The Innocents Abroad, Part 2 of 6
by
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
Produced by David Widger
INNOCENTS ABROAD
by Mark Twain
[From an 1869--1st Edition]
Part 2.
CHAPTER XI.
We are getting foreignized rapidly and with facility. We are getting
reconciled to halls and bedchambers with unhomelike stone floors and no
carpets--floors that ring to the tread of one's heels with a sharpness
that is death to sentimental musing. We are getting used to tidy,
noiseless waiters, who glide hither and thither, and hover about your
back and your elbows like butterflies, quick to comprehend orders, quick
to fill them; thankful for a gratuity without regard to the amount; and
always polite--never otherwise than polite. That is the strangest
curiosity yet--a really polite hotel waiter who isn't an idiot. We are
getting used to driving right into the central court of the hotel, in the
midst of a fragrant circle of vines and flowers, and in the midst also of
parties of gentlemen sitting quietly reading the paper and smoking. We
are getting used to ice frozen by artificial process in ordinary bottles
--the only kind of ice they have here. We are getting used to all these
things, but we are not getting used to carrying our own soap. We are
sufficiently civilized to carry our own combs and toothbrushes, but this
thing of having to ring for soap every time we wash is new to us and not
pleasant at all. We think of it just after we get our heads and faces
thoroughly wet or just when we think we have been in the bathtub long
enough, and then, of course, an annoying delay follows. These
Marseillaises make Marseillaise hymns and Marseilles vests and Marseilles
soap for all the world, but they never sing their hymns or wear their
vests or wash with their soap themselves.
We have learned to go through the lingering routine of the table d'hote
with patience, with serenity, with satisfaction. We take soup, then wait
a few minutes for the fish; a few minutes more and the plates are
changed, and the roast beef comes; another change and we take peas;
change again and take lentils; change and take snail patties (I prefer
grasshoppers); change and take roast chicken and salad; then strawberry
pie and ice cream; then green figs, pears, oranges, green almonds, etc.;
finally coffee. Wine with every course, of course, being in France.
With such a cargo on board, digestion is a slow process, and we must sit
long in the cool chambers and smoke--and read French newspapers, which
have a strange fashion of telling a perfectly straight story till you get
to the "nub" of it, and then a word drops in that no man can translate,
and that story is ruined. An embankment fell on some Frenchmen
yesterday, and the papers are full of it today--but whether those
sufferers were killed, or crippled, or bruised, or only scared is more
than I can possibly make out, and yet I would just give anything to know.
We were troubled a little at dinner today by the conduct of an American,
who talked very loudly and coarsely and laughed boisterously where all
others were so quiet and well behaved. He ordered wine with a royal
flourish and said:
"I never dine without wine, sir" (which was a pitiful falsehood), and
looked around upon the company to bask in the admiration he expected to
find in their faces. All these airs in a land where they would as soon
expect to leave the soup out of the bill of fare as the wine!--in a land
where wine is nearly as common among all ranks as water! This fellow
said: "I am a free-born sovereign, sir, an American, sir, and I want
everybody to know it!" He did not mention that he was a lineal
descendant of Balaam's ass, but everybody knew that without his telling
it.
We have driven in the Prado--that superb avenue bordered with patrician
mansions and noble shade trees--and have visited the chateau Boarely and
its curious museum. They showed us a miniature cemetery there--a copy of
the first graveyard that was ever in Marseilles, no doubt. The delicate
little skeletons were lying in broken vaults and had their household gods
and kitchen utensils with them. The original of this cemetery was dug up
in the principal street of the city a few years ago. It had remained
there, only twelve feet underground, for a matter of twenty-five hundred
years or thereabouts. Romulus was here before he built Rome, and thought
something of founding a city on this spot, but gave up the idea. He may
have been personally acquainted with some of these Phoenicians whose
skeletons we have been examining.
In the great Zoological Gardens we found specimens of all the animals the
world produces, I think, including a dromedary, a monkey ornamented with
tufts of brilliant blue and carmine hair--a very gorgeous monkey he was
--a hippopotamus from the Nile, and a sort of tall, long-legged bird with a
beak like a powder horn and close-fitting wings like the tails of a dress
coat. This fellow stood up with his eyes shut and his shoulders stooped
forward a little, and looked as if he had his hands under his coat
tails. Such tranquil stupidity, such supernatural gravity, such
self-righteousness, and such ineffable self-complacency as were in the
countenance and attitude of that gray-bodied, dark-winged, bald-headed,
and preposterously uncomely bird! He was so ungainly, so pimply about
the head, so scaly about the legs, yet so serene, so unspeakably
satisfied! He was the most comical-looking creature that can be
imagined. It was good to hear Dan and the doctor laugh--such natural and
such enjoyable laughter had not been heard among our excursionists since
our ship sailed away from America. This bird was a godsend to us, and I
should be an ingrate if I forgot to make honorable mention of him in
these pages. Ours was a pleasure excursion; therefore we stayed with
that bird an hour and made the most of him. We stirred him up
occasionally, but he only unclosed an eye and slowly closed it again,
abating no jot of his stately piety of demeanor or his tremendous
seriousness. He only seemed to say, "Defile not Heaven's anointed with
unsanctified hands." We did not know his name, and so we called him "The
Pilgrim." Dan said:
"All he wants now is a Plymouth Collection."
The boon companion of the colossal elephant was a common cat! This cat
had a fashion of climbing up the elephant's hind legs and roosting on his
back. She would sit up there, with her paws curved under her breast, and
sleep in the sun half the afternoon. It used to annoy the elephant at
first, and he would reach up and take her down, but she would go aft and
climb up again. She persisted until she finally conquered the elephant's
prejudices, and now they are inseparable friends. The cat plays about
her comrade's forefeet or his trunk often, until dogs approach, and then
she goes aloft out of danger. The elephant has annihilated several dogs
lately that pressed his companion too closely.
We hired a sailboat and a guide and made an excursion to one of the small
islands in the harbor to visit the Castle d'If. This ancient fortress
has a melancholy history. It has been used as a prison for political
offenders for two or three hundred years, and its dungeon walls are
scarred with the rudely carved names of many and many a captive who
fretted his life away here and left no record of himself but these sad
epitaphs wrought with his own hands. How thick the names were! And
their long-departed owners seemed to throng the gloomy cells and
corridors with their phantom shapes. We loitered through dungeon after
dungeon, away down into the living rock below the level of the sea, it
seemed. Names everywhere!--some plebeian, some noble, some even
princely. Plebeian, prince, and noble had one solicitude in common--they
would not be forgotten! They could suffer solitude, inactivity, and the
horrors of a silence that no sound ever disturbed, but they could not
bear the thought of being utterly forgotten by the world. Hence the
carved names. In one cell, where a little light penetrated, a man had
lived twenty-seven years without seeing the face of a human being--lived
in filth and wretchedness, with no companionship but his own thoughts,
and they were sorrowful enough and hopeless enough, no doubt. Whatever
his jailers considered that he needed was conveyed to his cell by night
through a wicket.
This man carved the walls of his prison house from floor to roof with all
manner of figures of men and animals grouped in intricate designs. He
had toiled there year after year, at his self-appointed task, while
infants grew to boyhood--to vigorous youth--idled through school and
college--acquired a profession--claimed man's mature estate--married and
looked back to infancy as to a thing of some vague, ancient time, almost.
But who shall tell how many ages it seemed to this prisoner? With the
one, time flew sometimes; with the other, never--it crawled always. To
the one, nights spent in dancing had seemed made of minutes instead of
hours; to the other, those selfsame nights had been like all other nights
of dungeon life and seemed made of slow, dragging weeks instead of hours
and minutes.
One prisoner of fifteen years had scratched verses upon his walls, and
brief prose sentences--brief, but full of pathos. These spoke not of
himself and his hard estate, but only of the shrine where his spirit fled
the prison to worship--of home and the idols that were templed there.
He never lived to see them.
The walls of these dungeons are as thick as some bed-chambers at home are
wide--fifteen feet. We saw the damp, dismal cells in which two of Dumas'
heroes passed their confinement--heroes of "Monte Cristo." It was here
that the brave Abbe wrote a book with his own blood, with a pen made of a
piece of iron hoop, and by the light of a lamp made out of shreds of
cloth soaked in grease obtained from his food; and then dug through the
thick wall with some trifling instrument which he wrought himself out of
a stray piece of iron or table cutlery and freed Dantes from his chains.
It was a pity that so many weeks of dreary labor should have come to
naught at last.
They showed us the noisome cell where the celebrated "Iron Mask"--that
ill-starred brother of a hardhearted king of France--was confined for a
season before he was sent to hide the strange mystery of his life from
the curious in the dungeons of Ste. Marguerite. The place had a far
greater interest for us than it could have had if we had known beyond all
question who the Iron Mask was, and what his history had been, and why
this most unusual punishment had been meted out to him. Mystery! That
was the charm. That speechless tongue, those prisoned features, that
heart so freighted with unspoken troubles, and that breast so oppressed
with its piteous secret had been here. These dank walls had known the
man whose dolorous story is a sealed book forever! There was fascination
in the spot.
CHAPTER XII.
We have come five hundred miles by rail through the heart of France.
What a bewitching land it is! What a garden! Surely the leagues of
bright green lawns are swept and brushed and watered every day and their
grasses trimmed by the barber. Surely the hedges are shaped and measured
and their symmetry preserved by the most architectural of gardeners.
Surely the long straight rows of stately poplars that divide the
beautiful landscape like the squares of a checker-board are set with line
and plummet, and their uniform height determined with a spirit level.
Surely the straight, smooth, pure white turnpikes are jack-planed and
sandpapered every day. How else are these marvels of symmetry,
cleanliness, and order attained? It is wonderful. There are no
unsightly stone walls and never a fence of any kind. There is no dirt,
no decay, no rubbish anywhere--nothing that even hints at untidiness
--nothing that ever suggests neglect. All is orderly and beautiful--every
thing is charming to the eye.
We had such glimpses of the Rhone gliding along between its grassy banks;
of cosy cottages buried in flowers and shrubbery; of quaint old red-tiled
villages with mossy medieval cathedrals looming out of their midst; of
wooded hills with ivy-grown towers and turrets of feudal castles
projecting above the foliage; such glimpses of Paradise, it seemed to us,
such visions of fabled fairyland!
We knew then what the poet meant when he sang of: "--thy cornfields
green, and sunny vines, O pleasant land of France!"
And it is a pleasant land. No word describes it so felicitously as that
one. They say there is no word for "home" in the French language. Well,
considering that they have the article itself in such an attractive
aspect, they ought to manage to get along without the word. Let us not
waste too much pity on "homeless" France. I have observed that Frenchmen
abroad seldom wholly give up the idea of going back to France some time
or other. I am not surprised at it now.
We are not infatuated with these French railway cars, though. We took
first-class passage, not because we wished to attract attention by doing
a thing which is uncommon in Europe but because we could make our journey
quicker by so doing. It is hard to make railroading pleasant in any
country. It is too tedious. Stagecoaching is infinitely more
delightful. Once I crossed the plains and deserts and mountains of the
West in a stagecoach, from the Missouri line to California, and since
then all my pleasure trips must be measured to that rare holiday frolic.
Two thousand miles of ceaseless rush and rattle and clatter, by night and
by day, and never a weary moment, never a lapse of interest! The first
seven hundred miles a level continent, its grassy carpet greener and
softer and smoother than any sea and figured with designs fitted to its
magnitude--the shadows of the clouds. Here were no scenes but summer
scenes, and no disposition inspired by them but to lie at full length on
the mail sacks in the grateful breeze and dreamily smoke the pipe of
peace--what other, where all was repose and contentment? In cool
mornings, before the sun was fairly up, it was worth a lifetime of city
toiling and moiling to perch in the foretop with the driver and see the
six mustangs scamper under the sharp snapping of the whip that never
touched them; to scan the blue distances of a world that knew no lords
but us; to cleave the wind with uncovered head and feel the sluggish
pulses rousing to the spirit of a speed that pretended to the resistless
rush of a typhoon! Then thirteen hundred miles of desert solitudes; of
limitless panoramas of bewildering perspective; of mimic cities, of
pinnacled cathedrals, of massive fortresses, counterfeited in the eternal
rocks and splendid with the crimson and gold of the setting sun; of dizzy
altitudes among fog-wreathed peaks and never-melting snows, where
thunders and lightnings and tempests warred magnificently at our feet and
the storm clouds above swung their shredded banners in our very faces!
