Chapter VIII: The Cotentin

The Cotentin peninsula is a great jutting finger of land which runs out into that part of the Atlantic which Frenchmen know as La Manche, and which Anglo-Saxons know as the English Channel.

It terminates in the Nez de Jobourg, a rocky formation which in its detached fragments makes up the Chausey Islands and the northernmost of the Channel Islands.

The chief places of note in the Cotentin are Cherbourg, Valognes, and the ancient cathedral towns of St. Lô, Coutances, and Avranches, which, with Vire, Mortain, Pontorson, and Granville, and on the north coast Isigny, Carentan, and Harfleur, form a practical list of its important towns and cities. It is a great grazing and pasture-ground, and the little cows of the Cotentin, like those of Alderney, Jersey, and Guernsey, are held in great repute.

The military port of Cherbourg, as it is known to-day, is a lively up-to-date gateway for visitors to France, resplendent with hotels and all modern conveniences. It was not so in a former day, when a travelled Englishman said: “Cherbourg is not a place for residence longer than necessary. I was obliged to go to a vile hole, little better than a hogsty, where, for a miserable, dirty, wretched chamber, two suppers composed chiefly of a plate of apples and some butter and cheese, with some trifle besides, too bad to eat, and one miserable dinner, they brought me a bill of nearly thirty shillings.”

Things have indeed changed, if there was no exaggeration in the statement. Even the most modern and up-to-date hotel of a great provincial town in France now seldom charges one more than twelve francs per day.

There is not much of sentimental or romantic interest to be gleaned from a contemplation of Cherbourg, which, in the minds of most new-world travellers, is merely a landing-place whence one takes the train for Paris.

As a matter of fact, Cherbourg is a great military port, which had its inception a couple of centuries ago, when the French had no port for war-vessels between Dunkerque and Brest, the former capable only of receiving frigates. The deficiency was fatal to the French on more than one occasion in their little wars with England, so admirably supplied with a base at Portsmouth, inside the Isle of Wight, directly opposite the peninsula of the Cotentin.

To remedy this defect, a môle was planned to be thrown across the open bay to Cherbourg, but this proved so great an undertaking that the plan was modified in favour of a system of artificial banks or bars. There were two entrances for ships, each commanded by a fortress which it is said was equipped a century ago with an apparatus for launching forth red-hot shot.

On one of these bars, ultimately covered by the sea, was placed the following inscription:

“Louis XVI.--Sur ce premier cone échoue le 6 Juin 1794, a vu
l’immersion de celui de l’est, le 23 Juin 1786.”

With the completion of the new harbour works, the hitherto dull city of Cherbourg took on a new lease of life. New streets and new houses were built; but, in spite of the present-day signs of progress and activity, there is little here to appeal to the imaginative person.

The undertaking was a prodigious one for the time, and the famous dike or breakwater was only recently completed, at a total cost of 62,500,000 francs. It took more than fifty years of constant labour, and four million cubic feet of stone, and encloses an area of a thousand _hectares_.

Cherbourg has one valuable architectural monument, the fourteenth-century Church of the Trinity. It was consecrated in 1504 and restored in our own day. The interior has really fine decorations.

The Henry Art Museum, named after its founder, contains a rather bulky and ill-assorted lot of paintings of no particular merit or fame, except a Van Eyck, a Poussin, an alleged Murillo, and a few minor works of the Dutch and Italian schools.

The suburbs of Cherbourg, toward the tip of the peninsula, form one of the most unspoiled and little travelled corners of modern France.

Near Cherbourg on the peninsula of the Hague, in the parish of Greville, is the hamlet of Gruchy, the birthplace of the painter Millet. The house bears an inscription on a tablet and is not difficult to find, if one can only thread his way through the tangle of by-roads which lie westward beyond Landemer, eleven kilometres from Cherbourg. It is an artistic shrine of real interest; and tourists, when at Cherbourg, are advised to explore this wonderful “land’s end” of Normandy, and pay homage to the birthplace of Jean François Millet.

Perhaps no modern picture is really so familiar to our eyes as “The Angelus” of Jean François Millet, the struggling peasant painter of Normandy. Those two figures, man and woman in the bare field, with the village church peeping over the horizon, are “hung on the line,” so to speak, in the mind of every one who has seen them.

