Finally, we find the Girondist party flying from the “Convention” at Paris and setting up an insurrection in the provinces, making Caen their headquarters; and one more page from the awful book of the Revolution shows us Charlotte Corday setting out from Caen, grim, ungirlish, filled only with her dreadful purpose, down the long, white road to Paris--which to her meant Marat. Chapter Seven SAINT-LÔ AND COUTANCES In very early days there was in Northern Gaul a little city on a hill-top, with a river running below, and this city was called Briovira, after the name of the river Vire. But in Christian times a certain bishop of Coutances, a native of Briovira, extended his pastoral protection to his birthplace, and called it by his own name, Laudus, or Lô, by which it is known to this day, although the bishopstool has no longer a place there. Saint-Lô does not strike one, either at first sight or afterwards, as being a cathedral city. The first view, from the railway, is a very rural one, and from an artist’s point of view the place is more or less ideal, possessing as it does two important qualifications of a “paintable” town--it has a river, and it stands on a hill. Only the outskirts of Saint-Lô lie about the waterside; the real town is higher up on the steep frowning cliff, and the Rue Torteron straggles across the bridge and up the hill, and finally, by means of a steep little alley, leads out into the Place Ferrier, where stands the Cathedral. Here, too, the Saturday market is held, and then the hill-top, usually quiet and deserted, blossoms into life, and the Rue Torteron is all a-clatter with farmers’ carts and the scurry of _sabots_. The western half of the market-place is known as the “Place des Beaux-Regards,” and from it, as its name testifies, stretches a wide view of the river, fields, and wooded hills beyond; here, also, is the fountain, crowned by Leduc’s graceful bronze peasant-girl, with water-vessel poised easily over her shoulder. Saint-Lô was a Huguenot stronghold during the wars of the League, and the cliff-face still retains a fragment of the old defences, the Tour Beauregard, an ivy-covered ruin clinging to the rock, which probably served as a watch-tower in times when the meadows of the Vire were not so peaceful as they are to-day.