Chapter VI: The Pays De Caux

The whole coast-line northeast from Havre to the borders of Picardy is a delightful succession of villages and towns where the salt smell of the sea mingles with the odours of wild flowers.

Along the fringe of the coast itself the watering-places crowd close one upon the other, from the more ambitious resorts of Dieppe, Fécamp, Etretat, and Tréport, with their casinos and conventional amusements, to the quiet and tranquil little villages such as Yport, Petites Dalles, St. Valery en Caux, and Berneval, which possess quite all the advantages of the larger and more frequented resorts, so far as the charm of prospect goes, with none of their drawbacks.

From Havre to Etretat one rises to a grass-grown, chalky height, which extends quite all the distance to the famous “picture-rocks” of the latter place.

Just after leaving Havre, on the heights which seemingly hang so perilously above the city itself are the Phares de la Hève, two great quadrangular towers which were built in 1775. The larger of the towers has a flash-light in its lantern which is visible at sea a distance of fifty-one miles in clear weather. Between the two is situated one of those gaunt, long-armed semaphores, like Don Quixote’s windmill, with which the coast of France is so plentifully supplied. They are the forerunners of the wire-less telegraphy of to-day, and certainly serve their purpose admirably.

To Montivilliers, somewhat back from the coast, one passes the modern Château of Colmoulins, built after the style of the Renaissance, whose chatelain possesses, it is said, many fine pictures by old masters and the canopied bed in which hath once slept France’s great admiral, Jean Bart. Through the valley runs a charming little river called the Légarde.

The old-time pigeon-house attached to a great house or in a barn-yard is a frequent sight in Normandy. Usually it was a great, isolated round tower, large enough, one would think, to shelter thousands of pigeon families. That of the manor-house of Ango at Varengéville is one of the most curious of all, while St. Ouen at Rouen had, in the sixteenth century, one cruciform in shape, whose lower regions formed a cellar, the ground floor a poultry-house, and above was an open hanger or place for storing hay and grain.

Montivilliers, which is reached by electric cars from Havre, possesses a church which is a relic of a strong foundation dating from 682. The abbey was instituted by St. Philibert of Jumièges, and still other of the conventual buildings have now been incorporated into a local brewery, if such a degradation may be mentioned. The Cemetery of Brise Garet, with its surrounding galleries in sculptured wood representing funeral subjects, is decidedly unique, and quite well worth making the journey from Havre to see. The library of this small and wholly unimportant town of Caux has a collection of ten thousand volumes, all relating to the history of Normandy, as well as many precious manuscripts of the middle ages. It should form a vast treasure-house for some modern historian.

At St. Jouin, which is almost a suburb of Etretat, is the Hôtel de Paris, whose chatelaine was, in the days of the elder Dumas, known as “La belle Ernestine.” In 1865, Dumas fashioned the following portrait of her in verse, which, to say the least, seems rather free speech:

“Son esprit est comme ses hanches
Il est souple et toujours bondit,
Et comme elle a les dents blanches
Elle rit de tout ce qu’on dit.”

Dumas _fils_ followed with:

“Mais si vous croyez qu’elle m’aime
Vous vous trompez complètement.”

Finally, Wallon, the Minister of Public Instruction, wrote ten years later:

“Griffoner ici quelque chose
Pour la belle Ernestine oh! non!
Il y faudrait mettre une rose.
Je n’y puis mettre qu’un.”

The town itself is but a little fishing village of a thousand or more inhabitants, but luncheon in the dining-room of Madame Ernestine Aubourg’s little inn is to enjoy a feast for the eyes and mind as well as the inner man. The walls are hung with paintings, sketches, and autograph letters. Among the latter are those of Isabella II., Queen of Spain, Castelar, Offenbach, Suzanne Brohau, and Dumas. The paintings are by Lambert, Picou Hamon, Maurice Courant, Corot, Yvon, Becon, Olivié, Landelle _père_, and many others.

Etretat, with its _falaises_, its _bains de mer_, and accessory attractions, has lost some of its former vogue with the throng of rank and fashion, but it is still as charming as ever, and, though solitude is a scarce commodity there to-day, there are really grand outlooks to be had, which might inspire poets and painter alike, as of yore, did they not mind the rush of automobiles and the distractions of the casino and its crowds.

