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Boisrueil, who presently passed, told me that his name was Vallon; that he belonged to a poor but old family in the Cotentin, and that he had been only three months at court. "Making his fortune, I suppose?" I said grimly. "He games?" "No, your excellency." "Is in debt?" "Not to my knowledge." "To whom does he pay his court, then?" "To the King." "And the Queen?"
We are apt to forget that the nearest coast due west of the city of Coutances does not lie in Europe. We are apt further to forget that the whole of that west coast is not Côtentin. Avranches has its district also, and the modern department of Manche takes in both, as the modern diocese of Coutances takes in the older dioceses of Coutances and Avranches.
The one saw his effort was hopeless, the other was only anxious to remove his rival from the realm, and by a peace which the Count of Meulan negotiated Robert recognized Henry as King of England while Henry gave up his fief in the Cotentin to his brother the Duke. Robert's retreat left Henry free to deal sternly with the barons who had forsaken him.
From Coutances northwards to Cherbourg stretches that large tract of Normandy which used to be known as the Cotentin. At first the country is full of deep valleys and smiling hills covered with rich pastures and woodland, but as you approach Lessay at the head of an inlet of the sea the road passes over a flat heathy desert. The church at Lessay is a most perfect example of Norman work.
It had made itself particularly obnoxious to the English by having recently made an offer to the King of France to fit out an expedition and conquer England with its own resources. The voyage was short and favourable, and the expedition landed at La Hogue, on the small peninsula of Cotentin, without opposition.
Mixing with the early Saxon or English settlers, and with the still more primitive Celtic inhabitants, the Northmen founded a race extremely like that which now inhabits our own country. To this day, the Norman peasants of the Cotentin retain many marks of their origin and their half-forgotten kinship with the English race.
The events of the war, the long fits of hesitation on the part of both kings, and the repeated alternations from hostilities to truces and truces to hostilities, prevented anything from coming of this proposal, the authenticity of which has been questioned by M. Michelet amongst others, but the genuineness of which has been demonstrated by M. Adolph Despont, member of the appeal-court of Caen, in his learned Histoire du Cotentin.
Sir Francis Palgrave points out, with a kind of triumph, that the two Danish peninsulas, the original Jütland and this of the Côtentin, are the only two in Europe which point northward. And the Côtentin does look on the map very much as if it were inviting settlers from more northern parts. But the fact is that the land is not really so peninsular as it looks and as it feels.
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