Descriptive letterpress printed opposite this photograph:

IN THE MARKET SQUARE, CAEN.

THE picturesque old timber-framed houses of Normandy are fast disappearing. Those at Rouen, which Prout rendered so famous, are all gone. A few good specimens may still be found at Caen; two of the best are in the Rue St. Pierre, but the lower stories have been converted into modern shops. Others still exist in the Rue de Geôle and Rue N. Dame. Farther west, in the town of St. Lo, one of the finest of all may be seen the Maison du Poids Royale, and at Liseux is the most picturesque street yet remaining⎯the celebrated Rue aux Fèvres! These modern improvements may be necessary and desirable, but the artist loves better the old, overhanging, double-gabled tenement, though a little out of the perpendicular, with perhaps a stoop in one of its shoulders, or a rick in its neck, perhaps caught in the long night-watches of a couple of centuries. The characterless aspect of modern streets, smooth-faced, and uninteresting, composed of houses all alike, without curve or wrinkle, divested of any individuality, prim, decorous, and genteel, has little charm for him. Far more to his taste, are the broad eaves casting deep shadows, the richly carved barge-boards, the diamond casements, and the strongly marked individuality of the ancienne maison. How often two standing side by side present aspects as like and unlike each other, as two human personages! One tall and dignified, a patriarch of its kind: ample doorway, projecting stories one above another, corbels, gargoyles, and a façade full of expression. The other, broader, sturdier, and not half the height, a less acute gable, and one window only above, and a very long, broad one below, which at some distance does for the expression of the façade, that which a wide mouth does for the human countenance, imparting to it a smug comical expression, contrasted with its neighbour’s half-sad, patrician melancholy.

There is no more interesting place in Normandy than the ancient city of Caen, the tomb of the Conqueror, the scene of stirring episodes in French history, the birth-place of Poussin, the home of Charlotte Corday (born near Séez on the road from Caen to Alençon), and the last refuge of Beau Brummel, Many picturesque costumes may be seen on market days, but to see them in their most complete and varied forms, Coutances, during the annual Fête Dieu, is, of all other Norman towns, the place par excellence.