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Updated: June 21, 2025
Exmes indeed is one of those unlucky places which, even in the year 1891, remain without the comfort of a railway. But Almenèches has a station happily placed on two lines; it is visited by trains between Granville and Paris, and also by trains between Caen and Le Mans.
It thus seems to stand in a closer relation to the world of modern times than Exmes, to which he who does not care to trust himself to a Norman omnibus must go on his own account. To Almenèches too one may go on one's own account; each place makes a pleasant drive from Argentan.
One's thoughts somehow rather go away to Marsala than to Arques or Old Sarum perhaps because in those last we can freely go about, while gardens, houses, what not, come in the way both at Marsala and at Exmes. If they were away, the whole thing would be more like some of the ditches on the Malvern hills than anything else.
Here then we have found all that we want at Exmes and Almenèches. We understand the scene of the petty war which drove Abbess Emma to Saint-Evroul. We have found our two castles, all that we cared to find of them. We have found our abbey, or at least a successor on its site. Our next halting-place is Laigle on the Rille, the Rille that runs out to flow by Brionne and the Bec of Herlouin.
Counts and lords are with him, and the whole force of the land of Exmes. They hold their councils in the castle of Exmes; they did what they could against the tyrant; but he was too strong for them. He defeated the Duke in battle, and got possession of the castle of Exmes. Meanwhile Abbess Emma and her Sisterhood had to go whither they could. "Tener virginum conventus misere dispersus est."
We should be best pleased of all if the castle hill of Tillières was still crowned with an ancient donjon; next to that we should like to see it in the same case as Exmes or rather as Almenèches.
Still less do we hope to see the castles which Arnulf and Robert of Bellême seized on standing up as they were in their day. Both Exmes and Almenèches, in the present state of their military works, are among the places which most fully bear out the doctrine with which we started in speaking of Hauteville, that a site is often better when there is nothing on it.
In the journey now recorded it served as a centre for Falaise and Séez, and for what will to most people be the less familiar names of Exmes and Almenèches, and it might easily have been made a centre for other places. Argentan is a kind of town to which it would be hard to find an exact fellow in England.
He had languishing eyes, a sympathetic voice and a graceful figure, inexhaustible good-humour, despite his melancholy appearance, and unbounded audacity. As he was the owner of a farm in the Commune of Saint Arnould in the neighbourhood of Exmes, he was called Le Chevalier de Saint-Arnould, which gave him the position of a nobleman. He was moreover related to the nobility.
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.
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