CHAPTER IX

THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE

177. ABOUT the moment in the forenoon when the modern fashionable traveller, intent on Paris, Nice, and Monaco, and started by the morning mail from Charing Cross, has a little recovered himself from the qualms of his crossing, and the irritation of fighting for seats at Boulogne, and begins to look at his watch to see how near he is to the buffet of Amiens, he is apt to be baulked and worried by the train’s useless stop at one inconsiderable station, lettered ABBEVILLE. As the carriage gets in motion again, he may see, if he cares to lift his eyes for an instant from his newspaper, two square towers, with a curiously attached bit of traceried arch, dominant over the poplars and osiers of the marshy level he is traversing. Such glimpse is probably all he will ever wish to get of them; and I scarcely know how far I can make even the most sympathetic reader understand their power over my own life.¹

178. The country town in which they are central,-once, like Croyland, a mere monk’s and peasant’s refuge (so for some time called “Refuge”),-among the swamps of Somme, received about the year 650 the name of “Abbatis Villa,”² -“Abbot’s-ford,” I had like to have written: house and village, I suppose we may rightly say,-as the chief dependence of the great monastery founded by St. Riquier at his native place, on the hillside five miles east of the present

¹ [For Ruskin’s numerous visits and references to Abbeville, see the General Index. The description in the lecture on the “Flamboyant Architecture of the Valley of Somme” may specially be noted: Vol. XIX. pp. 243 seq.]

² [For the early history of Abbeville, see (besides the book mentioned on the next page) A. Guilbert’s Histoire des Villes de France, vol. ii. pp. 78 seq.]

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