ened 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.

[Illustration: 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.]

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 apse of St. Ouen, down the Rue de l'Epee and the
Rue du Ruisseau by way