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Belgium's triumph!

XIX. Furnes--The Town

Like so many of the cities of Belgium, Furnes is a town of the
past. To stand in the great square, surrounded by buildings
which would delight the heart of any artist, is to travel back
through three centuries of time. Spain and the Renaissance
surround us, and we look instinctively towards the Pavilion for
the soldiers of Philip, or glance with apprehension at the door of
the Palais de Justice for the sinister form of Peter Titelmann the
Inquisitor. Around this very square marched the procession of
the Holy Office, in all the insolent blasphemy of its power, and
on these very stones were kindled the flames that were to
destroy its victims. But all these have gone; the priest and his
victim, the swaggering bravo and the King he served, have
gone to their account, and Furnes is left, the record of a time
when men built temples like angels and worshipped in them like
devils.

The immense square, with the beautiful public buildings which
surround it, speaks of a time when Fumes was an important
town. As early as the year 850 it is said that Baldwin of the Iron
Arm, the first of the great Counts of Flanders, had established a
fortress here to withstand the invasion of the Normans. After
that Furnes appears repeatedly with varying fortunes in the
turbulent history of the Middle Ages, until in the thirteenth
century it was razed to the ground by Robert of Artois. In the
next three hundred years, however, it must have entirely
recovered its position, for in the days of the Spanish Fury it was
one of the headquarters of the Inquisition and of the Spanish
Army, and there is no town in Belgium upon which the Spanish
occupation has left a greater mark. Since then, of no commercial
or political importance, it has lived the life of a dull country town,
and tradition says that there is plenty of solid wealth stored by
its thrifty inhabitants behind the plain house-fronts which line
its quiet streets.

From the centre of the square one can see all that there is to be
seen of Furnes. The four sides are lined by beautiful old houses
whose decorated fronts and elaborate gables tell of the
Renaissance and of Spanish days. Behind the low red roofs
tower the churches of St. Walburga and St. Nicholas, dwarfing
the houses which nestle at their base. In the corners of the
square are public buildings, small when compared with those of
Bruges and Ypres, but unsurpassed in exquisite