Leuven

“ De Leuven, who had taken notice of him in Villers-Cotterets, found him out in Paris and returned with him. Some of his ancient splendour still stuck to the poor fellow, but you might seek in vain for any real stability at the base of his fresh plans for the future; those fleeting clouds hardly got beyond the stage of hopes. During his stay in Paris a great change had [Pg 104] come over Adolphe's character—a change which was to react on me. ”

“ Lafarge had laughed hugely at de Leuven's idea of making me his collaborator. For, indeed, what notice would the Parisian stage take of an uneducated child; a poor provincial lad, buried away in a small town in the Ile-de-France; ignorant both of French and foreign literatures; hardly acquainted with the names of the great; feeling only a tepid sympathy with their most highly praised masterpieces, his lack of artistic education having veiled their style from him; setting to work without knowing the theory of constructing a plot, an action, a catastrophe, a dénoûment ”

“ It was settled that Manceau should be searched for immediately after the meal was over.
"Good!" said de Leuven in a whisper to me,—"I will take the opportunity while everybody is out to write my verses in Louise's album."
[Pg 42]
"And I," I replied, "I will stand sentinel at the door to prevent your being disturbed."
Everything happened as had been arranged. The whole beehive of the castle swarmed into the garden. The older men—M. de Leuven the father, M. Collard, M. Méchin—stayed in the drawing-room to read the newspapers. Hippolyte played billiards with Maurice. ”

“ Madame Capelle I adored, as she took pity on my youthfulness when people made fun of my peculiarities—peculiarities which I will not hide from myself I possessed to a certain extent. She introduced me to de Leuven as a young friend of hers and asked me to lunch with them next day in the forest to improve our acquaintance; it was also arranged that, following upon the lunch, I should spend two or three days at the château of Villers-Hellon. Of course I accepted the invitation. The fête of Corey was on the way, with its delightful entertainments of dancing and merriment. ”

“ I recollect that because of the noise these two controversial plays made throughout the whole of the literary world, I, who was just beginning to feel the first breath of poetry stir within me, was anxious to read them. I wrote to de Leuven, who sent me both the Liberal and the Royalist work. ”

“ Louth was a seat of the wool trade as early as 1297; the modern manufactures seem to have arisen at the end of the 18th century, when, according to the charter of 1830, there was a great increase in the population, manufactures, trade and commerce of the town.
See E. H. R. Tatham, Lincolnshire in Roman Times (Louth, 1902) ; Richard W. Goulding, Louth Old Corporation Records (Louth, 1891) .
LOUVAIN (Flem. Leuven) , a town of Belgium in the province of Brabant, of which it was the capital in the 14th century before the rise of Brussels. Pop. ”

“ The whole town seethed with black-robed priests, brown-robed, bare-footed monks, and white-coped nuns.
In the Middle Ages Louvain had four times its present population; its once famous university had diminished in the same proportion. There was a time when no man might hold public office in the Austrian Netherlands who did not have a degree from the University of Louvain.
Of the two thousand cloth factories which made the city a hive of industry during the thirteen hundreds but little sign remained when we were there. During the fifteenth century it was the largest city west of the Alps. ”

“ Onward to Lewes, the county-town of Sussex, the distance is eight miles; the road beautiful and lonely, with but one village—that of Little Horsted—on the way, until quite close to Lewes itself, when the suburb village of Cliffe is passed. Lewes, with its castle, its memories of the great battle in the long ago, its quaint old churches and quainter old houses, piled up against one another along the steep streets, is a place not to be hurried through or properly seen in an hour. ”

“ Dick and Nona talked in a desultory fashion as they journeyed toward the famous old university town. One felt as if Louvain was already a city of the past. Within its suburbs there were many small ruined homes, looking as if a giant had ruthlessly pushed over whole rows of dolls' houses. For Louvain was formerly one of the lace-making centers of Belgium, and in these small houses dark-eyed women and girls once worked long hours at their trade. ”

“ We overtook a string of wagons fitted up as carryalls and bearing family parties of the burghers to Louvain to spend a day among the wreckage. There is no accounting for tastes. If I had been a Belgian the last thing I should want my wife and my baby to see would be the ancient university town, the national cradle of the Church, in its present state. Nevertheless there were many excursionists in Louvain that day.
The Germans had taken down the bars and sight-seers came by autobusses from as far away as Aix-la-Chapelle and from Liege and many from Brussels. ”

“ With this civil strife the importance and prosperity of Louvain declined. Many weavers fled to Holland and England, the duke took up his residence in the strong castle of Vilvorde, and Brussels prospered at the expense of Louvain. What it lost in trade it partially recovered as a seat of learning, for in 1423, Duke John IV. of Brabant founded there a university and ever since Louvain University has enjoyed the first place in Belgium. It has always prided itself most on its theological teaching. ”

“ Within this curving, sheltering hook of sand hills lie the smooth waters of Lewes Harbor, and, set a little back from the shore, the quaint old town, with its dingy wooden houses of clapboard and shingle, looks sleepily out through the masts of the shipping lying at anchor in the harbor, to the purple, clean-cut, level thread of the ocean horizon beyond.
Lewes is a queer, odd, old-fashioned little town, smelling fragrant of salt marsh and sea breeze. It is rarely visited by strangers. ”

“ A glance at the map will assure us that Lewes could not but be a place of great importance, increasing with England in wealth and strength. The South Downs stand like a vast rampart back from the sea, guarding South England from surprise and invasion. But this great wall is broken at four different places, at Arundel in the west where the Arun breaks through the chalk to find the sea, at Bramber where the Adur passes seaward, at Lewes where the Ouse goes through, and at Wilmington where the Cuckmere winds through the hills to its haven. ”

