the finest of the only three
good gates we had left, out of sheer stupidity; and you can see how they
let things go at sixes and sevens all over the city. But the
old-established citizens of Valenciennes are to blame also, not for the
decline of our population perhaps, but for the gradual disappearance of
all the features of the city worth preserving. Like the head of this
family, they care nothing about the past.'

In the course of a walk about the city, he showed me, in the Rue
Notre-Dame, an edifice, the condition of which certainly excused his
criticism of his fellow-citizens.

It is an ancient dwelling-house of the fifteenth century, standing at
the corner of two streets. A most graceful _tourelle_ markes the facade,
and strikingly resembles that which decorates still the house at Paris
near the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, in the vaulted doorway of which
Louis, Duc d'Orleans, was murdered, a crime avenged by the death, on the
bridge of Montereau, of its real author, Jean Sans-Peur, Duc de
Bourgogne. The exterior ornamentation of this house is admirable, nor is
it too far gone in dilapidation to be successfully restored. The door
was locked, boardings were fixed in some of the beautiful windows, and
advertisements of Amer-Picon and auctions and political meetings defaced
the front. Obviously the house belonged originally to some personage of
importance at a time when Valenciennes, the city of the Emperor
Valentinian, was still one of the great marts of Western Europe and a
capital of the civilisation of the West. Its population was then much
larger than it now is. By the Scheldt, it communicated with the sea, and
in the thirteenth century it was a member of the famous Hanse of London,
which included also, Reims, St.-Quentin, Douai, Arras, St.-Omer,
Abbeville, Amiens, Bruges, Ypres, and Ghent. This league dominated over
the Channel. Its chief, the Count of the Hanse, who seems to have been
in a manner a successor of the Roman Counts of the Saxon Shore, was
chosen by the leagued cities from among the great burghers of Bruges.
The privileges its representatives enjoyed in London were balanced by
sundry rather monastic restrictions; but it was a great commercial
corporation, and it played a great part in the social and economical
history of mediaeval Europe. As early as the ninth century Valenciennes
and Mons had been so rich and influential, that they were regarded as
the pillars of the '_noble Comte de Hainault, tenu d