The
whole too can be entirely taken away in six hours, a construction highly
useful in a river peculiarly liable to floods from sudden thaws; which
sometimes occasion such an increase of the waters, as to render the
lower stories of the houses in the adjacent parts of the city
uninhabitable. The bridge itself was destroyed by a similar accident, in
1709, for want of a timely removal. Its plan is commonly attributed to a
monk of the order of St. Augustine, by whom it was erected in 1626,
about sixty years after the stone bridge, built by the Empress Matilda
in 1167, had ceased to be passable. It seems the fate of Rouen to have
_wonderful_ bridges. The present is dignified by some writers with the
high title of a _miracle of art_: the former is said by Taillepied, in
whose time it was standing, to have been "un des plus beaux edifices et
des plus admirables de la France." A few lines afterwards, however, this
ingenuous writer confesses that loaded carriages of any kind were seldom
suffered to pass this _admirable edifice_, in consequence of the expence
of repairing it; but that two barges were continually plying for the
transport of heavy goods.
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