But I forgot. I am in elegant France now, and not scurrying through the
great South Pass and the Wind River Mountains, among antelopes and
buffaloes and painted Indians on the warpath. It is not meet that I
should make too disparaging comparisons between humdrum travel on a
railway and that royal summer flight across a continent in a stagecoach.
I meant in the beginning to say that railway journeying is tedious and
tiresome, and so it is--though at the time I was thinking particularly of
a dismal fifty-hour pilgrimage between New York and St. Louis. Of course
our trip through France was not really tedious because all its scenes and
experiences were new and strange; but as Dan says, it had its
"discrepancies."
The cars are built in compartments that hold eight persons each. Each
compartment is partially subdivided, and so there are two tolerably
distinct parties of four in it. Four face the other four. The seats and
backs are thickly padded and cushioned and are very comfortable; you can
smoke if you wish; there are no bothersome peddlers; you are saved the
infliction of a multitude of disagreeable fellow passengers. So far, so
well. But then the conductor locks you in when the train starts; there
is no water to drink in the car; there is no heating apparatus for night
travel; if a drunken rowdy should get in, you could not remove a matter
of twenty seats from him or enter another car; but above all, if you are
worn out and must sleep, you must sit up and do it in naps, with cramped
legs and in a torturing misery that leaves you withered and lifeless the
next day--for behold they have not that culmination of all charity and
human kindness, a sleeping car, in all France. I prefer the American
system. It has not so many grievous "discrepancies."
In France, all is clockwork, all is order. They make no mistakes. Every
third man wears a uniform, and whether he be a marshal of the empire or a
brakeman, he is ready and perfectly willing to answer all your questions
with tireless politeness, ready to tell you which car to take, yea, and
ready to go and put you into it to make sure that you shall not go
astray. You cannot pass into the waiting room of the depot till you have
secured your ticket, and you cannot pass from its only exit till the
train is at its threshold to receive you. Once on board, the train will
not start till your ticket has been examined--till every passenger's
ticket has been inspected. This is chiefly for your own good. If by any
possibility you have managed to take the wrong train, you will be handed
over to a polite official who will take you whither you belong and bestow
you with many an affable bow. Your ticket will be inspected every now
and then along the route, and when it is time to change cars you will
know it. You are in the hands of officials who zealously study your
welfare and your interest, instead of turning their talents to the
invention of new methods of discommoding and snubbing you, as is very
often the main employment of that exceedingly self-satisfied monarch, the
railroad conductor of America.
But the happiest regulation in French railway government is--thirty
minutes to dinner! No five-minute boltings of flabby rolls, muddy
coffee, questionable eggs, gutta-percha beef, and pies whose conception
and execution are a dark and bloody mystery to all save the cook that
created them! No, we sat calmly down--it was in old Dijon, which is so
easy to spell and so impossible to pronounce except when you civilize it
and call it Demijohn--and poured out rich Burgundian wines and munched
calmly through a long table d'hote bill of fare, snail patties, delicious
fruits and all, then paid the trifle it cost and stepped happily aboard
the train again, without once cursing the railroad company. A rare
experience and one to be treasured forever.
They say they do not have accidents on these French roads, and I think it
must be true. If I remember rightly, we passed high above wagon roads or
through tunnels under them, but never crossed them on their own level.
About every quarter of a mile, it seemed to me, a man came out and held
up a club till the train went by, to signify that everything was safe
ahead. Switches were changed a mile in advance by pulling a wire rope
that passed along the ground by the rail, from station to station.
Signals for the day and signals for the night gave constant and timely
notice of the position of switches.
No, they have no railroad accidents to speak of in France. But why?
Because when one occurs, somebody has to hang for it! Not hang, maybe,
but be punished at least with such vigor of emphasis as to make
negligence a thing to be shuddered at by railroad officials for many a
day thereafter. "No blame attached to the officers"--that lying and
disaster-breeding verdict so common to our softhearted juries is seldom
rendered in France. If the trouble occurred in the conductor's
department, that officer must suffer if his subordinate cannot be proven
guilty; if in the engineer's department and the case be similar, the
engineer must answer.
The Old Travelers--those delightful parrots who have "been here before"
and know more about the country than Louis Napoleon knows now or ever
will know--tell us these things, and we believe them because they are
pleasant things to believe and because they are plausible and savor of
the rigid subjection to law and order which we behold about us
everywhere.
But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and
lie. We can tell them the moment we see them. They always throw out a
few feelers; they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded
every individual and know that he has not traveled. Then they open their
throttle valves, and how they do brag, and sneer, and swell, and soar,
and blaspheme the sacred name of Truth! Their central idea, their grand
aim, is to subjugate you, keep you down, make you feel insignificant and
humble in the blaze of their cosmopolitan glory! They will not let you
know anything. They sneer at your most inoffensive suggestions; they
laugh unfeelingly at your treasured dreams of foreign lands; they brand
the statements of your traveled aunts and uncles as the stupidest
absurdities; they deride your most trusted authors and demolish the fair
images they have set up for your willing worship with the pitiless
ferocity of the fanatic iconoclast! But still I love the Old Travelers.
I love them for their witless platitudes, for their supernatural ability
to bore, for their delightful asinine vanity, for their luxuriant
fertility of imagination, for their startling, their brilliant, their
overwhelming mendacity!
By Lyons and the Saone (where we saw the lady of Lyons and thought little
of her comeliness), by Villa Franca, Tonnere, venerable Sens, Melun,
Fontainebleau, and scores of other beautiful cities, we swept, always
noting the absence of hog-wallows, broken fences, cow lots, unpainted
houses, and mud, and always noting, as well, the presence of cleanliness,
grace, taste in adorning and beautifying, even to the disposition of a
tree or the turning of a hedge, the marvel of roads in perfect repair,
void of ruts and guiltless of even an inequality of surface--we bowled
along, hour after hour, that brilliant summer day, and as nightfall
approached we entered a wilderness of odorous flowers and shrubbery, sped
through it, and then, excited, delighted, and half persuaded that we were
only the sport of a beautiful dream, lo, we stood in magnificent Paris!
What excellent order they kept about that vast depot! There was no
frantic crowding and jostling, no shouting and swearing, and no
swaggering intrusion of services by rowdy hackmen. These latter gentry
stood outside--stood quietly by their long line of vehicles and said
never a word. A kind of hackman general seemed to have the whole matter
of transportation in his hands. He politely received the passengers and
ushered them to the kind of conveyance they wanted, and told the driver
where to deliver them. There was no "talking back," no dissatisfaction
about overcharging, no grumbling about anything. In a little while we
were speeding through the streets of Paris and delightfully recognizing
certain names and places with which books had long ago made us familiar.
It was like meeting an old friend when we read Rue de Rivoli on the
street corner; we knew the genuine vast palace of the Louvre as well as
we knew its picture; when we passed by the Column of July we needed no
one to tell us what it was or to remind us that on its site once stood
the grim Bastille, that grave of human hopes and happiness, that dismal
prison house within whose dungeons so many young faces put on the
wrinkles of age, so many proud spirits grew humble, so many brave hearts
broke.
We secured rooms at the hotel, or rather, we had three beds put into one
room, so that we might be together, and then we went out to a restaurant,
just after lamplighting, and ate a comfortable, satisfactory, lingering
dinner. It was a pleasure to eat where everything was so tidy, the food
so well cooked, the waiters so polite, and the coming and departing
company so moustached, so frisky, so affable, so fearfully and
wonderfully Frenchy! All the surroundings were gay and enlivening. Two
hundred people sat at little tables on the sidewalk, sipping wine and
coffee; the streets were thronged with light vehicles and with joyous
pleasure-seekers; there was music in the air, life and action all about
us, and a conflagration of gaslight everywhere!
After dinner we felt like seeing such Parisian specialties as we might
see without distressing exertion, and so we sauntered through the
brilliant streets and looked at the dainty trifles in variety stores and
jewelry shops. Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we
put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the
incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed
we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile
verbs and participles.
We noticed that in the jewelry stores they had some of the articles
marked "gold" and some labeled "imitation." We wondered at this
extravagance of honesty and inquired into the matter. We were informed
that inasmuch as most people are not able to tell false gold from the
genuine article, the government compels jewelers to have their gold work
assayed and stamped officially according to its fineness and their
imitation work duly labeled with the sign of its falsity. They told us
the jewelers would not dare to violate this law, and that whatever a
stranger bought in one of their stores might be depended upon as being
strictly what it was represented to be. Verily, a wonderful land is
France!
Then we hunted for a barber-shop. From earliest infancy it had been
a cherished ambition of mine to be shaved some day in a palatial
barber-shop in Paris. I wished to recline at full length in a cushioned
invalid chair, with pictures about me and sumptuous furniture; with
frescoed walls and gilded arches above me and vistas of Corinthian
columns stretching far before me; with perfumes of Araby to intoxicate
my senses and the slumbrous drone of distant noises to soothe me to
sleep. At the end of an hour I would wake up regretfully and find my
face as smooth and as soft as an infant's. Departing, I would lift my
hands above that barber's head and say, "Heaven bless you, my son!"
So we searched high and low, for a matter of two hours, but never a
barber-shop could we see. We saw only wig-making establishments, with
shocks of dead and repulsive hair bound upon the heads of painted waxen
brigands who stared out from glass boxes upon the passer-by with their
stony eyes and scared him with the ghostly white of their countenances.
We shunned these signs for a time, but finally we concluded that the
wig-makers must of necessity be the barbers as well, since we could find
no single legitimate representative of the fraternity. We entered and
asked, and found that it was even so.
I said I wanted to be shaved. The barber inquired where my room was. I
said never mind where my room was, I wanted to be shaved--there, on the
spot. The doctor said he would be shaved also. Then there was an
excitement among those two barbers! There was a wild consultation, and
afterwards a hurrying to and fro and a feverish gathering up of razors
from obscure places and a ransacking for soap. Next they took us into a
little mean, shabby back room; they got two ordinary sitting-room chairs
and placed us in them with our coats on. My old, old dream of bliss
vanished into thin air!
I sat bolt upright, silent, sad, and solemn. One of the wig-making
villains lathered my face for ten terrible minutes and finished by
plastering a mass of suds into my mouth. I expelled the nasty stuff with
a strong English expletive and said, "Foreigner, beware!" Then this
outlaw strapped his razor on his boot, hovered over me ominously for six
fearful seconds, and then swooped down upon me like the genius of
destruction. The first rake of his razor loosened the very hide from my
face and lifted me out of the chair. I stormed and raved, and the other
boys enjoyed it. Their beards are not strong and thick. Let us draw the
curtain over this harrowing scene.
Suffice it that I submitted and went through with the cruel infliction of
a shave by a French barber; tears of exquisite agony coursed down my
cheeks now and then, but I survived. Then the incipient assassin held a
basin of water under my chin and slopped its contents over my face, and
into my bosom, and down the back of my neck, with a mean pretense of
washing away the soap and blood. He dried my features with a towel and
was going to comb my hair, but I asked to be excused. I said, with
withering irony, that it was sufficient to be skinned--I declined to be
scalped.
I went away from there with my handkerchief about my face, and never,
never, never desired to dream of palatial Parisian barber-shops anymore.
The truth is, as I believe I have since found out, that they have no
barber shops worthy of the name in Paris--and no barbers, either, for
that matter. The impostor who does duty as a barber brings his pans and
napkins and implements of torture to your residence and deliberately
skins you in your private apartments. Ah, I have suffered, suffered,
suffered, here in Paris, but never mind--the time is coming when I shall
have a dark and bloody revenge. Someday a Parisian barber will come to
my room to skin me, and from that day forth that barber will never be
heard of more.
At eleven o'clock we alighted upon a sign which manifestly referred to
billiards. Joy! We had played billiards in the Azores with balls that
were not round and on an ancient table that was very little smoother than
a brick pavement--one of those wretched old things with dead cushions,
and with patches in the faded cloth and invisible obstructions that made
the balls describe the most astonishing and unsuspected angles and
perform feats in the way of unlooked-for and almost impossible
"scratches" that were perfectly bewildering. We had played at Gibraltar
with balls the size of a walnut, on a table like a public square--and in
both instances we achieved far more aggravation than amusement. We
expected to fare better here, but we were mistaken. The cushions were a
good deal higher than the balls, and as the balls had a fashion of always
stopping under the cushions, we accomplished very little in the way of
caroms. The cushions were hard and unelastic, and the cues were so
crooked that in making a shot you had to allow for the curve or you would
infallibly put the "English" on the wrong side of the hall. Dan was to
mark while the doctor and I played. At the end of an hour neither of us
had made a count, and so Dan was tired of keeping tally with nothing to
tally, and we were heated and angry and disgusted. We paid the heavy
bill--about six cents--and said we would call around sometime when we had
a week to spend, and finish the game.
