The Alkahest | Page 5

still more patient industry, are
hereditary like their family fortunes. If we were asked to show in
human form the purest specimen of solid stability, we could do no
better than point to a portrait of some old burgomaster, capable, as was
proved again and again, of dying in a commonplace way, and without
the incitements of glory, for the welfare of his Free- town.
Yet we shall find a tender and poetic side to this patriarchal life, which

will come naturally to the surface in the description of an ancient house
which, at the period when this history begins, was one of the last in
Douai to preserve the old-time characteristics of Flemish life.
Of all the towns in the Departement du Nord, Douai is, alas, the most
modernized: there the innovating spirit has made the greatest strides,
and the love of social progress is the most diffused. There the old
buildings are daily disappearing, and the manners and customs of a
venerable past are being rapidly obliterated. Parisian ideas and fashions
and modes of life now rule the day, and soon nothing will be left of that
ancient Flemish life but the warmth of its hospitality, its traditional
Spanish courtesy, and the wealth and cleanliness of Holland. Mansions
of white stone are replacing the old brick buildings, and the cosy
comfort of Batavian interiors is fast yielding before the capricious
elegance of Parisian novelties.
The house in which the events of this history occurred stands at about
the middle of the rue de Paris, and has been known at Douai for more
than two centuries as the House of Claes. The Van Claes were formerly
one of the great families of craftsmen to whom, in various lines of
production, the Netherlands owed a commercial supremacy which it
has never lost. For a long period of time the Claes lived at Ghent, and
were, from generation to generation, the syndics of the powerful Guild
of Weavers. When the great city revolted under Charles V., who tried
to suppress its privileges, the head of the Claes family was so deeply
compromised in the rebellion that, foreseeing a catastrophe and bound
to share the fate of his associates, he secretly sent wife, children, and
property to France before the Emperor invested the town. The syndic's
forebodings were justified. Together with other burghers who were
excluded from the capitulation, he was hanged as a rebel, though he
was, in reality, the defender of the liberties of Ghent.
The death of Claes and his associates bore fruit. Their needless
execution cost the King of Spain the greater part of his possessions in
the Netherlands. Of all the seed sown in the earth, the blood of martyrs
gives the quickest harvest. When Philip the Second, who punished
revolt through two generations, stretched his iron sceptre over Douai,

the Claes preserved their great wealth by allying themselves in
marriage with the very noble family of Molina, whose elder branch,
then poor, thus became rich enough to buy the county of Nourho which
they had long held titularly in the kingdom of Leon.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, after vicissitudes which are
of no interest to our present purpose, the family of Claes was
represented at Douai in the person of Monsieur Balthazar Claes-Molina,
Comte de Nourho, who preferred to be called simply Balthazar Claes.
Of the immense fortune amassed by his ancestors, who had kept in
motion over a thousand looms, there remained to him some fifteen
thousand francs a year from landed property in the arrondissement of
Douai, and the house in the rue de Paris, whose furniture in itself was a
fortune. As to the family possessions in Leon, they had been in
litigation between the Molinas of Douai and the branch of the family
which remained in Spain. The Molinas of Leon won the domain and
assumed the title of Comtes de Nourho, though the Claes alone had a
legal right to it. But the pride of a Belgian burgher was superior to the
haughty arrogance of Castile: after the civil rights were instituted,
Balthazar Claes cast aside the ragged robes of his Spanish nobility for
his more illustrious descent from the Ghent martyr.
The patriotic sentiment was so strongly developed in the families exiled
under Charles V. that, to the very close of the eighteenth century, the
Claes remained faithful to the manners and customs and traditions of
their ancestors. They married into none but the purest burgher families,
and required a certain number of aldermen and burgomasters in the
pedigree of every bride-elect before admitting her to the family. They
sought their wives in Bruges or Ghent, in Liege or in Holland; so that
the time-honored domestic customs might be perpetuated around their
hearthstones. This social group became more and