Rheims has enjoyed for a long time popularity amongst travellers. As far back as a hundred and twenty years ago a writer, describing the town and its hotel accommodation, says: "The streets are almost all broad, strait and well built, equal in that respect to any I have seen; and the inn, the Hôtel de Moulinet, is so large and well served as not to check the emotions raised by agreeable objects, by giving an impulse to contrary vibrations in the bosom of the traveller, which at inns in France is too often the case.... We have about half a dozen real English dishes that exceed anything in my opinion to be met with in France; by English dishes I mean a turbot and lobster sauce, ham and chicken, a haunch of venison, turkey and oysters, and after these there is an end of an English table. It is an idle prejudice to class roast beef among them, for there is not better beef in the world than at Paris.... The French are cleaner in their persons, and the English in their houses."
To look at Soissons to-day, with its pleasant walks and modern houses, few people would guess it to have played an important part in the history of north-eastern France. Yet that pleasant, modern appearance is itself a proof of what the town endured in earlier days. So fierce was the struggle it had for existence, that the old Soissons has almost worn itself out, and, seen from the outside at least, a new and prosperous town would seem to have taken its place. It might well be called the city of sieges, for few towns have suffered more in this respect. From Roman days down to the Franco-Prussian war the place has seemed good and desirable from soldiers and conquerors, and has had to pay penalty for its splendid position on the Aisne. Both Cæsar and Napoleon recognised its importance as a military station, though a stretch of eighteen hundred years divided the Soissons of one general to the Soissons of the other. Like Lâon, it was for some time a royal seat; and it was here that Clovis the Frank defeated Syagrius, "Romanorum Rex," in 486, and turned a Roman into a Frankish kingdom, in which Soissons was for some time the capital. It was in the Abbey of St. Médard, which, except for some subterranean buildings, is now destroyed, that Louis le Débonnair was twice imprisoned by his unnatural children; and on the walls of one of these dungeons have been found some verses, apparently a description of the unfortunate prisoner, but dating only from the fifteenth century.