Word: louvain
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...burning of the Library of Louvain was a classic "German atrocity," barely surpassed by the shooting of Edith Cavell...
...Treaty of Versailles provides, in Part VIII, Section II, Article 247, that: "Germany undertakes to furnish to the University of Louvain . . . manuscripts, incunabula?, printed books, maps and objects of collection corresponding in number and value to those destroyed in the burning by Germany of the Library of Louvain...
...sentence was chosen by Belgium's hero Cardinal, the late Desire Mercier, to serve as an inscription across the facade of the rebuilt Library of Louvain. To gentle yet righteously incensed Desire Mercier "furore" seemed none too harsh a word to apply to Huns; but nowadays there is a milksop movement afoot to emasculate the Louvain inscription until it could not possibly give offense to those jovial, harmless fellows the Germans, who sacked and burned the original Library of Louvain...
Having thus lightninged and thundered, Architect Warren ended his declaration with a statement mild as milk. He declared that the official translation of the inscription is "DESTROYED BY TEUTONIC FOLLY; RESTORED BY AN AMERICAN GIFT." He added that Monsignor Ladeuze, Rector of the University of Louvain has finally ruled that the epithet "furore" shall stand. When curious persons turned to Latin dictionaries, last week, to see if "juror" could be stretched to mean "folly." they found as authorized synonyms "delusion," "frenzy," "madness," "rage" and "fury." Nobody's Latin except Architect Warren's could make "furor" mean "folly...
What "furor" meant to Desiré Mercier was discreetly hinted by foxy Architect Warren, who revealed that the Cardinal said, two months before his death: "When the Germans come back [to Louvain] as they will and as they have through the past centuries, when they read this inscription countersigned by America perhaps they may behave themselves more decently than they did the last time...