a salt-tax collector ship. His poem was entitled Les Mais; it appeared in 1779, was praised in MS., damned in print and restored to a just appreciation by the students of literature of the 19th century. It has the drawbacks of merely didactic descriptive poetry on the great scale, but occasionally displays much grace and spirit. The malicious wit of Rivarol's mot on the ill-success of the poem, “C’est le plus beau naufrage du siècle,” is not intelligible unless it is said that one of the most elaborate passages describes a shipwreck. Roucher was a disciple of Voltaire, and therefore a friend of the Revolution, but he remained moderate in his opinions. He frequently presided over an anti-Jacobin club, and denounced the tyranny of the popular demagogues in supplements published with the Journal de Paris in 1792. He was arrested on the 4th of October 1793, and, accused of being the leader of a conspiracy among the prisoners at Saint Lazare, was sent to the guillotine on the same tumbril with his friend André Chénier on the 25th of July 1794. Roucher translated in 1790 Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. His letters from prison were edited by his son-in-law under the title of Consolations de ma captivité (1797), and his death was made the subject of a tragedy in 1834 by his brother Claude Roucher-Deratte, a voluminous writer.
See A. Guillois, Pendant la terreur, la poète Roucher, 1745–1794 (1890), founded on the poet's papers by one of his descendants.
ROUÉ, a dissipated debauchee. The word is French, and
its original meaning was “broken on the wheel.” Breaking
on the wheel was a form of execution reserved in France, and
some other countries, for crimes of peculiar atrocity. A roué,
therefore, came by a natural process to be understood to mean
a man morally worse than a pendard or gallows-bird, who
only deserved hanging for common crimes. He was also a
leader in wickedness, since the chief of a gang of brigands
(for instance) would be broken on the wheel, while his obscure
followers were merely hanged. Philip, duke of Orleans, who
was regent of France from 1715 to 1723, gave the term the sense
of impious and callous debauchee, which it has borne since
his time, by habitually applying it to the very bad male company
who amused his privacy and his leisure. The locus classicus
for the origin of this use of the epithet is in the Memoirs of
Saint-Simon (vol. xii. pp. 441–46, ed. Chéruel and Regnier,
Paris, 1873–86).
ROUELLE, GUILLAUME FRANÇOIS (1703–1770), French
chemist, was born in 1703 at Mathieu, near Caen. He started
as an apothecary, but in 1742 he was appointed experimental
demonstrator of chemistry at the Jardin du Roi in Paris,
where he was especially influential and popular as a teacher,
numbering Lavoisier and J. L. Proust among his pupils.
Many stories are told of the vivacity and enthusiasm with
which he lectured, of the absent-mindedness which sometimes
led him, forgetting that his pupils could not hear what he was
saying, to continue his explanations while he was out of the
classroom looking for some piece of apparatus, and of the
vigorous tirades, generally culminating in the epithet “plagiaire,”
in which he used to indulge against men with whom
he disagreed (Höfer, Hist. de la chimie, ii. 378). His most
important achievement was to define “salts”—a term formerly
used in the most loose and indeterminate way—as the compounds
formed by the union of acids and bases, and further
to distinguish between neutral, basic and acid salts. Other
subjects on which he published papers were the inflammation
of turpentine and other essential oils by nitric acid, and the
methods of embalmment practised by the Egyptians. He
died at Passy on the 3rd of August 1770. He is known as
Rouelle the elder, to distinguish him from his younger brother and
assistant, Hilaire Marin (1718–1779), who, on his resignation
in 1768, succeeded him as demonstrator at the Jardin du Roi.
ROUEN, a city of France, capital of the department of Seine-Inférieure
and the ancient capital of the province of Normandy,
on the Seine, 87 m. N.W. of Paris by rail. Pop. (1906) 111,402.
The old city lies on the north bank of the river in an amphitheatre
formed by the hills which border the Seine valley. It
is surrounded by boulevards. Outside the ellipse formed by
these lie the suburbs of Martainville, St Hilaire, Beauvoisine,
Bouvreuil and Cauchoise; 212 m. to the east is the industrial
town of Darnétal (pop. 6770), and in the level plain on the
opposite bank of the Seine is the extensive manufacturing
suburb of St Sever with the industrial towns of Sotteville
(pop. 18,096) and Petit Quevilly (pop. 14,852) in its immediate
neighbourhood. Finally in the centre of the river, north-east
of St Sever, is the Ile Lacroix, which also forms part of Rouen.
Communication across the Seine is maintained by ferry and
by three bridges, including a pont transbordeur, or moving platform,
slung between two lofty columns and propelled by electricity.
Rouen possesses four railway stations, The central
point of the old town is the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, occupied
by the church of St Ouen, the hôtel de ville and an equestrian
statue of Napoleon I., and traversed by the Rue de la République
which leads from it past the cathedral to the Place de la République
and the Quai de Paris. Parallel to this street to the
west are the Rue Beauvoisine with its southern continuations,
the Rue des Carmes and the Rue Grand-Pont, and the wide and
handsome Rue Jeanne d'Arc terminating on the Quai de la
Bourse. These thoroughfares, which are all within the boulevards,
are crossed at right angles by the Rue de la Grosse-Horloge
and by the Rue Thiers, running from the Place Cauchoise
on the west to the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, and passing on the
left the Jardin Solferino and the museum.
The cathedral was built on the site of a previous cathedral which was destroyed by fire in 1200, and its construction lasted from the beginning of the 13th century, to which period belong the lateral doors of the west portal, to the beginning of the 16th century, when the Tour de Beurre was completed. The spire surmounting the central tower, which is the highest in France (485 ft.), is modern. The western façade, with its profusion of niches, pinnacles and statues, belongs, as a whole, to the Flamboyant style. But the northern tower, the Tour St Romain, is in the main of the 12th century, its upper stage (with its steep, pointed roof) having been added later. The southern tower, the Tour de Beurre, so named because funds for its building were given in return for the permission to eat butter in Lent, is of a type essentially Norman, and consists of a square tower pierced by high mullioned windows and surmounted by a low, octagonal structure, with a balustrade and pinnacles. The juxtaposition of these two towers, so different in character, is the most striking feature of the main facade, which is notable besides for its width. The portals of the transept are each flanked by two towers and decorated with sculpture and statuary. That to the north, the Portail des Libraires, looks upon the Cour des Libraires, once the resort of the booksellers of Rouen. That to the south is known as the Portail de la Calende. The plan of the church comprises a nave with aisles and lateral chapels, a transept and a choir with ambulatory. The most remarkable part of the interior is the Lady Chapel (1302–20) behind the choir with the tombs (1518–25) of Cardinal Georges d'Amboise and his nephew, the statuary of which, including the kneeling statues of the two cardinals, is of the finest Renaissance workmanship. The chapel also contains the tomb (1536–44) of Louis de Brézé, seneschal of Normandy. Behind the cathedral is the archiepiscopal palace, a building of the 14th and 15th centuries.
St Ouen, formerly the church of an abbey dating to the Roman period and reorganized by Archbishop St Ouen in the 7th century, exceeds the cathedral in length as well as in purity of style. In spite of the juxtaposition of the second and third, the Radiant and Flamboyant types of Gothic architecture, the building, as a whole, presents a unity which even the modern façade has failed to mar. It was founded in 1318 in place of a Romanesque church which previously occupied the site and of which the only relic is the chapel in the south transept. The choir alone was constructed in the 14th century. The nave of the church belongs to the 15th century, by the end of which the central tower with its octagonal lantern and four Banking turrets had been erected. The building of the western facade, which is flanked by two towers, was not undertaken till 1846.
