time Le
Mans has beheld no slight or unimportant warfare beneath its walls, and
that the city of Herbert and Helias bowed but yesterday to the power of
a third conquering William. Le Mans has lost something through the
foreign occupation, but the traveller needs to have it explained to him
what it has lost. When we hear that the Bishop's palace got burned by
the German invaders, it almost sounds as if Germans and Normans had got
confounded. But the damage wrought by the last conquerors is being
speedily made good on another site. It is the damage which is doing to
the city by the merciless hands of its own people that never can be made
good. One would have thought that the Cenomannian city on its height,
the proud line of its Roman bulwarks, the noble works of later days
which those bulwarks shelter, might have moved the heart of the most
ruthless of destroyers. It might have been a good work to clear away the
mean houses which cling to the Roman wall, and to let the mighty
rampart stand forth in all its majesty; but among those who have the
fate of the ancient city in their hands there is no thought of
preservation--destruction is the only object. We know not who are the
guilty ones. Perhaps there is some stuck-up Mayor or Prefect who would
think himself a great man if he could make Le Mans as ugly and
uninteresting as the dreary modern streets of Rouen or of Paris itself.
It is at all events certain that M. Haussmann was not long ago seen in
Le Mans, and such a presence at such a time is frightfully ominous. At
any rate the facts which can be seen by the traveller's own eyes are
beyond doubt. The later walls close by the river have been broken down
to leave fragments here and there as ornaments in a kind of garden, and,
worse still than this, the ancient wall has been broken through, and the
ancient city itself cleft in twain. By an amount of labour which reminds
one of Trajan cutting through the Quirinal, _la Cite_ has been cut into
two halves with a yawning gulf between them; the Roman wall is broken
through, and the very best of the twelfth-century houses has been
ruthlessly swept away. The excuse for this brutal havoc is to make a
road or street of some kind direct from the modern town to the river. If
the savages could have been persuaded to pay a visit to Devizes, they
might there have learned that the claims of past and present may be
reconciled. There the simple device of a tunnel carries the railway
under the