Of course Hans was a sufficiently ordinary name in Germany, but it was not a common one in the Netherlands, and there is another circumstance which makes it probable that the Hans in question was Hans Memlinc. No picture of Marmion has come down to us which can be identified as certainly his, but there are several which may be his handiwork. Amongst them four panels on which is depicted the life of St. Bertin. They once formed the wings of the sculptured retable of silver gilt, adorned with enamel and precious stones, which for more than three hundred years glistered behind the high altar in the Abbey Church of St. Bertin at St. Omer, the last resting-place of so many of the early Counts of Flanders. Exquisite alike in colour and design, in days when Gothic art was least esteemed these marvellous paintings excited universal admiration, and Rubens himself is said to have been so enamoured of their beauty that he offered to cover them with _Louis d'or_ if only the monks would consent to sell. Presently came the evil days of the French Revolution. The old church was pillaged and razed to the ground, and the triptych disappeared. Fortunately the shutters were saved. Somehow or other they came into the hands of a baker of St. Omer, who later on sold them to an art collector in the neighbourhood. In 1823 they were put up for sale at the Hôtel Bullion in Paris and purchased for 7500 francs (£300) by Monsieur Nieuwenhuys for William I., King of the Netherlands. Only the larger shutters, however, were placed in the King's collection. The smaller ones were re-sold to M. Beaucousin, and when he died in 1861 they were purchased along with his other pictures for the National Gallery. In days gone by these exquisite pictures were unhesitatingly attributed to Memlinc. There was an unbroken tradition at St. Bertin's that he had painted them. 'Never,' says M. de Laplane in his _Abbés de St. Bertin_ (1844), 'had there existed a doubt at the abbey as to their authorship.' The Abbé Descamps, who visited St. Omer in 1769, was quite sure that they were Memlinc's, and for over a hundred years historians, artists and archæologists alike were unanimous in adjudging them his. Even as recently as 1881 the well-known Dutch art critic Victor de Stuers expressed the same opinion. It was probably the Comte de Laborde who first expressed doubt as to their authorship. Writing in 1851 of the larger panels he says, 'To whom must we attribute these two delicious pages--to Memlinc in a peculiar phase of his talent, painting in a different and in some respects a less precise style than he painted at Bruges? or have we here the work of a disciple or, may be, of a rival? If so the artist who produced them must be reckoned among the most eminent.... I shall have no peace until I have discovered the date, the price, and the author of these pictures.[50]