“ Lewes is situated on the right bank of a great curve of the river Ouse, which almost encircles the town. To the south are the low-lying marshes through which the river meanders towards the sea, while to the north, east, and west are the bare slopes of the South Downs, through which the river forces its way past the gap in which the town is situated. ”

“ The natural strength and beauty of this situation has been much increased by the labour of man, for Lewes is set as it were all in a garden out of which it rises, a pinnacle of old houses crowned by the castle upon its half precipitous hill. It is a curiously un-English vision you get from the High Street for instance, looking back upon the hill or from the little borgo of Southover or from Cliffe, and yet there can be few more solidly English places than Lewes. ”

“ Louvain is the seat of the well-known University and the headquarters of the Clerical party of Belgium. Once a most important industrial center with a population of 200,000, it has dwindled to 45,000 or thereabouts. ”

“ But none of these being Companions for me, I only pass’d quite thro’ the Town; for I had seen the Churches before; and I was not a Stranger to the turbulent Spirit of the Inhabitants, who are the most unpolish’d of all the Netherlands. One of the grand Privileges of the University of Louvain, is a Nomination to a great Number of Benefices; about which they are actually at Law with several Bishops of the Netherlands, who pretend to dispute their said Right; on Pretence, that the University prefers Men to Livings, of whose Persons or Sentiments they have no Knowledge. ”

“ The name of the Ursuline Convent acted like a charm, for Louvain was papist to the core in these days of Spanish dominion. It had been a city of refuge nearly a hundred years ago for all that was truest and bravest and noblest among English Roman Catholics, in the cruel days of Queen Elizabeth, and Englishmen had become the leading spirits of the University there, and had attracted the youth of Romanist England to the sober old Flemish town, before the establishment of Dr. Allan’s rival seminary at Douai, Sir John could have found no safer haven for his little ewe lamb. ”

“ Perhaps after all the most fundamental truth about Lewes is that she is the capital of the South Downs, and the South Downs are the glory of the South Country; from the noble antiquity of Winchester to the splendour of Beachy Head they run like an indestructible line of Latin verse beneath the blazon of England. They stand up between the land and the sea, the most Roman thing in England, and of all English land it is their white brows that the sun kisses first when it rises over the sea, of all English hills every morning they are the first to be blest. ”

“ Those who have resided at Louvain have observed, that its inhabitants are in general more polite than in most of the towns in these provinces; but my stay was not sufficiently long to enable me to form any opinion on the subject. The manners of the people do not seem to me very dissimilar from those of the French, but others think they most resemble the Dutch. In fact, the Netherlanders have no very peculiar characteristics, but partake, in many respects, of those which distinguish the various nations from whom they are descended. ”

“ During the early Middle Ages, Louvain was also celebrated for its University, founded in 1426, and suppressed by the French in 1797. It was re-established by the Dutch in 1817, but abandoned by the Belgian Government in 1834, and then started afresh in the next year as a free private Roman Catholic University. Charles V. was educated here.
The modern town has shrunk far away within its ancient ramparts, whose site is now for the most part occupied by empty Boulevards. It is still the stronghold of Roman Catholic theology in Belgium. ”

“ Levan church-tower suddenly rising before you, scarce above your line of vision. The church, in fact, is built in a hollow—once a solitary hollow—giving upon the sea, a place where few strangers ever came in those distant fifth-century days when St. Levan lived the hermit [239] life. We know very little of that saint, except the tale of the disastrous entertainment he offered his sister when she came to visit him here. It seems that he subsisted entirely upon the fish he caught, and thinking he would spread a dainty meal before his visitors, he went out and caught a chad. ”

“ In the center of the city the sight is extraordinarily picturesque—gloomy, abominable, and more so in the evening when the full moon is shining over the mass of ruins, it is really fantastic, diabolical.
“The center of old Louvain, the old city of the Dukes of Brabant, exists no longer; a new city will have to be built in the center of the quarters spared by the torch. ”

“ THE SAVIOUR OF MONT CÉSAR Rain fell softly, as it frequently falls in Belgium, drenching the ripening fields of Brabant and the ghosts of ruined towns. By six o’clock in the evening we had reached Louvain. My motor-car rolled through the porte de Bruxelles and down the narrow, slippery Flemish streets into the heart of the city. From a sentry box marked with barber-pole stripes in the German colours—black, white, red; black, white, red again—a bearded Landsturm man leaped out, wearing a helmet like a Yohoghany miner’s cap, a faded gray-green service uniform, and high, mud-coloured boots. ”

“ This valley is in every respect a melancholy spot, and during a period of storms, or at night, it is exactly the place which might well be haunted by demon revellers. In the days of the saint from whom the parish has its name—St Leven—he lived a long way up from the cove, at a place called Bodelan, and his influence made that, which is now so dreary, a garden. By his pure holiness he made the wilderness a garden of flowers, and spread gladness where now is desolation. ”

“ It is necessary, however, to conclude this section, to say a few words about Louvain, which, lying as it does on the main route from Brussels to Liege, may naturally be considered on our way to the northern Ardennes.
Louvain, on the whole, has been much more modernized than other Belgian cities of corresponding bulk, such as Bruges or Malines. The road from the railway-station to the centre of the town is commonplace indeed in its lack of picturesque Flemish house-fronts or stepped, "corbie," Flemish gables. ”

“ But the Louvainese are really most provincial in many ways, for instance, they will dine heavily in the middle of the day at 12:30, taking light suppers at 7:30 in the evening, and after coffee or a glass of beer at one of the numerous good and well-kept cafés on the principal street, they will go home and to bed by half-past nine, and by ten o'clock the burgher has retired, the lights are out and the town "sleeps." I let a day pass before studying the Hotel de Ville, which is one of the greatest of the Flemish mediæval monuments. ”