Millet waged a long battle for art against poverty. At times he would exchange six drawings for a pair of shoes, or a picture for a bed. He faced starvation, and was not moved from his purpose of painting the truth as he saw it. Even his greatest pictures left him in poverty. He said: “They wish to force me into their drawing-room art to break my spirit. But, no, no; I was born a peasant, and a peasant I will die. I will say what I feel.”

Certainly when one is before his birthplace at Gruchy, it is not difficult to realize that at least there were no foppish or foolish influences at work in his youth, and that it was natural perhaps for him to carve out his future from the bald truth, as he saw it, in such pictures as “The Angelus” and “The Man with the Hoe.”

There is a neglected corner of France in the extreme northwest of the Cotentin peninsula, beyond Cherbourg even, and known locally as the Hague. Cape Hague, the Hague lighthouse, and the Nez de Jobourg form a trinity of attractions for the traveller jaded with the stock sights of conventional watering-places.

It is but a short thirty kilometres from Cherbourg, _en route_ to nowhere, unless one is heading for America, and is known to Frenchmen as the most isolated spot of all the mainland of France. “One must not look there,” they say, “for the wonders of art or civilization, for vegetation, the life of the casino, or the _tables d’hôte_ of the towns.”

Instead all is rock and sand and cliffs and zigzag paths cut in the steep escarpment, against which the sea batters tumultuously throughout the year.

The landlords have not spoilt this region with Restaurants de Paris or Hôtels d’Angleterre, and, accordingly, it is one of the few accessible and delightful spots where the lover of nature sees it as God made it. What accommodation there is in the neighbourhood does not rise above the dignity of modest tavern; but one will get such repasts of sea foods as would make the fortune of the proprietor of a Parisian restaurant could he but serve them as well and as cheaply.

Habitations of all sorts are rare, and roads and railways less prolific here, perhaps, than in any other part of France. No railways, post-offices, or telegraphs, save the line that runs to the signal-station at the Hague lighthouse. But it has its advantages as a place of resort, nevertheless.

The beautiful meadows of Urville and St. Martin are brilliant with their carpets of flowers in spring-time, as green and fresh as if they were in the south, and the hills between which tiny rivers flow into the Atlantic or the Manche are as shady with leaves as Vallombrosa. Suddenly all this changes as if by magic. The little river valleys become shelving red and brown rock and yellow sand; and the prairies end in a sheer fall of chalk-white cliff, tremendous to contemplate.

Cape Hague is the name of all of that tiny peninsula which forms the northwest extremity of the Cotentin; and its minor topographical formations, the cliffs of Gréville, the Creeks St. Martin, Jobourg, and Vauville, are only known to the native.

The great highway stops abruptly at a height of 180 metres above sea-level, just above the immense moors of Ste. Croix-Hague and Jobourg, with a view of the sea on three sides.

In clear weather one may see the English coast through the glass of the keeper at the lighthouse, and at one’s very feet, almost, are the jagged fangs of rocks which surround the Channel Isles, showing plainly how intimately they were once connected with the French mainland.

This highroad runs straight away from Cherbourg to the Nez de Jobourg, which is itself a high promontory of granite, carved curiously by the waves into grottoes, which are one of the principal curiosities of the region.

After one leaves the highroad, the only progress is on foot; even bicyclists had best leave their machines behind, and, as for automobilists, why, the chauffeur will doubtless not object to a repose in the tonneau, with nothing but the lap of the waves and the cries of sea-birds to disturb him.

The little zigzag paths and tracks will require all the attention and energies of the most sure-footed as he explores the region. But so much the better; for the picturesqueness and desolation of it all will amply repay one for his pains.

Between Cherbourg and the extremity of the cape is Querqueville. The road undulates, with occasional views of the great harbour and shipping of Cherbourg until one passes the fortifications on the moor of Ste. Anne.

Here in the open country one may see a tiny church, one of the oldest places of worship yet standing intact in all France. The choir is in the form of a _tréfle_, and is a rare archæological curiosity.

To the right, half-hidden in a deliciously shaded vale, is the Château of Nacqueville. Its amiable guardian will permit you to examine it if you happen to be a member of the Touring Club of France.

