How many a traveller moves from place to place, not realising anything beyond the transportation of his body! Yet in every town there is this fresh acquaintance, this lifelong friendship, that shall last while his own memory lasts, that is as fresh for him as for a thousand before him, and for tens of thousands after. When the bells of an unknown city have given me their first greeting, my first acknowledgment of that compelling invitation is to see those buildings in the town that can become alive again beneath their echoes. Of such churches, of such civic buildings, of private houses, of monuments by unknown hands for unknown owners, Rouen is full in almost all her streets. "La dans le passe tu peux vivre Chaque monument est un livre Chaque pierre un souvenir." The history of the Middle Ages is written upon magnificent and enduring volumes, and a great responsibility is laid on those who would deface the writing on the wall. Their virtues and vices, their jests and indecencies, their follies and their fears, are all writ large upon the pages of a book that was ever open to every passer-by, and that remains for us to read. It is no rhetorical exaggeration, that "_Ceci tuera cela_" of Victor Hugo. Our smaller doings are recorded in the perishable print of fading paper, and we have no care to stamp what little we have left of character upon our buildings. No one, at least it may be fervently hoped, will try in the future to reconstruct the ideals or the life of the Victorian Era from its architecture. Yet we are the heirs of all that is noblest in that greatest of all arts; and if you would test that, you need only look at any mediaeval French Cathedral with a seeing eye. You will find no meaningless mass of bricks and mortar, but the speaking record of the age that built them. "The stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber shall answer it." [Illustration] CHAPTER II _The First City_ "Latera aquilonis civitas regis magni Deus in domibus eius cognoscetur cum suscipiet eam."