Chauny possessed, as far back as the beginning of the twelfth century, a public hospital or Hotel-Dieu, and a hospital for lepers called the 'Maladrerie.' Who founded the Hotel-Dieu is not known, for in those 'ages of faith,' so lovingly described by Kenelm Digby, it was not thought so extraordinary a thing that a man or a woman should devote his or her substance to benevolent purposes, as it is fast coming to be in our own times. The mayor and sworn magistrates of the city were the official governors of the hospital, and the chaplain was taken from among the monks of Saint-Eloi-Fontaine. A century and a half afterwards, in 1250, the Abbot of Saint-Eloi-Fontaine received, under the wills of three burghers of Chauny, a sum equal to about 40,000 francs of our time for the service of the hospital of the Hotel-Dieu. It is worth remembering that the Third French Republic has passed a law forbidding ecclesiastics to receive or execute such benevolent trusts as this. I have already alluded in a note to a subsequent legacy made to this institution in the fifteenth century by a pious dame of Chauny. A few years later, in 1419, Colart Le Miroirier, a resident of Chauny, left to the Hotel-Dieu all his lands and goods at Chauny, Ognes, and Roy. The 'religious wars' wrecked the Hotel-Dieu in the sixteenth century; but in 1620 a devout woman, Marie Dubuisson, took the work of reconstruction in hand, and the citizens followed it up; so that, by the end of the seventeenth century, it was well in order once more, and it continued to be administered for the benefit of the poor of Chauny till the 'patriots' confiscated it in 1793. Under the Empire, in 1811, the re-established hospital was combined with an orphan asylum, and both were put under the charge of the Sisters of Charity, one of whom, Sister Renee Canet, had the good sense to found here a little manufactory of hosiery and caps, which holds its own, I am told, despite the not very benevolent combinations against it of the local hosiers. The old buildings of the Hotel-Dieu, however, no longer exist, and the chief public hospital of Chauny is installed in a large edifice put up under the Second Empire in 1865, and known as the 'Hospice-Sainte-Eugenie,' in honour of the Empress. It says something for the common sense of the local authorities that they have not insisted on changing the name of the institution.