certain: frescoes have actually been discovered in the chancel, and too, alas! wiped out, the illumination of the keystones of the vaulting still exists, and in other parts of the church there are some faint vestiges of mural painting, nor has the whitewash yet been everywhere removed. Doubtless, when this is done, more will be brought to light. For the rest, no lover of mediæval art will think of leaving Brussels without having first visited this most interesting building. [Illustration: NOTRE-DAME DE LA CHAPELLE.] NOTRE-DAME DE LA CHAPELLE The Church of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle has been for many centuries[33] what it still is, a simple parish church, the parish church of a district which has never been a rich one, and which, when the foundation stone was laid, and for more than three centuries afterwards, was the poorest quarter of the city. In those days this stately structure towered high above the squalid huts of turf or wood which the weavers called their homes; fires were frequent then, and in the great conflagration of 1405, which destroyed fourteen hundred houses, the old sanctuary, where so many generations of downtrodden toilers had brought their woes and grievances to the throne of the Most High, was all but burnt down. The choir and transepts were not so injured as to be past reparation, but the nave and the aisles and the tower were wholly destroyed, and it was decided to rebuild them in such a fashion that the poor man's church should be second to none in the city. For something like fifty years they laboured at it, and when at last the work was completed, not even the great collegiate Church of Saint Michael and Saint Gudule was more lovely than the chapel in the weavers' quarter. Saint Gudule's was of course, a larger church than Notre-Dame, but in those days the difference in size of the two buildings was not so great as it is at present: Saint Gudule's has waxed both in size and beauty since then, as we shall presently see, and Notre-Dame has waned. Villeroi shattered the spire in 1695, and some forty years before, two very beautiful side chapels on the north of the chancel were made one, which is not beautiful, and perhaps, too, when the church was restored after the French bombardment, the arrangement of the roof was altered: the more recent portion of the building is very considerably higher than the earlier work, and the junction is not very happily effected, at all events as seen from the exterior. This can hardly have been the original arrangement, unless, indeed, it was only regarded as a temporary one, with a view later on to the reconstruction of the transepts and the chancel, in the same style and on the same magnificent scale as the rest of the building. If this were the original plan of the architect, and if it had been successfully carried out, Brussels would have been possessed of the _chef-d'[oe]uvre_ of Brabant architecture, but on the other hand