Mechelen had originated in wetlands. Austria's Margarita's palace was not far from the Dyle River, while the railway-related processing workshops lay outside the city, near the Seine. In Mr. Martin's words, the conditions there were still rather harsh: construction sites and mud everywhere.
Almost every member of the inspection team had gone there without even entering the city. A large warehouse would be built there later; for now, construction materials and coal were piled up there, and a bakery was also to be built. This was another of Bonaparte's experiments: replacing bakery shops with large bread factories. They did not need to be located in the city center, since carts could transport the finished bread throughout the city.
A veterinary hospital was also to be built. Many of the inferior horses they had bought back from Hungary had died of illness on the way.
Georgiana glanced at Richard's mud-covered boots. Though he had rinsed them with water before coming in, they still looked filthy.
A shipping yard did not need to be located in a major consumption center. It could be built in the suburbs, where production and transport costs were lower. Belgium had one particular feature: there was not much difference between its cities and countryside, unlike France, where "everything beyond Paris is the countryside."
This was due to Belgium's history. It did not have merely one central city. Though Mechelen's city walls had been demolished, a circular ring remained, much like Paris's three rings of encircling walls.
Circular rings were often regarded as standard distances. France's post roads were classified by how many days it took to travel there from Paris: one day was one ring, two days another, three days another. Belgium was different. The travel time from Mechelen to Brussels was the same as that to