geographical position has affected every generation of the city's growth and strength.

Rouen that is now "cheflieu du département de la Seine-Inférieure," was once the Norman stronghold which commanded all the basin of the river from the incoming of the stream of Eûre. The Seine and its tributaries have cut vast plâteaux some four hundred feet in height, through chalk and débris piled above the Jurassic bedrock that crops out here and there, as it does at Bray. On the right bank of the river, at the summit of a huge curve, the city lies between the valley of Darnétal, that is watered by Robec and his mate Aubette, and the valley of Bapaume. Upon this northern side the town is guarded from east to west by the hills of St. Hilaire, Mont Fortin, Mont aux Malades and Mont Riboudet, and from these the houses grow downwards to the water's edge. Upon the plateau above perch the villages of Mont-Saint-Aignan and of Bois-Guillaume. But between the valley of Darnétal and the Seine, is yet another natural buttress, the promontory on whose summit is Mont Ste. Catherine and the hamlet Bonsecours. From this magnificent height you may take the best view of the natural setting of the town. The western horizon is closed by the plateau of Canteleu and the forest of Roumare. To the south, within that strong bent elbow of the stream, the bridges bind to Rouen her faubourg of St. Sever with its communes of Sotteville and of Petit Quévilly; and the forest of Rouvray spreads its shadow to the meeting of the sky.

MAP A

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The first Rothomagus, like the Rouen of to-day, was neither a hill city, for then it would have stood upon the Mont Ste. Catherine, nor an island city like ancient Paris, for the Ile St. Croix was too small. It was essentially a river city; and you may see at once the extraordinary natural strength of its position on the outside of the river's curve (see Map A), instead of on the inside which may have seemed more probable at first but would have left the town defenceless. Even to-day you can only get into Rouen, as into a town that has been battered and taken by assault, through the breach in her fortified lines. If you enter by the railway from Paris, from Havre, from Dieppe or from Fécamp, it is by subterranean tunnels only that approach is possible, and up a flight of steps that you make your first acquaintance with a "coin perdu" of the town, a corner without character, without size, without the least promise of the beauty that is hidden further off. Of all those great gates through which the mediæval city welcomed her dukes or sallied out against her enemies, but one is left, the Porte Guillaume Lion close by the quays, at the end of the Rue des Arpents, which is as faded and decrepit as its entrance.

To understand something of the origins of the town, it is far better to come there for the first time by the river, by the highway that has suffered least change since Rouen was a town at all. Yet the river itself is cribbed within far narrower bounds than when the first huts of savage fishermen were stuck upon the reed-beds of the marsh; for the town was first set upon islets that have long ago been absorbed into the mainland, and the waters of the Seine once washed the boatmen's landing stages at a spot that now bounds the Parvis of the Cathedral. Even now the Seine varies in breadth at this point from a hundred and thirty-five to two hundred and fifteen metres, with a depth of five metres on the quays at lowest tide. These tides are felt as far as twenty miles above the town. They vary in height from one metre to as much as three, and a tidal wave is formed that is one of the greatest dangers of the downstream navigation. Coming up from the sea is fairly easy in almost any kind of stout and steady craft, but it is difficult for all but the best steamers to get down without being delayed, and sometimes fairly stopped, by the great tidal wave at Caudebec or Quillebœuf. Only when the floods reduce their strength are the tides unable to turn the current of the stream; and flood water is not unusual in a country where the rain blows in so often from the Channel.

There is an average of a hundred and fifty rainy days each year, the late autumn being worst, for the clouds are attracted by the river, by the forests, and by the hills that stand round about the city. But the unhealthiness engendered by all this moisture is a thing of the past. An enlightened municipal authority has widened streets, planted broad boulevards, and cleansed the waterworks which Jacques Lelieur first sketched in the early years of the sixteenth century. And much as we may deplore the loss of picturesque surroundings, it was high time that some of the "Fumier du Moyen Age" should be shovelled out of sight. What existence meant in those Middle Ages we shall be better able to realise later on, and it will be possible as we pass through the streets of Rouen to see what little has been left of it; for the vandalism of ignorance has too often accompanied the innocent and hygienic efforts of the restorer, and undue Haussmanism has ruined many an inoffensive beauty past recall.

MAP B

MAP OF ROUEN
SHEWING THE LINES OF THE MODERN BOULEVARDS
(WHICH ARE THOSE OF THE WALLS BESIEGED BY KING HENRY V.)
WITH THE CHIEF BUILDINGS AND
MAIN STREETS OF THE CITY.

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As you look upon the modern town from the river, it is difficult to realise that the views of 1525, or of 1620, which I have reproduced in this book, can represent the same place. The old walls and battlements have disappeared, and all the ancient keeps save one. But though we cannot tell the towers of ancient Rothomagus, we can mark well her bulwarks, from the Church of St. Pierre du Chastel that stands in the Rue des Cordeliers (see Maps B and C) where was the first Castle of Rollo, to the Halles and the Chapelle de la Fierte St. Romain, where the names of Haute and Basse Vieille Tour recall the citadel of later dukes. Within her earliest walls was the site of the first Cathedral; outside them was built St. Ouen to the north-east, and the monastery of St. Gervais to the north-west where the Conqueror died. Above the town still rises the Tour Jeanne d'Arc, the donjon of the Castle of Bouvreuil, which showed that Normandy was no more an independent Duchy, but a part of the domains of Philip Augustus. This memory of bondage still remains; but of the home of her own dukes Rouen has not preserved one stone; nor of the English palace of King Henry the Fifth near "Mal s'y Frotte" is anything left in the Rue du Vieux Palais near the western quay.

The small compass of the first battlements set on the swamp grew, by the twelfth century, to the lines of the modern boulevards on the north and west, but at the Tour Jeanne d'Arc they turned east and southwards, round the