled
nation; and this is only the normal business of a city of 130,000
inhabitants.
[Illustration: _Cape de la Hève_]
The expense of all this vast equipment was of course considerable. It
may convey nothing to many passers-by to know that Havre, in the last
ten years, has spent some forty-one millions of francs on these
improvements, whilst the Chamber of Commerce has been directly
responsible for perhaps twenty-five millions more, all of which ought to
be a sufficiently tangible and plausible endorsement that the work is
being well done. When the work is complete the port of Havre will rival
the greatest in the world in magnitude and convenience. The historical
remains of Havre may not equal those of many other of the important
cities of France, and the Rue de Paris and the café-bordered Place
Gambetta may be poor substitutes, but, nevertheless, Havre’s past is
historic, though the ancient Havre de Grâce has disappeared entirely.
It was here, in 1514, that Leroy, the commandant of Honfleur, carried
out the orders of François I. to “excavate and construct a port suitable
and convenient to receive, provide for, and equip large ships, not only
of our own kingdom, but of our allies.” From this may be said to have
grown the present great port. The name of the city itself grew out of a
chapel founded a few years before by Louis XII. (1509).
Primarily François I. may have desired to make it a great home-port, but
no less did he have in mind that here was a most suitable place to
assemble his fleet, which some day he would put forth against England.
In 1545 he actually did get together nearly two hundred ships of all
sorts and conditions of fighting capacity for a descent upon England at
the Isle of Wight. The expedition was repulsed, and in return, in a few
years’ time (1562), the port was occupied by an English garrison.
Henri IV., the great Cardinal Richelieu, and Colbert were responsible in
no small measure for the great prosperity and strength which soon
settled down upon the city, though by the end of the seventeenth century
it dawned upon the English that here, at their very doors, was a
maritime rival which looked as though it were to outdistance all others
in the north of Europe.
As a precautionary measure, presumably, the English fleet made an attack
upon the port, but they in their turn met as fierce a repulse as did the
French in England under François I. Admiral Sir Sidney Smith, in a vain
attempt to capture a French vessel close under the guns of the fortress,
was captured and held a prisoner by the French in the old citadel built
by Charles IX. It was here, too, by the way, that the crafty Mazarin
imprisoned the Princes of Condé, Conti, and the Duc de Longueville. It
is recorded, in the annals of the city, that in the year 1535 the
greater part of the newer portions were swept away and large numbers of
persons drowned, by an extraordinary tidal wave--the ancestor, perhaps,
of those which periodically ascend the Seine, to the joy of the tourist
and the incidental profit of the innkeepers at Caudebec.
Large numbers of persons were drowned, mostly farmers who had gathered
in the town “_pour la populer_,” as the chronicle gives it.
In general, matters of artistic and archæological interest are wanting
in this city of commercialism, of great hotels, and the hum and echo of
the workaday world.
The Art Museum, to be sure, has examples of the masterpieces of Poussin
and Carrache, and even a Rubens, a Murillo, and a Van Dyck, but, on the
other hand, the public monuments of the city are not artistic.
Pilgrims to literary shrines should remember that Havre was the
birthplace of Bernardin St. Pierre, whose “Paul and Virginia” is as
immortal to the Frenchman as “Locksley Hall” to an Englishman. St.
Pierre’s statue, by David d’Angers, as well as another of Casimir
Delavigne, stands before the Art Museum. Another monument on the cliff
above the city, to Lefevre Desnouettes, once and again comes into view
as one strolls about. It is one of the most atrocious monuments ever
erected to the memory of man.
Havre is splendid and elegant in its way, but it is not picturesque,
except possibly in the low streets near the wharfs, frequented by
sailors, which have a cosmopolitanism reminiscent of Marseilles, itself
the most thoroughly cosmopolitan of all the ports of the world.
Here are strange, perhaps dangerous, _cabarets_, _cafés-concerts_, and
questionable amusements of all sorts, where strange and uncouth customs
shoulder each other in a veritable babel of tongues; mulattos from the
Caribbean Sea, Maltese, Greeks, Lascars, Chinamen, and above all
Portuguese, with an occasional English or American sailor down on his
luck,--all are here. _Calvados_, and dirks, and sharp knives all play
their part, and clearly the quayside of Havre is no place after dark.
