character. In all its details, this tall and handsome house expresses
the manners of the domesticated people of the Low Countries. The name of
the house for some two centuries has been Maison Claes, after the great
family of craftsmen who occupied it. These Van Claes had amassed
fortunes, played a part in politics, and had suffered many vicissitudes
in the course of history without losing their place in the mighty
bourgeois world of commerce. They were substantial people, princes of
trade.

At the end of the eighteenth century the representative of this ancient
and affluent family was Balthazar Claes, a tall and handsome young man,
who after some years' residence in Paris, where he saw the fashionable
world and made acquaintance with many of the great savants, including
Lavoisier the chemist, returned to his home in Douai, and set himself to
find a wife.

It was on a visit to a relation in Ghent that he heard gossip concerning
a young lady living in Brussels, which made him curious to see so
interesting a person. Rumour had two tales to tell of this Mlle.
Josephine Temninck. She was beautiful, but she was deformed. Could
deformity be triumphed over by beauty of face? A relative of Claes
thought that it could, and maintained this opinion against the opposite
camp. This relative spoke of Mlle. Temninck's character, telling how the
sweet girl had surrendered her share of the family estate that her
younger brother might make a great marriage, and how she had quite
resigned herself, even on the threshold of her life, to the idea of
spinsterhood and narrow means.

Claes sought out this noble soul. He found her inexpressibly beautiful,
and the malformation of one of her shoulders appeared as nothing in his