Page:Emily Bronte (Robinson 1883).djvu/89



Rue d'Isabelle had a character of its own. It lies below your feet as you stand in the Rue Royale, near the statue of General Béliard. Four flights of steps lead down to the street, half garden, half old houses, with at one end a large square mansion, owning the garden that runs behind it and to the right of it. The house is old; a Latin inscription shows it to have been given to the great Guild of Cross-bowmen by Queen Isabelle in the early years of the 17th century. The garden is older; long before the Guild of the Crossbowmen of the Great Oath, in deference to the wish of Queen Isabelle, permitted the street to be made through it, the garden had been their exercising place. There Isabelle herself, a member of their order, had shot down the bird. But the garden had a yet more ancient past; when apple-trees, pear-trees and alleys of Bruges cherries, when plots of marjoram and mint, of thyme and sweet-basil, filled the orchard and herbary of the Hospital of the Poor. And the garden itself, before trees or flowers were planted, had resounded with the yelp of the Duke's hounds, when, in the thirteenth century, it had been the Fosse-aux-chiens. This historic garden, this mansion, built by a queen for a great order, belonged in 1842 to Monsieur and Madame Héger, and was a famous Pensionnat de Demoiselles.