From the heights of Ingouville, of Cape de la Hève, or of Graville, the
illuminated effect of the city at night is wonderfully soft,
picturesque, and beautiful, the houses of all ranks twinkling with
lights, the streets and wharves luminous with orbs of electricity and
the reds, greens, and whites of the semaphore, the ships beyond flashing
out to each other signals and commands inexplicable to a landsman,--all
blend wonderfully into what the great Whistler would have called a
nocturne.
Once and again one will hear the infinitely sad wail of a siren whistle
on some vessel outward or inward bound, which will suggest the
mutability of all things, and the strain and stress under which we live.
But on the whole, a midnight reverie on the heights above the old Havre
de Grâce should awaken as pleasant emotions as the same view in broad
day--perhaps more so.
The Seine, at its mouth, has as many whims as a stricken hare. Its
channel turns about on itself in truly bewildering fashion, and what was
this year deep water and a fairway, next year becomes, perhaps, dry
land, or at least damp sand or swamp. In 1886 the channel followed
somewhat the shore of the north bank from Tancarville to the sea, but by
1889 it had shifted to the south bank, and two years later seemed likely
to engulf the ancient town of Honfleur, which was prosperous in the
fifteenth century, before Havre was even thought of. Indeed its harbour
is now so silted up that most of its commercial prosperity, though not
its picturesqueness, has disappeared.
It is written in the books of travellers with tourist tickets that they
may journey Paris-ward from Havre by Rouen either by boat or rail during
the summer months. Many avail themselves of the alternative water route,
and many do not. Those who do not miss a unique trip which is well worth
the extra hours _en route_, though there is no very grand scenery until
one comes well up with suburban Rouen, at, say, Molineux-La Bouille.
From the harbour at Havre runs the Tancarville Canal, which is a smooth,
straight waterway which enables craft proceeding up river to avoid the
shifting sands of the estuary and, at certain seasons of the year, to
escape the tidal wave or _mascaret_.
As a waterway of the rank of the deep-sea canals of Holland, the
Tancarville Canal looks, at first glance, wofully inefficient; but its
almost constant use precludes any doubt as to its value.
It runs straight as the crow flies from Havre to Harfleur, and thence to
Tancarville itself, where it joins the Seine, through the first lock, at
the twenty-third kilometre mark from Havre.
The section of the Seine between Havre and Rouen forms what is known
officially as the “Ninth Section,” though the application is properly
given as one descends the stream, the section above, from Rouen to the
mouth of the Oise, being known as the “Eighth Section.”
From the five hundred and sixty-third kilometre mark, at Havre, counting
from Méry in the Department of the Aube, near Troyes, to Rouen, is 125
kilometres.
Up to the latter point, the rules of navigation as known upon the deep
seas are applicable, and those which apply to the navigation of rivers,
canals, lakes, and ponds of fresh water cease to apply.
The law on this subject is very explicit, and was promulgated in 1890,
because of the lack of uniformity existing in the laws relating to
navigation on French waterways. On the Seine the actual line of
delimitation is at the curious, though not ungainly, Bridge du
Transbordeur at Rouen.
The entire ninth section of the Seine is officially recognized as
navigable for the whole of its 338 kilometres from Havre to the
confluence of the Oise, its most important tributary below Paris.
Below Paris freight is carried largely by towboats. But there are some
steam-carriers of curious design and build with a pair of twin
stern-wheels revolving like a squirrel-cage, the pilot or helmsman
perched upon a little platform between. These quaint craft carry from
150 to 280 tons of package freight, the _péniches_ from 200 to 400 tons,
and the barges perhaps as much as 650 tons. Recent improvements in
dredging have given a depth of water which has of late allowed the
development and use of a new type of steamer.
The steam-coasters carry a maximum of 750 tons at sea, from Havre to St.
Brieuc or Morlaix, or to Dunkerque, and five hundred tons in the river.
[Illustration: _Towboats on the Seine_]
Another sort of large barge has a carrying capacity of one thousand
tons, on a significantly shallow draught, and finally, there are the
steam-coasters, already mentioned, making the service between Paris and
London, which are in reality ocean-going steamers, in spite of their
collapsible masts and funnels.
