Rouen (France) -- Description and travel; Rouen (France) -- History
Though Henri Quatre could not get through the gates of Rouen while the
town remained faithful to the League, and considered him a heretic,
the sturdy citizens were ready enough to accept a king of their own
religion, and when the "Vert Galant" made his first solemn entry into
the place in 1596, they welcomed him as heartily as any of his
predecessors. You will remember that there were Englishmen with him
when he was trying to get into Rouen a few years before, and it was to
Rouen again that the Earl of Shrewsbury and a brilliant suite brought
the Queen of England's greeting to her cousin of France, and sent him
the famous Order of the Garter. The Ambassador was most appropriately
lodged in a very famous house in Rouen, which itself formed a
remarkably complete memorial of the friendship between the same two
thrones earlier in the century. The Maison Bourgtheroulde, at the
corner of the Place de la Pucelle and the Rue du Panneret, contains
indeed one of the best pictorial records that exists in Europe, not
only of the meeting of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, but also of the
decorations that were displayed there.
The house is a good example of the transition between "Gothic"
domestic architecture and that of the Renaissance. Built about the
same time as the Palais de Justice and the Bureau de Finances, it
formed a part of that brilliant series of beautiful dwellings in which
the early years of the sixteenth century at Rouen were so fruitful.
Its exterior facade upon the Place de la Pucelle is so terribly
changed and mutilated now, that unless you will refer to Lelieur's
drawing, reproduced with Chapter IX., no view of its present condition
can suggest to you the original design. Of that high roof with lofty
crested windows, of the side-turret at the angle of the street, of the
beautifully carved door, not a trace remains. The principal entrance
built on the old Marche aux Veaux was placed between two heavy
pillars, which had statues on them, and even before the traveller had
passed inside, these suggested to him the motive which underlies the
whole decoration of the house; for these are the two pillars which
were on each side of the English King's pavilion at the Field of the
Cloth of Gold. Whereof the one, in the words of the English
chronicler, was "intrayled with anticke works, the old god of wine
called Bacchus birlyng the wine, which by the conduits in the erthe
ran to all people plenteously with red, white, and claret wine, over
whose head was written in letters of Romayn in gold, 'Faicte bonne
chere qui vouldra.'" The other pillar was "of ancient Romayne work,
borne with four lions of gold ... and on the summit of the said piller
stood an image of the blynde God, Cupid, with his bowe and arrowes of
love, by hys seeming, to stryke the yonge people to love." But these
have gone, and so little is left of the beauty of the facade that it
really will require some courage to believe what I have just said, and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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