Cotmania. Vol. I. 1926-7

Cotman in Normandy.
Further Gleanings. No. II
(by Arthur Batchelor.)
Avranches was our next halt; Avranches, whence Cotman set out in 1817 for his first sight of Mont St. Michel. I took the light railway, which skirts the road as far as Genets, the little fishing village from which certain adventurous tourists still make the passage across the sands at a given state of the tide. From this side the Tamberlane Island lies in the middle distance with the Mount - and the great bay beyond it. Long strings of fisherfolk, sheep or geese, still give additional interest to the interminable flats of sand, and I was lucky enough to strike a day of Atlantic cloud and sunshine which enhanced its beauty enormously. In the little Norman church at Genets is a quite modern yet excellent memorial window to a schoolmistress named Gournay. Our hotel was not, like Cotman's, uncomfortably, crowded, but we dined one night at the next table to a coal-black negress in a turban. I made a pilgrimage to Domfront passing Mortain on the way, where I was able to prove that a conjecture of mine as to a certain "sketch in Normandy" was correct, and at Domfront I found everything much as it was in 1820, except that they are in the act of crowning the top of the town with an expression of the modern spirit in the shape of a church in ferro concrete. Imagine a colossal spire in white sugar, shaped approximately like that of Framingham Pigot, and you have what dominates the plain for 50 miles in every direction. I fled and hurried down a very steep woodman's footpath below the castle rock and was rewarded by the sight of what I feared I might not find. "Cleft rocks" confronted me unchanged after more than a century, notwithstanding that the railway now runs beneath the quarry and, passing the Domfront church of the etching, I reached the station in a glow of gratification that another previous conjecture had proved correct.
Of this district he writes in 1818 "without a single Englishman, and every requisite for comfort. Out of the way it is, but not so very, why do they not settle here?" It appears that history repeats itself in many ways. In 1817 he says "the English one meets are not greatly liked, they behave so ill."
Unhappily that is still the case. Most of our compatriots make us wonder what town could possibly have bred them. Does the Foreign Office, with all its fuss about passports, ever consider the only really necessary qualification is a pass in manners? Most of the English one meets would be booed in Blackpool and mobbed in Margate.
We left Avranches for Vire and Caen on a day of steaming south-west rain which, however, cleared up in time for us to enjoy the beauties of that delightful journey, and our room at the Victoire once more looked on that spacious courtyard which I have always earmarked as an ideal theatre for the Norwich Players in one of their holiday trips. The hotel restaurant is used as their mess by the professors at the university, few members of which can ever have seen Shakespeare adequately presented. Adjoining the hotel is the Chapel in the Castle, permission to draw which gave Cotman so much difficulty to obtain.
At Lisieux I was lucky enough to see Cotman's South Door subject, lit by a brilliant moon, the night before we left for Pont L'Eveque and Honfleur, where I found an English M.P. sketching a lovely little fountain which we agreed would have delighted John Sell Cotman. The Frenchman who accompanied him spoke enthusiastically of the beauties of "Blackigny and Northwich" both of which places he knew well. One looks across the mouth of the Seine to Honfleur and Montivillers, both of them Cotman subjects. We were to ascend the valley in which they lie next day en route for Fécamp- where it will be remembered Cotman made in 1817 his first valiant attempts at French conversation with "Madame Dupin, very young, very handsome, and at her toilette." He does not appear to have been greatly struck with Fécamp, which is suprising in view of its intimate connexion with Norwich, the beauty of its Abbey Church, and the fascination of its harbour which, even at this day, was crowded with big three-masted sailing ships, elsewhere, alas, becoming a rarity. To Cotman, of course, they would hardly have made the appeal of novelty as they do to us, and what at now only very occasional visitors to Yarmouth were to him perfectly familiar. Besides, we must remember that the avowed object of his journeys was the collection of Norman architecture rather than landscape.
Admirers of Rudyard Kipling will be interested to hear that the dories of "Captain Courageous" are turned out by the dozen at Fécamp, where they may be seen stacked in fours on the quay, packed one inside the other ready for shipment. They are all the same length apparently, about 18 x 5, and the seats being moveable allow of this sardine-like treatment. Amongst the other attractions of Fécamp one should mention the manufacture of "Benedictine", but apart from that it should prove a delightful place of pilgrimage to Norwich citizens, for our first bishop was prior of its abbey church. Let no one miss the little museum opposite the "Grand Cerf." It is full of interesting ship models, the courtyard itself opens on one of the apsidal chapels of the church, and at any moment the town planning fiend may sweep the whole block away.
And so home. But visitors who return from Havre as we did should beware the fact that one is not allowed aboard the Southampton boat before 9 O'clock at night. They should "consigne" their baggage, and I hope they may find for there last in France as good and cheap a meal as we did. The proprietor came from and stocked the wine of Roussillon, which is a very far cry from Normandy. For obvious reasons I shall not be more explicit, but I might for the benefit of students record the fact that the drawings illustrated are, as they should be, in Norfolk; at Crown Point, to be exact.