We adjourned to one of those pretty cafes and took supper and tested the
wines of the country, as we had been instructed to do, and found them
harmless and unexciting. They might have been exciting, however, if we
had chosen to drink a sufficiency of them.
To close our first day in Paris cheerfully and pleasantly, we now sought
our grand room in the Grand Hotel du Louvre and climbed into our
sumptuous bed to read and smoke--but alas!
It was pitiful,
In a whole city-full,
Gas we had none.
No gas to read by--nothing but dismal candles. It was a shame. We tried
to map out excursions for the morrow; we puzzled over French "guides to
Paris"; we talked disjointedly in a vain endeavor to make head or tail of
the wild chaos of the day's sights and experiences; we subsided to
indolent smoking; we gaped and yawned and stretched--then feebly wondered
if we were really and truly in renowned Paris, and drifted drowsily away
into that vast mysterious void which men call sleep.
CHAPTER XIII.
The next morning we were up and dressed at ten o'clock. We went to the
'commissionaire' of the hotel--I don't know what a 'commissionaire' is,
but that is the man we went to--and told him we wanted a guide. He said
the national Exposition had drawn such multitudes of Englishmen and
Americans to Paris that it would be next to impossible to find a good
guide unemployed. He said he usually kept a dozen or two on hand, but he
only had three now. He called them. One looked so like a very pirate
that we let him go at once. The next one spoke with a simpering
precision of pronunciation that was irritating and said:
"If ze zhentlemans will to me make ze grande honneur to me rattain in
hees serveece, I shall show to him every sing zat is magnifique to look
upon in ze beautiful Parree. I speaky ze Angleesh pairfaitemaw."
He would have done well to have stopped there, because he had that much
by heart and said it right off without making a mistake. But his
self-complacency seduced him into attempting a flight into regions of
unexplored English, and the reckless experiment was his ruin. Within ten
seconds he was so tangled up in a maze of mutilated verbs and torn and
bleeding forms of speech that no human ingenuity could ever have gotten
him out of it with credit. It was plain enough that he could not
"speaky" the English quite as "pairfaitemaw" as he had pretended he
could.
The third man captured us. He was plainly dressed, but he had a
noticeable air of neatness about him. He wore a high silk hat which was
a little old, but had been carefully brushed. He wore second-hand kid
gloves, in good repair, and carried a small rattan cane with a curved
handle--a female leg--of ivory. He stepped as gently and as daintily as
a cat crossing a muddy street; and oh, he was urbanity; he was quiet,
unobtrusive self-possession; he was deference itself! He spoke softly
and guardedly; and when he was about to make a statement on his sole
responsibility or offer a suggestion, he weighed it by drachms and
scruples first, with the crook of his little stick placed meditatively to
his teeth. His opening speech was perfect. It was perfect in
construction, in phraseology, in grammar, in emphasis, in pronunciation
--everything. He spoke little and guardedly after that. We were charmed.
We were more than charmed--we were overjoyed. We hired him at once. We
never even asked him his price. This man--our lackey, our servant, our
unquestioning slave though he was--was still a gentleman--we could see
that--while of the other two one was coarse and awkward and the other was
a born pirate. We asked our man Friday's name. He drew from his
pocketbook a snowy little card and passed it to us with a profound bow:
A. BILLFINGER,
Guide to Paris, France, Germany,
Spain, &c., &c.
Grande Hotel du Louvre.
"Billfinger! Oh, carry me home to die!"
That was an "aside" from Dan. The atrocious name grated harshly on my
ear, too. The most of us can learn to forgive, and even to like, a
countenance that strikes us unpleasantly at first, but few of us, I
fancy, become reconciled to a jarring name so easily. I was almost sorry
we had hired this man, his name was so unbearable. However, no matter.
We were impatient to start. Billfinger stepped to the door to call a
carriage, and then the doctor said:
"Well, the guide goes with the barbershop, with the billiard-table, with
the gasless room, and may be with many another pretty romance of Paris.
I expected to have a guide named Henri de Montmorency, or Armand de la
Chartreuse, or something that would sound grand in letters to the
villagers at home, but to think of a Frenchman by the name of Billfinger!
Oh! This is absurd, you know. This will never do. We can't say
Billfinger; it is nauseating. Name him over again; what had we better
call him? Alexis du Caulaincourt?"
"Alphonse Henri Gustave de Hauteville," I suggested.
"Call him Ferguson," said Dan.
That was practical, unromantic good sense. Without debate, we expunged
Billfinger as Billfinger, and called him Ferguson.
The carriage--an open barouche--was ready. Ferguson mounted beside the
driver, and we whirled away to breakfast. As was proper, Mr. Ferguson
stood by to transmit our orders and answer questions. By and by, he
mentioned casually--the artful adventurer--that he would go and get his
breakfast as soon as we had finished ours. He knew we could not get
along without him and that we would not want to loiter about and wait for
him. We asked him to sit down and eat with us. He begged, with many a
bow, to be excused. It was not proper, he said; he would sit at another
table. We ordered him peremptorily to sit down with us.
Here endeth the first lesson. It was a mistake.
As long as we had that fellow after that, he was always hungry; he was
always thirsty. He came early; he stayed late; he could not pass a
restaurant; he looked with a lecherous eye upon every wine shop.
Suggestions to stop, excuses to eat and to drink, were forever on his
lips. We tried all we could to fill him so full that he would have no
room to spare for a fortnight, but it was a failure. He did not hold
enough to smother the cravings of his superhuman appetite.
He had another "discrepancy" about him. He was always wanting us to buy
things. On the shallowest pretenses he would inveigle us into shirt
stores, boot stores, tailor shops, glove shops--anywhere under the broad
sweep of the heavens that there seemed a chance of our buying anything.
Anyone could have guessed that the shopkeepers paid him a percentage on
the sales, but in our blessed innocence we didn't until this feature of
his conduct grew unbearably prominent. One day Dan happened to mention
that he thought of buying three or four silk dress patterns for presents.
Ferguson's hungry eye was upon him in an instant. In the course of
twenty minutes the carriage stopped.
"What's this?"
"Zis is ze finest silk magazin in Paris--ze most celebrate."
"What did you come here for? We told you to take us to the palace of the
Louvre."
"I suppose ze gentleman say he wish to buy some silk."
"You are not required to 'suppose' things for the party, Ferguson. We do
not wish to tax your energies too much. We will bear some of the burden
and heat of the day ourselves. We will endeavor to do such 'supposing'
as is really necessary to be done. Drive on." So spake the doctor.
Within fifteen minutes the carriage halted again, and before another silk
store. The doctor said:
"Ah, the palace of the Louvre--beautiful, beautiful edifice! Does the
Emperor Napoleon live here now, Ferguson?"
"Ah, Doctor! You do jest; zis is not ze palace; we come there directly.
But since we pass right by zis store, where is such beautiful silk--"
"Ah! I see, I see. I meant to have told you that we did not wish to
purchase any silks to-day, but in my absent-mindedness I forgot it. I
also meant to tell you we wished to go directly to the Louvre, but I
forgot that also. However, we will go there now. Pardon my seeming
carelessness, Ferguson. Drive on."
Within the half hour we stopped again--in front of another silk store.
We were angry; but the doctor was always serene, always smooth-voiced.
He said:
"At last! How imposing the Louvre is, and yet how small! How
exquisitely fashioned! How charmingly situated!--Venerable, venerable
pile--"
"Pairdon, Doctor, zis is not ze Louvre--it is--"
"What is it?"
"I have ze idea--it come to me in a moment--zat ze silk in zis magazin--"
"Ferguson, how heedless I am. I fully intended to tell you that we did
not wish to buy any silks to-day, and I also intended to tell you that we
yearned to go immediately to the palace of the Louvre, but enjoying the
happiness of seeing you devour four breakfasts this morning has so filled
me with pleasurable emotions that I neglect the commonest interests of
the time. However, we will proceed now to the Louvre, Ferguson."
"But, doctor," (excitedly,) "it will take not a minute--not but one small
minute! Ze gentleman need not to buy if he not wish to--but only look at
ze silk--look at ze beautiful fabric. [Then pleadingly.] Sair--just only
one leetle moment!"
Dan said, "Confound the idiot! I don't want to see any silks today, and
I won't look at them. Drive on."
And the doctor: "We need no silks now, Ferguson. Our hearts yearn for
the Louvre. Let us journey on--let us journey on."
"But doctor! It is only one moment--one leetle moment. And ze time will
be save--entirely save! Because zere is nothing to see now--it is too
late. It want ten minute to four and ze Louvre close at four--only one
leetle moment, Doctor!"
The treacherous miscreant! After four breakfasts and a gallon of
champagne, to serve us such a scurvy trick. We got no sight of the
countless treasures of art in the Louvre galleries that day, and our only
poor little satisfaction was in the reflection that Ferguson sold not a
solitary silk dress pattern.
I am writing this chapter partly for the satisfaction of abusing that
accomplished knave Billfinger, and partly to show whosoever shall read
this how Americans fare at the hands of the Paris guides and what sort of
people Paris guides are. It need not be supposed that we were a stupider
or an easier prey than our countrymen generally are, for we were not.
The guides deceive and defraud every American who goes to Paris for the
first time and sees its sights alone or in company with others as little
experienced as himself. I shall visit Paris again someday, and then let
the guides beware! I shall go in my war paint--I shall carry my tomahawk
along.
I think we have lost but little time in Paris. We have gone to bed every
night tired out. Of course we visited the renowned International
Exposition. All the world did that. We went there on our third day in
Paris--and we stayed there nearly two hours. That was our first and last
visit. To tell the truth, we saw at a glance that one would have to
spend weeks--yea, even months--in that monstrous establishment to get an
intelligible idea of it. It was a wonderful show, but the moving masses
of people of all nations we saw there were a still more wonderful show.
I discovered that if I were to stay there a month, I should still find
myself looking at the people instead of the inanimate objects on
exhibition. I got a little interested in some curious old tapestries of
the thirteenth century, but a party of Arabs came by, and their dusky
faces and quaint costumes called my attention away at once. I watched a
silver swan, which had a living grace about his movements and a living
intelligence in his eyes--watched him swimming about as comfortably and
as unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass instead of a
jeweler's shop--watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and
hold up his head and go through all the customary and elaborate motions
of swallowing it--but the moment it disappeared down his throat some
tattooed South Sea Islanders approached and I yielded to their
attractions.
Presently I found a revolving pistol several hundred years old which
looked strangely like a modern Colt, but just then I heard that the
Empress of the French was in another part of the building, and hastened
away to see what she might look like. We heard martial music--we saw an
unusual number of soldiers walking hurriedly about--there was a general
movement among the people. We inquired what it was all about and learned
that the Emperor of the French and the Sultan of Turkey were about to
review twenty-five thousand troops at the Arc de l'Etoile. We
immediately departed. I had a greater anxiety to see these men than I
could have had to see twenty expositions.
We drove away and took up a position in an open space opposite the
American minister's house. A speculator bridged a couple of barrels with
a board and we hired standing places on it. Presently there was a sound
of distant music; in another minute a pillar of dust came moving slowly
toward us; a moment more and then, with colors flying and a grand crash
of military music, a gallant array of cavalrymen emerged from the dust
and came down the street on a gentle trot. After them came a long line
of artillery; then more cavalry, in splendid uniforms; and then their
imperial majesties Napoleon III and Abdul Aziz. The vast concourse of
people swung their hats and shouted--the windows and housetops in the
wide vicinity burst into a snowstorm of waving handkerchiefs, and the
wavers of the same mingled their cheers with those of the masses below.
It was a stirring spectacle.
But the two central figures claimed all my attention. Was ever such a
contrast set up before a multitude till then? Napoleon in military
uniform--a long-bodied, short-legged man, fiercely moustached, old,
wrinkled, with eyes half closed, and such a deep, crafty, scheming
expression about them!--Napoleon, bowing ever so gently to the loud
plaudits, and watching everything and everybody with his cat eyes from
under his depressed hat brim, as if to discover any sign that those
cheers were not heartfelt and cordial.
Abdul Aziz, absolute lord of the Ottoman empire--clad in dark green
European clothes, almost without ornament or insignia of rank; a red
Turkish fez on his head; a short, stout, dark man, black-bearded,
black-eyed, stupid, unprepossessing--a man whose whole appearance
somehow suggested that if he only had a cleaver in his hand and a white
apron on, one would not be at all surprised to hear him say: "A mutton
roast today, or will you have a nice porterhouse steak?"
