nons left the main block of Cathedral-buildings to go into
lodgings in this quarter so near at hand, they still kept their oven,
their granary, and their common cellar in the Cour d'Albane. This
quiet little quadrangle is one of the prettiest nooks of old Rouen,
and I am fortunate enough to be able to show in the drawing on p. 218
how well worth while it is to find the entrance to it just north of
the Tour St. Romain in the angle of the Rue des Quatre Vents. It was
probably first built for cloisters and a cemetery, and afterwards used
merely as a "deambulatorium." But the bakery of the chapterhouse,
which remained here for so long, was always renowned for the purity
and goodness of its bread, and loaves from it were often presented to
distinguished visitors on occasions when the civic authorities were
obliged either to rise to jewellery or to descend to nuts. The "Salle
Capitulaire," now being restored from M. Sauvageot's designs, used
also to open on the cloister, and in it the canons transacted their
temporal and spiritual business, including their famous choice for the
Fierte St. Romain, and their trials of ecclesiastical prisoners.
Crimes of "outsiders" committed within the Cathedral limits were tried
by a special tribunal in the Porter's Lodge, and he guarded the
prisoners in the dungeon beneath the Tour St. Romain. Another more
interesting duty of the same official was to care, during daytime, for
the dogs who were loosed in the Cathedral at night to keep out
sacrilegious robbers, a custom which lasted down to 1760. But the Cour
d'Albane took its name from the founder of that school for choir-boys
with which it is most intimately associated now. Pierre de Colmieu,
the Archbishop from 1236 to 1245, was also Cardinal d'Albano, and from
him was named the institution he endowed to educate three priests,
three deacons, and four subdeacons. Paid singers were unknown at that
time; the services were long and pompous, and it took some time to
learn them, so these men, all over twenty-one, were chosen as much for
their ability to read and sing as for their good conduct. They
benefited again in 1401 by the bequests of Jacques Cave, who is buried
beneath the Tour de Beurre. There were seven of these singers in 1440,
and it was one of Jeanne d'Arc's judges, Gilles Deschamps, who left
money to provide the little choir-boys with the red caps they wear to
this day to keep their little shaved heads from the cold. In 1459
painters a