CHAPTER XIV.

UPPER NORMANDY.

Calais.--The Black Prince.--Étretat.--French Bathing.--Legend.-- Rouen.--Story of St. Louis.--Story of St. Bartholomew's Eve.

The Class stopped briefly at Calais, and was disappointed to find a city so famous in history situated in a barren district, and surrounded with little that is picturesque. The old walls around the town are, however, pleasant promenades, and command a view of the white cliffs of England. It was here, after a siege of eleven months, that Eustace de St. Pierre and his five companions offered themselves to Edward III. as a ransom for the city, and were saved from death by the pleading of Queen Philippa. The town was a fortress then, and looked menacingly over to England. The English proudly held possession of it for more than two hundred years, or from 1347 to 1558, when it was captured in Bloody Mary's time by the French under the Duc de Guise.

"When I am dead," said Mary in her last days, "and my body is opened, ye shall find _Calais_ written on my heart."

Calais recalls the stories of valor of the chivalrous campaigns of Edward III. and his son, the Black Prince, in Normandy. At Crecy, the Black Prince, when only sixteen years of age, led the English army to victory, and slew the King of Bohemia with his own hand.

King Edward watched this battle from a windmill on a hill. The French army was many times larger than the English. The Prince during the battle found himself hard pressed, and at one point the Earl of Warwick sent to the king for assistance.

"Is my son killed?"

"No, sire," said the messenger.

"Is he wounded?"

"No, sire."

"Is he thrown to the ground?"

"No, but he is hard-pressed."

"Then," said the king, "I shall send no aid. I have set my heart upon his proving himself a brave knight, and I am resolved that the victory shall be due to his own valor."

In 1356, in another campaign in Normandy, the Black Prince won a most brilliant victory at Poitiers, and captured the French King John. The latter was a brave soldier, and fought with his battle-axe until all the nobles had forsaken him. The Black Prince made a supper for him in his tent in the evening, and waited upon him at the table with his own hands. The Black Prince and the captive king rode through London together, the former in great pomp, and the latter on a cream-colored pony by his side. All of these things read prettily in history, but one is glad that the time is past when war was the game of kings, and armies were used as their playthings.

A series of easy rides near the cool sea brought the Class to the old fishing village of Étretat, now a fashionable summer resort for French artists, and a popular bathing-place for those desiring seclusion amid the coast scenery. It is situated amid rocks which the sea has excavated into arches, aiguilles, and other fantastic recesses and caverns. Its pretty châlets and villas on the hills, its gayly-dressed summer idlers, its groups of fishermen who are to be seen in all weathers, its handsome fisher girls bronzed by the sun who lead a free life by the sea, its bathers in brilliant dresses of blue serge and bright trimmings, its bracing air and usually fine weather, make it one of the quaintest and most restful nooks in France.

There are the remains of a Norman church near the sea. It is said to occupy the spot where the people watched the great flotilla of William the Conqueror drift to St. Valery, there to take the Norman army to England.

A French watering-place is quite different from an American seaside resort. You have your board and sleeping-room in one of the hotels, but your parlors, piazzas, and places of recreation are in an elegant pleasure house, called the _Casino_. For the privileges of the Casino you pay a small sum; at Étretat it amounts to about ten dollars a month. The billiard-rooms, ball-room, and the rooms for general conversation are in the Casino.

Every one bathes in the sea at Étretat, women and children, whole families together, and most of the girls are expert swimmers. It is delightful to sit upon the _shingle_, as the pebbly beach is called, and watch the sport in the sun-bright mornings or golden and dreamy afternoons. The costumes of the bathers are so pretty that the scene seems like a ball in the sea. Bathing men are stationed here and there to render any needed assistance.

The great caverns which the sea has worn in the rocks at Étretat remind one of the ruins of immense cathedrals, and are grand indeed in the light of the full summer moon.

The place abounds with story-telling fishermen. The Class was told one story here which is worthy of a poem.

"A beautiful stream once watered the valley. Its bed may still be seen, but it now runs under ground. On the stream an industrious miller built his mill and did a thriving business. One day a woman, sick and destitute, came to him for help. He turned heartlessly away from her with abuse. The poor creature raised her withered arm, and said,--

"'To-morrow thou shalt have thy reward.'

