From the Musée Charlier, it's a five-minute walk west to place de la Liberté , a leafy little square decorated with a statue of Charles Rogier (1800-85), a one-time member of the Provisional Government of 1830 and later a railway magnate. The square is at the heart of one of the more attractive parts of the city centre, a pocket-sized district where the mansions of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, built with dignified balconies and wrought-iron grilles, overlook wide, straight streets and fetching little piazzas. One of these squares, the somewhat dilapidated place des Barricades , is named after the impromptu barricades that were erected here against the Dutch in 1830. There's no plaque, but no. 4 was once owned by Victor Hugo, who was exiled from France for supporting the revolution of 1848. It was a long exile - Hugo only returned to France after the fall of the Second Empire in 1870 - but one that he shared with other literary lights, notably Dumas and Baudelaire.

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