only of the
workmen, but of the company also.

Although Chauny is really a very ancient city--dating back at least to
the age of Charlemagne, when the monks of Cuissy and St.-Eloi-Fontaine,
with the keen eye of those early agriculturists for a good thing,
reclaimed its marshes and turned them into a fat land, yielding, as an
old local _dicton_ tells us, the

'septem commoda vitae,
Poma, nemus, segetes, linum, pecus, herba, racemus.'

--it has almost nothing to show to-day in the way of antique
architecture. Of the 'seven comforts of life,' the vine has vanished
also; but all the others flourish abundantly, and the people of Chauny
have little to complain of on the score of the natural resources of
their region. During the wars, though, of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, the place was so often taken and retaken that its buildings
were pretty well battered to pieces. The English of Harry the Fifth
stormed it in 1417, and England held it for a quarter of a century,
during which period an incident occurred much more creditable to the
burghers of Chauny than is the taking of the Bastille in 1789 to the
citizens of Paris. Monstrelet tells the story in a quaint and vigorous
fashion. Chauny at that time was part of the appanage of the Duc
d'Orleans, then a prisoner in England, and it was held for the
conquerors by a French, nobleman, 'Messire Collard de Mailly,' who had
accepted the office of Bailli of Vermandois from King Henry of England.
The burghers of Chauny, who had lived for two centuries in the enjoyment
of the rights and privileges granted them in a royal charter by Philip
Augustus, did not like this state of things at all. So they made up
their minds to demolish the castle, lest 'Messire Collard de Mailly'
should fill it with English soldiers and make himself quite unendurable.

It was a rather hardy enterprise, and the burghers went about it with
great coolness and good sense. Theirs was a real rising of the citizens
of a town to abate a nuisance which threatened their liberties, and not,
like the attack on the Bastille, a blow struck at law, order, and the
constituted authorities of a great kingdom by a subsidised mob; and
their leaders were the most respectable men of Chauny--not a crew of
thieves and murderers like the infamous Maillard, that 'hero of the
Bastille,' against whom his own employers and allies were eventually
forced to proceed as the chief of a gang of ruffians, and wh