ne" was a word as alarming to Richard
le Bon and his nobility as "Fenian" was at first to the most bigoted of
Orangemen. The Duke employed Raoul, Count of Ivri, to crush the
Communists. Raoul was the son of a rich peasant, but he had no sympathy
with his father's order. As in modern life the most determined
aristocrat is often the man whose origin is the lowest, so was it nine
centuries ago, in Normandy. Raoul was a sort of Claverhouse and Jeffreys
in one person, and he "enjoyed the sport of dogging the Villainage. He
fell upon the Communists;--caught them in the very fact,--holding a
Lodge,--swearing in new members. Terrible was the catastrophe. No trial
vouchsafed. No judge called in. Happy the wretch whose weight stretched
the halter. The country was visited by fire and flame; the rebels were
scourged, their eyes plucked out, their limbs chopped off, they were
burnt alive; whilst the rich were impoverished and ruined by
confiscations and fines." Such were the good old times, which never can
return. Heaven be praised! Such was the origin of the Norman nobility,
destined to become the patricians of the world. The cruelty with which
the peasants were treated by the new nobles is a type of the system that
ever was pursued by men of "the gentle Norman blood" toward a restless
people. "The folk of Normandie" had no mercy on men who disputed, or
even called in question, their right to unrestricted dominion.

The Cotentin was the most important part of Normandy,--was to Normandy
what Normandy was to the rest of Europe. It has been well described as
"not merely the physical bulwark of Normandy, but the very kernel of
Norman nationality." It now forms a part of the _Departement de la
Manche_, and it holds Cherbourg in its bosom,--the _Caesaris Burgus_ of
the Romans, which the French imperial historian of the first Caesar is
completing as a defiance to England, thus finishing what was long since
begun under the old monarchy. Ages ago--even before the Romans had
entered Gaul--what we call Cherbourg is believed to have attracted
Gaulish attention because of its marine advantages. It is all but
certain that the Romans fortified it. The Normans were children of the
sea, and they did not neglect it. The Normans of the Cotentin were the
purest men of their race. They kept up that connection with the ocean
from which some other Normans revolted; and they were led from the land
to the sea by the same inducement that had sent their ances