"When the miller awoke the next morning he found his mill standing on dry ground. The river had gone down into the earth, where it still runs."

The fisher's hymn which Ernest Wynn gave the Club at its first meeting was asked for here by Master Lewis, and was procured. It is sung before the departure of ships and during great storms in the fishing season, being a part of the mass for seamen, or the _messe d'equipage_.

The Class left Étretat for Rouen.

* * * * *

"O Rouen! Rouen! it is here I must die, and here shall be my last resting-place!" said Joan of Arc at the stake. Rouen was hardly the resting-place of the heroic peasant girl, for her ashes were thrown into the Seine. But the thought of the stranger on coming to Rouen is less associated with its history under the sea-kings of the North, the Norman dukes and the English invaders, than with the hard fate and the public memorials of the simple shepherdess, who seems to have been called from her flocks to change the destiny of France.

The Class entered Rouen after a series of short, zigzag journeys, partly in coaches and partly on foot, going leisurely from town to town through roads that presented to view continuous landscapes of shining orchards, ripening gardens, and resplendent poppy-fields; stopping at Amiens, the birthplace of Peter the Hermit, meeting here and there a ruin, and finding everywhere the connecting historical links between the present and the past.

At Amiens the Class was brought into the presence of a relic which greatly excited the boys' wonder.

"This church," said their guide, taking the Class to a side chapel of the cathedral, "contains a very rare relic,--a part of the head of John the Baptist!"

Passing into the beautiful chapel the Class was shown the shrine containing the precious treasure, which consists of the supposed frontal bone, and the upper jaw of the saint.

The _valet de place_ who accompanied the Class from the hotel seemed to have no doubt of the genuineness of the relic, or of the propriety of adoring it, if indeed it were real,--and he bowed reverently before the shrine.

"A very rare relic," he said.

"Wonderful!" said Frank. "I did not know that such sacred remains were anywhere to be found as are shown us in the churches of France."

"_Quite_ a rare relic," said Master Lewis, coolly. "I believe that, previous to the French Revolution, several whole heads of John the Baptist were to be seen in France."

"You do not think that a church like this would be guilty of imposture, do you?" asked Ernest Wynn.

"Not wilfully. Most of these French relics were brought from Constantinople at the time of the Crusades. They may be genuine,--the people believe them so; but, in the absence of direct historic evidence, it is probable that the Crusaders were deceived in them by others, who in their turn may have been deceived.

"You will be shown wonderful relics or shrines supposed to contain them, in nearly all the great churches of France. The French people were taught their reverence for relics by St. Louis, who sought to enrich the churches of his country with such treasures."

"Who was St. Louis?" asked Ernest.

"I am glad to have you ask the question," said Master Lewis. "His name meets you everywhere in France.

STORY OF ST. LOUIS.

"St. Louis was one of the best men that ever sat on a throne. But he was influenced by the superstitions of the times in which he lived.

"His mother was a most noble and pious woman, and he was a dutiful and affectionate son.

"It was regarded as very pious at this time for a prince to go on a crusade. St. Louis was taken sick, and he made a vow that, if he recovered, he would become a crusader. On his recovery, he appointed his mother regent, and sailed with forty thousand men for Cyprus, where he proceeded against Egypt, thinking by the conquest of that country to open a triumphant way to Palestine. He was defeated, and returned to France.

"He was a model prince among his own people. He used to spend a portion of each day in charity, and to feed an hundred or more paupers every time he went to walk. He visited his own domestics when they were sick; he founded charities, which have multiplied, and to-day cause his name to be remembered with gratitude almost everywhere in France. He made it the aim of his life to relieve suffering wherever it might be found.

"It is related of him, among a multitude of stories, that he was once accosted by a poor woman standing at the door of her cottage, who held in her hand a loaf, and said,--

"'Good king, it is of this bread that comes of thine alms that my poor, sick husband is sustained.'

"The king took the loaf and examined it.

"'It is rather hard bread,' said he; and he then visited the sick man himself and gave the case his personal sympathy.

"Going out on a certain Good Friday barefoot to distribute alms, he saw a leper on the other side of a dirty pond. He waded through it to the wretched man, gave him alms, then, taking his hand in his own, kissed it. The act greatly astonished his attendants, but the disease was not communicated to him.

