BelgiumOmond, George W. T. (George William Thomson)
History
Belgium
Omond, George W. T. (George William Thomson)
Belgium -- Description and travel
The Episcopal Palace, now the Palais de Justice, the erection of
which took thirty years during the commencement of the sixteenth
century, has undergone many alterations since the days of Érard de
la Marck. Two hundred years after it was finished a fire destroyed
the original front, which had to be rebuilt, and the rest of the vast
structure was restored in the nineteenth century. The primitive façade
has been replaced by one moulded on severely classic lines; but the
inner squares, with their picturesque cloisters, are strangely rich
in types of every style, a medley of Gothic, Renaissance, Moorish,
as if symbolic of the vicissitudes undergone by the Bishop-Princes
who inhabited this immense building. Most of the grotesque carvings,
the demons in stone, and the fantastic figures which surround these
courts, were conceived by the luxuriant imagination of Francis Borset,
a sculptor of Liége.
Close to the Episcopal Palace is the market-place, where so many of
the scenes described in these pages took place, and where now stands
the modern Perron, designed by Delcour at the end of the seventeenth
century to replace the old column, at the foot of which the laws of the
Principality, peace, or war used to be proclaimed. There is nothing
about it to recall the history of the stormy times when Charles the
Bold carried it off into Flanders; but the tradition of the ancient
Perron still survives.
At Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, Louvain, the Hôtels de Ville retain
their aspect of the Middle Ages, when they were the centres of
that passionate civic life which throbs through all the history of
the Netherlands. But the Hôtel de Ville of Liége is modern, of the
eighteenth century. It would make a commodious private mansion, but has
nothing in common with the architectural gems which adorn the great
cities of Flanders and Brabant.
This lack of architectural distinction is characteristic of modern
Liége. The hammers of the French Revolution, in destroying the
Cathedral of St. Lambert, completed what the fires of Charles the
Bold began, and of the really old Liége almost nothing remains. But
the fiery spirit which once led to so many wars and revolutions now
finds an outlet in useful work. The industrious character of the
Walloons is perhaps most highly developed in other Walloon parts of
Belgium--among the carpet factories of Tournai, the iron-works of
Charleroi, the flax-works of Courtrai, and in the coal-mines of the
Borinage, which blacken the landscape for miles round Mons. But the
people of Liége have always been famous for their skill in working
steel and iron. In the old days they forged the weapons of war which
they used so often; and at the present time there are in the town many
flourishing companies who turn out large quantities of guns, engines,
and machinery, while up the Meuse there are coal-mines, furnaces, and
factories, where the Walloons toil as laboriously as in Hainaut.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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