The little village of Urville is hardly more than a score of coquettish-looking little houses, charmingly disposed along the shady roadway. Here on a great sandy beach the English disembarked in 1758, when they besieged Cherbourg and invaded the Cotentin. Certainly they chose a most suitable spot; but all is peaceful now, and the only invader one is likely to see is an American or an English artist, who has set up his easel far away from the madding throng.

A little farther on, beyond the village of Laudemer, is a little hotel, all white and high up above the rocky escarpment which pares off toward the sea. It is the Hôtel Millet, founded by the brother of the painter of “The Angelus.” Truly we are now in an artists’ paradise, and, if not wholly an undiscovered land, it is a region not yet overrun with the conventional tourists. True, Barbizon is better known than Hague, but it is no more entrancing. In mid-August you will hardly find a dozen guests at the _table d’hôte_ of Hôtel Millet.

Far away extends Cape Levi, and the Gatteville lighthouse is just discernible.

The isolated villa of Valtelles is camped securely upon a rock dominating the sea below, and a little thread of a foot-path marks the daily tramp of the coast-guard and the custom-house officer.

At the opposite corner of the Cotentin peninsula is the little maritime port of Barfleur, of 1,200 inhabitants. It would perhaps hardly be remembered to-day were it not for the celebrated naval battle of Barfleur. The town is quite worth the visiting for its own quaintness and charming situation, but is usually passed by.

The Gatteville lighthouse is one of those wonderful monumental lighthouses which the French are so fond of erecting. This really great work lies just to the northward of Barfleur, and is a vast granite pile some ninety feet in circumference at its base, half that at its summit, and has a height of two hundred odd feet above its already imposing foundation.

The rays of its great electric lamp shine out over the waters of the Channel for ninety kilometres, over fifty-five miles.

From the top of this great tower the view is of great extent, embracing the whole peninsula of the Hague; and, at night, one may clearly see the great light at St. Catherine’s on the Isle of Wight.

At Brix, a small town of two thousand inhabitants, between Cherbourg and Valognes, is a fine church built from the remains of an old fortress. This will, or should, recall the fact that Brix was the native town of the illustrious family of Bruce which gave to Scotland Robert the Bruce.

Valognes, the ancient Alaounia of the Romans, and a strong fortress in the middle ages, is a small town, though it is the principal one of its district. It possesses a library of twenty thousand volumes and a handsome church of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which is said to have the only Gothic dome in France.

There are a number of magnificent old houses which have come down from the time when Valognes was a viscounty.

A great cattle market is held here every Monday, and the great establishment which packs and exports the butter, eggs, and cheese of the neighbourhood is a sight worth seeing.

The remains of the old fortress-château of the middle ages, now moss-grown, still exist in the suburbs of Alleume.

Carentan is an unassuming little town in the midst of the butter farms of the Cotentin. With Isigny it leads the butter market of France so far as its first blends are concerned. Due to the prosperity arising from its milk products is a fine, rebuilt fifteenth-century church, and there are many memories of the ancient importance of the town. Edward III. of England burned it in 1346, some days before the eventful battle of Crecy, and in 1679 a conflagration destroyed over five hundred houses. Besides being the greatest centre for the trade in butter in all Normandy, it is also the centre of the region which raises the half-breed trotting-horse.

Carentan is connected with the sea by a canal eight kilometres in length, and there is considerable small coasting trade with neighbouring ports.

Isigny, like Carentan, is noted for its cream and butter. Isigny butter is the name given to the product of all that region of Normandy lying between Bayeux, Barfleur, and Coutances.

The grain elevators and the cattle market are truly the sights of the town on market-days, and all else pales before the importance of this trade.

Grandcamp, beneath which are the celebrated Rocks of Grandcamp, is a summer resort and a tiny fishing port.

It has a real artists’ resort in its Hôtel de la Croix Blanche, whose dining-room is a veritable picture-gallery, with landscapes and seascapes by Boutigny, Gagliardini, Mathon, Bonne Maison, and others.

In reality there is no port here at Grandcamp, only a sloping beach upon which boats are drawn as they fetch and carry from the vessels which anchor at some distance from the shore, beyond the bank of wild fairylike rocks at the base of the little cliffs.

