Close to the Place Verte is the Marché du Vendredi, where, in 1578, Christopher Plantin, 'the Rubens of the printing-press,' set up his works. The story of Plantin's life is a romance of labour. He was born at Tours in 1514, of a wealthy family called Tercelain; but, his father having lost his fortune, he changed his name to Plantin, and found employment at Caen as a bookbinder. Having married there, he went to Antwerp, and opened a small shop, in which he worked at his own trade while his wife sold cloth. The story goes that one night during the carnival he was wounded by some masqueraders, who mistook him for another person. To hush up the affair they paid him a sum of money, with which he bought a press and types, began to print almanacs and books for children, and did this so well that he soon had a flourishing business. [Illustration: ANTWERP THE Place Verte.] The first important work produced at the Plantin Press was 'L'Instruction d'une Fille de Noble Maison,' a translation from the Italian, which appeared in 1555. His reputation grew, and in thirteen years he was able to purchase the site at the Marché du Vendredi. His name, like that of Joannes Rubens, was on the list of suspected Calvinists after the image-breaking, and his printing-house was searched. But nothing was found to support the charge of heresy, and his orthodoxy must have been established beyond doubt, for Philip not only employed him to produce the famous Polyglot Bible, but gave him the monopoly of printing missals and breviaries for the whole of the Spanish Empire. After his death in 1589, the business, which now had branches in Paris, Leyden, and Frankfort, was carried on by his son-in-law, Jean Mourentorff, whose family afterwards changed their name, in accordance with the pedantic fashion of the day, to Moretus. The Musée Plantin-Moretus, with the dwelling-rooms and their Renaissance furniture; the type and presses of the sixteenth century; the old proof-sheets, looking as if the printer's reader had just left them; the tapestry and paintings; and the quaint courtyard with the aged vine-tree, which traditions say was put there by Plantin himself--is the place of all others where some idea may be formed of the family life and surroundings of a wealthy business man in the Netherlands 300 years ago. [Illustration: ANTWERP THE Musée Plantin-Moretus (the Arrière Boutique).]