The Episcopal Palace, now the Palais de Justice, the erection of which took thirty years during the commencement of the sixteenth century, has undergone many alterations since the days of Érard de la Marck. Two hundred years after it was finished a fire destroyed the original front, which had to be rebuilt, and the rest of the vast structure was restored in the nineteenth century. The primitive façade has been replaced by one moulded on severely classic lines; but the inner squares, with their picturesque cloisters, are strangely rich in types of every style, a medley of Gothic, Renaissance, Moorish, as if symbolic of the vicissitudes undergone by the Bishop-Princes who inhabited this immense building. Most of the grotesque carvings, the demons in stone, and the fantastic figures which surround these courts, were conceived by the luxuriant imagination of Francis Borset, a sculptor of Liége.
Close to the Episcopal Palace is the market-place, where so many of the scenes described in these pages took place, and where now stands the modern Perron, designed by Delcour at the end of the seventeenth century to replace the old column, at the foot of which the laws of the Principality, peace, or war used to be proclaimed. There is nothing about it to recall the history of the stormy times when Charles the Bold carried it off into Flanders; but the tradition of the ancient Perron still survives.
At Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, Louvain, the Hôtels de Ville retain their aspect of the Middle Ages, when they were the centres of that passionate civic life which throbs through all the history of the Netherlands. But the Hôtel de Ville of Liége is modern, of the eighteenth century. It would make a commodious private mansion, but has nothing in common with the architectural gems which adorn the great cities of Flanders and Brabant.
This lack of architectural distinction is characteristic of modern Liége. The hammers of the French Revolution, in destroying the Cathedral of St. Lambert, completed what the fires of Charles the Bold began, and of the really old Liége almost nothing remains. But the fiery spirit which once led to so many wars and revolutions now finds an outlet in useful work. The industrious character of the Walloons is perhaps most highly developed in other Walloon parts of Belgium--among the carpet factories of Tournai, the iron-works of Charleroi, the flax-works of Courtrai, and in the coal-mines of the Borinage, which blacken the landscape for miles round Mons. But the people of Liége have always been famous for their skill in working steel and iron. In the old days they forged the weapons of war which they used so often; and at the present time there are in the town many flourishing companies who turn out large quantities of guns, engines, and machinery, while up the Meuse there are coal-mines, furnaces, and factories, where the Walloons toil as laboriously as in Hainaut.