solidity have been maintained throughout the centuries. In one of the
simplest houses of the square Victor Hugo first took refuge after the
great catastrophe of the _coup d'etat_. It bore the number 27. A
tobacco-shop occupied the ground floor. The poet's parlor was furnished
in a style of bald simplicity, with chairs and a sofa covered with black
haircloth. But he was wont to say, pointing to the Hotel de Ville, "I
have the most wonderful piece of carving in the world for a sideboard."
In this modest abode he wrote _Napoleon le Petit_. Then, stirred by the
historic memories around him, he chose the Inquisition itself for a
subject, and planned his as yet unpublished tragedy of _Torquemada_. The
dwelling in the Grande Place became the haunt of all the proscribed
republicans of France. Yet Belgium gave them but a cold welcome and
grudging hospitality. They were subjected to a series of humiliating
formalities, chief among which was the requirement of the authorities
that each should provide himself with a permit of residence. These
permits were temporary and revocable, and their holders were obliged to
go weekly to ask for their renewal at the central police-office. It is
not surprising, therefore, that so few of the fugitives should have
remained in Belgium. Seven thousand took refuge there after the coup
d'etat, but only two hundred and fifty took up their abode on Belgian
soil. Yet Brussels remained, in some sense, the continental
head-quarters of Victor Hugo, though never kindly or generous in her
treatment of the great exile. In 1871, the rumor having gone abroad that
he had offered shelter to some of the fugitive Communists, his house was
attacked by an armed mob, and its inmates barely escaped with their
lives.

Brussels possesses among her other sights a curiosity with which she
could very well dispense--namely, the Wiertz Gallery. It is a collection
of horrors depicted on a colossal scale by a man whose powers of
painting were scarcely equal to those of a respectable scene-painter. A
series of nightmares, expressed with a sort of epileptic violence and
without any artistic value, clothe the walls of the immense studio with
gigantic abominations. There is neither originality of conception nor
intelligence of execution to redeem their hideousness: their horror is
of the simplest bugaboo kind. A man blowing his head to pieces with a
pistol-shot; a supposed corpse coming to life in its coffin; the First
Napoleon in