Opposite Havre and connected by frequent boat journeys during the day is
the most ancient port of Honfleur. One frequently enough reaches it via
Havre, but, properly speaking, it belongs to that little group of
coastwise cities and towns which stretches from the mouth of the Seine
to the Cotentin.
Just above Havre on the Seine is the florid spire of the noble church of
Harfleur,--not to be confounded with the now dormant port of Honfleur on
the opposite bank,--one of the most imposingly placed spires in
Normandy, if not in France.
Harfleur was besieged in 1415 by Henry V. of England, and fell after
forty days, when sixteen hundred families were transported to England,
“without having any belongings except the clothes they stood in and five
_sols_ each.”
The superb spire of St. Martin’s Church dates from the fifteenth century
and dominates the fifteenth and sixteenth-century houses at its base
quite like an angel guardian. The sixteenth-century château of the Comte
de Labédoyère is an imposing edifice in the style of Louis XIII.
To-day this old seaport of Harfleur--which, like Honfleur across the
estuary, has lost its former pride and glory--is scarcely more than a
suburb of Havre, a half-dozen kilometres distant.
On an isolated cliff on the Seine above Harfleur, one sees the two great
towers of the Château of Tancarville. This fortress-château was first
built in the eleventh or twelfth century, on the plan of a triangle,
having at each of its angles a great tower, and, on the intervening
walls on each side, intermediate towers to the number of seven.
Within the walls was the castle of the seigneurs of Tancarville, of
which more or less fragmentary ruins still remain.
On the terrace masking the ruins is the new château, a cold, modern
edifice which no one could possibly be in love with, but for the
admirably imposing outlook from its windows.
Lillebonne, on the Seine midway between Rouen and Havre, is known to
have the remains of one of the most northerly--if not the most
northerly--Roman amphitheatre extant.
Supposedly this little Seine-side town was named for the great Roman and
bore the name Juliabona, from which was derived its present
nomenclature.
Numerous Roman antiques have been discovered here from time to
time,--most of which are to be seen in the museum at Rouen,--which marks
it as having been a city of importance, indeed only such ever had a
great open-air theatre such as is indicated by the remains visible at
Lillebonne to-day.
Lillebonne was also the capital of the Province of Caux, but fell into
decadence after the invasions. The Norman William resuscitated the place
and made it a strong fortification. Remains of his château, also
restored in the thirteenth century by the Comtes d’Harcourt, who in turn
possessed the town, are yet to be seen. For the most part the edifice is
in fragments, but enough remains of the old walls,--now forming a
terrace,--a crenelated low tower, a hexagonal tower, and a cylindrical
donjon--with walls a dozen feet in thickness--to suggest that the town’s
former importance under the Norman dukes was quite the equal of that of
its Roman days.
Lillebonne has also a most interesting mediæval church, dating from the
fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.
At last one reaches Caudebec-en-Caux, a picturesque old town, with a
most magnificent parish church and a little tree-bordered quay which is
charming. But in season all is spoiled by the general attitude of lying
in wait for unwary trippers and excursionists from London, which seems
to have set its mark upon the inhabitants of this otherwise delightful
stopping-place.
[Illustration: _Quay of Caudebec-en-Caux_]
That great wonder of nature, the _mascaret_, is the great
drawing-card of Caudebec, even more than the artistic pretensions of its
flamboyant fifteenth-century church, with its wonderful spire, the old
houses of the town, its famous market, and the quaint costumes of the
Cauchoise women.
The great wave comes suddenly, as if the flood-gates were let loose, to
a height of two or three metres above the normal surface of the water,
and during May or June, when the _mascaret_ is at its best, it is the
chief magnet of attraction to scores of travellers who have timed their
itineraries so as to witness this freak of nature.
The market-place of Caudebec is most delightfully situated, extending
from the base of the old church to the tree-bordered quays, where also
are the town’s two chief hotels, with delightful little balconies, on
which one may dine and watch the throng below and the water-borne
traffic of the Seine.
