Part 8

To an Englishman with little available spare cash and time, and in want of a thorough change of scene and air, which category I take to include a very handsome percentage of our fellow-countrymen, I can recommend a run in Normandy without the slightest hesitation. I am come to the age when one learns to be what the boys call _cocksure_ of nothing in this world, but am, nevertheless, prepared to take my stand on the above recommendation without fear or reservation. For in Normandy he will get an exquisitely light and bracing air, a sky at least twice as far off as our English one (which alone will raise his spirits to at least twice their usual altitude), a pleasant, lively, and well-to-do people, a picturesque country, delicious pears, and, to an Englishman, some of the most interesting old towns in the world out of his own island. All this he may well enjoy for ten days for a five-pound note, or thereabouts, in addition to his return fare to Dieppe or Havre. So let us throw up our insular vacation wide-awakes, and bless the men who invented steam, and pears, and Norman architecture, “and everything in the world beside,” as the good old song of “the leathern bottèl” has it, and start for the fair land from which our last conquerors came before the days get shorter than the nights. Alas! how little of that blissful time now remains to us of the year of grace 1863.

It is some few years, I forget how many, since I was last in a Norman town, and must confess that in some respects they have changed for the better, externally at least, now that the Second Empire has had time to make itself felt in them. All manner of police arrangements, the sweeping, lighting, and paving, are marvellously improved, and there is an air of prosperity about them which does one good. Even in Rouen, the centre of their cotton district, there are scarcely any outward signs of distress, although, so far as I could see, not more than one in three of the mills is at work. I was told that there are still nearly 30,000 operatives out of work in the town and neighbourhood, who have no means of subsistence except any odd job they can pick up to earn a few sous about the quays and markets, but if it be so they kept out of sight during my wanderings about the town. But there is one characteristic sign of the empire to be noted in all these same Norman towns, for which strangers will not feel thankful, though the inhabitants may. The building and improving fever is on them all. In Rouen, amongst other improvements, a broad new street is being made right through some of the oldest parts of the town, from the quays straight up to the boulevards, which it joins close by the railway-station. This Grand Rue de l’Empereur will be a splendid street when finished, to judge by the few houses which are already built at the lower end. Meantime, the queer gables of the houses whose neighbours have been destroyed, and a chapel or two, and an old tower, standing out all by itself, which would make the architectural fortune of any other city, and which find themselves with breathing room now, for the first time, I should think, in the last five hundred years, look down ruefully on the cleared space, in anticipation of the hour rapidly approaching, when they will be again shut out from human ken by four-storied stone palaces, and this time, undoubtedly, for good and all. They can never hold up until another improving dynasty arrives.

At Havre the same process is going on. New houses are springing up all along the new boulevards. Between the town and Frescati’s great hotel and bathing establishment, which faces the sea, there used to stand a curious old round tower of great size, which commanded the mouth of the harbour, and some elaborate fortifications of more modern date. All these have been levelled, old and new together, and the ground is now clear for building, and will, no doubt, be covered long before I shall see it again. Large seaports are always interesting towns, and Havre, besides the usual attractions of such places, has a sort of shop in greater perfection than any other port known to me. In these you can buy or inspect curiosities, alive and dead, from all parts of the world. Parrots of all colours of the rainbow scream at the door, long cages full of love-birds, and all manner of other delicate little feathered creatures one has never seen elsewhere, hang on the walls, or stand about amongst china monsters, and cases of amber, and inlaid stools from Stamboul, and marmoset monkeys, and goodness knows what other temptations to solvent persons with a taste for collections or pets. To neither of these weaknesses can I plead guilty, so after a short inspection I stroll to the harbour’s mouth, and do wonder to think over the astounding audacity of our late countryman, Sir Sidney Smith, who ran his ship close in here, and proceeded in his boats to cut out a French frigate under the guns of the old fortifications. His ship got aground, and was taken; he also. But, after all, it was less of a forlorn hope than throwing himself with his handful of men into Acre, and facing Bonaparte there, which last moderately lunatic act made him a name in history. _Audace! et encore d’audace! et toujours d’audace!_ was the rule which brought our sailors triumphantly through the great war. And there is another picture in that drama which Havre harbour calls up in the English mind, to put in the scale against Sir Sidney’s failure--I mean Citizen Muskein and his gunboats skedaddling from Lieutenant Price in the _Badger_. Do you remember, sir, Citizen Muskein’s--or rather Canning’s--inimitable address to his gunboats in the _Anti-Jacobin?_--

Gunboats, unless you mean hereafter

To furnish food for British laughter,

Sweet gunboats, and your gallant crew,

Tempt not the rocks of St. Marcou,

Beware the _Badger’s_ bloody pennant

And that d----d invalid Lieutenant!