"In 1270 he started on a new crusade, but died in Tunis of the pestilence. Visions of the conquest of the Holy City seemed to fill his mind to the last. He was heard to exclaim on his death-bed in his tent, 'Jerusalem! Jerusalem! We will go up to Jerusalem!'"

* * * * *

One of the first places which the Class sought out in Rouen was the statue of Joan of Arc. It is placed on a street fountain near the spot where the unfortunate maid was burned. It disappointed our tourists, and seemed an unworthy tribute to such an heroic character. The great tower, called the Tower of Joan of Arc, seemed a more fitting reminder of her achievements.

The streets of Rouen are narrow, but are full of life. Rouen has been called a New Paris, and Napoleon said that Havre, Rouen, and Paris were one city of which the river Seine was the highway. The gable-faced, timber-fronted mansions are interspersed with evidences of modern thrift, and the Rouen of romance seems everywhere disappearing in the Rouen of trade.

The Cathedral of Rouen is a confusing pile of art; it has beautiful rose windows, and its spire is four hundred and thirty-six feet high. The old church of St. Ouen, which is larger and more splendid than the cathedral, is regarded as one of the most perfect specimens of Gothic art in the world. It is 443 feet long.

The Palais de Justice, as the old province house or parliament house is called, is an odd but picturesque structure. It lines three sides of a public square.

"To-morrow," said Master Lewis, after a day of sight-seeing in Rouen, "we go to the most beautiful city in all the world."

"I wish I knew more about the history of Paris," said Ernest Wynn, "now that it is so near to us. I think of it as a place of gayety and splendor, the scene of St. Bartholomew's Massacre, of the Revolution, and the Commune. It was the city that Napoleon seemed to love more than any thing else in the world. What is its early history?"

"You will read in Julius Cæsar's Commentaries, in your course in Latin," said Master Lewis, "a brief account of Lutetia, the chief town of the Parisii, a Gallic tribe that the Romans conquered. This, I think, is the oldest historical allusion to Paris, as Lutetia came to be called. It was probably an old town at the time of the Roman invasion; it was chosen by Clovis as the seat of his empire in the sixth century; it began to grow when the Northmen came sailing up the Seine in their strange ships to its gates, and made it their prey. In the tenth century it became the residence of Hugh Capet, the founder of the Capetian line of kings, and soon after increased so rapidly that it doubled in size and population. Under Henri of Navarre, in 1589, the city began to be famous for its tendencies to gayety and splendor. Louis the Great lavished the wealth of France upon it, converting the old ramparts into picturesque public walks or boulevards, and enlarging and adorning its palaces so that they rivalled the royal structures of the East. Then Napoleon I. enriched it with the spoils of Europe, spending on it more than £4,000,000 in twelve years. Napoleon III. completed the work of his predecessors by introducing into the city all modern improvements, and making Paris in every respect the most magnificent capital in Europe.

"I have given you in the story of Charlemagne and in the visit to Aix-la-Chapelle a view of the early French Empire; in the story of St. Louis you have had a glance at France at the time of the Crusades; I think I will here tell you a story which will present to you another period of the nation's history.

STORY OF CHARLES IX. AND ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S EVE.

"Charles IX., the twelfth king of the family of Valois, came to the French throne when only ten years of age, under the regency of his mother, that terrible woman, Catharine de Medici. He was an impulsive youth, restless and vacillating, and was left wholly to the evil influences of his mother. The first years of his reign were disturbed by the struggles between the Protestant and Catholic parties in France. These difficulties were apparently settled in 1569.

"The queen-mother, who was a Catholic, seemed to entertain kind feelings towards the Protestant leaders. The Protestant King of Navarre was promised the hand of the king's sister Marguerite, and marked courtesy and apparent kindness of feeling were shown by the royal household to many of the leading men of the great Protestant party. The latter were thus rendered unsuspicious of danger, and became almost wholly disarmed.

"But Catharine de Medici, full of craft and wickedness, had resolved to destroy the Protestant power. She was fully versed in crime, and the passion for dark deeds grew upon her with years. One day she went to the boy-king, Charles, and disclosed a plot for the massacre of the Protestants of France. He listened with a feeling of horror. He had learned to love the Protestant statesmen, and to call their great leader, Coligny, 'father.' His young heart recoiled from such a deed. But his mother gave him no rest. She confided her plot to the Catholic leaders, who joined hand in hand with her to accomplish the crime. Church and State united to persuade the young king that the stability of the throne, the glory of his family, and the advancement of religious truth demanded the slaughter of the Huguenots, as the Protestant party were called. Still he hesitated; but after a little while exhibited his characteristic weakness under the influence of persuasion, and the conspirators knew his final assent was certain.

