Arras has a combined Hôtel de Ville and belfry which puts the market-house and belfry of Bruges quite in the shade from an impressive architectural point of view. There is not the quiet, splendid severity of its more famous compeer at Bruges, but there is far more luxuriance in its architectural form, and, at any rate, it was a surprise and a pleasure to find that any such splendid monument were here.
The Spanish invasion of other days has left its mark all through Flanders, and here at Arras the florid Renaissance architecture of the Hôtel de Ville and the vaults and roofs of the market-square are manifestly exotics from a land strange to French architectural ways.
Arras, with its quaint old arcaded market-place, is a great distributing-point for cereals. A million of francs' worth in value changes hands here in a year, and the sale, in small lots, out in the open, is a survival of the moyen âge when the abbés of a neighbouring monastery levied toll for the privilege of selling on the market-place. Today the toll-gatherer, he who collects the small fee from the stall-owners, is still known as the Abbé.
Arras is quaint and interesting, and withal a lively, progressive town, where all manner of merchandizing is conducted along very businesslike lines. You can buy sewing-machines and agricultural machinery from America at Arras, and felt hats and orange marmalade (which the Frenchman calls, mysteriously, simply, "Dundee") from Britain.
To Douai, from Cambrai, was another hour's run. Douai has a Hôtel de Ville and belfry, too, which were entirely unlooked for. Quaint, remarkable, and the pet and pride of the inhabitant, the bells of the belfry of Bible-making Douai ring out rag-time dances and Sousa marches. Such is the rage for up-to-dateness!
There is a goodly bit to see at Douai in the way of ecclesiastical monuments, but the chief attraction, that which draws strangers to the place, is the July "Fête de Gayant," at which M. and Mme. Gayant (giant), made of wickerwork and dressed more or less à la mode, are promenaded up and down the streets to the tune of the "Air de Gayante." All this is in commemoration of an unsuccessful attempt to capture the city by Louis XI. in 1479. The fête has been going on yearly ever since, and shows no signs of dying out, as does the Guy Fawkes celebration in England.
We were now going through France's "black country," the coal-fields of the north, and the gaunt scaffolds of the mine-pits dotted the landscape here and there, as they do in Pennsylvania or the Midlands of England. They did not especially disfigure the landscape, but gave a modern note of industry and prosperity which was as marked as that of the farmyards of the peasants and high-farmers of Normandy or La Beance. France is an exceedingly wealthy, and, what is more, a "self-contained" nation; and this fact should not be forgotten by the critics of what they like to call effete Europe.
Bethune is in the heart of the coal country, and is not a particularly lovely town. It has a dream of an old-world hotel, though, and one may go a great deal farther and fare a great deal worse than at Bethune's Hôtel du Nord, a great rambling, stone Renaissance building, with heavy decorated window-frames, queer rambling staircases, and ponderous, beamed ceilings.
It sits on a little Place, opposite an isolated belfry, from whose upper window there twinkles, at night, a little star of light, like a mariner's beacon. What it is all supposed to represent no ones seems to know, but it is an institution which dies hard, and some one pays the expense of keeping it alight. A belfry is a very useful adjunct to a town. If the writer ever plans a modern city he will plant a belfry in the very centre, with four clock-faces on it, a sun-dial, a thermometer, and a peal of bells. You find all these things on the belfry of Bethune, and altogether it is the most picturesque, satisfying, and useful belfry the writer has ever seen.