Enough of war memories, and for the future the very last thing one wishes to have to do with this simple, cheery, and, for all I can see, honest people, is to fight them.

There are packets twice a day from Havre across the mouth of the Seine, a seven miles’ run, to Honfleur, described in guide-books as a dirty little town, utterly without interest. I can only say I have seldom been in a place of its size, not the site of any great historic event, which is better worth spending an afternoon in, and I should strongly advise my typical Englishman to follow this route. In the first place, the situation is beautiful. From the steep wooded heights above the town, where are a chapel, much frequented by sailors, and some villas, there are glorious views up the Seine, across to Havre, and out over the sea. Then, in the town, there is the long street, which runs down to the lighthouse, and which, I suppose, the guide-book people never visit, as it is out of the way. It is certainly as picturesque a street as can be found in Rouen, or any other French town I have ever seen--except Troyes, by the way. The houses are not large, but there is scarcely one of them which Prout would not be proud to ask to sit to him.

Then there is the church in the centre of the town by the market-place, with the most eccentric of little spires. It seems, at an early period of the Middle Ages, to have taken it into its clock--or whatever answers to a spire’s head--that it would seer more of the world, and to have succeeded in getting about thirty yards away from its nave. Here, probably finding locomotion a tougher business than it reckoned on, it has fallen asleep, and, while it slept, several small houses crept up against its base and fell asleep also. And there it remains to this day, looking down over the houses in which people live, and many apples and pears are being sold, and crying, like the starling, “I can’t get out.” There is a splendid straight avenue, stretching a mile and a half up the Caen road, and a good little harbour full of English vessels, which ply the egg and fruit trade, and over every third door in the sailors’ quarter you see “Cook-house” written up in large letters, for the benefit of the British sailor.

The railway to Lisieux passes through a richly wooded, hilly country, and then runs out into the great plain in which Caen lies. The city of William the Conqueror is quite worthy of him, which is saying a good deal. For, though one may not quite share Mr Carlyle’s enthusiasm for “Wilhelmus Conquestor,” it must be confessed that he is, at least, one of the three strongest men who have ruled in England, and that in the long run he has done a stroke of good work for our nation. The church of the Abbey _des Hommes_, which he began in 1066, and of which Lanfranc was the first abbot, stands just as he left it, except the tops of two towers at the west end, which were finished two centuries later. It is a pure Norman church, 320 feet long, and 98 feet high in the nave and transepts, and the simplest and grandest specimen of that noble style I have ever seen. William’s grave is before the high altar, the spot marked by a dark stone, and no king ever lay in more appropriate sepulchre. The Huguenots rifled the grave and scattered his bones, but his strong stern spirit seems to rest over the place. There is an old building near the Abbey surmounted by a single solid pinnacle, under which is a room which tradition says he occupied. It is now filled with the wares of a joiner who lives below. Caen is increasing in a solid manner in its outskirts, but seems less disturbed and altered by the building mania than any of her sisters. There was an English population of 4000 and upwards living here before 1848, but the English Consul fairly frightened them away by assurances of his inability to protect them (against what does not seem to have been settled) in that wild time, and now there are not as many hundreds. One of the survivors is the Commissionaire of the Hôtel d’Angleterre, West by name, a really intelligent and serviceable man, well up to his work. It is scarcely ever worth while to spend a franc on a commissionaire, but West is an exception to the rule. His father was in the lace trade, which is active in Caen, but his premises were burnt down some years since, and an end put to his manufacture. West is now trying to revive the family business, and one of his first steps was to get over a new lace machine, and a man to work it, from England. It has not proved a good speculation as yet, for no one else can manage the machine, and the Englishman insists on being drunk half his time.