The banks of the Seine itself at Caudebec begin to rise and narrow, and
the generally flat lowland aspect takes on more of the nature of wooded
hills, with an occasional château or church peeping out from among the
trees.
Next above Caudebec is one of the most celebrated abbeys in the north of
France, St. Wandrille’s. It keeps company, or rather its ruin does,
with those other grand remains of Jumièges and St. Georges de
Boscherville, all of which lie within a twenty-mile square plot of
ground on the two peninsulas made by the windings of the Seine just
north of Rouen.
The cloister of St. Wandrille, which, in ruins, may yet be seen, was one
of the most beautiful of the middle ages.
The founder of the abbey, in 648, was St. Wandrille, a disciple of St.
Columba and a member of one of the most distinguished families of
Austrasia. St. Wandrille exercised the most important functions at the
court of Pepin, but subsequently retired to the monastery of Montfauçon
in Champagne, ultimately to come to Normandy, where he founded the
monastery of Fontenelle, or St. Wandrille, as it afterward became known.
In a little time the establishment came to a flourishing prosperity,
with over three hundred monks.
St. Wandrille evangelized the entire Province de Caux and sent out many
colonies of monks to carry on the work.
From the Abbey of Fontenelle came St. Lambert, Bishop of Lyons, St.
Ansbart, the Bishop of Rouen, St. Gennade, and St. Agathon. In all,
forty personages coming from the abbey were subsequently honoured in the
French calendar by the title of saint.
The structure itself, splendid and magnificent, and its church, above
all, was only to be compared to the gems of its era.
Nothing, or nearly nothing, remains of all this splendour to-day; some
fragmentary piers and arches, or a bit of wall set shrine-like in the
midst of the wooded valley on the right bank of the Seine, tell the
story, but they tell it well.
There is a record of an old _bénitier_ or holy-water font here which had
engraven upon its rim the following admonition:
“He who takes the holy water without having immersed the hand, does a
thing dishonest, and must demand a pardon from his God.”
It does not exist to-day, but the precept seems to be one which might
find a useful place in twentieth-century churches.
Just above St. Wandrille is Duclair, a market-town of mean enough
pretensions as to population except on market-days. On those occasions
its principal streets and tiny place are encumbered with many varieties
of live stock, from sucking pigs to crowing hens. For an automobile to
pass through its restricted streets and not decapitate something (a
fowl costs two francs, a duck five, and so on) would be a feat of skill
indeed.
The town has no great artistic attractions, though its church is a queer
composition of Norman fourteenth-century and Renaissance attributes.
Beneath the steeple are also some ancient Gallo-Romain columns with
sculptured capitals.
In the peninsula lying to the south of Duclair, where the river turns
into one of those wonderful serpent-like bends, such as one used to see
on the cashmere shawls of our grandmothers, are the remains of the
ancient Abbey of Jumièges. Its two sombre towers, square at the base,
but dwindling to an octagon, enflank an enormous shell, now dismantled
and all but dismembered.
Jumièges was the most ancient monastery in Normandy. It was founded in
the seventh century by St. Philibert, and had at one time nine hundred
monks.
It endured for many centuries rich, powerful, and renowned; its abbots
were beatified and many of them made bishops and archbishops. The Dukes
of Normandy and the Kings of England and of France had the right to
lodge there when passing in its neighbourhood.
[Illustration: _Jumièges_]
The abbey declined with the reformatory ideas which went abroad through
the Calvinists, who pillaged it of its riches.
Afterward a few monks were sheltered there, but these, too, were
dispersed when the fabric finally suffered demolition during the
Revolution.
[Illustration]
The remains, with the fine surrounding gardens, are now the property of
a Madame Lepel-Cointet, who herself inhabits one of the dependencies of
the ancient monastery.
Lovers of French history will do well to recall the fact that Charles
VII., and that paragon Agnes Sorel, frequently lodged here. It was at
Jumièges, on the ninth of February, 1450, that the “_gentille Agnes_,”
the beautiful mistress of Charles VII., died, some say of poison. She
had the good fortune to merit far more approbation than most of the
royal mistresses of France, and whether one pauses before the shrine of
her birthplace at Fromenteau near Bourges, her tomb at Loches, or at
Jumièges, their memories will unconsciously echo the following lines:
“Gentille Agnès, plus de loz tu mérites,
Ta cause étant de France recouvrer,
Que n’en pourrait dedans un cloistre ouvrer
Close nonain, on bien dévot hermite.”
