All this time the bells are ringing at intervals, and omnibuses loaded with holiday people rattle past with shouting and cracking of whips.  The old fashion and the new become mingled and confused, old white caps and Parisian bonnets, old ceremonies and modern ways; the Norman peasant and the English school-girl walk side by side in the crowd, whilst the western door of the Church of St. Pierre, to which they are tending, bears in flaming characters the name of a vendor of ’modes parisiennes’ Men, women, and children, in gay and new attire, fill the streets and quite outnumber those of the peasant class; the black coat and hat predominate on fete days; a play-bill is thrust into our hands announcing the performance of an opera in the evening, and we are requested frequently to partake of coffee, syrop, and bonbons as we make our way through the Rue St. Pierre and across the crowded square.

Stay here for a moment and witness a little episode—­another accidental collision between the old world and the new.

[Illustration]

An undergraduate, just arrived from England on the ‘grand tour,’ gets into a wrangle with an old woman in the market-place; an old woman of nearly eighty years, with a cap as old and ideas as primitive as her dress, but with a sense of humour and natural combativeness that enables her to hold her own in lively sallies and smart repartees against her youthful antagonist.[18] It is a curious contrast, the wrinkled old woman of Caen and the English lad—­the one full of the realities and cares of life; born in revolutionary days, and remembering in her childhood Charlotte Corday going down this very street on her terrible mission to Paris; her daughters married, her only son killed in war, her life now (it never was much else) an uneventful round of market days, eating and sleeping, knitting and prayers; the other—­young, careless, fresh to the world, his head stored with heathen mythology, the loves of the Gods, and problems of Euclid—­taking a light for his pipe from the old woman, and airing his French in a discussion upon a variety of topics, from the price of apples to the cost of a dispensation; the conversation merging finally into a regular religious discussion, in which the disputants were more abroad than ever,—­a religion outwardly represented, in the one case by so many chapels, in the other by so many beads.

It is a ‘fete’ to day (according to a notice pasted upon a stone pillar) ‘avec Indulgence pleniere,’

  GRAND MESSE a 10 a.m.,
  LES VEPRES a 3 p.m.,
  SALUT ET BENEDICTION DU SACRAMENT,
  SERMON, &c.’

Let us now follow the crowd (up the street we saw in the illustration) into the Church of St. Pierre, which is already overflowing with people coming and going, pushing past each other through the baize door, dropping sous into the ‘tronc pour les pauvres,’ and receiving, with bowed head and crossed breast, the holy water, administered with a brush.