Douai
Douai
Although across the border in France, Douai must still be called a Flemish town, because of its history and affiliations. The town is quaint in the extreme and of great antiquity, growing up originally around a Gallo-Roman fort. In the many wars carried on by the French against the English, the Flemish and the Germans, not to mention its sufferings from the invading Spaniards, it suffered many sieges and captures. Resisting the memorable attack of Louis the Eleventh, it has regularly celebrated the anniversary of this victory each year in a notable Fête or Kermesse, in which the effigies of the giant Gayant and his family, made of wickerwork and clad in medieval costumes, are paraded through the town by order of the authorities, followed by a procession of costumed attendants through the tortuous streets, to the music of bands and the chimes from the belfry of the Hôtel de Ville.
This, the most notable edifice in the town, is a fine Gothic tower one hundred and fifty feet high, with a remarkable construction of tower and turrets, supported by corbels of the fifteenth century, containing a fine chime of bells made by the Van den Gheyns. The bells are visible from below, hanging sometimes well outside the turret of the bell chamber, and, ranging tier upon tier, from those seemingly the size of a gallon measure, to those immense ones weighing from fifteen hundred to two thousand pounds. This great tower witnessed the attack and occupation of the Spaniards, the foundation by the Roman Catholics of the great University in 1652 to counter-act the Protestantism of the Netherlands, which had but a brief career, and the capture of the town by Louis the Fourteenth. Here was published in 1610 an English translation of the Old Testament for Roman Catholics, as well as the English Roman Catholic version of the scriptures, and the New Testament translated at Rheims in 1582, and known as the "Douai Bible." This was also the birthplace of Jean Bellgambe, the painter (1540) surnamed "Maître des Couleurs," whose nine great oaken panels form the wonderful altarpiece in the church of Notre Dame.