The history of Etretat points to the fact that it was once the most famous resort on the north coast of Europe; but it is now surpassed by Trouville-Deauville and Ostend, which have been taken up by society, to the financial, though not artistic, detriment of Etretat.

The first bathers, the local chronicles will tell one, arrived 1803. In 1844 the old Maréchal de Grouchy came to Etretat, and Alphonse Karr contributed to the popularity of the place at about the same time by laying there the scene of his romances, “Vendredi Soir” and “Le Chemin le Plus Court.” Karr really was responsible for the great popularity which Etretat had as a watering-place at one time. He wrote further in its praises thus:

“Etretat is a new province which either I or the painters Le Pottevin and Isabey have discovered. I am as Americus Vespucius to Christopher Columbus or Daguerre to Niepèce. I nearly called it by my own name.... I talked so much about Etretat that I made it the mode, ... but to-day it has become merely a branch of Asnières.”

Isabey may be said to have been the first painter to discover Etretat. After him came Le Pottevin and Mozin; then an Englishman named Stanfield, and since then no one shall say how many artists have made its chalky cliffs and pebbly beaches their own.

From all this one might think that Etretat was essentially modern in all respects; but it existed in the _epoque romain_, and its name appeared, in a charter of 1024 given to the abbey of St. Wandrille, as Estrutat.

The chief attraction of Etretat, outside its delightful situation and its conventional amusements, is its fine Church of Notre Dame of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries; really a delightful old edifice, which, taken in conjunction with the gaieties of the summer life of the town, seems sadly out of place.

The whole neighbourhood round about abounds in delicious wooded hills and valleys running through openings in the cliff to the sea, often with a tiny, transparent rivulet clasped closely in its embrace.

Here is Guy de Maupassant’s charming description of one of these delightful Norman valleys, which for fidelity and picturesqueness of phrasing could hardly be improved upon:

“From Dieppe to Havre the coast presents an uninterrupted face of cliff about three hundred feet high and as straight and smooth as a wall. Now and then, where there is an abrasure in the cliff, a little valley descends from the well-wooded and perhaps cultivated plateau behind. Sometimes this little ravine resembles the bed of a torrent; and sometimes a little village settles itself in one of these self-same valleys.

“I have passed a summer here in one of these ravines which faced the sea, lodged at the house of a peasant. From my windows I could see a vast triangle of blue framed by the green sides of the valley, dotted now and then with white sails glittering brilliantly in the sunlight.”

There is a very considerable portion of the Normandy coast (and that of Brittany as well) which has just this aspect. The rivers, curiously enough, with the exception of the Seine, are not navigable. They are simply little rivers which carry off a certain amount of surplus water from the table-land above. Some of these have gone dry; hence the gorges or ravines which exist so very numerously along the Norman coast. They are truly delightful, and by no means have they become tourist-worn or denuded of idyllic charm.

From Etretat to Fécamp, which is a veritable metropolis compared to the former, is but a dozen kilometres as the crow flies, though the windings of the road as it nears Fécamp add six or eight more.

Yport lies between, and is what the French call a “_petit bain familial_.” It is a picturesque fishing port as well, and much nicer than either Etretat or Fécamp, the first of which smells of automobiles, and the second of Benedictine. It has a casino, too, but it is not pretentious and offers a sort of homœopathic amusement quite suited to French mammas and their strictly guarded daughters.

Fécamp is a historic town and the first deep-sea fishing port in France.

Sixteen hundred men and sixteen thousand tons of shipping are engaged in the Newfoundland fisheries out of Fécamp. The ships depart for the Grand Banks in March and return in September, when their crews lay up their great schooners, and equip their two hundred odd boats for the herring and mackerel season in the North Sea. And so the round of the year goes on in the fishing port of Fécamp, ceaselessly but profitably, and whether the Fécampois is hailing a Gloucester schooner on the banks, or passing observations on the weather with a Yarmouth trawler in the North Sea, he is always the good-natured, hard-working Frenchman that one sees in all the Norman and Breton seaports; for there is none of the _laisser-aller_ of the Mediterranean fisherman in his make-up.

