Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/16

2 past. There was Norman music in the streets, there were Norman plays at the theatres, Norman mysteries in the cathedral close. Banquet followed banquet and toast followed toast, till the cider of Normandy paled before the champagne of France. Finally a great pageant, starting, like the city, from the river-bank, unrolled the vast panorama of Norman history through streets whose very names reecho its great figures—Rollo and his Norse companions arriving in their Viking ships, the dukes his successors, William Longsword, Richard the Fearless, Robert the Magnificent, William the Conqueror, the sons of Tancred of Hauteville who drove the paynim from Sicily, and that other Tancred who planted the banner of the cross on the walls of Jerusalem, all with their knights and heralds and men at arms, followed by another pageant of the achievements of Normandy in the arts of peace. And on the last evening the great abbey-church of Saint-Ouen burnt red fire for the first time in its history till the whole mass glowed and every statue and storied niche stood out with some clear, sharp bit of the Norman past, while its lantern-tower, "the crown of Normandy," shone out over the city and the river which are the centre of Norman history and where this day the dukes wore again their crown.

In this transitory world the thousandth anniversary of anything is sufficiently rare to challenge attention, even in an age which is rapidly becoming hardened to