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strays from home.
I find nothing harder to realize than that this was the country of the French Revolution and that all these country churches were gutted then.
August 5. En route
With real regret I have torn myself away from this charming place and feel quite lonely for a moment at quitting the Hennessys. . . . I had an hour at Lisieux, which was delightful.
Of the two churches I could only see St. Jacques, not the cathedral.
But the old houses fulfilled my visions of Normandy picturesque.
They are quite beyond Honfleur, and there is a single house which eclipses all in Chester — the house of the Salamander in a very narrow street.
It is four stories high, not large, but the woodwork absolutely covered with the quaintest old carving; every timber end and upright has weird faces or figures, sometimes in very high relief, the whole crowned by a great salamander, which seems crawling down from the ridgepole-this creature being the crest of King Francis the First, to whom it belonged.
Beneath that roof Pierre Ronsard and Clement Marot very probably sang and caroused and then went to confession in the old church near by. Now the house is almost tottering and the lower part is a clothing store of the cheap grade.
I lifted a coarse frock marked three francs to enter the door where the beauty who threw the glove to the lion may have passed out (see Browning's poem “The glove” ).From Normandy Colonel Higginson strayed into the borderland of Germany and Switzerland.
