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Updated: June 15, 2025
Flowers were everywhere, wreathed along the house-fronts, tied to the horses' ears, in ladies' hands and gentlemen's button-holes, while venders went up and down the street bearing great trays of violets and carnations and camellias for sale.
A few of the house-fronts were covered by grape vines, others by roses climbing to the second-story windows, through which they wafted the fragrance of their scattered bunches. One end of the square enters the main street of the Lower Town, the gardens of which reach to the bank of one of the two rivers which water the valley of Provins.
Since then, of no commercial or political importance, it has lived the life of a dull country town, and tradition says that there is plenty of solid wealth stored by its thrifty inhabitants behind the plain house-fronts which line its quiet streets. From the centre of the square one can see all that there is to be seen of Furnes.
The long run in the dripping autumn afternoon along the Antwerp Road, where the miserable fugitives were still trudging in thousands; the search for lodgings in the stricken city, where most of the streets were silent and deserted as if the plague had passed there, and the only bustling life was in the central quarter, where "the field-gray ones" abounded; the closed shops, the house-fronts shattered by shells, the great cathedral standing in the moonlight, unharmed as far as we could see, except for one shell which had penetrated the south transept, just where Rubens's "Descent from the Cross" used to hang before it was carried away for safety I shall never forget those impressions.
They chattered gaily and tasted and pecked with dainty lips and turned-up noses. The waiters ran here, there, like slaves. Those coaxing smells stung like adders and roused evil thoughts in his brain. His stomach fretted awfully and his empty head turned. He hurried away. In a street with windowless house-fronts, a street without people in it, he felt better.
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. Louvain, in fact, unlike the two "dead" cities of West Flanders and Brabant, wears a briskly business-like aspect, and pulses with modern life.
Then was the time in which the chains, fastened in those huge rings which still dangle from the grim house-fronts, were stretched across the street; thus enclosing and fettering a compact mass of combatants in an iron embrace, while from the rare and narrow murder-windows in the walls, and from the beetling roofs, descended the hail of iron and stone and scalding pitch and red-hot coals to refresh the struggling throng below.
The dwellings in the suburb were poor, though few even in the richer quarters were at all handsome; the streets barely sixteen feet wide, ill-paved, filthy, dingy. A line of dirty gray stucco house-fronts was broken only by the small doors and the smaller windows in the second story.
The air is hazy, and the Alps of Savoy look like a light veil beneath the sun. In this light the water is of a bright green like malachite. Beyond Lausanne the mist disappears, and the Alps again appear dazzling white and steep as pyramids and towers. Towns, villages, and villas cast reflections of their white or coloured house-fronts and their light balconies on the lake.
It was as though a bird's-eye view levelled the city, the famous hills merely showing like bosses, swellings scarcely perceptible amidst the spreading sea of house-fronts.
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