The ‘Fete of the three Kings’ (a remnant of a custom in the time of the Druids) is still religiously observed by its inhabitants, and incantations and ceremonies are kept up by the country people around Bayeux, especially on the eve of this fete.  The time is winter, and around the town of Bayeux (as many visitors may have noticed) a curious fog or mist hangs over the fields and the neighbouring gardens, through which the towers of the cathedral are seen like phantoms; it is then that the peasants light their torches, and both priests and people wander in procession through the fields, singing in a loud, but mournful tone, a strange and quaint ditty.  Thus their fields and the crops (which they are about to sow) will be productive, and a good harvest bless the land!

We are still in the middle ages at Bayeux, we believe implicitly in witches, in good omens, and in fairy rings; we are told gravely by an old inhabitant that a knight of Argouges, near Bayeux, was protected by a good fairy in his encounter with some great enemy, and we are shewn, in proof of the assertion, the family arms of the house of Argouges, with a female figure in the costume of Lady Godiva of Coventry, and the motto, a la fee; and we hear so many other romantic stories of the dark ages, that history at last becomes enveloped in a cloud of haze, like the town of Bayeux itself on a winter’s night.

We must now pass from the region of romance and fable to its very antipodes in realism; to the examination of a strip of fine linen cloth of the colour of brown holland, which is exhibited in the Public Library at Bayeux.

[Illustration]

This world-renowned relic of antiquity, which Dibdin half-satirically describes as ’an exceedingly curious document of the conjugal attachment and enthusiastic veneration of Matilda,’ is now kept with the greatest care, and is displayed on a stand under a glass case, in its entire length, 227 feet.  It is about 20 inches wide, and is divided into 72 compartments.  Every line is expressed by coarse stitches of coloured thread or worsted, of which this arrow’s head is a facsimile, and the figures are worked in various colours, the groundwork and the flesh tints being generally left white.  The extraordinary preservation of the tapestry, when we consider, not only the date of the work, but the vicissitudes to which it has been subjected, is so remarkable, that the spectator is disposed to ask to see the ‘original,’ feeling sure that this fresh, bright-looking piece of work cannot have lasted thus for eight hundred years.  And when we remember that it was carried from town to town by order of Napoleon I., and also exhibited on the stage on certain occasions; that it has survived the Revolution, and that the cathedral, which it was originally intended to adorn, has long been levelled with the ground, we cannot help approaching it with more than ordinary interest; an interest in which the inhabitants, and even the ecclesiastics of Bayeux, scarcely seem to share.  It was but a few years ago that the priests of the cathedral, when asked by a traveller to be permitted to see the tapestry, were unable to point it out; they knew that the ‘toile St. Jean,’ as it is called, was annually displayed in the Cathedral on St. John’s Day, but of its historical and antiquarian interest they seemed to take little heed.