In the middle ages the belief that the relic of the Precious Blood of the Saviour had been brought here by a mysterious craft, and landed on the coast at the ancient settlement which bore the Latin name of Fiscamnum, was the cause from which grew up the ancient monastery for women founded by St. Waneng in 660. In time this establishment became an abbey for men, through the means of the monk Guillaume of Dijon.

To this abbey was attached a great and flourishing school which endured until the thirteenth century.

The Maison Morillon in the Quartier de l’Hospice is built up of relics from the old abbey demolished in 1802, and the Abbaye de la Trinity, with its church dating from 1125-75, is indeed of quite the first rank, though modern restorations have vulgarized it almost beyond belief.

The name Fécamp is also familiar to lovers of Bénédictine, that subtle liqueur invented by the monk Wincelli.

Leaving the coast, one finds Cany, a leading town of the district, at the mouth of the little river Durdent, a dozen kilometres from Veulettes. The little town sits in a delightfully wooded valley and possesses a fine sixteenth-century church. In the kitchen of the Hôtel du Commerce is one of those rare architectural or decorative accessories that one comes across now and then in out-of-the-way places,--a great armorial chimneypiece which dates from 1624.

The market is one of the most lively in all the Pays de Caux, and is frequented by large numbers of folk from the country-side and neighbouring towns.

On the coast are Grandes and Petites Dalles, small places where the bathing is the chief attraction of the visitor. They are surrounded, however, by the most beautifully rustic woodland country it is possible to imagine.

Veulettes partakes of much the same characteristics, except that this little town of three hundred odd inhabitants possesses a somewhat apocryphal legend all its own. “Formerly,” according to the legend, “there existed here an important town built upon the sands, at the mouth of the river Durdent, known as ‘_la grande ville de Durdent_,’ which one day was engulfed by the sands or overflowed by the waves, and so disappeared from view.”

St. Valery-en-Caux is a veritable metropolis for these parts. It contains, perhaps, four thousand souls, and has grown up from an ancient settlement which surrounded a monastery founded here by St. Valery, who also erected another similar establishment, some leagues up the coast at the mouth of the Somme in Picardy, known as St. Valery-sur-Somme.

Both the ancient fishing port, which was also established here, and the town which hugged the old monastery in its grasp, grew to some considerable prominence, but were stunted by the wars of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, only recovering their prosperity by the aggrandizement caused by the accession of the fisherfolk of Veules, who had been driven away from their own homes by the encroachments of the sea.

Of late years the usual watering-place tendencies have developed; and a casino has sprung up which draws a floating summer population of some hundreds of strangers from June to September.

Notre Dame de Bon Port is St. Valery’s chief ecclesiastical monument. It dates from the sixteenth century only, but has a remarkable wooden vaulted roof and two thirteenth-century pillars, and arches built into its portal.

The Maison Henri IV. (1549), so called because of having been the lodging-place of that turncoat monarch, is perhaps the other chief architectural curiosity. It is a typical Renaissance house with some finely sculptured woodwork. In the quarter known as the town is a Renaissance cross and a slate roofing over the ruins of the priory founded, perhaps, by St. Valery.

On the road to Dieppe, beyond St. Valery, is Veules-les-Roses, most picturesquely and euphoniously named. It has but 760 inhabitants, many of its fisherfolk having removed to Dieppe, where they settled in the quarter known to-day as Petit Veules.

Dieppe all cross-channel travellers well know. It is a great port of entry, a watering-place, a fishing port, and a city of shops and industries, all of considerable magnitude. Its attractions for all classes are many and varied, and no attempt is made to catalogue them here. To the eastward of the town the great promontory which juts out into the channel is strongly fortified; and at all times since the days of Philippe-Auguste, the town and its environs have been considered of great strategic value.

The Dieppois as seafarers were in the old days, and to some extent are still, the rivals of the Malouins of St. Malo in Brittany. In the fourteenth century explorers from Dieppe scoured the seas as far as Cape Verde and the African coast; and fished for cod off the coasts of Iceland and Norway.

