St.-Amand now has a population of ten or twelve thousand souls. Part of the Anzin property lies within the communal limits, but the place is a busy place and has industries of its own. It is connected with Anzin and with Valenciennes by a steam tramway, and I went there with M. Guary one fine summer morning to see what is left of the once magnificent Benedictine monastery of the seventeenth century, which was the great feature of St.-Amand a hundred years ago. A picture preserved in the collection at Valenciennes gives a fair notion of the extent and magnificence of the abbey, the demolition of which has been going on from 1793 to this day. M. Guary remembers the stately ruins as much more extensive in his youth than they now are, and as the good people of St.-Amand have very recently allowed the local architect to put up, under the very shadow of the exquisitely beautiful belfry still standing, one of the most dismal and commonplace brick school-houses I have seen in France, it is to be presumed that a few more years will see everything pulled down, and replaced, perhaps, by a miniature reproduction in steel and iron of the Eiffel Tower. Before the deviltries of 1789 began, the marketplace of St.-Amand must have been one of the most picturesque in Northern Europe. The market is still held there, and the place was full when we crossed it of peasant women and peasants, carts laden with vegetables, tables set out with all manner of utensils, with fruits, with knicknacks. All was bustle and animation. It was the old picture, save for the uncomely modifications of our modern costume. But of the splendid architectural frame in which that picture once was set, how little now is left! Beside the lofty belfry, one of the most graceful seventeenth-century buildings now to be anywhere seen, a few arches of one of the cloisters and one of the great abbatial gatehouses converted into a town-hall! The Vandal Directory of Chauny dealt more rationally with Premontre than the 'patriots' of St.-Amand with their superb abbey. Had they preserved it, their town would now have possessed not only an architectural monument of interest and importance, but ample space and the best possible 'installations' for all its public uses and offices.