Napoleon III, the representative of the highest modern civilization,
progress, and refinement; Abdul-Aziz, the representative of a people by
nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive,
superstitious--and a government whose Three Graces are Tyranny, Rapacity,
Blood. Here in brilliant Paris, under this majestic Arch of Triumph, the
First Century greets the Nineteenth!
NAPOLEON III., Emperor of France! Surrounded by shouting thousands, by
military pomp, by the splendors of his capital city, and companioned by
kings and princes--this is the man who was sneered at and reviled and
called Bastard--yet who was dreaming of a crown and an empire all the
while; who was driven into exile--but carried his dreams with him; who
associated with the common herd in America and ran foot races for a
wager--but still sat upon a throne in fancy; who braved every danger to
go to his dying mother--and grieved that she could not be spared to see
him cast aside his plebeian vestments for the purple of royalty; who kept
his faithful watch and walked his weary beat a common policeman of
London--but dreamed the while of a coming night when he should tread the
long-drawn corridors of the Tuileries; who made the miserable fiasco of
Strasbourg; saw his poor, shabby eagle, forgetful of its lesson, refuse
to perch upon his shoulder; delivered his carefully prepared, sententious
burst of eloquence upon unsympathetic ears; found himself a prisoner, the
butt of small wits, a mark for the pitiless ridicule of all the world
--yet went on dreaming of coronations and splendid pageants as before; who
lay a forgotten captive in the dungeons of Ham--and still schemed and
planned and pondered over future glory and future power; President of
France at last! a coup d'etat, and surrounded by applauding armies,
welcomed by the thunders of cannon, he mounts a throne and waves before
an astounded world the sceptre of a mighty empire! Who talks of the
marvels of fiction? Who speaks of the wonders of romance? Who prates of
the tame achievements of Aladdin and the Magii of Arabia?
ABDUL-AZIZ, Sultan of Turkey, Lord of the Ottoman Empire! Born to a
throne; weak, stupid, ignorant, almost, as his meanest slave; chief of a
vast royalty, yet the puppet of his Premier and the obedient child of a
tyrannical mother; a man who sits upon a throne--the beck of whose finger
moves navies and armies--who holds in his hands the power of life and
death over millions--yet who sleeps, sleeps, eats, eats, idles with his
eight hundred concubines, and when he is surfeited with eating and
sleeping and idling, and would rouse up and take the reins of government
and threaten to be a sultan, is charmed from his purpose by wary Fuad
Pacha with a pretty plan for a new palace or a new ship--charmed away
with a new toy, like any other restless child; a man who sees his people
robbed and oppressed by soulless tax-gatherers, but speaks no word to
save them; who believes in gnomes and genii and the wild fables of The
Arabian Nights, but has small regard for the mighty magicians of to-day,
and is nervous in the presence of their mysterious railroads and
steamboats and telegraphs; who would see undone in Egypt all that great
Mehemet Ali achieved, and would prefer rather to forget than emulate him;
a man who found his great empire a blot upon the earth--a degraded,
poverty-stricken, miserable, infamous agglomeration of ignorance, crime,
and brutality--and will idle away the allotted days of his trivial life
and then pass to the dust and the worms and leave it so!
Napoleon has augmented the commercial prosperity of France in ten years
to such a degree that figures can hardly compute it. He has rebuilt
Paris and has partly rebuilt every city in the state. He condemns a
whole street at a time, assesses the damages, pays them, and rebuilds
superbly. Then speculators buy up the ground and sell, but the original
owner is given the first choice by the government at a stated price
before the speculator is permitted to purchase. But above all things, he
has taken the sole control of the empire of France into his hands and
made it a tolerably free land--for people who will not attempt to go too
far in meddling with government affairs. No country offers greater
security to life and property than France, and one has all the freedom he
wants, but no license--no license to interfere with anybody or make
anyone uncomfortable.
As for the Sultan, one could set a trap any where and catch a dozen abler
men in a night.
The bands struck up, and the brilliant adventurer, Napoleon III., the
genius of Energy, Persistence, Enterprise; and the feeble Abdul-Aziz, the
genius of Ignorance, Bigotry, and Indolence, prepared for the Forward
--March!
We saw the splendid review, we saw the white-moustached old Crimean
soldier, Canrobert, Marshal of France, we saw--well, we saw every thing,
and then we went home satisfied.
CHAPTER XIV.
We went to see the Cathedral of Notre Dame. We had heard of it before.
It surprises me sometimes to think how much we do know and how
intelligent we are. We recognized the brown old Gothic pile in a moment;
it was like the pictures. We stood at a little distance and changed from
one point of observation to another and gazed long at its lofty square
towers and its rich front, clustered thick with stony, mutilated saints
who had been looking calmly down from their perches for ages. The
Patriarch of Jerusalem stood under them in the old days of chivalry and
romance, and preached the third Crusade, more than six hundred years ago;
and since that day they have stood there and looked quietly down upon the
most thrilling scenes, the grandest pageants, the most extraordinary
spectacles that have grieved or delighted Paris. These battered and
broken-nosed old fellows saw many and many a cavalcade of mail-clad
knights come marching home from Holy Land; they heard the bells above
them toll the signal for the St. Bartholomew's Massacre, and they saw the
slaughter that followed; later they saw the Reign of Terror, the carnage
of the Revolution, the overthrow of a king, the coronation of two
Napoleons, the christening of the young prince that lords it over a
regiment of servants in the Tuileries to-day--and they may possibly
continue to stand there until they see the Napoleon dynasty swept away
and the banners of a great republic floating above its ruins. I wish
these old parties could speak. They could tell a tale worth the
listening to.
They say that a pagan temple stood where Notre Dame now stands, in the
old Roman days, eighteen or twenty centuries ago--remains of it are still
preserved in Paris; and that a Christian church took its place about A.D.
300; another took the place of that in A.D. 500; and that the foundations
of the present cathedral were laid about A.D. 1100. The ground ought to
be measurably sacred by this time, one would think. One portion of this
noble old edifice is suggestive of the quaint fashions of ancient times.
It was built by Jean Sans-Peur, Duke of Burgundy, to set his conscience
at rest--he had assassinated the Duke of Orleans. Alas! Those good old
times are gone when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and
soothe his troubles to sleep simply by getting out his bricks and mortar
and building an addition to a church.
The portals of the great western front are bisected by square pillars.
They took the central one away in 1852, on the occasion of thanksgivings
for the reinstitution of the presidential power--but precious soon they
had occasion to reconsider that motion and put it back again! And they
did.
We loitered through the grand aisles for an hour or two, staring up at
the rich stained-glass windows embellished with blue and yellow and
crimson saints and martyrs, and trying to admire the numberless great
pictures in the chapels, and then we were admitted to the sacristy and
shown the magnificent robes which the Pope wore when he crowned Napoleon
I; a wagon-load of solid gold and silver utensils used in the great
public processions and ceremonies of the church; some nails of the true
cross, a fragment of the cross itself, a part of the crown of thorns.
We had already seen a large piece of the true cross in a church in the
Azores, but no nails. They showed us likewise the bloody robe which that
archbishop of Paris wore who exposed his sacred person and braved the
wrath of the insurgents of 1848, to mount the barricades and hold aloft
the olive branch of peace in the hope of stopping the slaughter. His
noble effort cost him his life. He was shot dead. They showed us a cast
of his face taken after death, the bullet that killed him, and the two
vertebrae in which it lodged. These people have a somewhat singular
taste in the matter of relics. Ferguson told us that the silver cross
which the good archbishop wore at his girdle was seized and thrown into
the Seine, where it lay embedded in the mud for fifteen years, and then
an angel appeared to a priest and told him where to dive for it; he did
dive for it and got it, and now it is there on exhibition at Notre Dame,
to be inspected by anybody who feels an interest in inanimate objects of
miraculous intervention.
Next we went to visit the Morgue, that horrible receptacle for the dead
who die mysteriously and leave the manner of their taking off a dismal
secret. We stood before a grating and looked through into a room which
was hung all about with the clothing of dead men; coarse blouses,
water-soaked; the delicate garments of women and children; patrician
vestments, hacked and stabbed and stained with red; a hat that was
crushed and bloody. On a slanting stone lay a drowned man, naked,
swollen, purple; clasping the fragment of a broken bush with a grip
which death had so petrified that human strength could not unloose it
--mute witness of the last despairing effort to save the life that was
doomed beyond all help. A stream of water trickled ceaselessly over the
hideous face. We knew that the body and the clothing were there for
identification by friends, but still we wondered if anybody could love
that repulsive object or grieve for its loss. We grew meditative and
wondered if, some forty years ago, when the mother of that ghastly thing
was dandling it upon her knee, and kissing it and petting it and
displaying it with satisfied pride to the passers-by, a prophetic vision
of this dread ending ever flitted through her brain. I half feared that
the mother, or the wife or a brother of the dead man might come while we
stood there, but nothing of the kind occurred. Men and women came, and
some looked eagerly in and pressed their faces against the bars; others
glanced carelessly at the body and turned away with a disappointed look
--people, I thought, who live upon strong excitements and who attend the
exhibitions of the Morgue regularly, just as other people go to see
theatrical spectacles every night. When one of these looked in and
passed on, I could not help thinking--
"Now this don't afford you any satisfaction--a party with his head shot
off is what you need."
One night we went to the celebrated Jardin Mabille, but only staid a
little while. We wanted to see some of this kind of Paris life, however,
and therefore the next night we went to a similar place of entertainment
in a great garden in the suburb of Asnieres. We went to the railroad
depot, toward evening, and Ferguson got tickets for a second-class
carriage. Such a perfect jam of people I have not often seen--but there
was no noise, no disorder, no rowdyism. Some of the women and young
girls that entered the train we knew to be of the demi-monde, but others
we were not at all sure about.
The girls and women in our carriage behaved themselves modestly and
becomingly all the way out, except that they smoked. When we arrived at
the garden in Asnieres, we paid a franc or two admission and entered a
place which had flower beds in it, and grass plots, and long, curving
rows of ornamental shrubbery, with here and there a secluded bower
convenient for eating ice cream in. We moved along the sinuous gravel
walks, with the great concourse of girls and young men, and suddenly a
domed and filigreed white temple, starred over and over and over again
with brilliant gas jets, burst upon us like a fallen sun. Nearby was a
large, handsome house with its ample front illuminated in the same way,
and above its roof floated the Star-Spangled Banner of America.
"Well!" I said. "How is this?" It nearly took my breath away.
Ferguson said an American--a New Yorker--kept the place, and was carrying
on quite a stirring opposition to the Jardin Mabille.
Crowds composed of both sexes and nearly all ages were frisking about the
garden or sitting in the open air in front of the flagstaff and the
temple, drinking wine and coffee or smoking. The dancing had not begun
yet. Ferguson said there was to be an exhibition. The famous Blondin
was going to perform on a tightrope in another part of the garden. We
went thither. Here the light was dim, and the masses of people were
pretty closely packed together. And now I made a mistake which any
donkey might make, but a sensible man never. I committed an error which
I find myself repeating every day of my life. Standing right before a
young lady, I said:
"Dan, just look at this girl, how beautiful she is!"
"I thank you more for the evident sincerity of the compliment, sir, than
for the extraordinary publicity you have given to it!" This in good,
pure English.
We took a walk, but my spirits were very, very sadly dampened. I did not
feel right comfortable for some time afterward. Why will people be so
stupid as to suppose themselves the only foreigners among a crowd of ten
thousand persons?
But Blondin came out shortly. He appeared on a stretched cable, far away
above the sea of tossing hats and handkerchiefs, and in the glare of the
hundreds of rockets that whizzed heavenward by him he looked like a wee
insect. He balanced his pole and walked the length of his rope--two or
three hundred feet; he came back and got a man and carried him across; he
returned to the center and danced a jig; next he performed some gymnastic
and balancing feats too perilous to afford a pleasant spectacle; and he
finished by fastening to his person a thousand Roman candles, Catherine
wheels, serpents and rockets of all manner of brilliant colors, setting
them on fire all at once and walking and waltzing across his rope again
in a blinding blaze of glory that lit up the garden and the people's
faces like a great conflagration at midnight.