The “_gentille Agnes_” had a manor-house in the neighbourhood, but died
within the walls of the monastery itself in 1450, to the monks of which
she bequeathed her heart.
In the Art Museum is still to be seen the stone which originally covered
this relic, as well as the stone tomb of Nicolas Léroux, the fifty-ninth
abbé, one of the judges of Jeanne d’Arc.
From the country round about are exported considerable quantities of
early summer fruits and vegetables to England, the soil and the climate
of the Seine country being particularly suitable to the early
advancement of garden-crops.
Before one finally draws up on Rouen and its down-river suburbs there is
still another ecclesiastical monument, St. Georges de Boscherville,--the
third great church of other times still remaining to tell its story.
St. Georges de Boscherville was more fortunate than Jumièges or St.
Wandrille as to its enduring qualities. Its abbey church is to-day one
of those marvels which one continually comes across in the
out-of-the-way places of France; admirably preserved, of wonderfully
excellent design, and immense in size--as compared with the functions
which it performs to-day. It is one of the architectural wonders of a
region distinctly prolific in treasures of the kind. Its strong,
Norman-arched nave and walls, its chapter-house, its portal, in fact the
whole structure, is of that long-lived Romanesque-Norman variety of
building which gave its name and style to the far-heralded Norman
architecture. It is a monument to the genius of one man: its builder,
Raoul de Tancarville, the chamberlain of William the Conqueror. He posed
the crowning stone of the edifice in 1066, the year of the Norman
invasion of England, in the domain of Boscherville, of which he was
governor.
The abbey was first devoted to the canons regular of St. Augustin, but
in 1114 it was occupied by monks of the order of St. Benoit.
St. Georges de Boscherville is a grand church edifice, with a
chapter-house. It could easily hold five thousand people, whereas the
present population of the parish cannot be over a couple of hundred
souls.
It is commonly accredited as one of the best preserved examples of
Norman religious architecture extant. Over its doorway one may yet read
this inscription to its founder.
“A la pieuse munificence de Raoul de Tancarville,
grand chambellan de Guillaume II. le Conquérant,
duc de Normandie.”
Toward Rouen the Seine describes a triple bend, its contours enveloped
with high, wooded plateaus, of which the Roumare, Londe, and Rouvray
forests are most charming, and are to the Norman capital what
Fontainebleau and Rambouillet are to Paris.
Thickly set for many miles along the river-bank are villages and towns
blending industrial and country pursuits in inextricable fashion, with
here and there the luxurious villa of a wealthy manufacturer of Rouen
peeping out from among the sheltering trees.
The Seine, both above and below Rouen, makes a series of snakelike
curves which encircle a half-dozen or more forest-grown peninsulas,
which appeal particularly to one who, judging only from the appearance
of the dunes of the seacoast or the faintly outlined, tree-bordered
roads which run tangently in various directions, had made up his mind
that France is a barren, treeless land.
Back of St. Sauveur, but within full sight of a person standing on the
water-front at Rouen, are the oak-clad hills which form the forest of
Rouvray. The next peninsula contains the forest of Londe; and, across
the river, on the same side with Rouen itself, is the forest peninsula
of Roumare, which has for a neighbour another thumblike neck of land, on
which is the forest of Jumièges and the ruins of its ancient abbey.
These taken together form the down-river environs of Rouen. The panorama
along the banks of the Seine is a great treasure-house of natural
beauties and historical relics.
There is a great deal of smoke near Rouen, but the chimneys from which
it belches forth are, nevertheless, picturesque. Farther down the river
are the busy manufacturing and ship-building towns of Petit and Grand
Quévilly; while on the Rouen side at this point are a series of
picturesque hamlets along the riverside road which extends for a score
of miles around the flank of the peninsula to Duclair.
The foliage along the river-banks here, except for the high-grown
forests behind, is much the same as elsewhere,--slim, light larches,
with here and there a clump of low-lying willows and an undergrowth
which runs to the water’s edge.