St. Lô is of ancient Gallic origin, and was once called Briovera, which in the Celtic tongue signified Bridge-over-the-Vire, as the little stream which passes by the foundations of the town is called. St. Laud or St. Lô, Bishop of Coutances, came here to preach evangelization. Soon after his death personal relics of the saint were brought here, and finally the ancient town took his name.

The religious history of the town is most profound, and as a place celebrated in warfare St. Lô ranks among the most important in Lower Normandy. The Catholics captured the town in 1574, after the Calvinists had been its masters for a dozen years, and massacred three thousand of its inhabitants.

During the Revolution St. Lô was called the “Rock of Liberty.”

The very beautiful Church of Notre Dame, the _ci-devant_ cathedral, is admirably placed on the edge of the table-land overlooking the valley of the Vire. Before it became a cathedral it was an ancient collegiate church, but this fine Gothic edifice as seen to-day dates only from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.

Its towers quite rival, and are reminiscent of, those of either Chartres, Séez, or Senlis, and are far more beautiful and imposing than those of any church of its rank in all Normandy.

There is also a fifteenth-century open-air pulpit, almost a unique attribute of a great French church, which is artistically charming. From it were, and still are, read publicly the acts of episcopal jurisdiction.

In the Rue Poids-de-Ville, at No. 4, is the fifteenth-century Maison Dieu, a fine stone structure richly ornamented with stone sculptures.

On the square before the cathedral one notes a charming statue of a water-carrier, depicting the local custom which has not yet died out here. To-day even one may see these sturdy Cotentin maidens carrying their picturesque water-jugs in exactly the same pose as depicted in the statue itself.

From St. Lô to Coutances is thirty kilometres by road. The city is an ancient bishopric, and its great cathedral is one of the most imposing and celebrated of those of the second rank in all France.

Anciently known as Cosedia, the city became in time known as Constantia, after, it is believed, Constance Chlore, who fortified it and made of it a stronghold long before the end of the Roman occupation of Gaul.

The city was taken and retaken in the course of the wars which continued during the lives of the sons of Norman William, in the Hundred Years’ War, and in the other religious wars.

During the massacres of St. Bartholomew it was saved through the moderation of its governor, the Count of Matignon.

The cathedral sits upon the crest of a hill three hundred feet above the surrounding plain, and is, in every respect, an exceedingly beautiful structure, with its two great towers rising to a height of nearly 250 feet. There is also a great octagonal tower at the crossing, from which may be had a magnificent view of the surrounding country, south to Avranches and Granville and, perhaps, on a clear day to Mont St. Michel, and westward to the isles of Jersey and Guernsey.

Coutances has another remarkable old church in St. Pierre, fitted with pews, seldom seen in Normandy or indeed in France. It is a rebuilt fifteenth-century structure showing many Renaissance interpolations; but, on the whole, it is imposing and pleasing.

St. Nicholas is another ecclesiastical shrine with a tall square tower reminiscent of an English parish church. Its chief distinction lies perhaps in the great monocylindrical columns which divide the arcades of the nave.

The public garden of Coutances is an exceedingly ample and beautifully disposed park for a town of but seven thousand inhabitants.

The aqueduct of Coutances, to the west of the town, was one of the most remarkable works of its time. The Romans built more magnificent ones, and many have been constructed in later days; but the pointed and buttressed arches of the thirteenth-century Coutances aqueduct, now almost entirely disappeared, must remain always one of the chief works of its kind.

On the coast, midway between Coutances and Avranches, is Granville. It once had the reputation of being a vile, ugly, ill-built hole, whose only gaiety was due to the triflers on market-day. To-day the description does not fit, though it is gay enough in all conscience, and at all seasons, with its steamer traffic, its fishing, and summer visitors, for four months of the year. Before one is the Bay of Cancale, noted for its oysters; and in the far distance is St. Michel’s rock, with its satellite of Tombelaine. Down at the head of the bay is the gateway into Brittany, through the episcopal town of Dol, itself a queer, sleepy old place, with a street of decrepit houses, over which artists rave, and a grim weather-beaten cathedral, which looks like the bastion of a fortress.

