tellorum_ stet honos et gratia vivax;"

and, in 1590, the fortress raised by Philip Augustus experienced the
fate of its predecessors; it was then ruined and dismantled, and the
portion which was allowed to stand, was degraded into a jail. Now the
three[51] towers just mentioned are alone remaining, and these would
attract little notice, were it not that one of them bears the name of
the _Tour de la Pucelle_, as having been, in 1430, the place of
confinement of the unfortunate Joan of Arc, when she was captured before
Compiegne and brought prisoner to Rouen.

It must be stated, however, that the first castle recorded to have
existed at Rouen, was built by Rollo, shortly after he had made himself
master of Neustria. Its very name is now lost; and all we know
concerning it is, that it stood near the quay, at the northern extremity
of the town, in the situation subsequently occupied by the Church of St.
Pierre du Chatel, and the adjoining monastery of the Cordeliers.

After a lapse of less than fifty years, Rouen saw rising within her
walls a second castle, the work of Duke Richard Ist, and long the
residence of the Norman sovereigns. This, from a tower of great strength
which formed a part of it, and which was not demolished till the year
1204, acquired the appellation of _la Vieille Tour_; and the name
remains to this day, though the building has disappeared.

The space formerly occupied by the scite of it is now covered by the
_halles_, considered the finest in France. The historians of Rouen, in
the usual strain of hyperbole, hint that their _halles_ are even the
finest in the world[52], though they are very inferior to their
prototypes at Bruges and Ypres. The hall, or exchange, allotted to the
mercers, is two hundred and seventy-two feet in length, by fifty feet
wide: those for the drapers and for wool are, each of them, two hundred
feet long; and all these are surpassed in size by the corn-hall, whose
length extends to three hundred feet. They are built round a large
square, the centre of which is occupied by numberless dealers in
pottery, old clothes, &c.; and, as the day on which we chanced to visit
them was a Friday, when alone they are opened for public business, we
found a most lively, curious, and interesting scene.

It was on the top of a stone staircase, the present entry to the
_halles_, that the annual ceremony[53] of delivering and pardoning a
criminal for the sake of St. Romain, the tutelary protecto