Rouen, sometimes called the second city in the kingdom, carried on a large trade, but it had not yet become the “Manchester” of France. It had four yearly fairs, and its quays were crowded with ships, sometimes as many as two hundred “small vessels” being there at the same time.[205] Then, as now, the poorer people drank no wine but “bira di pere e poma.” When Henry II. and Catherine visited Rouen in 1550, the citizens welcomed them with a remarkable ballet or masque. The banks of the Seine were transformed so as to present a picture of Brazilian life. There is an old wood-cut representing the curious scene. A meadow, sloping down to the river, is planted with trees, colored and trimmed so as to resemble those of South American forests. Parroquets and other gaily-colored birds are flying about them, and apes and monkeys clambering among the branches. The natives are represented by three hundred mariners of Rouen, Dieppe, and Havre, who, unencumbered with the slightest clothing, are hunting, dancing, and fighting with as much animation as the fifty “real savages just arrived from America.” Offensive as the exhibition would be to our tastes, it was otherwise in the sixteenth century. The queen was delighted “aux jolys esbatements et schyomachie des sauvages.”[206] A somewhat similar but less undraped scene was represented before Charles IX. when he visited Bordeaux in April, 1565. Representatives--most of them stage representatives--of twelve nations defiled before him, among them being some real “Canarians, savages, Americans, Brazilians, and Taprobanians,” each speaking in his native tongue. A picture was painted to perpetuate the memory of the scene.[207] Bordeaux was a wealthy city, its foreign trade extensive, its population so numerous that it could furnish 10,000 fighting men, and its parliament ranked next after Paris and Toulouse.