If you are content to let me guide you further among the many buildings, whose very origin I have not yet had time to trace, you will find that to nearly every one of them may be attached some brilliant episode that stands out in a century, or some overshadowing personage whose life-story dominates a generation of his fellow-citizens. So that, as we visit these old walls together, they shall speak to us in no uncertain voice, of the lives of those who built them, and of the progress of the town. Until now, there have been but few buildings to which I could point as the visible witnesses of my written word. So that my story has had to proceed but slowly on its way, without the illustration which your eyes in Rouen streets could give it, making a gradual ground-work of which there are hardly any traces left. But with the building of the Cathedral I have reached a point where the tale of civic, or religious, or private houses that are still to be seen, is the tale of Rouen, told on pages well-nigh imperishable. These mile-stones on our road henceforth become so frequent, that in passing from one to the other, I shall have hardly any need to fill the gaps in a history that is at once more modern, and more easily understood. And as we left off with the highest expression of religious fervour, the Cathedral, we may well pass on, for the sake of contrast, to the most visible sign of purely municipal development, the belfry of the old Hotel de Ville, the famous buildings of the Rue de la Grosse Horloge. CHAPTER VII _La Rue de la Grosse Horloge_ Une rue delicieuse ou le monde se pourmene, ou tousiours il y ha du vent, de l'umbre et du soleil, de la pluye et de l'amour. Ha! Ha! riez doncques, allez-y doncques! c'est une rue tousiours neufve, tousiours royale, tousiours imperiale, une rue patrioticque, une rue a deux trottoirs, une rue ouverte des deux bouts ... brief, c'est la royne des rues, tousiours entre la terre et le ciel, une rue a fontaine, une rue a laquelle rien ne manque pour estre celebree parmi les rues.