Just off the shore from Granville is a group of nearly three hundred fanglike rocks which protrude toward the sky at low water, and are known as the Chausey Isles.

They seem a worthless pile of rocks at first glance, but when one recalls that Paris draws its supply of flagstones for its sidewalks from these granite protuberances their mission is seen to be an economic one.

To the west of the Chausey Isles are the very rocks described by Victor Hugo in his “Toilers of the Sea.” Still further from the mainland are the Minquiers and the Grelets, which at high water are, for the most part, hardly more than pin-heads above the level of the sea.

On the principal isle of the Minquiers, scarce a dozen feet above sea-level, is a little hamlet of a few huts and cabins of refuge built by the fishermen of Jersey and Guernsey.

Granville is indeed a city of sturdy sailors and men of affairs. It is situated at the very tip of an abrupt promontory, picturesque in the extreme, known as the Rock of Granville. The upper town and the lower town each adds its own variety of life; and there is no city in Normandy where one may observe more contrasting features than here on this rock-cut town overlooking the blue waters of the Manche.

The place is a summer resort of the very first rank, and its hotels are all that the most fastidious could require, in spite of which there still hangs about it all an atmosphere that has not yet become vitiated by the conventions of society. The tides of the ocean here rise and fall to greater heights and depths than on any other part of the European coast, and the sea is the great and abounding attraction of the city, which has twelve thousand inhabitants.

As early as the twelfth century a chapel was built upon the projecting rock; and from it and its influences grew up the present city. For many years the city was held by the English, but was retaken by the Normans in 1441, at whose head was Louis d’Estouteville, governor of Mont St. Michel. In 1695 it was bombarded by the English, and Louis XIV. ordered the fortification to be demolished.

In 1793 Granville opposed, with a courageous resistance, the Vendean army of twenty thousand men, commanded by La Rochejacquelin, who was forced to raise the siege.

Again, in 1803, the English bombarded the town, but with little effect.

Granville was the port of departure for a great number of privateers, who did considerable damage during the struggles between the French and English.

The Church of Notre Dame is Granville’s most interesting monument. It is built upon the point which culminates in the celebrated Granville Rock, and preserves many details of its ancient Roman construction. In its ensemble, however, it is highly florid Gothic, its later additions coming well down into the seventeenth century. In the interior is the Chapel of St. Nicholas, containing numerous donations of fishermen and sailors,--gilded anchors, models of full-rigged ships, and similar gifts.

There is an unobtrusive casino and the usual watering-place appurtenances, but all is subservient to the life of the port and the town.

The port itself is a wonder of what one might call marine architecture, were the term not applied to ships themselves. It has two great basins and a superb _môle_ considerably over a quarter of a mile in length.

For the most part, the activity of the port is due to the local fishing-boats, the coasters or _caboteurs_, and the deep-sea fishing-craft which sail to far-away Newfoundland and St. Pierre de Miquelon.

There is some ship-building and considerable industry in fish-curing and the production of cod-liver oil.

Avranches was once an old cathedral town, but the Revolution made away with its cathedral, along with many another ecclesiastical monument of France; but since the ancient bishopric of Avranches was in existence from 511 to 1790, it may be inferred that its importance was considerable.

To-day it is a most interesting tourist point, though manifestly its position is not as proud as it once was.

A single shaft surrounded by a few poor, broken fragments is all that now remains of the edifice before which Henry II. of England did penance for the murder of Becket.

The ancient episcopal palace is now the court-house, a modern reconstruction built upon remains which date from the fifteenth century.

The public library contains fifteen thousand volumes and some valuable historical manuscripts of as early a period as the twelfth century.

The Jardin des Plantes is the ancient garden of a former Capucin priory (1618), now actually occupied by a community of Ursulines. The remains of a fortified gateway and an ancient tower and some moss-grown fragments of an ancient donjon are still left to suggest the aspect of other days from a military and strategic point.

The view from the height of the upper town, the plateau on which once stood the former cathedral, and indeed where all of the modern town is situated, is one of great and wonderful beauty, particularly out toward the bay of Mont St. Michel, through the estuary of the river See. Indeed it is the altogether remarkable situation of the modern city on the summit of a great promontory plateau that constitutes its chief charm.

