little centuries and a half ago. Besieged and taken, burned and ravaged,
alternately by Protestant and Catholic, no wonder our ville has not even
ruins to show that we are older than the fifteen hundreds. Still,
ancient though we are, we have always been a ville of humble
folk,--hardy sailors, brave fishers, and thrifty bourgeois,--and to-day,
as always, our highest families buy and sell and build their philistine
homes back toward the _côte_, while our humble ones picturesquely
haunt the _quais_.

The town is exquisitely situated at the foot of abrupt _côtes_,
just where the broad and tranquil river shudders with mysterious deep
heavings and meets its dolphin-hued death in the all-devouring sea. Away
off in the shimmering distance is the second seaport city of France. On
still days,--and our gray or golden Norman days are almost always
still,--faint muffled sounds of life, the throbbing of factories, the
farewell boom of cannon from ships setting forth across the Atlantic,
even the musical notes of the Angelus, float across the water to us as
dreamily vague as perhaps our earth-throbs and passion-pulses reach a
world beyond the clouds. This city is our metropolis, with which we are
connected by small steamers crossing to and fro with the tide, and where
all our shopping is done, our own ville being too thoroughly limited and
_roturier_ in taste to merit many of our shekels.

In fact, such of our shopping as is done in our ville is in the quaint
marketplace, where black house-walls are beetling and bent, and
Sainte-Cathérine's ancient wooden tower stands the whole width of the
Place away from its Gothic church. Here we bargain and chaffer with
towering _bonnets blancs_ for peasant pottery and faïence,
paintable half-worn stuffs, and delicious ancestral odds and ends of
broken peasant households.