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OULOGNE is perhaps too near the starting point to arrest the outward-bound traveller; he ranks it with Calais, Dieppe, and Havre, as a place to be passed through as quickly as possible; and the splendid train service to Paris naturally makes him hesitate to break his journey at Boulogne. The general tendency in England is to despise the French railway service, and some guide-books even now tell us that the average speed of a French express is from thirty-five to forty-five miles an hour, also that the trains invariably pass each other on the left-hand side. As a matter of fact, all the main lines follow the same rule of the road which obtains in England, and as to average speed, the run from Calais to Paris equals, if it does not exceed, that of any long-distance train-service in our own country, covering the distance of 185 miles at the rate of fifty-six miles an hour.

As a seaport and fishing centre, Boulogne is one of the most interesting and important towns in France; and its fishing-boats sail out in great numbers to the North Sea for the cod fishery along the north coast of Scotland. When the herring fishing begins, Boulogne adds its contingent to the fleets of Cornwall, to the luggers of the West Coast, and to the cobbles of Whitby; and on the eve of the departure to the fishing-ground, the fisherman’s quarter, known as La Beurière, is alive with the orgies of its sailor population. Dancing takes place on the quays, and short entertainments are held in an improvised theatre, while the rich brown-ochre sails of the splendid luggers and smacks are stretched from deck to deck, forming an awning under which the owners and captains meet together with their friends to wish success to the undertaking of those who “go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters.”

Boulogne has the reputation of being the most Anglicised of French towns, and was in years gone by often associated with the seamy side of society. Many a stranger found here a convenient refuge, and Mr. Deuceace and other of Thackeray’s heroes enjoyed the sea breezes of Boulogne after the mental strain of somewhat questionable financial manœuvres.

THE PORTE GAYOLE, BOULOGNE

The city walls, restored in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, date back to 1231, and were built on the foundations of the ancient town of Bononia, generally identified with the Roman Gesoriacum, though not on very reliable authority. From its position on the high grassy cliffs of Picardy, guarding the little river Liane and looking out over the waves to the white line of the English shore, Boulogne in other days had an importance quite distinct from that which we now assign to it. The Viking sailing down the English Channel saw it as one of the outposts of a new and fair land open to the conquest of fire and sword, and in his primitive fashion of asserting the mastery, destroyed the city on the cliff. Later on, these ravages were made good under the rule of Rolf, the “Ganger,” by this time master of Neustria; the city was restored and became the head of a countship, which dignity it retained until late in the fifteenth century, when Louis XI. cast envious eyes upon it, and by a stroke of craft approaching near to genius, united it to the crown of France, declaring the Blessed Virgin to be patroness of the town and himself her humble vassal, holding it under her suzerainty, which no man in France dared to deny. Henry VIII. laid siege to Boulogne in 1544 and gained it for England; but the day of English prestige in France had gone by, and her right of possession was of very short duration, for in the next reign Boulogne was given back to France, and Calais alone remained to England of the spoils of the Hundred Years’ War.

Above the present town rises the monument known as the “Colonne de la Grande Armée,” a memorial of the first Napoleon’s encampment at Boulogne in 1804, and of his magnificent preparations for the invasion of England. In the Château, which dates from the thirteenth century and is now used as barracks, Napoleon III. was confined after his abortive descent upon the town in 1840. It was the second of these desperate attempts to dethrone the “constitutional king” Louis Philippe and reinstate the Imperial dynasty. The expedition to Strasburg four years before had at least been attended by this much success, that the young aspirant was enthusiastically welcomed by the military portion of the population; but the descent upon Boulogne, planned at the time when the body of the first Emperor was being brought from St. Helena to Paris, was a failure from first to last. The little band of conspirators, about fifty in number, with their tame eagle—a symbol of the Imperial power—landed at the port, but found no adherents, and within a few hours of their landing were under arrest. Napoleon himself underwent trial before the Chamber of Peers, and after a short imprisonment, as we have seen, in the Château, was sent to the castle of Ham-sur-Somme.

Three out of the four original gates of the ancient city still remain, notably the Porte Gayole, the rooms in whose flanking towers were at one time used as prisons. In the room above the gateway were formerly held the meetings of the Guyale, a réunion of ancient associations of merchants—what would now be called a chamber of commerce—and from this the gate-house was called Porte Gayole.

Of the cathedral at Boulogne it is difficult to speak with any enthusiasm. It stands as a memorial of the Renaissance work of that period which we should call early Victorian; but like so many modern churches, it possesses an ancient crypt, part of which belongs to the twelfth century, showing that the foundations at least are those of a Gothic church, which was probably destroyed during the Revolution.

On the journey to Amiens the train passes through Abbeville on the Somme, a place some sixty years ago sacred to geologists, who, led by the distinguished Boucher de Perthes, Prestwick and Evans, extracted from the river bed and neighbouring peat and undisturbed gravels, not only remains of beaver, bear, &c., but also innumerable hand-fashioned flints and stone hatchets, and made the valley of the Somme up to Amiens and St. Acheul classic ground to the antiquary and an object of pilgrimage to the student of pre-historic man.