Names of Dieppois famous to those who know the early discoverers and explorers of the new world are Jean Ango, the armateur (1480-1551), Jean Cousin, the pilot of Columbus, who discovered the Brazilian coast (1488), the Admiral Duquesne, one of the glories of the reign of Louis XIV. (1610-88), and many others.

Dieppe’s two great churches, St. Jacques and St. Remi, are wonderfully preserved monuments of their respective classes, and are rich in those accessories and details which make a great church truly beautiful. The chapel of St. Yves in St. Jacques served as the oratory of Jean Ango, Vicomte de Dieppe, the benefactor of the church.

The town hall is of modern construction, but it houses a library of twenty-five thousand volumes, including many rare works and maps and plans of the coasts of Europe.

The museum has many curios of town and country, which have come down from other days, and a fair collection of paintings, including works by Isabey, Le Pottevin, Colin, Lemaire Cugnot, Garnier, Falguière, and others. On the stairway leading to the second _étage_ is a curious and valuable _carte cosmographique_ by Jean Cousin (1570), near which are placed several of the nautical instruments made use of by him.

Dieppe, with its casino and its lawns, and the whole establishment devoted to baths and open air and indoor pleasures, places the town quite in the first rank of watering-places, though by no means is its situation as grand as that of Etretat; nor is it so greatly in vogue as Trouville-Deauville.

The château is a picturesque edifice high on the hillside, overlooking the shore, with four great towers, a donjon, and a pont-levis. It was built in 1435, but has been disfigured by various additions. To-day it forms the Ruffin barracks, and accordingly may not be visited by the curious.

Near Dieppe is Arques-la-Bataille and the forest of Arques.

The château of Arques was erected by William, the uncle of the Conqueror, about 1040. Its donjon was divided according to the usage of the time into two parts, though the second was doubtless a later addition. The history of this great fortress-château, one of the most formidable in all Normandy, is very vivid and extensive, and is known to all lovers of French history.

It was held successively, after its builder’s time, by the Conqueror, Stephen, Geoffrey Plantagenet, Cœur de Lion, Philippe-Auguste, and Jean-Sans-Terre. Finally it reverted to the French Crown. Louis XIV. visited the château of Arques in 1648; but the Bernardine monks took from it in the seventeenth century much material for the construction of their convent, at which time it became practically a vast quarry of stone. In 1793 the ruins were sold for 8,300 livres; but in 1869 it again became the property of the state, and a guardian was installed to prevent further ravage.

The sixteenth-century church of Arques-la-Bataille is an elaborate building, far more grand than one usually expects to find in a town of eleven hundred inhabitants; but, after all, the town’s chief attraction is the great rectangular donjon, practically all that remains of the old château.

The manor-house of Ango, also near Dieppe, is one of those reminders of the olden time which has reached us quite unspoiled. It was built by a celebrated ship-owner of Dieppe (1530-45), and is a great country-house surrounding a rectangular courtyard, to which one penetrates by two opposing entrances.

The very beautiful pigeon-house is quite the most elaborate of its kind anywhere to be seen.

Near Dieppe, also, is Puys, a sort of suburban watering-place for Dieppe itself. It owes its popular existence to Dumas _fils_, who made his residence there in summer. It was here that the elder romancer died in 1870; for which reason Puys may be said to be a true literary shrine.

“Monte Cristo” has something to say of the charms of Normandy. Addressing his companion, Bertuccio, Dantes says:

“I am desirous of having an estate by the seaside in Normandy, for instance, between Havre and Boulogne. You see I give you a wide range. It will be absolutely necessary that the place you select shall have a small harbour, creek, or bay, into which my vessel can enter and remain at anchor.”

Possibly Dumas may have had in mind the little Norman village of Puys, where he died, when he wrote the above lines; though more probably not, as the “Count of Monte Cristo” was written at an early period of his life, while he died only in 1870.

Eastward toward the boundary of Normandy and Picardy, one passes Varengeville-sur-Mer, Sainte Marguerite and Quiberville, all delightful little seaside towns with a touch of the _beau-monde_ in summer, and a dull, quiet, but none the less entrancing, life in winter, when the natives gossip about their last season’s visitors, and speculate as to what the harvest may be the coming year, meantime catching a few fish and going weekly to the nearest market-town.

