LOUVIERS  , a

town of north-western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Eure, 172 M . S.S.E. of Rouen by road . Pop . (1906) 9449 . Louviers is pleasantly situated in a green valley surrounded by wooded hills, on the Eure, which here divides into several branches . The old part of the town, built of wood, stands on the left bank of the river; the more modern portions, in brick and hewn stone, on the right . There are spacious squares, and the place is surrounded by boulevards . The Gothic church of Notre-Dame has a south portal which ranks among the most beautiful works of the kind produced in the 15th century; it contains fine stained glass of the 15th and 16th centuries and other works of art . The hotel-de-ville, a large modern building, contains a museum and library . The chief industry is cloth and flannel manufacture . There are wool-spinning and fulling mills, thread factories and manufactories of spinning and weaving machinery, and enamel ware; leather-working, dyeing, metal-founding and bell-founding are also carried on . The town is the seat of a sub-prefect and has a court of first instance, a tribunal of commerce, a chamber of arts and manufactures, and a council of trade arbitrators .

Louviers (Lovera) was originally a

villa, of the dukes of Normandy and in the middle ages belonged to the archbishops of Rouen; its cloth-making industry first arose in the beginning of the 13th century . It changed hands once and again during the Hundred Years' War, and from Charles VII. it received extensive privileges, space . This, Minsheu s guess, is now generally abandoned . The Old French form, of which the English is an adaptation, was lover or levier . The medieval Latin lodium, lodarium, is suggested as the ultimate origin . Du Cange (Glossarium, s.v . " lodia ") defines it as lugurium, i.e. a small hut . The English form " louvre " is due to a confusion with the name of the palace in Paris . The origin of that name is also unknown; louverie, place of wolves, is one of the suggestions, the palace being supposed to have originally been a hunting-box (see PARIS) .