Metz is built on a flattish spot, at the
junction of the Moselle and Seille, and
was fortified by the most subtle art of
Cormontaigne and Vauban, Louis the
Fourteenth's great engineers, and strengthened
by all the ingenuity of Marshal Belleisle.
It is calculated that its nine gates and
drawbridges, its citadel commanding the
river, its threatening double Couronne and
Belle Croix forts, built in 1728-31, and its
seventeen bridges, would require one
hundred and twenty thousand men to encircle
it in anything like a grip that would crush
its life out.

This city, which was finally secured to
France by the peace of Westphalia in
1648, is worth the plundering. Blucher,
who smacked his lips at the goldsmiths'
shops of London, and exclaimed: "Here's
for plunder!" would have revelled in Metz,
which is quite a commercial centre for the
departments of Moselle, Meurthe, and the
Ardennes. Its blouses make brandy and
vinegar, gunpowder, cannon, saltpetre,
leather, cotton-yarn, military hats, muslins,
beetroot-sugar, chicory, nails, hardware,
cutlery, buttons, glue, lace, brushes,
flannels, pins, and combs. Nothing comes amiss
to them, from an eighteen-pounder to a ten-
penny-nail. As a commercial town, Metz
never recovered the cruel and foolish
revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and it has
now twenty thousand inhabitants less than
it had in the time of Charles the Fifth.

In every way Metz is military. Its royal
gunpowder factory, on an island in the
Moselle, produces nearly the best powder
in France, and plenty of it is now being
experimented with on the banks of the Seille.
Its military hospital, large and airy, was built
by Louis the Fourteenth for fifteen hundred
men, but it will hold eighteen hundred. It
is a noble building, in two ranges, and will
soon, we fear, echo with the groans and
shrieks of mutilated men. Metz is also
naturally proud of its school of military engineering
for young officers from the Polytechnique.
It is attached to the arsenal, once part
of St. Arnauld's Abbey, and boasts a choice
library of ten thousand volumes, besides
charts, maps, and original manuscripts of
Vauban. There is also a sister establishment,
a regimental school of artillery, a
handsome building, completed in 1852. If
the Prussians should happen to enter
Metz at the rear of the French, they will
not forget to visit the arsenal with its
round Templars' chapel of the tenth
century, for there are eighty thousand stand
of arms there, and, what is more in the
Prussian way, a bronze culverin, called
the Vogel Greif, a trophy from Ehrenbreitstein,
in 1799. It is fifteen feet long, and
is seventeen inches wide at the muzzle; it
weighs twenty-eight thousand seven
hundred and seventeen pounds, and carries shot
one hundred and seventy-six and a half
pounds weight. That gun would certainly
roll back to Germany. It was cast for Richard
of Griffenclau, an elector of Treves. Metz
has also several large barracks and
magazines—one of the latter in the ex-abbey of
Clement, built by some Italian architect
in the sixteenth century—and being very
military, the town adores the memory of
its distinguished native Marshal Fabert, a
high-souled man, whose statue you are
taken to see in the Place Napoléon. Metz
is the strongest fortress in France except
Strasbourg.

There have been enthusiasts who,
forgetting Amiens and Chartres, have
pronounced Metz cathedral as the most perfect
Gothic work on the Continent. It is
certainly beautifully light, and its spire shoots
up like a fountain above the forest of carved
peaks and fretted pinnacles below. Begun
in 1014 by Bishop Thierri, the ghost of
that worthy prelate remained restless and
repining till 1546, when it was finished.
So, after all, even Catholic zeal had its
cold fits. The vergers tell you it is three
hundred and seventy-three feet long, and
that the spire is of the same height. The
nave is fifty-one feet wide and one hundred
and nine feet high. The great stone ark
is pierced with innumerable portholes, and
these windows were filled in 1526 by Busch
of Strasbourg with rich stained glass, just
in time before the art became lost. Its
beautiful open-work spire, light, as if carved
of wood, carries an enormous bell, the very
palladium of Metz, weighing about twenty-
eight thousand six hundred pounds, and
called La Mutte. The font, called the Cuve
de Cæsar, is probably an old Roman tomb.
The chief curiosities of the cathedral
are the stone thrones of the early bishops,
two processional crosses of the twelfth and
fourteenth centuries, an embroidered red
silk cope, said to be Charlemagne's, and a
dragon of pasteboard and canvas, formerly
used in street processions, and called Le
Gracelli. People who want to see the
walks and gardens of the esplanade, or the
strong redoubt, called the Pate, which can
be turned into an island by closing the
sluices on the Seille, should mount the
cathedral spire, first ascending the clerestory
gallery to see the stained glass and