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