Another Rubens, of less importance, originally belonged to the church of Notre-Dame de la Chaussee, which was pulled down, as well as pillaged, at the same time. It seems to have been rescued from the spoilers by the good people of the neighbourhood, and was honestly bought for the Museum in 1866, not magnificently 'presented' to it by official 'receivers,' not much better than the original thieves. Francois Pourbus of Bruges is represented here by two admirable full-length portraits of Philippe Emanuel de Croy, Comte de Solre, and of his sister, Marie de Croy, and by a full-length portrait of Dorothee de Croy, Duchesse d'Arschot, in a stately wedding-dress, painted, in the full maturity of his powers, at Paris, in 1617. This is the wedding-dress described, according to M. Foucart, an accomplished amateur of Valenciennes, one of the Conservators of the Museum, by Reiffenberg in his valuable book: '_Une existence de Grand Seigneur au XVI^e Siecle_,' and the Valenciennes Museum is particularly rich in pictures of interest from this, which may be called the documentary, point of view. Among these must be reckoned a curious painting of the mother and the wife of Henri III., with sundry dames of high degree, and women of the people violently squabbling together over a pair of trunk-hose, the property of the king, who lies prostrate in one corner of the canvas, struck down by the clenched fist of a man in the robes of a member of the Parliament of Paris. From this and from another painting on parchment which sets forth, as an inscription recites, 'the cruel martyrdom of the most reverend Cardinal de Guise by the inhuman tyrant Henri de Valois,' it may be clearly gathered that the people of French Flanders had very positive opinions, and were not slow to express them, long before the Abbe Sieyes constituted himself the Isaac Newton of political science. There is a goodly show, too, of historical portraits of interest, one of the Admiral de Coligny, which was exhibited at Paris in 1878, another of Fenelon, which came here from the pillage of the Chapterhouse of Cambray, another of Prince Maurice of Nassau, another of Hortense Mancini. A good full-length portrait of Bardo Bardi Magalotti, colonel of the 'Royal Italian' regiment under Louis XIV., is set in a very remarkable frame of superbly carved oak, part of the woodwork of the demolished church of St.-Gery. Of historical interest, too, is a large Van der Meulen, representing the defeat of Turenne before Valenciennes in 1656, by the Spanish army under Conde. From a bird's-eye view of Valenciennes in the background of this large canvas, we may see how much the city has lost by the gradual destruction of its finest architectural features.