Bayeux and its tapestry; its grave company of antique houses; its glorious cathedral dominating the whole--what a lovely old background against which poses the eternal modernness of the young noon sun! The history of Bayeux is commonly given in a paragraph. Our morning's walk had proved to us it was the kind of town that does more to re-create the historic past than all the pages of a Guizot or a Challamel.
The bells that were ringing out the hour of high-noon from the cathedral towers at Bayeux were making the heights of St. Lo, two hours later, as noisy as a village fair. The bells, for rivals, had the clatter of women's tongues. I think I never, before or since, have beheld so lively a company of washerwomen as were beating their clothes in Vire River. The river bends prettily just below the St. Lo heights, as if it had gone out of its way to courtesy to a hill. But even the waters, in their haste to be polite, could not course beneath the great bridge as swiftly as ran those women's tongues. There were a good hundred of them at work beneath the washing-sheds. Now, these sheds, anywhere in France, are really the open-air club room of the French peasant woman; the whole dish of the village gossip is hung out to dry, having previously been well soused and aired, along with the blouses and the coarse chemises. The town of St. Lo had evidently furnished these club members of the washing-stones with some fat dish of gossip--the heads were as close as currants on a stem, as they bent in groups over the bright waters. They had told it all to the stream; and the stream rolled the volume of the talk along as it carried along also the gay, sparkling reflections of the life and the toil that bent over it--of the myriad reflections of those moving, bare-armed figures, of the brilliant kerchiefs, of the wet blue and gray jerseys, and of the long prismatic line of the damp, motley-hued clothes that were fluttering in the wind.
The bells' clangor was an assurance that something was happening on top of the hill. Just what happened was as altogether pleasing a spectacle, after a long and arduous climb up a hillside, as it has often been my good fortune to encounter.
The portals of the church of Notre Dame were wide open. Within, as we looked over the shoulders of the townspeople who, like us, had come to see what the bells meant by their ringing, within the church there was a rich and sombre dusk; out of this dusk, indistinctly at first, lit by the tremulous flicker of a myriad of candles, came a line of white-veiled heads; then another of young boys, with faces as pale as the nosegays adorning their brand-new black coats; next the scarlet-robed choristers, singing, and behind them still others swinging incense that thickened the dusk. Suddenly, like a vision, the white veils passed out into the sunlight, and we saw that the faces beneath the veils were young and comely. The faces were still alternately lighted by the flare of the burning tapers and the glare of the noon sun. The long procession ended at last in a straggling group of old peasants with fine tremulous mouths, a-tremble with pride and with feeling; for here they were walking in full sight of their town, in their holiday coats, with their knees treacherously unsteady from the thrill of the organ's thunder and the sweetness of the choir-boys' singing.