In the early days of the Frank kings this quiet little town upon the Somme had acquired enough importance for fortification, and its city walls were built by Hugh Capet. Later on, after Peter the Hermit had lifted up his voice in Europe, and every man who called himself a true warrior turned his face eastward to Palestine, Abbeville was destined to play her part in the affairs of the great world outside her walls, and to share in the fortunes of that company of men whose watchword was “Jerusalem.” In the first two Crusades, when the crusading spirit was as yet ardent and pure and had not degenerated into a desire for plunder and rapine, the leaders met within the gates of Abbeville before setting out to the Holy Land.

One can well imagine the stir their presence made within the quiet precincts of the little town, the excitement of the townfolk, the eager crowding of the youth of the place around the standards of these great chiefs, Godfrey de Bouillon, destined to become king of Jerusalem; dark, passionate Robert of Normandy, son of the Conqueror; Hugh of Vermandois, brother to the King of France; Stephen of Blois; Raymond of Toulouse; Robert of Flanders, he who was called the “Sword and Lance of the Christians”; and, lastly, Tancred the chivalrous, the very embodiment of the spirit of the crusaders—and a “very perfect, gentle knight.”

For nearly two hundred years the English ruled Abbeville. When, in 1272, Eleanor of Castile was married to Prince Edward, afterwards Edward I., the town was included in the estates which she brought to England as her dowry; and being near the sea coast, and consequently within easy reach of England, its new lords were able to retain their hold upon the city even after the disastrous close of the Hundred Years’ War had given almost every English conquest back to France. Towards the end of the fifteenth century it fell into the hands of the Burgundian party, but the French crown finally reclaimed it in 1477. Since that time it has twice seen an international alliance concluded within its gates. In 1514, Anne of Brittany, the wife of Louis XII.—“Pater Patria”—died without having an heir in the direct line, and her husband, unwilling that the crown should go to François d’Angoulême, determined to take another wife, and made advances to Henry VIII. for the hand of his beautiful sister, Mary Tudor; and after the negotiations were completed, they were married at Abbeville. As far as Louis’s purpose went, however, the marriage was a failure, as the King died a few months later, and the Duc d’Angoulême, his son-in-law, ascended his throne as François I^er. To his reign belongs the second alliance in the history of Abbeville, the pact signed between the King of France and Cardinal Wolsey, on behalf of Henry VIII., against the common enemy, Charles V.—a figure so commanding, so infinitely greater than his contemporaries, that beside him the brilliancy of François, the gallantry of Henry, and the pomp and magnificence of his favourite Wolsey, seemed entirely eclipsed, and the three men appear almost as puppets, unstable and vacillating, now the closest of friends, and now the bitterest of enemies.

Abbeville still maintains many of the old picturesque landmarks which made it a favourite sketching ground for Prout and for Ruskin. The market-place is surrounded by a number of houses with high pitched gables, coloured in various tints of white, grey and pale green. Some beautiful drawings by Ruskin, executed in pencil and tint, which have lately been exhibited to the public, bear testimony to its picturesqueness, of which a great deal still remains in the side streets and along the river front.

ABBEVILLE

The church of St. Wolfran is late Flamboyant, and is looked upon by Ruskin as “a wonderful proof of the fearlessness of a living architecture,” for, say what one will of it, that Flamboyant of France, however morbid, was as vivid and intense in its imagination as ever any phase of mortal mind. The nave consists of bays having a high clerestory and a triforium screened by rich sixteenth century carving. The ribs of the vaulting fall sheer down without imposts or break of any kind. The low chancel and eastern termination of the church are unworthy of the splendid carving of the western façade.

The approach to Amiens offers no coup d’œil of clustering towers or spires such as an English or Norman cathedral city usually gives us, and the Cathedral itself is hidden as we pass into the heart of the town along the Rue des Trois Cailloux, a street which is said to follow the alignment of the old city walls. Ruskin advises the traveller, however short his time may be, to devote it, not to the contemplation of arches and piers and coloured glass, but to the woodwork of the chancel, which he considers the most beautiful carpenter’s work of the Flamboyant period. Note should be taken of two windows in the Chapel of the Cardinal de la Grange, built about 1375. These are very interesting as foreshadowing in their detail that style of architecture—the Flamboyant—which obtained in France in the fifteenth century and was contemporaneous with the English Perpendicular.

The two western towers look little more than heavily built buttresses, and as towers are not very appropriate in design, being not square, but oblong in plan. They rise little above the ridge line of the nave, whose crossing with the transepts is marked by a beautiful flèche, which Ruskin, however, describes as “merely the caprice of a village carpenter.” As he further declares, the Cathedral of Amiens is “in dignity inferior to Chartres, in sublimity to Beauvais, in decorative splendour to Rheims, and in loveliness of figure sculpture to Bourges,” yet it fully deserves the name given to it by Viollet-le-Duc—“The Parthenon of Gothic architecture.”