The dance had begun, and we adjourned to the temple. Within it was a
drinking saloon, and all around it was a broad circular platform for the
dancers. I backed up against the wall of the temple, and waited. Twenty
sets formed, the music struck up, and then--I placed my hands before my
face for very shame. But I looked through my fingers. They were dancing
the renowned "Can-can." A handsome girl in the set before me tripped
forward lightly to meet the opposite gentleman, tripped back again,
grasped her dresses vigorously on both sides with her hands, raised them
pretty high, danced an extraordinary jig that had more activity and
exposure about it than any jig I ever saw before, and then, drawing her
clothes still higher, she advanced gaily to the center and launched a
vicious kick full at her vis-a-vis that must infallibly have removed his
nose if he had been seven feet high. It was a mercy he was only six.
That is the can-can. The idea of it is to dance as wildly, as noisily,
as furiously as you can; expose yourself as much as possible if you are a
woman; and kick as high as you can, no matter which sex you belong to.
There is no word of exaggeration in this. Any of the staid, respectable,
aged people who were there that night can testify to the truth of that
statement. There were a good many such people present. I suppose French
morality is not of that straight-laced description which is shocked at
trifles.
I moved aside and took a general view of the can-can. Shouts, laughter,
furious music, a bewildering chaos of darting and intermingling forms,
stormy jerking and snatching of gay dresses, bobbing beads, flying arms,
lightning flashes of white-stockinged calves and dainty slippers in the
air, and then a grand final rush, riot, a terrific hubbub, and a wild
stampede! Heavens! Nothing like it has been seen on earth since
trembling Tam O'Shanter saw the devil and the witches at their orgies
that stormy night in "Alloway's auld haunted kirk."
We visited the Louvre, at a time when we had no silk purchases in view,
and looked at its miles of paintings by the old masters. Some of them
were beautiful, but at the same time they carried such evidences about
them of the cringing spirit of those great men that we found small
pleasure in examining them. Their nauseous adulation of princely patrons
was more prominent to me and chained my attention more surely than the
charms of color and expression which are claimed to be in the pictures.
Gratitude for kindnesses is well, but it seems to me that some of those
artists carried it so far that it ceased to be gratitude and became
worship. If there is a plausible excuse for the worship of men, then by
all means let us forgive Rubens and his brethren.
But I will drop the subject, lest I say something about the old masters
that might as well be left unsaid.
Of course we drove in the Bois de Boulogne, that limitless park, with its
forests, its lakes, its cascades, and its broad avenues. There were
thousands upon thousands of vehicles abroad, and the scene was full of
life and gaiety. There were very common hacks, with father and mother
and all the children in them; conspicuous little open carriages with
celebrated ladies of questionable reputation in them; there were Dukes
and Duchesses abroad, with gorgeous footmen perched behind, and equally
gorgeous outriders perched on each of the six horses; there were blue and
silver, and green and gold, and pink and black, and all sorts and
descriptions of stunning and startling liveries out, and I almost yearned
to be a flunkey myself, for the sake of the fine clothes.
But presently the Emperor came along and he outshone them all. He was
preceded by a bodyguard of gentlemen on horseback in showy uniforms, his
carriage-horses (there appeared to be somewhere in the remote
neighborhood of a thousand of them,) were bestridden by gallant-looking
fellows, also in stylish uniforms, and after the carriage followed
another detachment of bodyguards. Everybody got out of the way;
everybody bowed to the Emperor and his friend the Sultan; and they went
by on a swinging trot and disappeared.
I will not describe the Bois de Boulogne. I can not do it. It is simply
a beautiful, cultivated, endless, wonderful wilderness. It is an
enchanting place. It is in Paris now, one may say, but a crumbling old
cross in one portion of it reminds one that it was not always so. The
cross marks the spot where a celebrated troubadour was waylaid and
murdered in the fourteenth century. It was in this park that that fellow
with an unpronounceable name made the attempt upon the Russian Czar's
life last spring with a pistol. The bullet struck a tree. Ferguson
showed us the place. Now in America that interesting tree would be
chopped down or forgotten within the next five years, but it will be
treasured here. The guides will point it out to visitors for the next
eight hundred years, and when it decays and falls down they will put up
another there and go on with the same old story just the same.
CHAPTER XV.
One of our pleasantest visits was to Pere la Chaise, the national
burying-ground of France, the honored resting-place of some of her
greatest and best children, the last home of scores of illustrious men
and women who were born to no titles, but achieved fame by their own
energy and their own genius. It is a solemn city of winding streets and
of miniature marble temples and mansions of the dead gleaming white from
out a wilderness of foliage and fresh flowers. Not every city is so well
peopled as this, or has so ample an area within its walls. Few palaces
exist in any city that are so exquisite in design, so rich in art, so
costly in material, so graceful, so beautiful.
We had stood in the ancient church of St. Denis, where the marble
effigies of thirty generations of kings and queens lay stretched at
length upon the tombs, and the sensations invoked were startling and
novel; the curious armor, the obsolete costumes, the placid faces, the
hands placed palm to palm in eloquent supplication--it was a vision of
gray antiquity. It seemed curious enough to be standing face to face, as
it were, with old Dagobert I., and Clovis and Charlemagne, those vague,
colossal heroes, those shadows, those myths of a thousand years ago! I
touched their dust-covered faces with my finger, but Dagobert was deader
than the sixteen centuries that have passed over him, Clovis slept well
after his labor for Christ, and old Charlemagne went on dreaming of his
paladins, of bloody Roncesvalles, and gave no heed to me.
The great names of Pere la Chaise impress one, too, but differently.
There the suggestion brought constantly to his mind is, that this place
is sacred to a nobler royalty--the royalty of heart and brain. Every
faculty of mind, every noble trait of human nature, every high occupation
which men engage in, seems represented by a famous name. The effect is a
curious medley. Davoust and Massena, who wrought in many a battle
tragedy, are here, and so also is Rachel, of equal renown in mimic
tragedy on the stage. The Abbe Sicard sleeps here--the first great
teacher of the deaf and dumb--a man whose heart went out to every
unfortunate, and whose life was given to kindly offices in their service;
and not far off, in repose and peace at last, lies Marshal Ney, whose
stormy spirit knew no music like the bugle call to arms. The man who
originated public gas-lighting, and that other benefactor who introduced
the cultivation of the potato and thus blessed millions of his starving
countrymen, lie with the Prince of Masserano, and with exiled queens and
princes of Further India. Gay-Lussac the chemist, Laplace the
astronomer, Larrey the surgeon, de Suze the advocate, are here, and with
them are Talma, Bellini, Rubini; de Balzac, Beaumarchais, Beranger;
Moliere and Lafontaine, and scores of other men whose names and whose
worthy labors are as familiar in the remote by-places of civilization as
are the historic deeds of the kings and princes that sleep in the marble
vaults of St. Denis.
But among the thousands and thousands of tombs in Pere la Chaise, there
is one that no man, no woman, no youth of either sex, ever passes by
without stopping to examine. Every visitor has a sort of indistinct idea
of the history of its dead and comprehends that homage is due there, but
not one in twenty thousand clearly remembers the story of that tomb and
its romantic occupants. This is the grave of Abelard and Heloise--a
grave which has been more revered, more widely known, more written and
sung about and wept over, for seven hundred years, than any other in
Christendom save only that of the Saviour. All visitors linger pensively
about it; all young people capture and carry away keepsakes and mementoes
of it; all Parisian youths and maidens who are disappointed in love come
there to bail out when they are full of tears; yea, many stricken lovers
make pilgrimages to this shrine from distant provinces to weep and wail
and "grit" their teeth over their heavy sorrows, and to purchase the
sympathies of the chastened spirits of that tomb with offerings of
immortelles and budding flowers.
Go when you will, you find somebody snuffling over that tomb. Go when
you will, you find it furnished with those bouquets and immortelles. Go
when you will, you find a gravel-train from Marseilles arriving to supply
the deficiencies caused by memento-cabbaging vandals whose affections
have miscarried.
Yet who really knows the story of Abelard and Heloise? Precious few
people. The names are perfectly familiar to every body, and that is
about all. With infinite pains I have acquired a knowledge of that
history, and I propose to narrate it here, partly for the honest
information of the public and partly to show that public that they have
been wasting a good deal of marketable sentiment very unnecessarily.
STORY OF ABELARD AND HELOISE
Heloise was born seven hundred and sixty-six years ago. She may have had
parents. There is no telling. She lived with her uncle Fulbert, a canon
of the cathedral of Paris. I do not know what a canon of a cathedral is,
but that is what he was. He was nothing more than a sort of a mountain
howitzer, likely, because they had no heavy artillery in those days.
Suffice it, then, that Heloise lived with her uncle the howitzer and was
happy. She spent the most of her childhood in the convent of Argenteuil
--never heard of Argenteuil before, but suppose there was really such a
place. She then returned to her uncle, the old gun, or son of a gun, as
the case may be, and he taught her to write and speak Latin, which was
the language of literature and polite society at that period.
Just at this time, Pierre Abelard, who had already made himself widely
famous as a rhetorician, came to found a school of rhetoric in Paris.
The originality of his principles, his eloquence, and his great physical
strength and beauty created a profound sensation. He saw Heloise, and
was captivated by her blooming youth, her beauty, and her charming
disposition. He wrote to her; she answered. He wrote again; she
answered again. He was now in love. He longed to know her--to speak to
her face to face.
His school was near Fulbert's house. He asked Fulbert to allow him to
call. The good old swivel saw here a rare opportunity: his niece, whom
he so much loved, would absorb knowledge from this man, and it would not
cost him a cent. Such was Fulbert--penurious.
Fulbert's first name is not mentioned by any author, which is
unfortunate. However, George W. Fulbert will answer for him as well as
any other. We will let him go at that. He asked Abelard to teach her.
Abelard was glad enough of the opportunity. He came often and staid
long. A letter of his shows in its very first sentence that he came
under that friendly roof like a cold-hearted villain as he was, with the
deliberate intention of debauching a confiding, innocent girl. This is
the letter:
"I cannot cease to be astonished at the simplicity of Fulbert;
I was as much surprised as if he had placed a lamb in the power
of a hungry wolf. Heloise and I, under pretext of study, gave
ourselves up wholly to love, and the solitude that love seeks
our studies procured for us. Books were open before us, but we
spoke oftener of love than philosophy, and kisses came more
readily from our lips than words."
And so, exulting over an honorable confidence which to his degraded
instinct was a ludicrous "simplicity," this unmanly Abelard seduced the
niece of the man whose guest he was. Paris found it out. Fulbert was
told of it--told often--but refused to believe it. He could not
comprehend how a man could be so depraved as to use the sacred protection
and security of hospitality as a means for the commission of such a crime
as that. But when he heard the rowdies in the streets singing the
love-songs of Abelard to Heloise, the case was too plain--love-songs come
not properly within the teachings of rhetoric and philosophy.
He drove Abelard from his house. Abelard returned secretly and carried
Heloise away to Palais, in Brittany, his native country. Here, shortly
afterward, she bore a son, who, from his rare beauty, was surnamed
Astrolabe--William G. The girl's flight enraged Fulbert, and he longed
for vengeance, but feared to strike lest retaliation visit Heloise--for
he still loved her tenderly. At length Abelard offered to marry Heloise
--but on a shameful condition: that the marriage should be kept secret
from the world, to the end that (while her good name remained a wreck, as
before,) his priestly reputation might be kept untarnished. It was like
that miscreant. Fulbert saw his opportunity and consented. He would see
the parties married, and then violate the confidence of the man who had
taught him that trick; he would divulge the secret and so remove somewhat
of the obloquy that attached to his niece's fame. But the niece
suspected his scheme. She refused the marriage at first; she said
Fulbert would betray the secret to save her, and besides, she did not
wish to drag down a lover who was so gifted, so honored by the world,
and who had such a splendid career before him. It was noble,
self-sacrificing love, and characteristic of the pure-souled Heloise,
but it was not good sense.
But she was overruled, and the private marriage took place. Now for
Fulbert! The heart so wounded should be healed at last; the proud spirit
so tortured should find rest again; the humbled head should be lifted up
once more. He proclaimed the marriage in the high places of the city and
rejoiced that dishonor had departed from his house. But lo! Abelard
denied the marriage! Heloise denied it! The people, knowing the former
circumstances, might have believed Fulbert had only Abelard denied it,
but when the person chiefly interested--the girl herself--denied it, they
laughed, despairing Fulbert to scorn.
The poor canon of the cathedral of Paris was spiked again. The last hope
of repairing the wrong that had been done his house was gone. What next?
