Commend me to an attic window to put one in sympathetic relations with cathedral spires! At this height we and they, for a part of their flight upward, at least, were on a common level--and we all know what confidences come about from the accident of propinquity. They seemed to assure us as never before when sitting at their feet, the difficulties they had overcome in climbing heavenward. Every stone that looked down upon the city wore this look of triumph.
In the end it was this Caen in the air--it was this aerial city of finials, of towers, of peaked spires, of carved chimneys, of tree-tops over which the clouds rode; of a plain, melting--like a sea--into the mists of the horizon; this high, bright region peopled with birds and pigeons; of a sky tender, translucent, and as variable as human emotions; of an air that was rapture to breathe, and of nights in which the stars were so close they might almost be handled; it was this free, hilly city of the roofs that is still the Caen I remember best.
There were other features of Caen that were good to see, I also remember. Her street expression, on the whole, was very pleasing. It was singularly calm and composed, even for a city in a plain. But the quiet came, doubtless, from its population being away at the races. The few townspeople who, for obvious reasons, were stay-at-homes, were uncommonly civil; Caen had evidently preserved the tradition of good manners. An army of cripples was in waiting to point the way to the church doors; a regiment of beggars was within them, with nets cast already for the catching of the small fry of our pennies. In the gay, geranium-lit garden circling the side walls of St. Pierre there were many legless soldiers; the old houses we went to see later on in the high street seemed, by contrast, to have survived other wars, those of the Directory and the Mountain, with a really scandalous degree of good fortune. On our way to a still greater church than St. Pierre, to the Abbaye aux Dames, that, like the queen who built her, sits on the throne of a hill--on our way thither we passed innumerable other ancient mansions. None of these were down in the guide books; they were, therefore, invested with the deeper charm of personal discovery. Once away from the little city of the shops, the real Caen came out to greet us. It was now a gray, sad, walled town; behind the walls, level-browed Francis I. windows looked gravely over the tufts of verdure; here was an old gateway; there what might once have been a portcullis, now only an arched wreath of vines; still beyond, a group of severe-looking mansions with great iron bound windows presented the front of miniature fortresses. And everywhere gardens and gardens.