At Bouille-Molineux, the terminus of the ferry-boats from Rouen, is the
famous monument to the French combatants who perished here in 1871;
which reminds one of the bronze and marble effigies with which the
Germans have decorated the Rhine. Here also is the suggestively named
_Maison Brulée_, famed for its fried eels, which are really a delicacy
as they are served in France.
The chief and only attraction of Petit Couronne is the home of
Corneille, surely a literary shrine of the first rank, although
frequently neglected by the tourist birds of passage who flock to the
continent of Europe in summer. Why this should be so is inexplicable. It
is scarce five miles from the Norman capital, and a plea is here made to
hero-worshippers and lovers of literary landmarks for a better
acquaintance.
The house dates from 1554, and was bought by the poet’s father in 1608,
from whom Pierre inherited it in 1639. Two years after the poet’s death,
in 1686, it was sold for 5,100 livres. The Department of the Lower
Seine bought it in 1874 and transformed it into the _Musée Corneillen_,
an art museum devoted to Corneille.
Within are many personal relics of the poet and a vast collection of
contemporary works of art. Among the chief are a bust of Corneille after
that in the Comédie-Française, some Louis XIII. chairs, portraits of the
poet by Lebrun and Mignard, an engraving of Meissonier’s portrait
retouched by himself, a statue by David d’Angers, and a manuscript
letter bearing the signature “P. Corneille.”
The construction of the building is ingenious and peculiar. It is of the
old timbered style, now grown so scarce, with an elaborately roofed
garret.
The care with which such monuments are preserved is expressive of the
fondness of the French for the memories of their great men; and, though
it was wholly through local pride that the _Musée Corneillen_ was
established, it may well be considered a monument of national interest.
Petit Quévilly has a few memorials of other days which are perhaps of
interest to the archæologist, if not to the general tourist: a chapel
dedicated to St. Julien dating from the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, the somewhat scanty fragments of a hospital for lepers,
founded in 1183 by Henry II. of England, some ruins of an ancient
cloister, and an old Carthusian convent of the seventeenth century,
which has since been turned into a factory.
Grand Quévilly still preserves the Château of Montmorency, built in the
eighteenth century, when ornamental domestic architecture fell far below
the height it had reached two centuries before. The château is
beautifully situated in the midst of a fine park. Here, too, is the farm
of Grand Aulnay, belonging to the hospital at Rouen, a gift to the old
foundation by Richard Cœur de Lion in 1197.
By this time the traveller up the Seine is well in sight and sound of
Rouen’s chimney-stacks, and the roaring traffic of its quays and
streets.
At Croisset, on the banks of the Seine three kilometres below Rouen, is
a literary shrine which is little known. It is the home of Gustave
Flaubert. Maupassant, De Goncourt, Daudet, and Zola frequently met there
for luncheon with the author of “Madame Bovary.”
When Flaubert died the house was for a long time deserted; but a
committee has recently been formed to preserve its associations, as was
done for the home of Corneille at Grand Couronne, on the opposite bank
of the river.
“Truly a fair estate, here beside this great river up and down which the
masts of ships pass before one, ...” wrote Edmond de Goncourt in 1830.
It was an appropriate home for a man of letters; for in the eighteenth
century it housed a colony of Benedictines, and is destined to become
one of those haunts of literary people, of which there are so many
throughout France. All who go to Rouen should make a pilgrimage to the
home of Flaubert.
No one who knows Rouen, the city of the Northmen, the Conqueror, and of
Jeanne d’Arc, will for a moment contest its right to be ranked as one of
the liveliest, if not one of the biggest seaports of the world. One
marvels at the size and number of deep-sea ships at its wharfs. Here you
will see colliers from Sunderland and Wales, of great depth and beam;
lumber ships from Norway, of equally sturdy girth; and occasionally a
full-rigged ship which has been towed up from Havre, where perhaps it
has unloaded a part of its South Sea cargo. Across the _Pont Corneille_,
just off the quay which separates the _Grand Cours_ from the river, is
the harbour of the great canal-boats which carry coal from Newcastle and
Sunderland to Paris and the upper Seine, the Eure, and their branches,
between the city of great churches and the metropolis of Paris. They are
huge craft, built as if they were expected to cross the ocean. There are
none as large as they, except their sister ships of Holland which ply on
the lower reaches of the Maas and Neder Rijn or the great trunk-line
canals. All other barges, canal-boats, and lighters pale before the
splendour and magnitude of these great coal-carrying craft, which form a
fleet of a hundred or more at a time tied up in their harbour in Rouen.