We left by one of the steamers which ply daily from Caen to Havre. The run down the river is chiefly interesting from the quarries on its banks. They are not the principal quarries, but are of very considerable extent; and from the quantities of tip, heaped into moderate-sized grass-covered hills by the river side, it is plain that they must have been in work here for centuries. You see the stone in many places lying like rich Cheddar cheese, and cut as regularly in flakes as a grocer would cut his favourite cheeses. The stone is very soft when it comes first from the quarries, but gains its great hardness and sharpness after a short exposure. After passing the quarries we got between salt marshes haunted by abundance of jack snipe, and so we passed out to sea.

Gleanings from Boulogne

There is one large portion of the French people which has improved marvellously in appearance in the last few years, and that is the army. The setting up of the French soldier of the line used to be much neglected, but now you never see a man, however small and slight, who does not carry himself and move as if every muscle in his body had been thoroughly and scientifically trained. And this is the actual fact. They have the finest system of military gymnastics which has ever been seen. In every garrison town there is a gymnasium, in which the men have to drill as regularly as on the parade-ground. The one close to the gate of the old town of Boulogne is an admirable specimen, and well worth a visit. Our authorities are, I believe, slowly following in the steps of the French, but little has as yet been done. There is no branch of army reform which may more safely be pressed on. We have undoubtedly the finer material. The English soldier is a bigger and more muscular man than the French soldier, but is far behind him in his physical education, and must remain so until we provide a proper system of gymnastic training, which, by the bye, will benefit the general health of the men, and develop their intelligence as well as their muscles.

During our stay at Boulogne there was some very heavy weather. A strong sou’-wester came on one night, and by two o’clock next day, when I went down, was hurling the angry green waves against the great beams of the southern pier in fearful fashion. The entrance to the harbour, as most of your readers will remember, is quite narrow, not one hundred yards across between the two pier heads. The ebb-tide was sweeping down from the north, and, meeting the gale right off the harbour’s mouth, made a battling and raging sea which brought one’s heart into one’s mouth to look at. The weather was quite bright, and though the wind was so strong that I held my hat on with difficulty, the northern pier was crowded, as the whole force of the sea was spent against the southern pier, over which it was leaping every moment. We were in comparative shelter, and could watch, Without being drenched with spray, the approach of one of the fishing smacks of the port, which was coming home. I shall not easily forget the sight. We stood there, jammed together, rough sailors, fishwomen, Cockneys, weatherbound soldiers, well-dressed ladies, a crowd of all ranks, the wind singing through us so that we could scarcely make our nearest neighbours hear. Not that we wanted to talk. The sight of the small black hull and ruddy brown sail of the smack, now rising on the crest of a great wave, and the next moment all but disappearing behind it, took away the desire, almost the power, of speech. Two boats, manned with fishermen, pulled to the harbour’s mouth, and lay rolling in the comparatively still water just within the shelter of the southern pier head. It was comforting to see them there, though if any catastrophe had happened they could never have lived in that sea. But the gallant little smack needed no help. She was magnificently steered, and came dancing through the wildest part of the race without shipping a single sea, seeming to catch each leaping wave just in the spot where it was easiest to ride over. As she slid out of the seething cauldron into the smooth water past the waiting boats the crowd drew a long breath, and many of us hurried back to get a close view of her as she ran into her place amongst the other fishing boats alongside the quay. I envied the grizzly old hero at the helm, as he left his place, threw off his dreadnought coat, and went to help the two men and two boys who were taking in the sail and coiling away the ropes. There was much shouting and congratulation from above; but they made little answer, and no fuss. Their faces struck me very much, especially the boys’, which were full of that quiet self-contained look one sees in Hook’s pictures. There was no other boat in the offing then, so I went home; but within a few hours heard that a smack had capsized in the harbour’s mouth, with the loss of one man. I only marvel how the rest could have been saved.