THE PLACE VOGEL, AMIENS

The height of the nave and aisles is, according to Mr. Francis Bond in his book “Gothic Architecture in England,” respectively nearly three times their span, and the vastness of the fenestration is very striking, particularly in the clerestory, through whose lower mouldings the triforium is negotiated, thus dividing each bay into two storeys, clerestory and pier arch, instead of into three, clerestory triforium and pier arch. This gives the effect after which the French architect strove: one vast blaze of light and colour through the upper windows, coming not only from the clerestory, but from the glazed triforium also; the magnificent deep blue glass typifying the splendour of the heavens. On the other hand, in a sunny clime, builders cared less for light, and preferred the effect of a blind triforium which throws the choir below into gloomy and mysterious shadow. Thus we see that upon the design of the triforium depends to a very great extent the effect of the light and shade of the interior of a great church.

Once, being personally conducted by the dean over one of the cathedrals of the west of England, the writer was suddenly called upon to give the derivation of “triforium.” The word is applied to the ambulatory or passage, screened by an arcade, which runs between the pier arches and clerestory windows, and is considered to refer to the three openings, or spaces, trinæ fores, into which the arcading was sometimes divided. It probably has nothing to do with openings in multiples of three, nor with a Latinised form of “thoroughfare,” as suggested in Parker’s Glossary, although the main idea is that of a passage running round the inside of a church, either as at Westminster, in the form of an ambulatory chamber, or of a gallery pierced through the main walls, from whence the structure can be inspected without the trouble of using ladders or erecting scaffolding. M. Enlart in his “Manuel d’Archéologie Française,” derives the word from a French adjective “trifore,” or “trifoire,” through the Latin “transforatus,” a passage pierced through the thickness of the wall; and this idea of a passage-way is certainly suggested by an old writer, Gervase, who, in his description of the new Cathedral of Canterbury, rebuilt after the fire, alludes to the increased number of passages round the church under the word “triforia.” “Ibi triforium unum, hic duo in choro, et in alâ ecclesiæ tercium.”

On the north side of the Cathedral flows the Somme, and there is perhaps no better means of realising the great height and mass of the building than by walking along the river banks, whence we see the old houses, great and small, rise tier above tier under the quiet grey outline of this “giant in repose.”

EVENING ON THE SOMME AT AMIENS

In an extract from his private diary Ruskin gives the following description of this walk along the river, showing it in an aspect at once squalid and picturesque: “Amiens, May 11th.—I had a happy walk here this afternoon, down among the branching currents of the Somme: it divides into five or six, shallow, green, and not over-wholesome; some quite narrow and foul, running beneath clusters of fearful houses, reeling masses of rotten timber; and a few mere stumps of pollard willow sticking out of the banks of soft mud, only retained in shape of bank by being shored up with timbers; and boats like paper boats, nearly as thin at least, for the costermongers to paddle about in among the weeds, the water soaking through the lath bottoms, and floating the dead leaves from the vegetable baskets with which they were loaded. Miserable little back yards, opening to the water, with steep stone steps down to it, and little platforms for the ducks; and separate duck staircases, composed of a sloping board with cross bits of wood leading to the ducks’ doors; and sometimes a flower-pot or two on them, or even a flower—one group, of wall-flowers and geraniums, curiously vivid, being seen against the darkness of a dyer’s backyard, who had been dyeing black, and all was black in his yard but the flowers, and they fiery and pure; the water by no means so, but still working its way steadily over the weeds, until it narrowed into a current strong enough to turn two or three windmills, one working against the side of an old Flamboyant Gothic church, whose richly traceried buttresses sloped down into the filthy stream; all exquisitely picturesque, and no less miserable. We delight in seeing the figures in these boats, pushing them about the bits of blue water, in Prout’s drawings; but as I looked to-day at the unhealthy face and melancholy mien of the man in the boat pushing his load of peat along the ditch, and of the people, men as well as women, who sat spinning gloomily at the cottage doors, I could not help feeling how many persons must pay for my picturesque subject and happy walk.”

In his “Miscellaneous Studies” Walter Pater says: “The builders of the Church seem to have projected no very noticeable towers; though it is conventional to regret their absence, especially with visitors from England, where indeed cathedral and other towers are apt to be good and really make their mark. … The great western towers are lost in the west front, the grandest, perhaps the earliest, of its species—three profound sculptured portals; a double gallery above, the upper gallery carrying colossal images of twenty-two kings of the house of Judah, ancestors of our Lady; then the great rose; above it the singers’ gallery, half marking the gable of the nave, and uniting at their topmost storeys the twin, but not exactly equal or similar towers, oddly oblong in plan as if meant to carry pyramids or spires. In most cases, those early Pointed churches are entangled, here and there, by the construction of the old round-arched style, the heavy, Norman or other, Romanesque chapel or aisle, side by side, though in strange contrast, with the soaring new Gothic nave or transept. But the older manner of the round arch, the plein-cintre, Amiens has nowhere or almost nowhere, a trace. The Pointed style, fully pronounced, but in all the purity of its first period, found here its completest expression.”