through two generations, stretched his iron sceptre over Douai, the
Claes preserved their great wealth by allying themselves in marriage
with the very noble family of Molina, whose elder branch, then poor,
thus became rich enough to buy the county of Nourho which they had long
held titularly in the kingdom of Leon.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, after vicissitudes which
are of no interest to our present purpose, the family of Claes was
represented at Douai in the person of Monsieur Balthazar Claes-Molina,
Comte de Nourho, who preferred to be called simply Balthazar Claes. Of
the immense fortune amassed by his ancestors, who had kept in motion
over a thousand looms, there remained to him some fifteen thousand
francs a year from landed property in the arrondissement of Douai, and
the house in the rue de Paris, whose furniture in itself was a fortune.
As to the family possessions in Leon, they had been in litigation
between the Molinas of Douai and the branch of the family which remained
in Spain. The Molinas of Leon won the domain and assumed the title of
Comtes de Nourho, though the Claes alone had a legal right to it. But
the pride of a Belgian burgher was superior to the haughty arrogance of
Castile: after the civil rights were instituted, Balthazar Claes cast
aside the ragged robes of his Spanish nobility for his more illustrious
descent from the Ghent martyr.

The patriotic sentiment was so strongly developed in the families exiled
under Charles V. that, to the very close of the eighteenth century, the
Claes remained faithful to the manners and customs and traditions of
their ancestors. They married into none but the purest burgher families,
and required a certain number of aldermen and burgomasters in the
pedigree of every bride-elect before admitting her to the family. They
sought their wives in Bruges or Ghent, in Liege or in Holland; so that
the time-honored domestic customs might be perpetuated around their
hearthstones. This social group became more and more restricted, until,
at the close of the last century, it mustered only some seven or eight
families of the parliamentary nobility, whose manners and flowing robes
of office and magisterial gravity (partly Spanish) harmonized well with
the habits of their life.

The inhabitants of Douai held the family in a religious esteem that was
well-nigh superstition. The sturdy honesty, the untainted loyalty of
the Claes, their unfailing decorum of manne