Human nature suggested revenge. He compassed it. The historian says:
"Ruffians, hired by Fulbert, fell upon Abelard by night, and
inflicted upon him a terrible and nameless mutilation."
I am seeking the last resting place of those "ruffians." When I find it
I shall shed some tears on it, and stack up some bouquets and
immortelles, and cart away from it some gravel whereby to remember that
howsoever blotted by crime their lives may have been, these ruffians did
one just deed, at any rate, albeit it was not warranted by the strict
letter of the law.
Heloise entered a convent and gave good-bye to the world and its
pleasures for all time. For twelve years she never heard of Abelard
--never even heard his name mentioned. She had become prioress of
Argenteuil and led a life of complete seclusion. She happened one day to
see a letter written by him, in which he narrated his own history. She
cried over it and wrote him. He answered, addressing her as his "sister
in Christ." They continued to correspond, she in the unweighed language
of unwavering affection, he in the chilly phraseology of the polished
rhetorician. She poured out her heart in passionate, disjointed
sentences; he replied with finished essays, divided deliberately into
heads and sub-heads, premises and argument. She showered upon him the
tenderest epithets that love could devise, he addressed her from the
North Pole of his frozen heart as the "Spouse of Christ!" The abandoned
villain!
On account of her too easy government of her nuns, some disreputable
irregularities were discovered among them, and the Abbot of St. Denis
broke up her establishment. Abelard was the official head of the
monastery of St. Gildas de Ruys, at that time, and when he heard of her
homeless condition a sentiment of pity was aroused in his breast (it is a
wonder the unfamiliar emotion did not blow his head off,) and he placed
her and her troop in the little oratory of the Paraclete, a religious
establishment which he had founded. She had many privations and
sufferings to undergo at first, but her worth and her gentle disposition
won influential friends for her, and she built up a wealthy and
flourishing nunnery. She became a great favorite with the heads of the
church, and also the people, though she seldom appeared in public. She
rapidly advanced in esteem, in good report, and in usefulness, and
Abelard as rapidly lost ground. The Pope so honored her that he made her
the head of her order. Abelard, a man of splendid talents, and ranking
as the first debater of his time, became timid, irresolute, and
distrustful of his powers. He only needed a great misfortune to topple
him from the high position he held in the world of intellectual
excellence, and it came. Urged by kings and princes to meet the subtle
St. Bernard in debate and crush him, he stood up in the presence of a
royal and illustrious assemblage, and when his antagonist had finished he
looked about him and stammered a commencement; but his courage failed
him, the cunning of his tongue was gone: with his speech unspoken, he
trembled and sat down, a disgraced and vanquished champion.
He died a nobody, and was buried at Cluny, A.D., 1144. They removed his
body to the Paraclete afterward, and when Heloise died, twenty years
later, they buried her with him, in accordance with her last wish. He
died at the ripe age of 64, and she at 63. After the bodies had remained
entombed three hundred years, they were removed once more. They were
removed again in 1800, and finally, seventeen years afterward, they were
taken up and transferred to Pere la Chaise, where they will remain in
peace and quiet until it comes time for them to get up and move again.
History is silent concerning the last acts of the mountain howitzer. Let
the world say what it will about him, I, at least, shall always respect
the memory and sorrow for the abused trust and the broken heart and the
troubled spirit of the old smooth-bore. Rest and repose be his!
Such is the story of Abelard and Heloise. Such is the history that
Lamartine has shed such cataracts of tears over. But that man never
could come within the influence of a subject in the least pathetic
without overflowing his banks. He ought to be dammed--or leveed, I
should more properly say. Such is the history--not as it is usually
told, but as it is when stripped of the nauseous sentimentality that
would enshrine for our loving worship a dastardly seducer like Pierre
Abelard. I have not a word to say against the misused, faithful girl,
and would not withhold from her grave a single one of those simple
tributes which blighted youths and maidens offer to her memory, but I am
sorry enough that I have not time and opportunity to write four or five
volumes of my opinion of her friend the founder of the Parachute, or the
Paraclete, or whatever it was.
The tons of sentiment I have wasted on that unprincipled humbug in my
ignorance! I shall throttle down my emotions hereafter, about this sort
of people, until I have read them up and know whether they are entitled
to any tearful attentions or not. I wish I had my immortelles back, now,
and that bunch of radishes.
In Paris we often saw in shop windows the sign "English Spoken Here,"
just as one sees in the windows at home the sign "Ici on parle
francaise." We always invaded these places at once--and invariably
received the information, framed in faultless French, that the clerk who
did the English for the establishment had just gone to dinner and would
be back in an hour--would Monsieur buy something? We wondered why those
parties happened to take their dinners at such erratic and extraordinary
hours, for we never called at a time when an exemplary Christian would be
in the least likely to be abroad on such an errand. The truth was, it
was a base fraud--a snare to trap the unwary--chaff to catch fledglings
with. They had no English-murdering clerk. They trusted to the sign to
inveigle foreigners into their lairs, and trusted to their own
blandishments to keep them there till they bought something.
We ferreted out another French imposition--a frequent sign to this
effect: "ALL MANNER OF AMERICAN DRINKS ARTISTICALLY PREPARED HERE." We
procured the services of a gentleman experienced in the nomenclature of
the American bar, and moved upon the works of one of these impostors. A
bowing, aproned Frenchman skipped forward and said:
"Que voulez les messieurs?" I do not know what "Que voulez les
messieurs?" means, but such was his remark.
Our general said, "We will take a whiskey straight."
[A stare from the Frenchman.]
"Well, if you don't know what that is, give us a champagne cock-tail."
[A stare and a shrug.]
"Well, then, give us a sherry cobbler."
The Frenchman was checkmated. This was all Greek to him.
"Give us a brandy smash!"
The Frenchman began to back away, suspicious of the ominous vigor of the
last order--began to back away, shrugging his shoulders and spreading his
hands apologetically.
The General followed him up and gained a complete victory. The
uneducated foreigner could not even furnish a Santa Cruz Punch, an
Eye-Opener, a Stone-Fence, or an Earthquake. It was plain that he was a
wicked impostor.
An acquaintance of mine said the other day that he was doubtless the only
American visitor to the Exposition who had had the high honor of being
escorted by the Emperor's bodyguard. I said with unobtrusive frankness
that I was astonished that such a long-legged, lantern-jawed,
unprepossessing-looking specter as he should be singled out for a
distinction like that, and asked how it came about. He said he had
attended a great military review in the Champ de Mars some time ago, and
while the multitude about him was growing thicker and thicker every
moment he observed an open space inside the railing. He left his
carriage and went into it. He was the only person there, and so he had
plenty of room, and the situation being central, he could see all the
preparations going on about the field. By and by there was a sound of
music, and soon the Emperor of the French and the Emperor of Austria,
escorted by the famous Cent Gardes, entered the enclosure. They seemed
not to observe him, but directly, in response to a sign from the
commander of the guard, a young lieutenant came toward him with a file of
his men following, halted, raised his hand, and gave the military salute,
and then said in a low voice that he was sorry to have to disturb a
stranger and a gentleman, but the place was sacred to royalty. Then this
New Jersey phantom rose up and bowed and begged pardon, then with the
officer beside him, the file of men marching behind him, and with every
mark of respect, he was escorted to his carriage by the imperial Cent
Gardes! The officer saluted again and fell back, the New Jersey sprite
bowed in return and had presence of mind enough to pretend that he had
simply called on a matter of private business with those emperors, and so
waved them an adieu and drove from the field!
Imagine a poor Frenchman ignorantly intruding upon a public rostrum
sacred to some six-penny dignitary in America. The police would scare
him to death first with a storm of their elegant blasphemy, and then pull
him to pieces getting him away from there. We are measurably superior to
the French in some things, but they are immeasurably our betters in
others.
Enough of Paris for the present. We have done our whole duty by it. We
have seen the Tuileries, the Napoleon Column, the Madeleine, that wonder
of wonders the tomb of Napoleon, all the great churches and museums,
libraries, imperial palaces, and sculpture and picture galleries, the
Pantheon, Jardin des Plantes, the opera, the circus, the legislative
body, the billiard rooms, the barbers, the grisettes--
Ah, the grisettes! I had almost forgotten. They are another romantic
fraud. They were (if you let the books of travel tell it) always so
beautiful--so neat and trim, so graceful--so naive and trusting--so
gentle, so winning--so faithful to their shop duties, so irresistible
to buyers in their prattling importunity--so devoted to their
poverty-stricken students of the Latin Quarter--so lighthearted and
happy on their Sunday picnics in the suburbs--and oh, so charmingly,
so delightfully immoral!
Stuff! For three or four days I was constantly saying:
"Quick, Ferguson! Is that a grisette?"
And he always said, "No."
He comprehended at last that I wanted to see a grisette. Then he showed
me dozens of them. They were like nearly all the Frenchwomen I ever saw
--homely. They had large hands, large feet, large mouths; they had pug
noses as a general thing, and moustaches that not even good breeding
could overlook; they combed their hair straight back without parting;
they were ill-shaped, they were not winning, they were not graceful; I
knew by their looks that they ate garlic and onions; and lastly and
finally, to my thinking it would be base flattery to call them immoral.
Aroint thee, wench! I sorrow for the vagabond student of the Latin
Quarter now, even more than formerly I envied him. Thus topples to earth
another idol of my infancy.
We have seen every thing, and tomorrow we go to Versailles. We shall see
Paris only for a little while as we come back to take up our line of
march for the ship, and so I may as well bid the beautiful city a
regretful farewell. We shall travel many thousands of miles after we
leave here and visit many great cities, but we shall find none so
enchanting as this.
Some of our party have gone to England, intending to take a roundabout
course and rejoin the vessel at Leghorn or Naples several weeks hence.
We came near going to Geneva, but have concluded to return to Marseilles
and go up through Italy from Genoa.
I will conclude this chapter with a remark that I am sincerely proud to
be able to make--and glad, as well, that my comrades cordially endorse
it, to wit: by far the handsomest women we have seen in France were born
and reared in America.
I feel now like a man who has redeemed a failing reputation and shed
luster upon a dimmed escutcheon, by a single just deed done at the
eleventh hour.
Let the curtain fall, to slow music.
CHAPTER XVI.
VERSAILLES! It is wonderfully beautiful! You gaze and stare and try to
understand that it is real, that it is on the earth, that it is not the
Garden of Eden--but your brain grows giddy, stupefied by the world of
beauty around you, and you half believe you are the dupe of an exquisite
dream. The scene thrills one like military music! A noble palace,
stretching its ornamented front, block upon block away, till it seemed
that it would never end; a grand promenade before it, whereon the armies
of an empire might parade; all about it rainbows of flowers, and colossal
statues that were almost numberless and yet seemed only scattered over
the ample space; broad flights of stone steps leading down from the
promenade to lower grounds of the park--stairways that whole regiments
might stand to arms upon and have room to spare; vast fountains whose
great bronze effigies discharged rivers of sparkling water into the air
and mingled a hundred curving jets together in forms of matchless beauty;
wide grass-carpeted avenues that branched hither and thither in every
direction and wandered to seemingly interminable distances, walled all
the way on either side with compact ranks of leafy trees whose branches
met above and formed arches as faultless and as symmetrical as ever were
carved in stone; and here and there were glimpses of sylvan lakes with
miniature ships glassed in their surfaces. And every where--on the
palace steps, and the great promenade, around the fountains, among the
trees, and far under the arches of the endless avenues--hundreds and
hundreds of people in gay costumes walked or ran or danced, and gave to
the fairy picture the life and animation which was all of perfection it
could have lacked.
It was worth a pilgrimage to see. Everything is on so gigantic a scale.
Nothing is small--nothing is cheap. The statues are all large; the
palace is grand; the park covers a fair-sized county; the avenues are
interminable. All the distances and all the dimensions about Versailles
are vast. I used to think the pictures exaggerated these distances and
these dimensions beyond all reason, and that they made Versailles more
beautiful than it was possible for any place in the world to be. I know
now that the pictures never came up to the subject in any respect, and
that no painter could represent Versailles on canvas as beautiful as it
is in reality. I used to abuse Louis XIV for spending two hundred
millions of dollars in creating this marvelous park, when bread was so
scarce with some of his subjects; but I have forgiven him now. He took a
tract of land sixty miles in circumference and set to work to make this
park and build this palace and a road to it from Paris. He kept 36,000
men employed daily on it, and the labor was so unhealthy that they used
to die and be hauled off by cartloads every night. The wife of a
nobleman of the time speaks of this as an "inconvenience," but naively
remarks that "it does not seem worthy of attention in the happy state of
tranquillity we now enjoy."
