them, give the cowled attendant a franc and he will unfold the tale, not
just as I have written it, but substantially. He will tell you that Van
Dyck stopped here on his way to Italy and painted these pictures as a
pious offering to God, and what boots it after all!

More than once have the village peasants collected, armed with scythes,
hoes and pitchforks, to protect these sacred pictures from vandalism on
the part of lustful collectors or marauding bands of soldiers.

In Eighteen Hundred Fourteen, a detachment of French soldiers killed a
dozen of the villagers, and a priest fell fighting for these treasures on
the sacred threshold, stabbed to his death. Then the vandals tramped over
the dead bodies, entered the church, and cut from its frame Van Dyck's
"Holy Family" and carried the picture off to Paris. But after Napoleon
had gotten his Waterloo (only an hour's horseback ride from Saventhem),
the picture was restored to the villagers on order of the Convention.

Rubens waited expectantly, thinking to have news from his brilliant pupil
in Italy. He waited a month. Two months passed, and still no word. After
three months a citizen reported that the day before he had seen Van Dyck,
aided by a young woman, putting up a picture in the village church at
Saventhem.

Rubens saddled his horse and rode down there. He found Van Dyck and his
lady-love sitting hand in hand on a mossy bank, in a leafy grove,
listening to the song of a titmouse. Rubens did not chide the young man;
he merely took him one side and told him that he had stayed long enough,
and "beyond the Alps lies Italy." He also suggested that Anthony Van Dyck
could not afford to follow the example of his illustrious Roman namesake
who went down into Egypt and found things there so softly luxurious that