|THE town of lace," wrote William of Orange to the Estates on the 13th
of April, 1677, "is lost to us. We are very sorry to be obliged to tell
your High Mightinesses that it has not pleased God to bless on this
occasion the arms of the State under our guidance." And then fell also
to the troops of Louis XIV the towns of Cambrai, St. Omer, and the
defense of Lorraine.
But there is now no lace made in Valenciennes. The larger part of the
population of twenty-eight thousand worked in the iron foundries and the
great machine shops surrounding the town, from which clouds of soft coal
smoke rose, reminding one of our own Pittsburgh, but with the addition
of much quaint antiquity, which was now (1910) unhappily rapidly
disappearing through lack of interest on the part of not only the
inhabitants but the authorities, whom one would think alive to their
value as an attraction to the town.
Formerly strongly fortified and most powerful, this quaint semi-Flemish
town, which was now given over thus to prosaic manufacture, was situated
at the junction of the rivers Scheldt and Rhondelle. There were huge,
ugly sugar factories as well as iron mills, indeed,'tis said that nearly
all the sugar used in France was produced here.
Like all Flemish towns, Valenciennes had a good deal of drunkenness to
contend with on the part of its working people, but I must confess I saw
little of it.
It is said that Valentinian I, Roman Emperor, gave name to the town,
which was at first the capital of a small independent principality.
Later it passed into the hands of the Counts of Hainault; suffered and
resisted sieges by Margaret of Hainault in 1254; by Louis XI, in 1477;
by Turenne, in 1656; and by the Spaniards in the seventeenth century;
and by Scherer in 1794. Since the treaty of Nymegen in 1678 it has
belonged to France.
A great many celebrated men were born at Valenciennes, and all about
the statue of Froissart their effigies are arranged in a series of
medallions. Among these are Antoine, Louis and François Watteau, Pujol,
the painters, Lemaire and Carpeaux, the sculptors, and Charles, Sire
de Lannoy and Viceroy of Naples--all natives of the little town. Madame
d'Epinay, the author, also was born here.
Valenciennes had a most attractive and picturesque square, which
occupied the former glacis of the ancient fortifications demolished
about twenty years ago, and there was a handsome street, called the Rue
de Ferrand, upon which was the "Lycée," formerly a Jesuit college, and
the Ecole des Beaux Arts, in which was a museum of natural history,
containing a fine collection of minerals of which the townspeople
were inordinately proud. They quite ignored the value of a splendid
collection of MSS., numbering nearly a thousand examples of mediaeval
workmanship, contained in the Municipal Library, occupying part of
the old Jesuit college. The custode wrung his hands in despair at the
indifference of the authorities to its importance, and became positively
and alarmingly affectionate over me when I showed enthusiasm for some
of the specimens, so that I had to place myself behind one of the cases
where he could not well reach me while I examined the illuminations.
There was a fine statue of Antoine Watteau, the painter, by the sculptor
Carpeaux, with four figures grouped about it representing Italian
comedy. (This statue, I am informed, was shipped to Germany by the
invaders in 1916, to be melted up and cast into cannon. An irreparable
loss, as it was considered one of the finest examples of the work of
Carpeaux.)
In the Square was the ancient Church of St. Géry, a remarkable example
of Gothic workmanship dating from the thirteenth century, and much
studied and valued by architects. In its choir were fine wood carvings
illustrating events in the life of St. Norbert, who was the founder of
the Præmonstratensian order. The handsome and noteworthy Place d'Armes
contained some most quaint and ancient timber dwellings, which were
dated variously during the seventeenth century, and in an astonishingly
fine state of preservation. But by far the most interesting building
in Valenciennes was the Hôtel de Ville, which though lately restored
(1868), dated from the seventeenth century, the period of the Spanish
occupation. The façade was quite imposing, consisting of a row of Doric
columns, upholding a row of Ionic columns, which supported a number
of caryatides and a sort of open gallery above. Carpeaux designed the
sculptures ornamenting the pediment, which represented the Defense of
Valenciennes.