The spring of Saint Clotilde and Château Gaillard

Tradition has it that in 511, the year her husband Clovis died, Queen Clotilde came to Les Andelys and had a monastery built there for girls of noble family, on the spot where the collegiate church of Notre-Dame stands today. Historians are careful: no reliable document confirms it, and the royal convent of Les Andelys remains for them a fine story. The people of the town have been telling it for a thousand years.

One summer day, they say, the workmen on the site complained of the heat and the thirst. The wine had run out, the chalk threw the sun back at them, and the men were talking of laying down their tools. The queen stepped aside, knelt by the nearby spring and prayed. When the masons drank, the water had for them alone the strength and the taste of wine. Other tellers go further and say the water turned into wine; the subtler ones add that it was a wine without drunkenness, for the queen wanted straight walls and not merry workmen.

The work went on. The spring has never run dry. All through the Middle Ages and under the old regime people came in procession to lie in its basin and be healed; today it is credited above all with power over diseases of the skin. It flows at the end of the rue Sainte-Clotilde, in a garden where a few courses of a Merovingian wall still stand.

Seven centuries later another building site set the town talking. In 1196 Richard the Lionheart, king of England and duke of Normandy, chose the chalk cliff standing over the bend of the river. Philip II Augustus had taken Gisors, Gaillon and Vernon from him; the road to Rouen lay open, and Rouen was the second city of the realm. A bolt had to be put on the door.

The place belonged to the archbishop of Rouen, and a treaty forbade fortifying it. Richard went ahead all the same. The archbishop laid the interdict on the whole of Normandy, and only in October 1197 did the king buy his peace with Dieppe and Bouteilles. Meanwhile the stones were rising: forty-five thousand pounds, as much as a year of pay for seven thousand foot soldiers, four thousand seven hundred tonnes of stone, a keep with buttresses like upturned pyramids, a scalloped curtain wall meant to make missiles glance off. In less than two years it all stood up, and for a castle of that size that came close to a marvel.

Hence the words tradition puts in the king’s mouth before his work: «How fair she is, my one-year-old daughter!» No chronicler of the time passes them on, and the Normans called the place not Gaillard but la Roche, or la Roque. The name, like the sentence, comes to us from the scribes of the country around Paris. The king is also made to boast that he would hold this castle even if its walls were made of butter.

Richard died in 1199. Five years later his one-year-old daughter fell. Philip II Augustus laid siege in September 1203, ringed the rock with a double ditch bristling with wooden towers, and waited. Roger de Lacy held the place. In December, to spare the stores, he drove out the twelve hundred inhabitants of Petit-Andely who had taken refuge inside the walls; the French would not let them through, and some of them spent the winter in the ditches. Even so, it was not hunger that decided the matter. The attackers got in through a low window of the chapel that John Lackland had had added, and on 6 March 1204 the thirty-six knights and a hundred and seventeen sergeants still left surrendered. Three months later the whole of Normandy belonged to the king of France.

The rest is a slow demolition. The English took the castle in 1419, Charles VII in 1449; the Leaguers barricaded themselves in it, Henri IV drove them out in 1591, and then the estates of Normandy asked for the nest to be pulled down. The convents of Grand-Andely and Petit-Andely came to fetch the stones by the cartload.

What is left still commands the landscape. The broken keep and its white curtain wall stand a hundred metres above the river and above the roofs of Petit-Andely. And up in the town the queen’s water is still running.