I always thought ill of people at home who trimmed their shrubbery into
pyramids and squares and spires and all manner of unnatural shapes, and
when I saw the same thing being practiced in this great park I began to
feel dissatisfied. But I soon saw the idea of the thing and the wisdom
of it. They seek the general effect. We distort a dozen sickly trees
into unaccustomed shapes in a little yard no bigger than a dining room,
and then surely they look absurd enough. But here they take two hundred
thousand tall forest trees and set them in a double row; allow no sign of
leaf or branch to grow on the trunk lower down than six feet above the
ground; from that point the boughs begin to project, and very gradually
they extend outward further and further till they meet overhead, and a
faultless tunnel of foliage is formed. The arch is mathematically
precise. The effect is then very fine. They make trees take fifty
different shapes, and so these quaint effects are infinitely varied and
picturesque. The trees in no two avenues are shaped alike, and
consequently the eye is not fatigued with anything in the nature of
monotonous uniformity. I will drop this subject now, leaving it to
others to determine how these people manage to make endless ranks of
lofty forest trees grow to just a certain thickness of trunk (say a foot
and two-thirds); how they make them spring to precisely the same height
for miles; how they make them grow so close together; how they compel one
huge limb to spring from the same identical spot on each tree and form
the main sweep of the arch; and how all these things are kept exactly in
the same condition and in the same exquisite shapeliness and symmetry
month after month and year after year--for I have tried to reason out the
problem and have failed.
We walked through the great hall of sculpture and the one hundred and
fifty galleries of paintings in the palace of Versailles, and felt that
to be in such a place was useless unless one had a whole year at his
disposal. These pictures are all battle scenes, and only one solitary
little canvas among them all treats of anything but great French
victories. We wandered, also, through the Grand Trianon and the Petit
Trianon, those monuments of royal prodigality, and with histories so
mournful--filled, as it is, with souvenirs of Napoleon the First, and
three dead kings and as many queens. In one sumptuous bed they had all
slept in succession, but no one occupies it now. In a large dining room
stood the table at which Louis XIV and his mistress Madame Maintenon, and
after them Louis XV, and Pompadour, had sat at their meals naked and
unattended--for the table stood upon a trapdoor, which descended with it
to regions below when it was necessary to replenish its dishes. In a
room of the Petit Trianon stood the furniture, just as poor Marie
Antoinette left it when the mob came and dragged her and the King to
Paris, never to return. Near at hand, in the stables, were prodigious
carriages that showed no color but gold--carriages used by former kings
of France on state occasions, and never used now save when a kingly head
is to be crowned or an imperial infant christened. And with them were
some curious sleighs, whose bodies were shaped like lions, swans, tigers,
etc.--vehicles that had once been handsome with pictured designs and
fine workmanship, but were dusty and decaying now. They had their
history. When Louis XIV had finished the Grand Trianon, he told
Maintenon he had created a Paradise for her, and asked if she could think
of anything now to wish for. He said he wished the Trianon to be
perfection--nothing less. She said she could think of but one thing--it
was summer, and it was balmy France--yet she would like well to sleigh
ride in the leafy avenues of Versailles! The next morning found miles
and miles of grassy avenues spread thick with snowy salt and sugar, and a
procession of those quaint sleighs waiting to receive the chief concubine
of the gaiest and most unprincipled court that France has ever seen!
From sumptuous Versailles, with its palaces, its statues, its gardens,
and its fountains, we journeyed back to Paris and sought its antipodes
--the Faubourg St. Antoine. Little, narrow streets; dirty children
blockading them; greasy, slovenly women capturing and spanking them;
filthy dens on first floors, with rag stores in them (the heaviest
business in the Faubourg is the chiffonier's); other filthy dens where
whole suits of second and third-hand clothing are sold at prices that
would ruin any proprietor who did not steal his stock; still other filthy
dens where they sold groceries--sold them by the half-pennyworth--five
dollars would buy the man out, goodwill and all. Up these little crooked
streets they will murder a man for seven dollars and dump the body in the
Seine. And up some other of these streets--most of them, I should say
--live lorettes.
All through this Faubourg St. Antoine, misery, poverty, vice, and crime
go hand in hand, and the evidences of it stare one in the face from every
side. Here the people live who begin the revolutions. Whenever there is
anything of that kind to be done, they are always ready. They take as
much genuine pleasure in building a barricade as they do in cutting a
throat or shoving a friend into the Seine. It is these savage-looking
ruffians who storm the splendid halls of the Tuileries occasionally, and
swarm into Versailles when a king is to be called to account.
But they will build no more barricades, they will break no more soldiers'
heads with paving-stones. Louis Napoleon has taken care of all that. He
is annihilating the crooked streets and building in their stead noble
boulevards as straight as an arrow--avenues which a cannon ball could
traverse from end to end without meeting an obstruction more irresistible
than the flesh and bones of men--boulevards whose stately edifices will
never afford refuges and plotting places for starving, discontented
revolution breeders. Five of these great thoroughfares radiate from one
ample centre--a centre which is exceedingly well adapted to the
accommodation of heavy artillery. The mobs used to riot there, but they
must seek another rallying-place in future. And this ingenious Napoleon
paves the streets of his great cities with a smooth, compact composition
of asphaltum and sand. No more barricades of flagstones--no more
assaulting his Majesty's troops with cobbles. I cannot feel friendly
toward my quondam fellow-American, Napoleon III., especially at this
time,--[July, 1867.]--when in fancy I see his credulous victim,
Maximilian, lying stark and stiff in Mexico, and his maniac widow
watching eagerly from her French asylum for the form that will never
come--but I do admire his nerve, his calm self-reliance, his shrewd good
sense.
CHAPTER XVII.
We had a pleasant journey of it seaward again. We found that for the
three past nights our ship had been in a state of war. The first night
the sailors of a British ship, being happy with grog, came down on the
pier and challenged our sailors to a free fight. They accepted with
alacrity, repaired to the pier, and gained--their share of a drawn
battle. Several bruised and bloody members of both parties were carried
off by the police and imprisoned until the following morning. The next
night the British boys came again to renew the fight, but our men had had
strict orders to remain on board and out of sight. They did so, and the
besieging party grew noisy and more and more abusive as the fact became
apparent (to them) that our men were afraid to come out. They went away
finally with a closing burst of ridicule and offensive epithets. The
third night they came again and were more obstreperous than ever. They
swaggered up and down the almost deserted pier, and hurled curses,
obscenity, and stinging sarcasms at our crew. It was more than human
nature could bear. The executive officer ordered our men ashore--with
instructions not to fight. They charged the British and gained a
brilliant victory. I probably would not have mentioned this war had it
ended differently. But I travel to learn, and I still remember that they
picture no French defeats in the battle-galleries of Versailles.
It was like home to us to step on board the comfortable ship again and
smoke and lounge about her breezy decks. And yet it was not altogether
like home, either, because so many members of the family were away. We
missed some pleasant faces which we would rather have found at dinner,
and at night there were gaps in the euchre-parties which could not be
satisfactorily filled. "Moult" was in England, Jack in Switzerland,
Charley in Spain. Blucher was gone, none could tell where. But we were
at sea again, and we had the stars and the ocean to look at, and plenty
of room to meditate in.
In due time the shores of Italy were sighted, and as we stood gazing from
the decks, early in the bright summer morning, the stately city of Genoa
rose up out of the sea and flung back the sunlight from her hundred
palaces.
Here we rest for the present--or rather, here we have been trying to
rest, for some little time, but we run about too much to accomplish a
great deal in that line.
I would like to remain here. I had rather not go any further. There may
be prettier women in Europe, but I doubt it. The population of Genoa is
120,000; two-thirds of these are women, I think, and at least two-thirds
of the women are beautiful. They are as dressy and as tasteful and as
graceful as they could possibly be without being angels. However, angels
are not very dressy, I believe. At least the angels in pictures are not
--they wear nothing but wings. But these Genoese women do look so
charming. Most of the young demoiselles are robed in a cloud of white
from head to foot, though many trick themselves out more elaborately.
Nine-tenths of them wear nothing on their heads but a filmy sort of veil,
which falls down their backs like a white mist. They are very fair, and
many of them have blue eyes, but black and dreamy dark brown ones are met
with oftenest.
The ladies and gentlemen of Genoa have a pleasant fashion of promenading
in a large park on the top of a hill in the center of the city, from six
till nine in the evening, and then eating ices in a neighboring garden an
hour or two longer. We went to the park on Sunday evening. Two thousand
persons were present, chiefly young ladies and gentlemen. The gentlemen
were dressed in the very latest Paris fashions, and the robes of the
ladies glinted among the trees like so many snowflakes. The multitude
moved round and round the park in a great procession. The bands played,
and so did the fountains; the moon and the gas lamps lit up the scene,
and altogether it was a brilliant and an animated picture. I scanned
every female face that passed, and it seemed to me that all were
handsome. I never saw such a freshet of loveliness before. I did not
see how a man of only ordinary decision of character could marry here,
because before he could get his mind made up he would fall in love with
somebody else.
Never smoke any Italian tobacco. Never do it on any account. It makes
me shudder to think what it must be made of. You cannot throw an old
cigar "stub" down anywhere, but some vagabond will pounce upon it on the
instant. I like to smoke a good deal, but it wounds my sensibilities to
see one of these stub-hunters watching me out of the corners of his
hungry eyes and calculating how long my cigar will be likely to last.
It reminded me too painfully of that San Francisco undertaker who used to
go to sick-beds with his watch in his hand and time the corpse. One of
these stub-hunters followed us all over the park last night, and we never
had a smoke that was worth anything. We were always moved to appease him
with the stub before the cigar was half gone, because he looked so
viciously anxious. He regarded us as his own legitimate prey, by right
of discovery, I think, because he drove off several other professionals
who wanted to take stock in us.
Now, they surely must chew up those old stubs, and dry and sell them for
smoking-tobacco. Therefore, give your custom to other than Italian
brands of the article.
"The Superb" and the "City of Palaces" are names which Genoa has held for
centuries. She is full of palaces, certainly, and the palaces are
sumptuous inside, but they are very rusty without and make no pretensions
to architectural magnificence. "Genoa the Superb" would be a felicitous
title if it referred to the women.
We have visited several of the palaces--immense thick-walled piles, with
great stone staircases, tesselated marble pavements on the floors,
(sometimes they make a mosaic work, of intricate designs, wrought in
pebbles or little fragments of marble laid in cement,) and grand salons
hung with pictures by Rubens, Guido, Titian, Paul Veronese, and so on,
and portraits of heads of the family, in plumed helmets and gallant coats
of mail, and patrician ladies in stunning costumes of centuries ago.
But, of course, the folks were all out in the country for the summer, and
might not have known enough to ask us to dinner if they had been at home,
and so all the grand empty salons, with their resounding pavements, their
grim pictures of dead ancestors, and tattered banners with the dust of
bygone centuries upon them, seemed to brood solemnly of death and the
grave, and our spirits ebbed away, and our cheerfulness passed from us.
We never went up to the eleventh story. We always began to suspect
ghosts. There was always an undertaker-looking servant along, too, who
handed us a program, pointed to the picture that began the list of the
salon he was in, and then stood stiff and stark and unsmiling in his
petrified livery till we were ready to move on to the next chamber,
whereupon he marched sadly ahead and took up another malignantly
respectful position as before. I wasted so much time praying that the
roof would fall in on these dispiriting flunkies that I had but little
left to bestow upon palace and pictures.
And besides, as in Paris, we had a guide. Perdition catch all the
guides. This one said he was the most gifted linguist in Genoa, as far
as English was concerned, and that only two persons in the city beside
himself could talk the language at all. He showed us the birthplace of
Christopher Columbus, and after we had reflected in silent awe before it
for fifteen minutes, he said it was not the birthplace of Columbus, but
of Columbus' grandmother! When we demanded an explanation of his conduct
he only shrugged his shoulders and answered in barbarous Italian. I
shall speak further of this guide in a future chapter. All the
information we got out of him we shall be able to carry along with us, I
think.
I have not been to church so often in a long time as I have in the last
few weeks. The people in these old lands seem to make churches their
specialty. Especially does this seem to be the case with the citizens of
Genoa. I think there is a church every three or four hundred yards all
over town. The streets are sprinkled from end to end with shovel-hatted,
long-robed, well-fed priests, and the church bells by dozens are pealing
all the day long, nearly. Every now and then one comes across a friar of
orders gray, with shaven head, long, coarse robe, rope girdle and beads,
and with feet cased in sandals or entirely bare. These worthies suffer
in the flesh and do penance all their lives, I suppose, but they look
like consummate famine-breeders. They are all fat and serene.