One may eat of the best of sea and shore, including the famous oysters of Cancale, at any of Avranches’s inns, so there is every excuse for not omitting it from one’s itinerary.

From the height of Avranches is the first clear view of the famous Mont St. Michel, so well known that one almost forbears attempting to write of its somewhat terrible historical memories. It is indeed wonderful, but is difficult to enjoy properly, owing to the number of people sent around with one guide, and the touts who throng the single street, and who do not leave you a moment’s peace.

Impossible as it is mentally to plunge back into the past, as ought to be done when at such a place, there is always a remembrance to take away, and the gaps can be filled up afterward.

One can imagine how grand the place must look at neap tides, when the sea rushes in faster than a horse can gallop, or in winter in a storm, for it has been justly called “_St. Michel au Peril de la Mer._”

Tombelaine, the island from which the English made their gallant attack on St. Michel, offers a curious instance of the delusiveness of space. It looks to be within a stone’s throw of Avranches and the mount itself, but it really is quite an hour’s hard walking, if one has the temerity to brave the always possible danger of the quicksands which surround it.

The bay of Mont St. Michel of a moonlight night, when seen from the causeway leading to Pontorson, or, better yet, from a boat on the bosom of the bay itself, is indeed enough to have inspired the verses of Jean Richepin, entitled:

“LES ECUS DE LA LUNE

“La lune au ras des flots étincelants
Casse en morceaux ses jolis ecus blancs.
Bon sang! que de pécune!
Si ton argent, falle, t’embarrassait,
Pourquoi ne pas le mettre en mon gousset,
Ohé, la Lune?”

It is a fine road that runs from Avranches via Pontaubault to Pontorson, whence one makes his way along the causeway to the mount itself.

It seems futile to attempt to describe one’s emotions at first sight of that stupendous and wonderful fortress-abbey of Mont St. Michel. To know this wonderful place is to love it; but no one can become intimately acquainted with it in a few hours, or even in a few days.

A rampart of walls and towers surrounds the little cluster of houses at the base of the mount; and before its ancient barbican the steam-cars, omnibuses, and automobiles set down their hordes of visitors of all nationalities, to say nothing of the countless hundreds who come on foot and on bicycles over the causeway from Pontorson. The year’s visitors are supposed to approximate fifty thousand.

These ancient walls enclose a population of 250 souls. Where they all live, and what they all do when tourists are few and far between, is a question. Viewed from a distance of a mile, the great rock with its crowning abbey does not look as if it had any other attribute save that of a vast mediæval religious establishment. As one draws nearer, he sees the few score of houses huddled about the abbey’s haunches; but even then he doubts as to whether a quarter of a thousand people can stow themselves comfortably away, and wonders where they find room for the visitors.

The Porte du Roi, the Claudine and the Châtelet towers, and the fortified bridge all prove the fact that the abbey was also a great fortress. These, however, together with the Michelette and the home of Duguesclin, are but minor attractions. The real and overpowering feature of it all is the great abbey itself, which rises tier upon tier, its statue-crowned pinnacle seeming literally to pierce the sky.

In entering, one crosses the guard-hall, and goes up fifty steps to the court of the church, that tiny plateau from which one gets so wide a view of sea and shore and sky that he wonders if it is not the most ample and interesting in all the known world. Pontorson, Avranches, Granville, Dol, and St. Malo, on the mainland, are all spread out in the vast panorama. Near by is Tombelaine, a little brother to the mount itself, while on the dim horizon are the Chausey Isles, the Minquiers, and, if the day be clear, perhaps Jersey.

Within the sanctuary one remarks all eras of mediæval architecture, from the Roman nave to the flamboyant Gothic choir.

A narrow staircase to the right leads to a little terrace cut from the rock itself, which supports the Crypt of the Gros-Piliers. On this same little terrace the great supporting buttresses of the upper works find their foundations, and one may climb a story, if he choose, on the charming _Escalier de Dentelle_.

To enter the Merveille one descends again, and passes through the cloister, one of the most originally and gracefully disposed of any of its kind extant, surrounded by 120 svelt little columns forming the arcade. The refectory is a wonderfully brilliant apartment, and the Hall of the Chevaliers beneath, supported by three ranges of columns, will awake the memories of other days in the minds of all who know the romanticism of historical details in the least degree. It was here, in this wonderfully old abbey, that the order of St. Michel was first instituted.

