Notwithstanding the slovenly 'edility' of Valenciennes, I found it a very interesting place. The Hotel du Commerce there is a very well-kept old-fashioned hostelry, installed in a stately and spacious house, long the residence of a considerable family. Indeed, one of my friends in Valenciennes was quite severe in his comments upon the indifference of the head of this family, still a man of large property, to this conversion of the ancestral mansion into an inn. With its fine gateway, its porter's lodge on either hand, its large courtyard shaded with well-grown old trees, and its well-proportioned apartments, it is certainly a specimen worth preserving of such a house as King Louis need not have disdained to enter, when he made Valenciennes and French Flanders definitely French in 1677. 'We have a noisy, ignorant set of people in power here now,' said my friend, 'who pulled down, not long ago, 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.