Besides these, there are the local _bateaux mouches_, which ply up and
down to near-by suburbs, much as they do in Paris, as well as a more
splendid craft which carries passengers on alternate days from Rouen to
Havre. Last, but not least, the spider-like _Pont Transbordeur_ is
visible from every direction as evidence of progress.
Rouen, moreover, is about the only city of France which has its
water-front flanked by first-class cafés. From the _Pont Corneille_,
down-stream to the _Pont Transbordeur_, is one long succession of wicker
chairs and marble-topped tables, where on a summer’s afternoon there is
as much gaiety and splendour of life to be seen as on the most crowded
of the boulevards of Paris.
[Illustration: _A Rouen Café_]
There is this distinction, however. Instead of the tables being crowded
with _boulevardiers_ and their female companions of more or less vulgar
raiment, they are occupied by substantial merchants and men of affairs,
officers of the army, and, on Sundays and holidays, by many of their
families, to say nothing of the numerous tourists both English and
American.
All of this is in strong contrast to the workaday aspect of the ships
which lie along the wharfs, and the long trucks and drays of wine-casks
which form their cargo.
The Douane, the Bourse, the Grande Poste, and the Cours Boïeldieu, with
its most excellent bronze statue of the composer, all combine to give an
air of great prosperity to all Rouen.
The tourist in general, as well as the antiquarian and the artist, often
overlook these components which make for the well-being of a great
centre of population. But they are of vital interest to the genuine
travel-lover, and indicate in an unmistakable way the real social and
economic aspects of its life.
A capital city Rouen always was. May she continue to flourish as one of
the artistic capitals of France, if not of Europe. She is truly the city
of the best Gothic art. Nowhere else, indeed, can one see so complete an
exposition of the development of this architectural style as in Rouen,
with its three great and famous churches, its half-dozen half-demolished
and desecrated ones, its court-house, and old-time buildings.
Again the art of the Renaissance is here seen in its very best domestic
application, in the old timbered and stone shop fronts and houses, in
the Hôtel Bourgtheroulde, or the Tour de la Grosse Horloge, and the
Porte Guillaume Lion, almost unknown to the hurried traveller.
The magnitude of the harbour of Rouen and of Quévilly as a ship-building
centre is comparatively unknown to most strangers.
The real port of Rouen, that part of the Seine flanked by imposing
warehouses and luxurious quays, shows more plainly than in any other
inland town or city of France the spectacle of modern activity which
comes from commercial association with the cities of other lands. It was
built at a great expense; and to-day allows access to ships drawing as
much as twenty-four feet of water and of a burden of six thousand tons.
The shipping of the port amounts to over two million tons a year.
From Havre to Rouen the depth of the Seine varies from 6.0 to 7.5 metres
and it is unobstructed by locks or bridges.
Just above the entrance to the Tancarville Canal, where rises the
Aiguille de Pierre Gant, and less loftily the ruined towers of the
thirteenth-century Château of Tancarville, is a bend in the river which
offered the guardians of the safety thereof an opportunity to install a
wonderful lighthouse, which at night is weirdly kaleidoscopic in its
functions, to say the least. Here it is that salt-water navigation
practically ends, and the coast pilot turns over his great cargo
steamer, bound perhaps from Norway, America, or the Antipodes, to Rouen,
to the tenderer mercies of the river pilot. The pilot station is at
Quillebeuf, a quaint old town on the left bank. Quillebeuf is the port
of the lower Seine; but, though its active history goes back to the
thirteenth century, and it was one time known as Henricopolis, because
it was one of the first cities of Normandy to acknowledge the French
king, there is little of interest in its streets and quays except for
the painter of long-shore marines.