To one side is the visitors’ room, a remarkably graceful, though much smaller chamber than any of the foregoing.

The next lower floor is occupied by the cellar and the armory, all in the most sober architectural display.

Crossing the walk and the crypts, one comes to the “_Roue monte-charges_,” a great machine turned by the hands of prisoners of other days, by which materials and supplies were brought to this vast height from the sea-level below.

In the thick granite of the walls of the old fortress-church were many dungeons and caves, where were hidden away criminal and political prisoners of all ranks. Here Barbés, Blanqui, and Raspail were imprisoned.

In returning across the Hall of the Chevaliers it is necessary to descend some steps graven in the rock itself; following respectfully behind the guardian, who jingles his great bunch of keys, as if to hurry along the unwilling ones, which is practically what it amounts to, for he is a much overworked individual, this guardian. If you wish, you may make another round, for he will not leave you behind, and he journeys through these silent, untenanted halls and chambers many times a day, with the precision and routine of a soldier on sentry duty, or a corporal inspecting the guard.

If one spends the night on the mount, he may see the most splendid sunrise he has ever witnessed. One need not rise, for his chamber, if it is on the water side, faces the east. It is incomparable to anything to be seen elsewhere. It is as if one were in mid-ocean. The Normandy coast, not so very far distant, is silhouetted against the sky as the refulgent sun breaks through the clouds and mists of early morning. Suddenly the sea reflects it with mirror-like brilliancy,--another day is born.

West of Avranches is Mortain, situated in the midst of the most picturesque country-side of the Cotentin. It sits high on the flank of what, in Normandy, may well be called a mountain, and below it runs the tiny river Cance.

The chief artistic monument of Mortain is the Church of St. Evroult, erected during the early part of the thirteenth century, with a Roman portal thought to belong to an ancient collegiate church of three centuries before. There is a series of fifty-eight elaborately sculptured stalls of the fifteenth century, and, altogether, it is quite as worthy of enthusiastic admiration as many a more famous one elsewhere.

To the northward, a half-hour’s brisk walk, is the ancient Abbaye Blanche, or a reconstruction of it, founded in 1105 for the Benedictines, and some years later affiliated with the order of Citeaux.

The Cance below Mortain is one of those rocky river-beds that awaken one’s admiration and surprise. It does not resemble in any way the Grand Cañon of the Colorado or the Gorges of the Tarn, but it is an unspoiled bit of nature, quite as God made it.

A Norman poet--Pontgibault--has eulogized it thus:

“Combien j’eusse aimé mieux m’en aller avec vous
Parcourir ces vallons dont un Suisse est jaloux,
Jouir (comme on jouet lorsqu’on est en vacance)
Des méandres charmants que dessine la Cance;
Voir ce ‘Pas,’ où, dit-on, les Diables s’égara,
La ‘Cascade’ aux flots bleus, petit niagara,
La ‘Grotte aux Sarrasins,’ dont la fraicheur sinette
Le dispute à ses eaux Fontaine Perrinette!”

Vire is another town of the Cotentin which, like most of its brothers or sisters, sits high upon an escarpment of surrounding hills. It occupies a veritable amphitheatre, and it is most curiously, if not beautifully, planned. It was an ancient feudal settlement which grew in time to some importance as far as its military history is concerned.

It is the birthplace of Olivier Basselin, the “_satirique_” of the “Vaux de Vire” and the inventor (in the fifteenth century) of that form of dramatic representation which we of a later day have come to know as “vaudeville.” The evolution of the term is thus made simple enough, though what such representations themselves have actually become in these days is perhaps not so easy to define.

The great Clock Tower and its ogival gate of the thirteenth century is Vire’s chief architectural curiosity.

Its greatest and most artistic architectural attribute is the Church of Notre Dame, which dates from the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Its interior appointments are marvellously elaborate, including a fine sculptured pulpit in wood dating from 1643.

The town hall, a seventeenth and eighteenth century edifice, encloses a library of forty-four thousand books and 240 manuscripts, including a rich collection of works relating to the country. There is also a very considerable collection of paintings.