VIRE

I think the Norman towns, especially the smaller ones, lose half their interest for the traveller if he does not know the peculiar history of the duchy and the way in which it stood out as a separate thing in European history for nearly five hundred years, and is something still distinct among the French provinces. Even as it is, the lesser towns of Normandy are singularly little known, considering how easy of access they are, how hospitable, and how charming. And Vire, although it lies on one of the main railway lines, is little visited.

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Like nearly all Norman towns, you must understand it as a feudal fortress. Roughly speaking, there are two types of towns in western Europe—I mean towns with any tradition and antiquity. They are either natural mercantile centres—for instance, the first bridge across a great river with sea-borne commerce, such as is Rouen or even Caen (though there the river is small)—or they are towns the sites of which were chosen because, under the conditions of the time in which they arose, they had good opportunity for defence.

The towns which were mercantile centres and early became large places were fortified in spite of their position; the sea-ports, for instance, Dieppe and Harfleur—now high and dry—and Honfleur opposite; and towns like Bayeux were fortified in spite of the difficulties of defence in order to protect their wealth; but nearly all the other Norman ones were first chosen for their defensive position.

So you must begin at Vire, as you should begin in so many other places, by taking what is left of the castle for your starting point in the understanding of the town. Massive ruined walls still remain as the relics of the keep which Henry of England, the son of the Conqueror, first put up in this place. It stands on its granite rock, plumb over the ravine of the River Vire below, and was the making of the place. Next you will note here and there, remaining in isolated sections and half ruined, individual towers built into later buildings, the ramparts, and the gates. One famous gate still stands, called the Gate of the Tower. It was on a height from which any approach to the little city could be spotted by watchers for miles around. From the summit of it you saw to the south the wide range above Sourdeval (Sourdeval was the lordship of the first man to leap upon the wall of Jerusalem in the first Crusade); and to the north, all the country of the Bocage—that district of lower Normandy which, being hilly and densely wooded, kept its ancient customs longest. It was the last place to witness a revolt against national taxation by the king—as late as Louis XIV.

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Of this tower gate the people of Vire are proud enough; they have decorated it on numberless occasions; as late as the seventeenth century they put up a statue of Our Lady above the arch, and it is to be prayed that they will never pierce streets round it, as men have done with so many other of the old narrow gateways of Europe—as for instance, at Southampton. For its whole character and all its architectural effect lie in the way it blocks the narrow street and forms a true defensible entry.

Vire has ventured, and not unsuccessfully, little manufactories, but happily without hurting its soul in any way; and it has managed not to deteriorate, in spite of any number of temptations; not even the motor car has done it evil, and you can hardly say that of any other such town, except perhaps its sister, Mortain, over the hills to the south beyond Sourdeval.

Even if it had no history, all that district would still be a delight; and anyone with leisure who wants to understand lower Normandy may take Vire for his centre and learn more and more of what age and tradition mean in things European. He is within a walk of Mortain and its cascade and its old headship of a county, now half forgotten; within a walk of Avranches, and the superb view over St. Michael’s Bay; within a walk of the battlefield of Tinchebrai; and in Vire itself he has a whole collection of mediæval and Renaissance heirlooms to please him—the granite church with its vivid sculpture, the ruin of the second gate, the famous little valley below, the half-dozen Renaissance or very late mediæval private buildings testifying to the wealth of the place.

And it is still wealthy. It is one of the chief pleasures of these small old Norman towns that they have not lost, as have towns in many European countries, their quality of local residence. They are not the tiny capitals they once were; it is no longer a necessity for the gentry round about to make such places their centres of provision and their meeting-place for neighbours; but the wealth, made in the town itself and the surroundings, is still spent for the most part in Vire. And it is this which gives life to the older places of Europe; lacking it, when they fall under the industrial system of the new economic era, they must inevitably forfeit their personality.

The way in which Vire keeps its soul and independence, in which Vire lives on, feeling prouder than its little sister towns, is due to the effect of eight hundred years of custom now forgotten—but during all these centuries an essential of the place: it was royal; it had no local lord. Vire was the ‘Duke’s Town,’ small as it was; and when Normandy fell to the crown, it was the ‘King’s Town.’ Vire does not know to-day why it is still proud. That is the reason. But even if it did know, it would scarcely pay any heed, for its pride has become a thing of interminable habit, self-sustaining, and self-augmenting as time goes on. It has always been moved by an independence surpassed at last only by patriotism. It has obeyed no master save the ruler of its peers. And those who are alive to history feel that spirit in its streets to-day.