On Treves by Hilaire Belloc — Read

As I stood in Treves Market Place the other day after an absence of seven years (and the war in between) I could not but wonder whether -- since the tide in Europe has turned -- the city would not recover what is, if they only knew it, the glory of these German towns: its individual tradition; its private excellence; its pride in antiquity.

Treves as an outer frontier thing is unworthy of its history. Treves was never meant to be a dependency of vulgar Prussia. It is as old as Europe. It has, like all those towns of the Rhine basin -- of which it is the last Western example -- a faculty for preserving what is old and an active tradition within it of the Roman Empire. It was a provincial capital of that Empire just at the moment of the transition before the central government broke down, and the story of it from that time onwards has never been interrupted. There are many modern authorities who pretend (basing their thesis upon guesswork) that Treves and this lower valley of the Moselle was once Celtic -- or, as we say to-day, French -- that it was just like Toul, or Metz, or Verdun, but that the district was later overflowed by German speech; that it was invaded. There is no real or certain evidence for any change in the boundaries of German speech towards the West within recorded time.