Les Deux Amants

Towards the end of the 12th century, at the mouth of the Andelle, there was a fief belonging to Robert, Baron de Cantelou, lord of Amfreville-les-Monts, who followed Richard the Lionheart on the crusade. His wife, left alone with her daughter, Mathilde, had a relative, Alix de Bonnemare, who lived in the manor located in the parish of Radepont, and had a son, Raoul. Mathilde's mother died. The chatelaine of Bonnemare took in Mathilde. Two years later Baron de Cantelou returned, in the company of a knight who had saved his life at the cost of an eye and a scar which had horribly disfigured him.

Baron de Cantelou had forbidden any marriage during his absence; the young people presented themselves in crowds upon his arrival. Then, "he prescribed to each of them the most bizarre and harsh tests: some were obliged to spend the first night of their wedding perched like birds on the branches of some large tree; others were immersed for two hours in the icy waters of the Andelle; these were harnessed like animals to a plow, and forced to trace a painful furrow; those were obliged to jump with both feet over a deer's antler... and woe to those who did not obey his tyrannical orders: they were adjourned for another year.” (The hermit in Normandy by M. Lefebvre-Duruflé, published under the name of M. de Jouy).

A few days later, he ordered his daughter to marry the knight. She resisted and was locked up in the monastery of Fontaine-Guérard. In one of his hunts, the baron was wounded by a wild boar, and Raoul ran and saved his life. The baron said to him: "I am willing to give you Mathilde, but I have subjected my vassals to harsh tests, and the knight who wants to obtain the daughter of the lord of Cantelou will have to resign himself to the harshest one that he has imposed on him. This day, see Raoul, see this steep peak; Mathilde will be your wife if you can carry her running, from the base to the summit.

Raoul arrived at the top and fell lifeless. Mathilde, holding Raoul's body in her arms, cried out "My father, the union that you have allowed is accomplished", and rushed into the void. For the first time, the baron's merciless soul was softened, he founded the Priory of the Two Lovers, where he took the habit as penance which he wore until his death. The nuns of Fontaine-Guérard claimed the bodies of the two victims, and placed them in the same tomb, near the choir of their church. It was still seen before the Revolution, covered with a stone, where the arms of the Bonnemare and the Cantelou were united in a single escutcheon. The baron did not take long to die, and for a hundred years his specter wandered repeating "Mathilde, Mathilde, a hundred years of penance". The hillsides witnessing these apparitions were abandoned as a cursed place, and since that time, one of the hillsides overlooking Radepont Park has been called Champ Dolent.