Thirty miles South of Aix-la-Chapelle, and twenty-four South-east of Liege, embosomed in a sombre but rather romantic valley of the Ardennes, lies Spa, formerly one of the most aristocratic and celebrated chalybeates of Europe.
We proceed from Liege to Spa along the valley of the Vesdre, and a more beautiful drive can hardly be met with. I do not think it inferior to the banks of the Meuse, and it certainly is much more beautiful than many parts of the Rhine. The sides of the valley are clothed with wood, or cultivated carefully, from their very summits, and studded with beautiful villas, cottages, and hamlets, in all directions. At every winding, we see hundreds of men at work, carrying the new rail-road over rivers and through the solid rock.
“Cette route charmante decouvre à chaque detour de ravissants vallons qui laissant aperçevoir au loin des maisons de plaisance, de vieux chateaux, et de riants villages. Les cotes escarpées des montagnes qui en dessinent les sinuositées parsemées d’arbres, de rochers, et de precipices.”
At the village of Pepinsterre, about sixteen miles from Liege, we quit the Aix-la-Chapelle road, and turn up to the right. The whole way from this to Spa is a constant ascent, the air becoming more bracing, and the scenery more wild, or of the Ardennes-forest character, till we approach the town through a triple avenue, the centre one a pavé, and the side ones for walking or riding. Spa itself lies in a very picturesque dell, the eastern side of which is very abrupt, and covered with wood. The houses are all white and clean, and the locale, altogether, pleased me more than almost any spa I had previously visited.
Yet the place is comparatively abandoned! We saw very few English there, and up to the 23d July, 1840, only about a thousand names were entered on the books, many, perhaps most, of whom were casual visitors, or merely passengers to other spas! I fear the good citizens of Spa will not erect a statue to Sir Francis Head.
A catalogue of the emperors, kings, queens, princes, and nobility of all grades (laying aside the gentry and bureaucracy) who have lined their ribs with steel, and tanned their slender chylopoietics in the Pouhon or Geronsterre, would fill a volume. Our countrymen bear a conspicuous part in this roll of worthies. Henry the Third, of France, visited Spa in the sixteenth century—in the same, Charles Stuart, having lost his kingdom, repaired to Spa to regain his health. In 1717, Peter the Great drank the waters of the Pouhon and Geronsterre—in one single year, (1783,) the list of princes, dukes, and princesses, alone, amounted to 33, besides the hosts of inferior gentry.
The following history of one of our countrymen, recorded by Henry de Steers, the Sydenham of Spa, is not a little curious:—“In 1620, arrived here a Milord Anglais, accompanied by his medical attendant. The College of Physicians in London, who had been consulted in this case, instead of putting Milord into a strait-waistcoat—or, at all events, under surveillance, recommended him to the care of De Steers, at Spa. This unfortunate gentleman laboured under monomania of three distinct forms, which attacked him periodically, and in succession. During the first ten days of every month, he neither ate, nor drank, nor spoke. He kept to his room all the time. On the eleventh morning he would rise from his bed early, go out a hunting, and come home hungry, eating and drinking enormously. This was his occupation during the second decade of the month. In the third decade, the scene entirely changed. He became passionately fond of music, and squandered hundreds upon the squallini’s of that day. At the end of the month the taciturnity and fasting, &c. returned.”
It is hardly necessary to say that De Steers, being unable to prevail on the monomaniac to drink the Spa waters, the patient returned to England, and became a furious and confirmed maniac.
“As soon,” says Dr. Dordonville, “as the roads to Spa were rendered passable, the English, travellers by disposition, and great admirers of the picturesque, thronged to the fountains, and filled the town by their magnificence. They loved to expend their riches; and those, whose energetic passions threw them into dissipation, introduced a fatal and ruinous luxury.”