"Men, women, children, all stuffed full to bursting; Appetites ravening, and instincts rife, Furies of stomach, and of throats athirsting, Debauchery, explosion of rich life, In which these master gluttons, never sated, Too genuine for insipidities, Pitching their easels lustily, created Between two drinking bouts a masterpiece."
Even amid the ruins of their country, Belgian writers, like the Belgian people, are indomitable. Verhaeren, from his retreat in London, sends out words that are a pæan of victory, and the bugle note of "Chantons, Belges, chantons!" by another author, is a call to great deeds in the future.
"O little towns, obscure and quaint, Writ on the map in script so faint, Today in types how large, how red, On battle scroll your titles spread!"
Brussels is ideally located for the motorist. From it both the Flemish and the Walloon districts could easily be reached. To be sure, the towns were paved with the famous Belgian blocks, but the roads outside the towns were in excellent condition. One of our favourite trips was to Antwerp, where we went often, either to meet people landing from steamers from America or to look up boxes shipped us from home.
A bit aside from the direct route between the two cities, but well worth going out of one's way to see, was Louvain. Baedeker speaks of it as "a dull place with 42,000 inhabitants," but we found it delightful. It was a pretty old town, with its richly fretted Hôtel de Ville, the finest in Belgium, its university and library, its impressive church in the center of the city, and the innumerable other gray old churches with their long sloping roofs. The streets were narrow, picturesque and rather dirty. They were lined with the high walls and closed windows of convent after convent, and there were huge clusters of monastic buildings on the hills about, many of these newly built and modern. The whole town seethed with black-robed priests, brown-robed, bare-footed monks, and white-coped nuns.
In the Middle Ages Louvain had four times its present population; its once famous university had diminished in the same proportion. There was a time when no man might hold public office in the Austrian Netherlands who did not have a degree from the University of Louvain.