"St. Bartholomew's Day was at hand, the time appointed by the Catholic leaders, the Guises, for the work of death. Paris was full of Huguenots from the principal provincial cities, who had been drawn hither by the magnificent wedding of the Protestant King of Navarre. The preparations for the massacre were nearly complete, but the young king still hesitated to issue the fatal order.

"His mother now used every art in her power to make him place himself boldly with the Guises. As he was king, she wished the sanction of a royal edict to do her bloody work. With this the preparations for the destruction of the Huguenots would be complete. Her appeals at length so wrought upon his mind that he excitedly exclaimed, 'Well, then, kill them! kill them all, that not a single Huguenot may live to reproach me!' This frantic remark was construed as an order.

"The massacre was appointed to begin on St. Bartholomew's Eve, at the tolling of a bell. The young king was fearfully nervous and agitated during the preceding day. Just before the fatal hour, his conscience had so affected his better feelings, that he despatched orders to the Duc de Guise, countermanding the slaughter. The duke received the message as he was in the act of mounting his horse to lead the assassins.

"'_Il est trop tard!_' 'It is too late!' said the duke to the bearer, and at once rode away.

"It was a still night, August 24, 1572. The defenceless Huguenots were unsuspicious of danger, while armed assassins were lurking in every house. At last the heavy clang of a great bell fell on the breathless evening air, and the slaughter began.

"All that summer night the streets ran with blood. The young and the old, the daughter, the mother, the nobleman and the beggar,--all who bore the name of Huguenot,--were cut off without mercy. None were spared. Even women murdered women, and children, it is said, impelled by the maddening example, applied the dagger to other children in their beds. The streets of Paris ran with blood. From thirty to seventy thousand persons were slain in the city and in the towns of France on this night and a few days following it.

"The new Queen of Navarre, Marguerite de Valois, had gone to bed on the fatal eve, by the express order of Catharine. Just as she was going to sleep, she says, a man knocked with hands and feet at her door, shouting 'Navarre! Navarre!' The nurse, thinking it was the king, opened the door. A Protestant gentleman, bleeding, and pursued by four archers, threw himself on her bed for protection. The archers rushed after him, but were stayed by the appearance of the captain of the guard. The young queen hid the wounded Huguenot in one of her closets, and cared for him until he was able to escape. Such scenes took place in nearly all the houses of the nobility.

"Coligny was rudely murdered, and his body thrown out of the window of his apartments into the courtyard, where it is said to have been kicked by the Duc de Guise. The young king was in a court of the palace of the Louvre, with his mother, when the great bell began to toll. At first he trembled with fear and horror. He recovered presently from his fear, and, running to the palace window, became so excited at the sight of blood that he fired upon the wretched fugitives who were attempting to escape by swimming across the Seine.

"But the young king never knew a happy hour after that dreadful night. He grew pale and thin, and his tortured conscience and shattered brain called up in his solitary hours the images of the slain.

"Two years after the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve the young king lay dying. His disease, it has been said, was caused by poison, which had been applied to the leaves of one of his favorite books for the purpose, by his unnatural mother. His sufferings were dreadful in the extreme. Historians tell us that he sweat drops of blood. His mental anguish was as fearful as his bodily distress. He would cry out to his nurse, '_Ah, nourrice, ma mie, ma bonne! que du sang, que d'assassinats! Oh quels mauvais conseils j'ai suivis! Oh Seigneur Dieu, pardonnez moi, et faites moi misericorde!_' 'Ah, nurse, my good nurse! What blood! What murders! Oh what bad counsels I followed! Lord God, pardon me! Have mercy on me!'

"Historians cover the memory of Charles IX. with infamy, but his first impulses were usually kind, and his first intentions good. He does not seem to have inherited the disposition of that monster of wickedness, his mother. His most evil acts could hardly be called his own. Left to himself he would have been deemed a most polished and amiable prince, though wanting in decision. As a victim of bad counsellors, pity should mingle with the censure that follows his name."