Tréport and Mers are the last two resorts on the Norman coast.

There are the usual summer attractions, of course, but there is much more also, and the life of the fisherfolk of Tréport and Mers forms a pleasant antidote to the observer of men and things who may become tired of watching bathers and red umbrellas.

Tréport was the Ulterior Portus of the Romans; but it came to no great importance until well along in the middle ages. Robert I., Comte d’Eu, founded here in 1059 an abbey of the order of St. Benoit; and Robert Courte Heuse garnered his forces here to set out in battle against Henri Beau Clerc, King of England.

The affairs of the ancient Comté d’Eu, in which Tréport was situated, were many and varied in the middle ages, and it was but natural that the seaport of the fief should speedily have grown to respectable proportions.

The Church of St. Jacques dates from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries; and, though reconstructed in the Renaissance period, has many attractive and beautiful details. The ancient presbytery is a charming Renaissance building with a façade of sculptured wood.

Mers, on the opposite bank of the Bresle, is usually linked with Tréport, and is of itself a seaside resort of no mean pretensions.

Next, perhaps, to the Château d’Anet, Normandy’s most celebrated Renaissance château is that of Eu in the Department of the Lower Seine, just south of Tréport on the river Bresle. Eu itself is a town of considerable rank; and has, besides its historic château, a remarkable church,--St. Laurent’s. It is an ancient collegiate church and one of the most beautiful in all Normandy.

The church was built 1186-1230 and reconstructed in the fifteenth century, but it ranks with the cathedral at Rouen, St. Maclou, and the choir of La Trinité of Fécamp as one of the greatest and most typical of the florid Gothic church edifices of Normandy.

It should interest Hibernians from the fact that it is dedicated to St. Laurence O’Tool, one time Archbishop of Dublin. Behind its fine retro-choir is a casket containing the personal relics of this great man.

In its actual state the Château d’Eu is of modern construction; but its souvenirs of the middle ages are numerous, nevertheless, and the names of its counts are not without honour in the annals of Normandy. The precise period of its foundation is unknown, but it dates perhaps from the period which preceded the arrival of the Normans into the Comté d’Eu, when it was probably simply a feudal fortress.

The hereditary Counts of Eu do not date back before the eleventh century. The first who bore the title was Guillaume, son of Richard Sans Peur, Duc de Normandie, and grandson of Rollon. When he died, in 996, he left the estates to his son, Richard le Bon, whose reign was apparently a troublous one, beset on all sides by turbulent seigneurs, who envied his security of tenure and wanted it for themselves, as was the way in those days.

Robert, Comte d’Eu, played a great part in the Conqueror’s invasion of England, and indeed aided greatly in the preparations which went on previous to the actual descent upon England’s shores. At the battle of Hastings he commanded the right wing of the invading army, and, as a recompense for his bravery and ability, was given Hastings Castle and its domains in the counties of Kent and Sussex. He died in 1080 and was interred in the Abbey of Tréport, founded by his father, where reposed already the remains of his wife Beatrix.

Guillaume, the next heritor, had nothing of the good qualities and abilities of his father, and was “of an unquiet spirit and a pusillanimous heart,” as the annalist has it. His _mauvais passions_ inspired him to ill deeds; and altogether he was an unpopular sort of a person.

Jean de Bourgogne, Comte d’Eu, promised to deliver up the château to Edward IV., the English king, but Louis XI. ordered its destruction instead.

From a document of the time one reads the following, written in the picturesque old French of the time:

“_Dix-huictiesme jour de juillet, an mille quatre cent soixante et quinze, environ neuf heures du matin fut la ville de Eu et chastel ars et bruslés par les gens de guerre, par le commandement et ordonnance du roi._”

Five years after this event, in 1480, a modest manor-house was erected on the ruins of the old castle. A century later the present splendid château was begun, but, unfortunately, in the second year of our new century it suffered so greatly by fire that somewhat of its former magnitude has been impaired.

The sixteenth-century château was begun after the marriage of Catherine of Clèves, Comtesse d’Eu, with Henri de Guise (Le Balafré). It was never wholly completed as planned, but the notorious De Guise (or famous, if one chooses to think so) spent some time here, “always absorbed and preoccupied.”

