the roof, the ground floor being arranged for open shops,
with the principal entrance at one side. Lelieur himself is shown (as
may be seen in his small view of Rouen which I have reproduced)
offering his manuscript to four municipal officers seated round their
council-table, with a clerk at a side-desk. The walls at the right and
at the back are panelled, and decorated on the left with fleurs de
lys.

The third Hotel de Ville was built when the old shops of the Rue de la
Grosse Horloge began to tumble down. In June 1607 the first stone was
laid according to the plans of Jacques Gabriel. By 1658 Gomboust's map
of Rouen shows that the facade on the street was finished. It was in
the Italian style with "rusticated" blocks of stone, and had round
arcades on the ground floor for shops. The building originally formed
a square, and the retreating angle may still be seen northwards from
the Rue de la Grosse Horloge. In the centre of the courtyard was a
statue of Louis XIV.; a chapel stood at the north-east with a
pyramidal steeple of wood covered with lead. A fountain was placed at
the east end (no doubt supplied by the old "puits"). In 1705 the entry
upon the Grosse Horloge was opened by Jacques Monthieu, just where
the Passage de l'Hotel de Ville is to-day. In 1796 the whole building
was sold to various proprietors for 72,000 livres.

Though it is very degraded in its present state, you can still see the
Doric and Ionic pilasters in couples, and the heavy circular tops
alternating with triangles above the windows; and though all those
parts of the decoration which jutted out have been destroyed, there is
still a massive dignity about the building that would have thoroughly
justified its better preservation. In any case the municipal
authorities might have had some memory of the traditions of the old
centre of their civic life, before they moved to the commonplace
erections on the north side of the Abbey Church of St. Ouen.

So, though little but the foundations remain of the original Hotel de
Ville in the Rue de la Grosse Horloge, yet the stones of its successor
are still there, and the belfry that rang out its messages is much
more than a name; so I have thought it convenient to attach to them a
few memories of the people of Rouen as they lived in the days before
the great changes of the sixteenth century. In my next two chapters I
shall have to pause for a moment over the English siege, and the death
of Jeanne d'Arc, bu