“Once a cathedral, always a cathedral” was the theory which led us to Lisieux _en route_ for Bayeux. It seemed almost as absurd that the great church of St. Pierre should not be counted a cathedral as that St. Etienne and the other churches of Caen should be churches and nothing more. In this respect, indeed, Lisieux takes precedence of Caen, for until the days of the Empire she had a bishopstool of her own, while Caen never actually possessed the dignity of an episcopal see. Lisieux is one stage further on the high road between French Normandy and Norman Normandy, and is some way over the Norman border; at Rouen, at Evreux even, we were in France, but here all around us, as at Bayeux, are signs and tokens of a land more closely akin to our own, and we feel that we have at last reached Normandy proper. Lisieux, both for its Cathedral and for itself, is full of interest. The general impression is that of a bright little place with a great deal of life--the life of shop and market--to be seen on all sides, but none of the modern commercial spirit, such as dominates a place like Rouen. There is a very mediæval air about Lisieux, and the old houses, of which there are plenty, are to be found not in out-of-the-way alleys, but in the chief streets. The Grande Rue has one magnificent specimen, now a boot-maker’s shop, opposite the Rue du Paradis; down at the bottom of the hill, in the Rue de Caen, is a house where Charlotte Corday spent the night on the way to Paris to fulfil her terrible mission, and the Rue aux Fèvres, where one seems to have walked straight into the Middle Ages, contains the “Manoir de François Ier,” a beautiful sixteenth-century house, from whose name one would at least suppose that François once spent a night there, whereas he probably never went near the place, and its chief claim to the title lies in the abundance of carved salamanders on the splendid house-front, and even these are mixed up with apes and other grotesque creatures. [Illustration: THE TOWER OF EVREUX] The Church of St. Jacques stands almost at the top of the hill, between the Rue St. Jacques and the Marché au Beurre, where most of the straggling streets converge. It was built in the last years of the fifteenth century, and is a fairly complete specimen of the French style of that period, standing upon a long, wide flight of steps, with a balustrade running completely round the building. The floor inside follows the slope of the hill, and slants upwards from west to east. The church contains some half-effaced frescoes on the nave pillars, and a very curious old painting on wood, representing the miraculous translation of St. Ursin’s relics to Lisieux in 1055. This picture hangs in a chapel in the south aisle, dedicated to St. Antony of Padua, not in St. Ursin’s own chapel, which is on the other side of the nave.