On the 1st of October in every year there is a solemn festival of the seafaring people of Boulogne, and the sea is blessed by their pastors. I was anxious to wait for the ceremony, but was unable to do so. There seems to be a strange mixture of trust in God and superstition in all people who “occupy their business on the great waters.” There is a little chapel looking down on Boulogne port full of thank-offerings of the sailors’ wives, where the fishwomen go up to plead with God, and pour out the agony of their souls in rough weather. There are propitiatory gifts, too, by the side of the thank-offerings, and the shadow of a tyrannous power in nature, to be bought off with gifts, darkens the presence of the true Refuge from the storm. There are traces, too, of a more direct idolatry in the town. In the year 643 of our era the Madonna came to Boulogne in an open boat, so runs the story, and left an image with the faithful, which soon became the great religious lion of the neighbourhood, drawing largely, and performing a series of miracles all through the Middle Ages. When Henry VIII. took the town the English carried off the image, but it was restored in good condition when peace came, and as powerful as ever for wonder-working. The Huguenots got hold of it half a century later, and were supposed to have destroyed it; but an image, which at any rate did duty for it, was ultimately fished up out of a well. Doubts as to identity, however, having arisen, the matter was referred to the Sorbonne, and a jury of doctors declared in favour of the genuineness of the article which was forthcoming. And so it continued to practise with varying success until the Revolution, when the Jacobins laid hands on it, broke it up, and burnt it, thinking to make once for all an end of this and other idol-worships. But a citizen not so enlightened as his neighbours stayed by the fire, and succeeded at last in rescuing what he declared to be an arm of the original image, which remains an object of veneration still, and is said not to have lost all healing power. But it is far inferior in this respect to some drops of the holy blood, for the reception of which a countrywoman of ours has built a little chapel in the suburbs.

Boulogne has all the marks of rapidly increasing material prosperity which may be seen now in every French town, one of the many fruits of which is a wonderful improvement in the condition of the streets and thoroughfares. The fine new buildings, the look of the shops and of the people, all tell the same tale. In fact, one comes away from France now with a feeling that, so far as surface polish and civilisation are concerned, this is the country which is going to the front. Whether it goes any deeper is a matter upon which a traveller flitting about for a few weeks cannot venture an opinion.

I came back in one of the daily packets to London Bridge, which, besides carrying seventy passengers, was piled fore and aft with cargo. There were 400 cases of wine on deck, besides other packages, which sorely curtailed our walking privileges. But the boats are good boats, and the voyage past Dover, through the Downs, round the North Foreland, and up the Thames, is so full of life and interest that it is well worth making a long day of it, if one is a moderately good sailor. The advertisements call it eight and a half hours, which means eleven; but it is not a moment too long.

Blankenberghe

Yesterday (14th August) we were warned by meagre fare at the _table d’hôte_ of our hotel that it was the vigil of some saint’s day. Our gastronomic knowledge was enlarged by the opportunity of partaking of boiled mussels. A small and delicate species of this little fish--despised of Englishmen--is found in extraordinary quantities on this coast. The sand is dotted with the shells after every ebb. The wattles of the jetties are full of them. After the first shock of having a salad bowl full of small black shells presented to one, following immediately on a delicate _potage à l’oseille_, the British citizen may pursue his education in this direction fearlessly, with the certainty of becoming acquainted with a delicate and appetising morsel; and he will return to his native country with at least a toleration for “winks” and “pickled whelks,” when he sees them vended at corner stalls in Clare Market or in the Old Kent Road, for the benefit of the dangerous classes of his fellow-citizens who take their meals in the street. In these Flemish parts they are eaten with bread and butter, and even as whitebait, and by all classes.

After the meal I consulted the calendar in my pocket-book as to the approaching festival, not wishing to thrust my heretical ignorance unnecessarily on the notice of the simple folk who inhabit the _Lion d’Or_. That obstinately Protestant document, however, informed me simply that the Rev. E. Irving was born on this day in 1792, probably not the saint I was in quest of. A _Churchman’s Almanac_, with which the only English lady in the place was provided, was altogether silent as to the day. In the end, therefore, I was obliged to fall back upon the bright-eyed little _demoiselle de la maison_, who informed me that it was the vigil of the Assumption of the Virgin, and that the _fête_ was one greatly honoured by the community of Blankenberghe.