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Updated: June 8, 2025
Falaise is now a larger town than Argentan; but we feel that at Falaise the town has simply grown up at the foot of the castle hill. Saint Gervase at Falaise is no fellow to the mighty fortress on the felsen, as Saint German of Argentan must have been to the donjon of Argentan, even when that donjon was better seen than it is now.
"There are more than eighty thousand persons working at lace in Alencon, Seez, Argentan, Falaise, and the circumjacent parishes," said a letter to Colbert from the superintendent of Alencon, "and I can assure you, my lord, that it is manna and a blessing from heaven over all this district, where even little children of seven years of age find means of earning a livelihood; the little shepherd-girls from the fields work, like the rest, at it; they say that they will never be able to make such fine point as this, and that one wants to take away their bread and their means of paying their talliage."
As the carriage which took the funds to Alençon usually changed horses at Argentan, it was sufficient to know the time of its arrival in that town to deduce therefrom the hour of its appearance elsewhere. Now Le Chevalier had secured the cooperation of a hostler named Gauthier, called "Boismâle," who was bribed to let Dusaussay know when the carriage started.
It is thus that from Argentan to Caën I found myself seated between a stout motherly person from Auvergne, and a little dark man from whose direction was wafted so strong an odour of garlic that I had no difficulty discerning from what region he hailed.
But Stephen's army, the Flemings under William of Ypres, and the forces of some of the Norman barons, blocked the way. William was anxious to fight, but the Normans refused, and William with his Flemings left them in disgust and joined Stephen. Geoffrey, however, gave up his attempt on Caen and drew back to Argentan.
This, one need hardly say, is a thing which has happened over and over again, in this place and that, till we take it for granted as the explanation of such a state of things as we see at Argentan. But in a local book, in which a great deal of information about Argentan is brought together, Le Vieil Argentan, by M. Eugène Vimont, it is distinctly asserted that the case is the other way.
Let him eat in the Lord's name;" and to his friends, "It is better for the king to eat without us, than for our humility to pass the Eternal King's order unfulfilled." Near Argentan, in Normandy, he once found a new grave by the roadside and learnt that a beggar-boy lay there. The priest had let him lie there, because there was no fee and no one would carry him to the church-yard.
But they go on to tell us how the faithless King went on into the land of Exmes, how he burned Argentan, and came back to fortify Tillières again as a bulwark of France against Normandy. Time passed on.
Well informed of the plots which were preparing at Oporto, to which a French officer named Argentan had been engaged to lend a hand, he resolved upon attacking as speedily as possible the positions of the marshal.
One of the quaintest of these built in 1616 is the galleried building illustrated here, and from a parallel street not many yards off there is a peep of a house that has been built right over the stream which is scarcely less picturesque. The church of St Martin is passed on entering Argentan from Falaise.
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