Charles de Lorraine, Duc de Guise, and son of Henri de Guise, inherited the title, but never visited his château or the town.

On June 26, 1641, Louis XIII., returning from Dieppe, stayed at the château; and his successor, Louis XIV., and the famous Montpensier sojourned there for a time; of which circumstance one may read at some length in that lady’s “Mémoires.” Shortly after she became Countess of Eu herself.

In 1660 Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orleans came into possession. The Duc du Maine came in turn to occupy the estates, but, though he sent a deputation to take formal possession, he himself never inhabited the château.

The Duc de Penthièvre inherited the domain and occupied the château from 1776 up to 1791. Louis-Philippe made much of the Château d’Eu. His court was frequently held here; and a most splendid fête was given on the occasion of the visit of Queen Victoria, who came to return a call from the French king. Some years later, in 1848, the prince became an exile in England, demanding a refuge from the young queen whom he had entertained so graciously. To-day the château belongs to the Duc d’Orléans.

On the little river Bresle just south of Tréport and Eu are Aumale and Blagny. The former possesses a remarkable sixteenth-century church, with a tower attributed, somewhat doubtfully, to Jean Goujon. Blagny has the Church of Notre Dame of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries; and near by, at Séry, are the remains of a Premonstratensian abbey, founded toward 1120.

Neuchâtel-en-Bray, across country toward Yvetôt and Bolbec, is in the very midst of one of the richest pasture-lands of Normandy. The town dates from Merovingian times, and was called Driencourt before the construction of its château in 1106 by Henri I., Duke of Normandy and King of England. Thus its importance was early established.

The Church of Notre Dame dates in part from the twelfth century, and, with its later additions, forms an admirable expression of the architecture of its period, though in reality it is a work yet unfinished. It has been sadly mutilated.

An ancient abbey of the Bernardine monks is now occupied by the town hall, library, Board of Trade, and school.

The library contains many rare works, among them a manuscript Bible of the thirteenth century, a polyglot Bible from the old Abbey of Foncarmont, a collection of ancient royal bells, dating from their origin, and a fine silver seal and _contre scel_ belonging to Louis II., who was Duc de Longueville and Comte de Dunois.

Situated in so rich a pasture-land, Neuchâtel is famous for its butter and cheese, as is Gourney, its neighbour on the west. The Suisse cheese of Neuchâtel is also a variety of light, sweet cream cheeses, and is often confounded with Neuchâtel in Switzerland, which really originated here in the midst of these Norman pastures.

Yvetôt, between Rouen and Havre, has not much fame with general travellers, though occasionally there is one who remembers Béranger’s verses on “Le Roi d’Yvetôt,” and thinks it warrants a call.

The history of Yvetôt does not offer anything of remarkable interest except the memory of the Kings of Yvetôt, which Béranger’s satire so well recalls.

The title of “Roi” was given to the seigneurs from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and was first popularized--perhaps in a vein of cynicism, too--by Henri IV.

Dumazet traced the succession of the title down to 1688, when it belonged to the illustrious family of Albon of Lyonnaise, the head of which was the Marquis d’Albon.

Tradition has preserved a certain style of buildings which crops out occasionally here. When the houses are not of wood, they are frequently built, or at least decorated, with little square cakes of quarried stone, in much the same manner as the Romans made use of decorative brick. Some of the old-time houses of Caux are indeed reminiscent of the Roman, with horizontal bands of stone or brick running across the façades in three or four rows.

The Cauchois have some distinctive customs in dress and manners of living, and Yvetôt is a good place to observe them.

Weaving is an important industry at Yvetôt, and it employs about a thousand workmen and women.

Near Yvetôt is Allouville-Bellefosse, which possesses a phenomenal oak-tree celebrated throughout Normandy. It is the grandest tree in the province. Its trunk is entirely hollow for a great distance above the ground and is nearly ten metres in circumference. It enfolds in its branches two _chêne-chapelles_, as they are known. The lower is dedicated to Notre Dame de la Paix and the upper is known as the “Calvaire.”

A French savant has figured out the age of this remarkable tree to be approximately eight hundred years.