ecome really a part
of my daily existence.

Victor Hugo, who traveled through Flanders in 1837, stopped for a time
in Malines, and was so impressed with the carillon that he is said to
have written there the following lines by moonlight with a diamond upon
the window-pane in his room:

"J'aime le carillon dans tes cites Antiques,
O vieux pays, gardien de tes moeurs domestiques,
Noble Flandre, ou le Nord se rechauffe engourdi
Au soleil de Castille et s'accouple au Midi.
Le carillon, c'est l'heure inattendue et folle
Que l'oeil croit voir, vetue en danseuse espagnole
Apparaitre soudain par le trou vif et clair
Que ferait, en s'ouvrant, une porte de l'air."

It was not until the seventeenth century that Flanders began to place
these wondrous collections of bells in her great towers, which seem to
have been built for them. Thus came the carillons of Malines, Bruges,
Ghent, Antwerp, Louvain, and Tournai. Of these, Antwerp possessed the
greatest in number, sixty-five bells. Malines came next with forty-four,
then Bruges with forty, and a great bourdon or bass bell; then Tournai
and Louvain with forty, and finally Ghent with thirty-nine.

In ancient times these carillons were played by hand on a keyboard,
called a _clavecin_. In the belfry at Bruges, in a dusty old chamber
with a leaden floor, I found a very old _clavecin_. It was simply a
rude keyboard much like that of a primitive kind of organ, presenting a
number of jutting handles, something like rolling pins, each of which
was attached to a wire operating the hammer, in the bell chamber
overhead, which strikes the rim of the bells. There was an old red,
leather-covered bench before this machine on which the performer sat,
and it must have been a task requiring considerable strength and agility
so to smite each of these pins with his gloved fist, his knees and each
of his feet (on the foot board) that the hammers above would fall on the
rims of the different bells.

From my room in the old "Panier d'or" in the market-place on many nights
have I watched the tower against the dim sky, and seen the light of the
"_veilleur_," shining in the topmost window, where he keeps watch over
the sleeping town, and sounds two strokes upon a small bell after each
quarter is struck, to show that he is on watch. And so passed the time
in this peaceful land until that fatal day in August, 1914.

Dixmude

Dixmude

There is no longer a Grand' Place at Dixmude