America with Rochambeau to secure the
independence of the United States--the Comte d'Estaing, who was well
known and very popular in Chauny.

When the tribunal, after its fashion, called upon the fearless sailor
for his name, he replied, 'You know my name perfectly well,--it suits
you, perhaps, to pretend that you do not. But when you have cut off my
head, as you mean to do, send it to the English fleet, and they will
tell you my name!'

Here at Chauny, as elsewhere, the first concern of these revolutionary
'friends of the people,' when they got possession of the machinery of
the State, was to confiscate the funds devoted by the piety and the
benevolence of past ages to the service of the people. The more closely
one looks into the social annals of France, the more amazing it is that
the world should so long have swallowed the monstrous misrepresentations
current in our century, as to the condition of the French people before
1789, and especially as to the organisation, under the _ancien regime_,
of public charity and of public education in France.

Chauny possessed, as far back as the beginning of the twelfth century,
a public hospital or Hotel-Dieu, and a hospital for lepers called the
'Maladrerie.' Who founded the Hotel-Dieu is not known, for in those
'ages of faith,' so lovingly described by Kenelm Digby, it was not
thought so extraordinary a thing that a man or a woman should devote his
or her substance to benevolent purposes, as it is fast coming to be in
our own times.

The mayor and sworn magistrates of the city were the official governors
of the hospital, and the chaplain was taken from among the monks of
Saint-Eloi-Fontaine. A century and a half afterwards, in 1250, the Abbot
of Saint-Eloi-Fontaine received, under the wills of three burghers of
Chauny, a sum equal to about 40,000 francs of our time for the service
of the hospital of the Hotel-Dieu. It is worth remembering that the
Third French Republic has passed a law forbidding ecclesiastics to
receive or execute such benevolent trusts as this.

I have already alluded in a note to a subsequent legacy made to this
institution in the fifteenth century by a pious dame of Chauny. A few
years later, in 1419, Colart Le Miroirier, a resident of Chauny, left to
the Hotel-Dieu all his lands and goods at Chauny, Ognes, and Roy.

The 'religious wars' wrecked the Hotel-Dieu in the sixteenth century;
but in 1620 a devout woman, Marie Dubuisson, took the work of
r