have left the town
defenceless. Even to-day you can only get into Rouen, as into a town
that has been battered and taken by assault, through the breach in her
fortified lines. If you enter by the railway from Paris, from Havre,
from Dieppe or from Fecamp, it is by subterranean tunnels only that
approach is possible, and up a flight of steps that you make your
first acquaintance with a "coin perdu" of the town, a corner without
character, without size, without the least promise of the beauty that
is hidden further off. Of all those great gates through which the
mediaeval city welcomed her dukes or sallied out against her enemies,
but one is left, the Porte Guillaume Lion close by the quays, at the
end of the Rue des Arpents, which is as faded and decrepit as its
entrance.

To understand something of the origins of the town, it is far better
to come there for the first time by the river, by the highway that has
suffered least change since Rouen was a town at all. Yet the river
itself is cribbed within far narrower bounds than when the first huts
of savage fishermen were stuck upon the reed-beds of the marsh; for
the town was first set upon islets that have long ago been absorbed
into the mainland, and the waters of the Seine once washed the
boatmen's landing stages at a spot that now bounds the Parvis of the
Cathedral. Even now the Seine varies in breadth at this point from a
hundred and thirty-five to two hundred and fifteen metres, with a
depth of five metres on the quays at lowest tide. These tides are felt
as far as twenty miles above the town. They vary in height from one
metre to as much as three, and a tidal wave is formed that is one of
the greatest dangers of the downstream navigation. Coming up from the
sea is fairly easy in almost any kind of stout and steady craft, but
it is difficult for all but the best steamers to get down without
being delayed, and sometimes fairly stopped, by the great tidal wave
at Caudebec or Quilleboeuf. Only when the floods reduce their
strength are the tides unable to turn the current of the stream; and
flood water is not unusual in a country where the rain blows in so
often from the Channel.

There is an average of a hundred and fifty rainy days each year, the
late autumn being worst, for the clouds are attracted by the river, by
the forests, and by the hills that stand round about the city. But the
unhealthiness engendered by all this moisture is a thing of the past.
An enlight