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Page 14
F.C. BAYLOR.
[TO BE CONCLUDED.]
OUR VILLE.
The picturesqueness of France in our day is confined almost exclusively
to its humble life. The Renaissance and the Revolution swept away in
most parts of the country moated castle, abbaye, grange, and chateau, to
replace them with luxurious but conventional piles and ruins humbly
restored and humbly inhabited. Many a farmhouse with unkempt _cour_
and dishevelled _pelouse_ is the relic of a turreted ch�teau,
stables are often desecrated churches, seigneurial _colombiers_
shelter swine, and battlemented portals to fortified walls serve, as
does the one of our ville, to house hideously-uniformed _douaniers_
watching the luggage of arriving travellers.
Our ville was never an aristocratic one, and to this day very few of our
names are preceded by the idealizing particle _de_. We have an
ancient history, however,--so ancient that all historians place our
origin at _un temps tr�srecule_. We had houses and walls when Rouen
yonder was a marsh, and we saw Havre spring up like a mushroom only two
little centuries and a half ago. Besieged and taken, burned and ravaged,
alternately by Protestant and Catholic, no wonder our ville has not even
ruins to show that we are older than the fifteen hundreds. Still,
ancient though we are, we have always been a ville of humble
folk,--hardy sailors, brave fishers, and thrifty bourgeois,--and to-day,
as always, our highest families buy and sell and build their philistine
homes back toward the _c�te_, while our humble ones picturesquely
haunt the _quais_.
The town is exquisitely situated at the foot of abrupt _c�tes_,
just where the broad and tranquil river shudders with mysterious deep
heavings and meets its dolphin-hued death in the all-devouring sea. Away
off in the shimmering distance is the second seaport city of France. On
still days,--and our gray or golden Norman days are almost always
still,--faint muffled sounds of life, the throbbing of factories, the
farewell boom of cannon from ships setting forth across the Atlantic,
even the musical notes of the Angelus, float across the water to us as
dreamily vague as perhaps our earth-throbs and passion-pulses reach a
world beyond the clouds. This city is our metropolis, with which we are
connected by small steamers crossing to and fro with the tide, and where
all our shopping is done, our own ville being too thoroughly limited and
_roturier_ in taste to merit many of our shekels.
In fact, such of our shopping as is done in our ville is in the quaint
marketplace, where black house-walls are beetling and bent, and
Sainte-Cath�rine's ancient wooden tower stands the whole width of the
Place away from its Gothic church. Here we bargain and chaffer with
towering _bonnets blancs_ for peasant pottery and fa�ence,
paintable half-worn stuffs, and delicious ancestral odds and ends of
broken peasant households.
We have many streets over which wide eaves meet, and within which
twilight dwells at noonday. Some of the hand-wide streets run straight
up the _c�te_, and are a succession of steep stairs climbing beside
crouching, timber-skeletoned houses perforated by narrow windows opening
upon vistas of shadow. Others seem only to run down from the _c�te_
to the sea as steeply as black planks set against a high building. Upon
the very apex of the _c�te_, visible miles away at sea, lives our
richest citizen. His house smiles serenely modern even if only
pseudo-classic contempt on all the quaint duskiness and irregularity
below, and is pillared, corniced, entablatured, and friezed, with lines
severely straight, although the building itself is as round as any
medi�val campanile and surmounted with a Gothic bell-turret, while the
entrance-gate is turreted, machicolated, castellated, like the
fortress-castles of the Goths.
Lower down the _c�te_, convent walls raise themselves above
red-tiled and lichen-grown roofs. In one of these convents, behind
eyeless grim walls, are hidden cloistered nuns; from others the Sisters
go freely forth upon errands of both business and mercy. The convent of
cloisters, Couvent des Augustines, is passing rich, and has houses and
lands to let. Once upon a time an _Am�ricaine_ coveted one of these
picturesque houses. She entered the convent and interviewed the
business-manager, a veiled nun behind close bars.
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