On one of these bars, ultimately covered by the sea, was placed the following inscription:
"Louis XVI.--Sur ce premier cone échoue le 6 Juin 1794, a vu l'immersion de celui de l'est, le 23 Juin 1786."
With the completion of the new harbour works, the hitherto dull city of Cherbourg took on a new lease of life. New streets and new houses were built; but, in spite of the present-day signs of progress and activity, there is little here to appeal to the imaginative person.
The undertaking was a prodigious one for the time, and the famous dike or breakwater was only recently completed, at a total cost of 62,500,000 francs. It took more than fifty years of constant labour, and four million cubic feet of stone, and encloses an area of a thousand _hectares_.
Cherbourg has one valuable architectural monument, the fourteenth-century Church of the Trinity. It was consecrated in 1504 and restored in our own day. The interior has really fine decorations.
The Henry Art Museum, named after its founder, contains a rather bulky and ill-assorted lot of paintings of no particular merit or fame, except a Van Eyck, a Poussin, an alleged Murillo, and a few minor works of the Dutch and Italian schools.
The suburbs of Cherbourg, toward the tip of the peninsula, form one of the most unspoiled and little travelled corners of modern France.
Near Cherbourg on the peninsula of the Hague, in the parish of Greville, is the hamlet of Gruchy, the birthplace of the painter Millet. The house bears an inscription on a tablet and is not difficult to find, if one can only thread his way through the tangle of by-roads which lie westward beyond Landemer, eleven kilometres from Cherbourg. It is an artistic shrine of real interest; and tourists, when at Cherbourg, are advised to explore this wonderful "land's end" of Normandy, and pay homage to the birthplace of Jean François Millet.
Perhaps no modern picture is really so familiar to our eyes as "The Angelus" of Jean François Millet, the struggling peasant painter of Normandy. Those two figures, man and woman in the bare field, with the village church peeping over the horizon, are "hung on the line," so to speak, in the mind of every one who has seen them.
Millet waged a long battle for art against poverty. At times he would exchange six drawings for a pair of shoes, or a picture for a bed. He faced starvation, and was not moved from his purpose of painting the truth as he saw it. Even his greatest pictures left him in poverty. He said: "They wish to force me into their drawing-room art to break my spirit. But, no, no; I was born a peasant, and a peasant I will die. I will say what I feel."