e
priceless were destroyed, for example, at St.-Denis, not in the least
that the metal might be cast into cannon--I am told the military records
show that the republican armies fought their battles, when finally they
got to fighting them, exclusively with the artillery of the
monarchy--but that the metal might be sold in the markets, and the
proceeds confiscated by the vendors. Certain rogues at Chauny and their
employers in Paris were doubtless the richer a hundred years ago for the
desecration of the Church of St.-Remi and the pillage of La Cressonniere
and the Chateau de Wissignicourt. But Wissignicourt and its people are
the poorer to-day for these performances.

An instructive estimate might be made of the dead loss which the little
city of Bourg-en-Bresse would have sustained during the past century if
the sensible Savoyards of that place had not cunningly protected the
magnificent statue-tombs of Marguerite d'Autriche, Marguerite de Bourbon
and Philibert le Beau in their grand old church of Notre-Dame de Brou,
against the rapacity of the revolutionary 'operators,' by cramming the
whole church full of straw and hay.

Soissons, in reality one of the very oldest cities in France, the seat,
when Caesar first assailed it, of a Gallic prince, whose authority
extended beyond the Channel into Britain, and the cradle long
afterwards of the first Frankish monarchy, might be taken, so far as
its general aspect goes, for a creation of the Second Empire, were it
not for its beautiful old cathedral, sadly damaged in 1793, but
very successfully restored, and for the graceful towers of
St.-Jean-des-Vignes. These latter were rescued with extreme difficulty
by the townspeople themselves from the felonious fury of the democratic
operators, who despoiled their city for ever of all the rest of that
superb castellated abbey. Of St.-Medard without the walls, which, were
it now standing, would be to the history of the French people what
Winchester Cathedral is to the history of the English, only the
subterranean chapels remain. The materials and the contents of the abbey
itself were turned into cash.

St.-Medard-lez-Soissons was only one of eighteen considerable
Benedictine abbeys which down to the Revolution existed within the
limits of the modern department of the Aisne of which Laon is the chief
town. Besides these, this region, the early reclamation and cultivation
of which, as I have already said, was chiefly due to the monastic