The remaining room is by far the most interesting, for it was here that Charles the Bold publicly betrothed Margaret of York. The room, which is officially termed the _Salle des Délibérations_, or Council Hall, has a fine old fireplace said to have been restored during the seventeenth century. It is decorated with two female figures in hoop skirts and bears the motto "_Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos_." This quotation from Vergil (Æneid 6:853) sounds rather pompous and out of place in the council chamber of this now completely vanquished and ruined city, and must have seemed so even in the seventeenth century, but it may have been a survival of an inscription placed over the original fireplace in the days when Damme dared to close its gates even against the men from Bruges itself, and the puissant Counts of Flanders had to use force to compel it to open them. It was in the year 1468 that this room in which we are now standing had its one great day and became, for a brief space, the setting of one of those splendid mediæval scenes that bards and novelists so fondly recall, and that--in our age of up-to-date inventions--the moving-picture men are so busily reconstructing and re-enacting. The Princess had landed at Sluys, near the mouth of the River Zwyn, where the Duke of Burgundy paid her a brief visit in secret--possibly to see what she looked like, for this was a marriage of state and intended to further his far-reaching ambitions. Probably if she had been as homely as a witch the wedding would have taken place just the same, but as the reverse was the case the preliminary inspection must have been very gratifying. The following day the royal lady and her company rode to Damme in a fleet of barges gorgeously decorated with gold, rich velvets and rare silks. Here she was lodged in this very Council Chamber of the Hotel de Ville, and here the Duke came in great state to perform the public ceremony of betrothal. The wedding ring was given in the presence of the English Bishop who had accompanied the Princess, and Charles announced that he would await her presence on the morrow at Bruges, where the wedding itself was to be celebrated in the Cathedral.