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Updated: May 20, 2025
In the month of November 1808 the Canon of Bayeux Cathedral who had been the keeper of Madame Bontems' conscience and her daughter's, came to Paris, spurred by the ambition to be at the head of a church in the capital a position which he regarded perhaps as the stepping-stone to a bishopric.
Like his father, he had had a half-acknowledged wife, Espriota, who was the mother of his only child, Richard, but he put her away in order to ally himself with one of the great French families, and he had his child brought up at Bayeux, among Norse-speaking nobles, as if he would rather see him a Norseman than a, French prince.
Here, as at Bayeux, the choir is raised a few steps above its aisles, giving a certain impressiveness beyond what might otherwise exist. The interior, generally, is admirable.
For this purpose a museum was built, and about 1835 the great Bayeux tapestry was carefully installed behind glass, its full length extended on the walls for all to see who journey thither and who ring the guardian's bell at the courtyard's handsome portico. Once since then, once only, has the venerable fabric left its cabinet.
The hanging was used in the cathedral of the little French city of Bayeux, draped entirely around the nave of the Norman Cathedral, which space it exactly covered. This indicates to archeologists the original purpose of the hanging. On the brown linen is embroidered in coloured wools a panoramic succession of incidents, with border top and bottom.
It has not been altogether choked by the tares of Paris. The word "Saxon" is so vague that we cannot pretend to say exactly who the Saxons of Bayeux were; but Saxons of some sort were there, even before another Teutonic wave came in with Rolf Ganger and his Northmen. Bayeux, as we have said, was the Scandinavian stronghold. Men spoke Danish there when not a word of Danish was understood at Rouen.
He appointed to the regency in his absence his brother Odo, an ecclesiastic, whom he had made Bishop of Bayeux, in France, and Earl of Kent, with great power and preeminence, in England, a man bold, fierce, ambitious, full of craft, imperious, and without faith, but well versed in all affairs, vigilant, and courageous.
The contemporary letter-writer only implies it by mentioning others, of whom he speaks a little scornfully, as well as the men of Bayeux, Avranches, and Coutances, and the Breton and Mansel allies.
Even the very representations of Europe, Asia, and Africa, on the walls, lost their typographical characteristics, and shone out to me in the guise of tapestried chronicles, ancient as those of Bayeux, describing deeds of gallant chivalry so my fancy pictured and love, and knight-errantry, painted over with oriental arabesques in crimson gilding, the cunning handiwork of the potent sun-god.
These are the Norman cathedrals of Bayeux and Coutances, both of them still Bishops' sees, and the Breton Cathedral of Dol, which, in the modern ecclesiastical arrangements, has sunk into a parish church. Bayeux lies on a great track, and we suppose that all the world goes there to see the tapestry.
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