un prix peu élevé.”

Throughout the islands the sentiment is decidedly republican, or if not republican is at least Norman.

It is the English king who is duke, but it is the descendant of Rollon who reigns.

All French provinciaux are patriotic beyond belief to the outsider. The Gascon is always a Gascon, and the Norman is always a Norman.

They were masterful folks, those early Normans and the Northmen before them. Rollon, the first Duke of Rouen; Rurik, the first Czar of Russia; Eric le Roux, the first colonizer of Iceland and Greenland; Leif Ericson, the first discoverer of America and the colonizer of Vineland.

Of the Normans, Guillaume, son of Herleve, Robert le Diable, and Robert Guiscard de Hauteville were kings of Sicily. Cabot of Jersey was the discoverer of Canada, and Jean Cousin of Honfleur was the pilot of Christopher Columbus. Binot Lipaulmier de Gonneville and Jean Denys were the discoverers of Newfoundland, of Brazil, and of the Canaries; the Chevalier de la Salle was the discoverer of the Mississippi; and Champlain was the founder of Quebec.

Among other great discoverers and navigators are Jean de Bethencourt, Jean Ango, Duquesne, Dumé, Tourville de Bricqueville, and Dumont d’Urville.

In letters and art Normandy has held a proud position.

In poesy stand forth the names of Pierre Corneille and his brother Thomas, Alain Chartier, Olivier Basselin, Jean Marot, Jean Bertand, Malherbe,—sometimes called “the father of modern poetry,”—Segrais, Malfiatre, Castel, Madeleine de Scudéry, Benserade, the Abbé de Chaulieu, Bernardin St. Pierre, Casimir Delavigne, and his rival in dramatic verse, Ancelot. The historians and savants, Fontenelle, Huét, and Mezeray, St. Evremond, Dacier, and Burnouf, Armand Carrel, Octave Feuillet, Louis Bouilhet, Gustave Flaubert, and Guy de Maupassant.

Among others of Normandy’s great names are: Fresnel, the inventor of the lenticular lanterns for lighthouses, and Conté, the inventor of crayons bearing his name.

Among the artists are Jouvenet, Restout, Nicolas Poussin, Gericault, Millet, and Chaplin, and the sculptors, Anguier and Harivel-Durocher, the composers, Boïeldieu and Auber, and the actor Melingue.

A great man in industry and statesmanship was Richard Waddington, while still greater and more ancient names, famed in history, round off the list: William the Conqueror, the Minister Le Tellier, Maréchal de Coigny, Charlotte Corday, Le Brun, the Duc de Plaisance, and Dupont de l’Eure.

Canada was discovered and colonized by the Norman fishermen, sailors, carpenters, and masons of the fleet of Champlain from Honfleur, Dieppe, and Havre.

The regard which the Norman has for things American has generally been overlooked. But one need not go so far as to say, as has been done by Norman writers, that the present cosmopolitan population of America is made up mostly of the Scotch, the Irish, and the Normans of England and France—the descendants of the people whom William and his sixty thousand companions organized in social order.

M. Hector Fabre has said that, while all the colonists of New France—actually Canada—were not Normans, it was a curious phenomenon that all the children born in Canada were Norman.

The St. Lawrence, which the French still call the Saint Laurent, is to them as Norman as the Mississippi or the Seine, and it is reasonable to presume that they still regard North America as “La Normandie Transatlantique.”

All this is with some justification, if we go back as far as the Northmen, as the good people of Boston, in America, well know, for it is they who have supplanted the Genoese admiral by Leif, the son of Eric, and have even erected a statue to him.

With all this, then, in view, may the writer be pardoned for presuming that Normandy is not a worn-out touring-ground, nor one of which there is nothing new to tell. The author wishes to repeat, however, that no more has been attempted herein than to gather together such romantic and historical facts as have readily suggested themselves to him and to the artist, who have each of them lived many months in the very heart of that old province between Paris and the sea.

Normandy is in many respects the ideal of a delightful tour for those who would not go further afield, or who wish to know still more of those conventional touring-grounds of which, truth to tell, but little is known by those tourists personally conducted in droves, who do a watering-place in the morning, take their lunch at some riverside shrine, and get to a cathedral town in time to nibble at its masterpiece before the hour of opening, which in Normandy, Rouen in particular, is early.

The great rhomboid which bounds the France of to-day, enclosed, before the Revolution, thirty-three great provinces, of which, save Guyenne, Gascogne, Languedoc, and Bretagne, Normandy was the largest, and certainly the most potently strenuous in the life of the times.

Surrounded by Picardy, the Ile de France (the domaine-royal of the Capets), by Maine, and Bretagne, and bordered on the north by La Manche, it was only joined to France by confiscation by Philippe-Auguste, from Jean Sans-Terre, some two hundred or more years after the advent of the third race of kings.

To-day it forms the Department of the Lower Seine, Eure, Le Calvados, La Manche, and a part of L’Orne.

Normandy was once doubtless a land of the Celts, who gradually withdrew to Bretagne. In time it became a part of Roman Gaul. The part once known as Neustria was ceded by Charles the Simple in 911 to the Norman descendants of Rollon, from whom it took its new name, Normandy.

The Dukes of Normandy became, after the conquest, Kings of England, and in 1154 the Counts of Anjou and of Maine inherited, through Henry Plantagenet, the throne of England, thus giving that country a line of Angevine kings.

This strong-growing power of the Norman dukes was broken by Philippe-Auguste, who conquered Normandy in 1204.

During the Hundred Years’ War the English many times invaded Normandy, but were finally driven out by the redoubtable Duguesclin.

Henry V. invaded France and took Harfleur in 1415, occupying all of the north and northwest of France. Charles VII. victoriously entered Rouen, and at Formigny again achieved the conquest of Normandy by the French. Louis XI. ceded Normandy to his brother.

Many ancient fiefs were contained in this great province, but the Comté d’Evreux, Comté d’Alençon, Comté d’Eu, and the Duché de Penthièvre were united definitely with the kingdom in 1789.

Previous to 1789 the ancient military government of the province was divided into Rouen, Caen, and Alençon.

By its reconstruction into departments the province lost two bishoprics, which were not reestablished by the Concordat, Lisieux and Avranches; and the latter lost, as well, nearly all vestiges of its former beautiful cathedral, before which Henry II. of England expiated his crime of the murder of Becket.

The Land of the Conqueror, trod by some of the greatest men the world has known in mediæval and modern times, has not, even now, in spite of its associations and accessibility, become a world-worn resort.

Students of art, architecture, and history, and a few tourists from London, who demand a change of scene in a near-by foreign land, reach its shores between Whitsun and the August Bank Holiday; but, popular supposition to the contrary, the traffic receipts of the steamship and railway companies do not indicate anything like a generous patronage of this ideal land for a present-day sentimental journey.

Normandy stands to-day as it stood in the middle ages, with many memorials and reminiscences of its feudal pomp and glory, with here and there a monument to Rollon, William the Conqueror, or Richard the Lion-hearted.

As it was three centuries or