windows.

[Footnote 63: This clearance was effected in August 1897, and Miss
James took advantage of it to make her drawing from a point of view
which has been invisible for centuries and may soon be lost again.]

What Rouen had asked from Charles VII. a century before she only
obtained when Francis I. gave her a Cour des Comptes separate from the
Financial Committee in Paris; but the boon was scarcely appreciated
when it was discovered that the King not only levied taxes on local
merchandise to pay his new judges, but also made quite a good thing
out of selling the offices to the highest bidder. In 1580 the need of
this Court began to be felt again, in a town which possessed its own
High Court of Justice, suitably housed, and also its Financial Bureau
in the Parvis. But all receivers of taxes had to go to Paris to settle
their accounts, so had all proprietors of fiefs, all men who wished to
register their letters of naturalisation, nobility, exemption, or
enfranchisement, and many others. So in December of that year the
Sieur de Bourdemy, then President of Parliament, established a
separate Cour des Comptes at Rouen, modelled upon the Court in Paris,
and held its first meetings in the Priory of St. Lo. In 1589 the house
just described in the Rue des Carmes was bought by Tanneguy le Veneur
for eight thousand crowns, and the arcaded wing was consecrated as a
chapel in 1593. In 1790 it was swept away like every similar
organisation in France, and to the fact that it was probably forgotten
and built over, we owe the preservation even of what little still
remains.

[Illustration: COUR DES COMPTES, FROM THE RUE DES CARMES]

Before you leave the atmosphere of Finance and Justice, which in this
chapter I have striven to realise for you round those monuments that
alone recall the spirit of the age which built them, there is one more
tale of Justice in Rouen which may perhaps leave a more charitable
impression of the Palais de Justice and its officials. It has been
told before by Etienne Pasquier, but it will bear translation (and
even shortening) for an English audience. In the days when Laurent
Bigot de Thibermesnil was first King's Advocate in the Parliament of
Normandy, one of those brilliant intellects of which the sixteenth
century was so full, it chanced that a merchant of Lucca, who had
lived long and prosperously in England, desired to come home and die
in Italy. So he wrote to his relations to prepare a house for h