Although Chauny is really a very ancient city--dating back at least to the age of Charlemagne, when the monks of Cuissy and St.-Eloi-Fontaine, with the keen eye of those early agriculturists for a good thing, reclaimed its marshes and turned them into a fat land, yielding, as an old local _dicton_ tells us, the 'septem commoda vitae, Poma, nemus, segetes, linum, pecus, herba, racemus.' --it has almost nothing to show to-day in the way of antique architecture. Of the 'seven comforts of life,' the vine has vanished also; but all the others flourish abundantly, and the people of Chauny have little to complain of on the score of the natural resources of their region. During the wars, though, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the place was so often taken and retaken that its buildings were pretty well battered to pieces. The English of Harry the Fifth stormed it in 1417, and England held it for a quarter of a century, during which period an incident occurred much more creditable to the burghers of Chauny than is the taking of the Bastille in 1789 to the citizens of Paris. Monstrelet tells the story in a quaint and vigorous fashion. Chauny at that time was part of the appanage of the Duc d'Orleans, then a prisoner in England, and it was held for the conquerors by a French, nobleman, 'Messire Collard de Mailly,' who had accepted the office of Bailli of Vermandois from King Henry of England. The burghers of Chauny, who had lived for two centuries in the enjoyment of the rights and privileges granted them in a royal charter by Philip Augustus, did not like this state of things at all. So they made up their minds to demolish the castle, lest 'Messire Collard de Mailly' should fill it with English soldiers and make himself quite unendurable. It was a rather hardy enterprise, and the burghers went about it with great coolness and good sense. Theirs was a real rising of the citizens of a town to abate a nuisance which threatened their liberties, and not, like the attack on the Bastille, a blow struck at law, order, and the constituted authorities of a great kingdom by a subsidised mob; and their leaders were the most respectable men of Chauny--not a crew of thieves and murderers like the infamous Maillard, that 'hero of the Bastille,' against whom his own employers and allies were eventually forced to proceed as the chief of a gang of ruffians, and who, not content with assassinating political prisoners and stealing their property in Paris, roamed all over the Departments of the Seine and the Seine-et-Oise, torturing farmers to make them give up their money, and maddening the countryside with outrages not to be described.