transgression he might have been guilty of towards any of them.—­At this moment, one Asselin, an obscure individual, starting from the crowd, exclaimed with a loud voice, “the ground upon which you are standing, was the site of my father’s dwelling.  This man, for whom you ask our prayers, took it by force from my parent; by violence he seized, by violence he retained it; and, contrary to all law and justice, he built upon it this church, where we are assembled.  Publicly, therefore, in the sight of God and man, do I claim my inheritance, and protest against the body of the plunderer being covered with my turf.”—­The appeal was attended with instant effect; bishops and nobles united in their entreaties to Asselin; they admitted the justice of his claim; they pacified him; they paid him sixty shillings on the spot by way of recompence for the place of sepulture; and, finally, they satisfied him for the rest of the land.

But the remarkable incidents doomed to attend upon this burial, were not yet at an end; for at the time when they were laying the corpse in the sarcophagus, and were bending it with some force, which they were compelled to do, in consequence of the coffin having been made too short, the body, which was extremely corpulent, burst, and so intolerable a stench issued from the grave, that all the perfumes which arose from all the censers of the priests and acolytes were of no avail; and the rites were concluded in haste, and the assembly, struck with horror, returned to their homes.

The latter part of this story accords but ill with what De Bourgueville relates.  We learn from this author, that four hundred and thirty years subsequent to the death of the Conqueror, a Roman cardinal, attended by an archbishop and bishop, visited the town of Caen, and that his eminence having expressed a wish to see the body of the duke, the monks yielded to his curiosity, and the tomb was opened, and the corpse discovered in so perfect a state, that the cardinal caused a portrait to be taken from the lifeless features.—­It is not worth while now to inquire into the truth of this story, or the fidelity of the resemblance.  The painting has disappeared in the course of time:  it hung for a while against the walls of the church, opposite to the monument; but it was stolen during the tumults caused by the Huguenots, and was broken into two pieces, in which state De Bourgueville saw it a few years afterwards, in the hands of a Calvinist, one Peter Hode, the gaoler at Caen, who used it in the double capacity of a table and a door.—­The worthy magistrate states, that he kept the picture, “because the abbey-church was demolished.”