Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/320

292 came to the warehouses for inflammable substances. Storehouses of petroleum and naphtha immerged like islets in marshy flats. Here the industry of the great city had halted for the time being. Barring the entrance to the country toward Austruweel rose the glacis of the old Citadelle du Nord, a discarded fortress, a bulky and antiquated rampart, a decayed bugbear, a wretched poultry-yard of which the utilitarian city had obtained the cession and which she was hurrying to sap in order to convert it, like her other annexations, into docks, basins, dry-docks and warehouses. Ah! why could she not do the same with all the other ramparts and intrenchments with which they persisted in surrounding her! For the city, essentially mercantile, reluctantly suffered her rôle of fortified town, although she had been predestined to it from her origin, by the Roman fort, her cradle, of which vestiges can still be seen today and whose despoiled and travestied poetry awaits its cavalier, as in the early days Elsa of Brabant, countess of Antwerp, conjured up the apparition of Lohengrin, her champion, from the dazzling track of the fatal swan.

Having in her heart a last filial scruple, instead of tearing down the ancient donjon, Antwerp contented itself with scoffing at it by flanking it with two galleries as shabby as the practicable bridges in a comic opera.

But she did not manifest even such debatable attentions to more recent fortresses.

She cursed as a detestable slavery the belt of fortifications which her princes consented to demolish from century to century only to transport them further out and make them inexpugnable.

The maid of Antwerp, more haughty than