ed with it. The view of the town
at the end of this chapter contains a little microscopic vignette in
the centre showing the artist presenting his famous Livre des
Fontaines to the civic dignitaries. It is on four long bands of
parchment, of which the Hotel de Ville carefully preserves one, and
the fourth is in the City Library. The drawings are done in black ink,
with the houses coloured a pale yellow, the roofs shown with red tiles
or bluish slates, the grass touched with yellowish-green. Besides
being a secretary and notary of the Royal Courts, Lelieur held office
in the town as councillor, sheriff, and finally President of the
General Assembly in the absence of the bailli and lieutenant in 1542.
He was crowned for his poem in the famous poetic tourney of the Puy
des Palinods de Rouen, and he owned two or three fine estates outside
the town.

The object of our little pilgrimage is nearly reached now, and after
you have admired the carvings on the front of No. 41, stop at the
quaint dwelling marked 29. This is the Maison Caradas, and its
position at a corner with the open space of the river beyond it
enables you to see it well all round. The slope of the ground upwards,
which I noticed in earlier chapters, is especially pronounced here,
and shows how much embankment had to be done before the town was
really rescued from the swamps and mud-flats of the Seine. The fashion
of building each upper storey to overlap the one beneath is very
evident here, and the effects I suggested in the last chapter may be
vividly realised; as Regnier[69] puts it with his usual frankness:--

"Et du haut des maisons tomboit un tel degout
Que les chiens alteres pouvoient boire debout."

[Footnote 69: Regnier had come to Rouen to be treated by Lesonneur, a
famous local specialist; but he unfortunately celebrated his recovery
with a little too much Vin d'Espagne, and died in the Rue de la Prison
in 1613.]

This is one of the houses drawn in Lelieur's book at the corner of the
Rue Tuile, with the Fontaine Lisieux near it, that is now merely a
grotesque ruin of its former splendours. So much uncertainty is
exhibited by the best local authorities as to the real owner of the
Maison Caradas that I shall not pretend to solve the problem here. It
is clear, however, that the word is a surname, or one of the by-names
so common in the first years of the sixteenth century when this was
built; and it is possible that it preserves one more s