seen in France, it is to be presumed that a few more years will see
everything pulled down, and replaced, perhaps, by a miniature
reproduction in steel and iron of the Eiffel Tower.

Before the deviltries of 1789 began, the marketplace of St.-Amand must
have been one of the most picturesque in Northern Europe. The market is
still held there, and the place was full when we crossed it of peasant
women and peasants, carts laden with vegetables, tables set out with all
manner of utensils, with fruits, with knicknacks. All was bustle and
animation. It was the old picture, save for the uncomely modifications
of our modern costume. But of the splendid architectural frame in which
that picture once was set, how little now is left!

Beside the lofty belfry, one of the most graceful seventeenth-century
buildings now to be anywhere seen, a few arches of one of the cloisters
and one of the great abbatial gatehouses converted into a town-hall! The
Vandal Directory of Chauny dealt more rationally with Premontre than the
'patriots' of St.-Amand with their superb abbey. Had they preserved it,
their town would now have possessed not only an architectural monument
of interest and importance, but ample space and the best possible
'installations' for all its public uses and offices.

Like all the Benedictine abbeys, St.-Amand was a home of letters and of
arts. What remains of its noble library is to be found, as I have said,
in the collection at Valenciennes. Of the treasury which the abbey
contained in the way of sculpture, painting, brass and iron work,
carving in wood, no such account can be given. Such of these as escaped
destruction were looted, sold, and dispersed. There is a tradition, well
or ill-founded, that some exceedingly fine sixteenth-century monuments
executed by Guyot de Beaugrant, the sculptor of the matchless
chimney-piece which, in the Chambre Echevinale at Bruges, commemorates
the expulsion of the French under Francis I. from Flanders, were brought
here and set up in the abbey. If so, no trace of them remains. In the
gatehouse, of which the local authorities have taken possession, a few
fine old books, relics of the abbatial library, are still kept, and the
vaulted chapter-room on the upper floor, used now as a council chamber,
contains four interesting _dessus de porte_ painted here by Watteau. The
subjects are scriptural, of course; but as, in spite of all her efforts,
the obliging damsel who acted as our cicerone c