At a corner of the market-place at Rouen, there stood, but a few years
ago, one of the most picturesque houses in all Normandy, and with a
story (if we are to believe the old chroniclers) as pathetic as any in
history.

It was from a door in this house that, in the year 1431, the unfortunate
Joan of Arc was led out to be 'burned as a sorceress' before the people
of Rouen. We need not dwell upon the story of the 'fair maid of
Orleans,' which every child has by heart, but (mindful of our
picturesque mission) we should like to carry the reader in imagination
to the same spot just four hundred years later, when an English artist,
heedless of the crowd that collects around him, sits down in the street
to sketch the lines of the old building, already tottering to ruin.
Faithfully and patiently does the artist draw the old gables, the unused
doorway, the heavy awnings, the piles of wood, the market-women, and the
grey perspective of the side street with its pointed roofs, curious
archways and oil lantern swinging from house to house; and as faithfully
(even to the mis-spelling of the word 'liquer,' on a board over the
doorway) almost indeed, with the touch of the artist's pencil, has the
engraver reproduced, by means of photography, the late Samuel Prout's
drawing on the frontispiece of this volume.[41]

Few artists have succeeded, as Prout succeeded, in giving the character
of the old buildings in Normandy, and certainly no other drawings with
which we are acquainted, admit of being photographed as his do, without
losing effect. It is scarcely too much to say that in this engraving we
can distinguish the different washes of colour, the greys and warmer
tints, the broad touches of his pencil on the white caps of the women,