The old Cathedral of San Lorenzo is about as notable a building as we
have found in Genoa. It is vast, and has colonnades of noble pillars,
and a great organ, and the customary pomp of gilded moldings, pictures,
frescoed ceilings, and so forth. I cannot describe it, of course--it
would require a good many pages to do that. But it is a curious place.
They said that half of it--from the front door halfway down to the altar
--was a Jewish synagogue before the Saviour was born, and that no
alteration had been made in it since that time. We doubted the
statement, but did it reluctantly. We would much rather have believed
it. The place looked in too perfect repair to be so ancient.
The main point of interest about the cathedral is the little Chapel of
St. John the Baptist. They only allow women to enter it on one day in
the year, on account of the animosity they still cherish against the sex
because of the murder of the Saint to gratify a caprice of Herodias. In
this Chapel is a marble chest, in which, they told us, were the ashes of
St. John; and around it was wound a chain, which, they said, had confined
him when he was in prison. We did not desire to disbelieve these
statements, and yet we could not feel certain that they were correct
--partly because we could have broken that chain, and so could St. John,
and partly because we had seen St. John's ashes before, in another
church. We could not bring ourselves to think St. John had two sets of
ashes.
They also showed us a portrait of the Madonna which was painted by St.
Luke, and it did not look half as old and smoky as some of the pictures
by Rubens. We could not help admiring the Apostle's modesty in never
once mentioning in his writings that he could paint.
But isn't this relic matter a little overdone? We find a piece of the
true cross in every old church we go into, and some of the nails that
held it together. I would not like to be positive, but I think we have
seen as much as a keg of these nails. Then there is the crown of thorns;
they have part of one in Sainte Chapelle, in Paris, and part of one also
in Notre Dame. And as for bones of St. Denis, I feel certain we have
seen enough of them to duplicate him if necessary.
I only meant to write about the churches, but I keep wandering from the
subject. I could say that the Church of the Annunciation is a wilderness
of beautiful columns, of statues, gilded moldings, and pictures almost
countless, but that would give no one an entirely perfect idea of the
thing, and so where is the use? One family built the whole edifice, and
have got money left. There is where the mystery lies. We had an idea at
first that only a mint could have survived the expense.
These people here live in the heaviest, highest, broadest, darkest,
solidest houses one can imagine. Each one might "laugh a siege to
scorn." A hundred feet front and a hundred high is about the style, and
you go up three flights of stairs before you begin to come upon signs of
occupancy. Everything is stone, and stone of the heaviest--floors,
stairways, mantels, benches--everything. The walls are four to five feet
thick. The streets generally are four or five to eight feet wide and as
crooked as a corkscrew. You go along one of these gloomy cracks, and
look up and behold the sky like a mere ribbon of light, far above your
head, where the tops of the tall houses on either side of the street bend
almost together. You feel as if you were at the bottom of some
tremendous abyss, with all the world far above you. You wind in and out
and here and there, in the most mysterious way, and have no more idea of
the points of the compass than if you were a blind man. You can never
persuade yourself that these are actually streets, and the frowning,
dingy, monstrous houses dwellings, till you see one of these beautiful,
prettily dressed women emerge from them--see her emerge from a dark,
dreary-looking den that looks dungeon all over, from the ground away
halfway up to heaven. And then you wonder that such a charming moth
could come from such a forbidding shell as that. The streets are wisely
made narrow and the houses heavy and thick and stony, in order that the
people may be cool in this roasting climate. And they are cool, and stay
so. And while I think of it--the men wear hats and have very dark
complexions, but the women wear no headgear but a flimsy veil like a
gossamer's web, and yet are exceedingly fair as a general thing.
Singular, isn't it?
The huge palaces of Genoa are each supposed to be occupied by one family,
but they could accommodate a hundred, I should think. They are relics of
the grandeur of Genoa's palmy days--the days when she was a great
commercial and maritime power several centuries ago. These houses, solid
marble palaces though they be, are in many cases of a dull pinkish color,
outside, and from pavement to eaves are pictured with Genoese battle
scenes, with monstrous Jupiters and Cupids, and with familiar
illustrations from Grecian mythology. Where the paint has yielded to age
and exposure and is peeling off in flakes and patches, the effect is not
happy. A noseless Cupid or a Jupiter with an eye out or a Venus with a
fly-blister on her breast, are not attractive features in a picture.
Some of these painted walls reminded me somewhat of the tall van,
plastered with fanciful bills and posters, that follows the bandwagon of
a circus about a country village. I have not read or heard that the
outsides of the houses of any other European city are frescoed in this
way.
I can not conceive of such a thing as Genoa in ruins. Such massive
arches, such ponderous substructions as support these towering
broad-winged edifices, we have seldom seen before; and surely the great
blocks of stone of which these edifices are built can never decay; walls
that are as thick as an ordinary American doorway is high cannot
crumble.
The republics of Genoa and Pisa were very powerful in the Middle Ages.
Their ships filled the Mediterranean, and they carried on an extensive
commerce with Constantinople and Syria. Their warehouses were the great
distributing depots from whence the costly merchandise of the East was
sent abroad over Europe. They were warlike little nations and defied, in
those days, governments that overshadow them now as mountains overshadow
molehills. The Saracens captured and pillaged Genoa nine hundred years
ago, but during the following century Genoa and Pisa entered into an
offensive and defensive alliance and besieged the Saracen colonies in
Sardinia and the Balearic Isles with an obstinacy that maintained its
pristine vigor and held to its purpose for forty long years. They were
victorious at last and divided their conquests equably among their great
patrician families. Descendants of some of those proud families still
inhabit the palaces of Genoa, and trace in their own features a
resemblance to the grim knights whose portraits hang in their stately
halls, and to pictured beauties with pouting lips and merry eyes whose
originals have been dust and ashes for many a dead and forgotten century.
The hotel we live in belonged to one of those great orders of knights of
the Cross in the times of the Crusades, and its mailed sentinels once
kept watch and ward in its massive turrets and woke the echoes of these
halls and corridors with their iron heels.
But Genoa's greatness has degenerated into an unostentatious commerce in
velvets and silver filagree-work. They say that each European town has
its specialty. These filagree things are Genoa's specialty. Her smiths
take silver ingots and work them up into all manner of graceful and
beautiful forms. They make bunches of flowers, from flakes and wires of
silver, that counterfeit the delicate creations the frost weaves upon a
windowpane; and we were shown a miniature silver temple whose fluted
columns, whose Corinthian capitals and rich entablatures, whose spire,
statues, bells, and ornate lavishness of sculpture were wrought in
polished silver, and with such matchless art that every detail was a
fascinating study and the finished edifice a wonder of beauty.
We are ready to move again, though we are not really tired yet of the
narrow passages of this old marble cave. Cave is a good word--when
speaking of Genoa under the stars. When we have been prowling at
midnight through the gloomy crevices they call streets, where no
footfalls but ours were echoing, where only ourselves were abroad, and
lights appeared only at long intervals and at a distance, and
mysteriously disappeared again, and the houses at our elbows seemed to
stretch upward farther than ever toward the heavens, the memory of a cave
I used to know at home was always in my mind, with its lofty passages,
its silence and solitude, its shrouding gloom, its sepulchral echoes, its
flitting lights, and more than all, its sudden revelations of branching
crevices and corridors where we least expected them.
We are not tired of the endless processions of cheerful, chattering
gossipers that throng these courts and streets all day long, either; nor
of the coarse-robed monks; nor of the "Asti" wines, which that old doctor
(whom we call the Oracle,) with customary felicity in the matter of
getting everything wrong, misterms "nasty." But we must go,
nevertheless.
Our last sight was the cemetery (a burial place intended to accommodate
60,000 bodies,) and we shall continue to remember it after we shall have
forgotten the palaces. It is a vast marble collonaded corridor extending
around a great unoccupied square of ground; its broad floor is marble,
and on every slab is an inscription--for every slab covers a corpse. On
either side, as one walks down the middle of the passage, are monuments,
tombs, and sculptured figures that are exquisitely wrought and are full
of grace and beauty. They are new and snowy; every outline is perfect,
every feature guiltless of mutilation, flaw, or blemish; and therefore,
to us these far-reaching ranks of bewitching forms are a hundred fold
more lovely than the damaged and dingy statuary they have saved from the
wreck of ancient art and set up in the galleries of Paris for the worship
of the world.
Well provided with cigars and other necessaries of life, we are now ready
to take the cars for Milan.
CHAPTER XVIII.
All day long we sped through a mountainous country whose peaks were
bright with sunshine, whose hillsides were dotted with pretty villas
sitting in the midst of gardens and shrubbery, and whose deep ravines
were cool and shady and looked ever so inviting from where we and the
birds were winging our flight through the sultry upper air.
We had plenty of chilly tunnels wherein to check our perspiration,
though. We timed one of them. We were twenty minutes passing through
it, going at the rate of thirty to thirty-five miles an hour.
Beyond Alessandria we passed the battle-field of Marengo.
Toward dusk we drew near Milan and caught glimpses of the city and the
blue mountain peaks beyond. But we were not caring for these things
--they did not interest us in the least. We were in a fever of impatience;
we were dying to see the renowned cathedral! We watched--in this
direction and that--all around--everywhere. We needed no one to point it
out--we did not wish any one to point it out--we would recognize it even
in the desert of the great Sahara.
At last, a forest of graceful needles, shimmering in the amber sunlight,
rose slowly above the pygmy housetops, as one sometimes sees, in the far
horizon, a gilded and pinnacled mass of cloud lift itself above the waste
of waves, at sea,--the Cathedral! We knew it in a moment.
Half of that night, and all of the next day, this architectural autocrat
was our sole object of interest.
What a wonder it is! So grand, so solemn, so vast! And yet so delicate,
so airy, so graceful! A very world of solid weight, and yet it seems in
the soft moonlight only a fairy delusion of frost-work that might vanish
with a breath! How sharply its pinnacled angles and its wilderness of
spires were cut against the sky, and how richly their shadows fell upon
its snowy roof! It was a vision!--a miracle!--an anthem sung in stone, a
poem wrought in marble!
Howsoever you look at the great cathedral, it is noble, it is beautiful!
Wherever you stand in Milan or within seven miles of Milan, it is visible
and when it is visible, no other object can chain your whole attention.
Leave your eyes unfettered by your will but a single instant and they
will surely turn to seek it. It is the first thing you look for when you
rise in the morning, and the last your lingering gaze rests upon at
night. Surely it must be the princeliest creation that ever brain of man
conceived.
At nine o'clock in the morning we went and stood before this marble
colossus. The central one of its five great doors is bordered with a
bas-relief of birds and fruits and beasts and insects, which have been so
ingeniously carved out of the marble that they seem like living
creatures--and the figures are so numerous and the design so complex that
one might study it a week without exhausting its interest. On the great
steeple--surmounting the myriad of spires--inside of the spires--over the
doors, the windows--in nooks and corners--every where that a niche or a
perch can be found about the enormous building, from summit to base,
there is a marble statue, and every statue is a study in itself!
Raphael, Angelo, Canova--giants like these gave birth to the designs, and
their own pupils carved them. Every face is eloquent with expression,
and every attitude is full of grace. Away above, on the lofty roof, rank
on rank of carved and fretted spires spring high in the air, and through
their rich tracery one sees the sky beyond. In their midst the central
steeple towers proudly up like the mainmast of some great Indiaman among
a fleet of coasters.
We wished to go aloft. The sacristan showed us a marble stairway (of
course it was marble, and of the purest and whitest--there is no other
stone, no brick, no wood, among its building materials) and told us to go
up one hundred and eighty-two steps and stop till he came. It was not
necessary to say stop--we should have done that any how. We were tired
by the time we got there. This was the roof. Here, springing from its
broad marble flagstones, were the long files of spires, looking very tall
close at hand, but diminishing in the distance like the pipes of an
organ. We could see now that the statue on the top of each was the size
of a large man, though they all looked like dolls from the street. We
could see, also, that from the inside of each and every one of these
hollow spires, from sixteen to thirty-one beautiful marble statues looked
out upon the world below.
From the eaves to the comb of the roof stretched in endless succession
great curved marble beams, like the fore-and-aft braces of a steamboat,
and along each beam from end to end stood up a row of richly carved
flowers and fruits--each separate and distinct in kind, and over 15,000
species represented. At a little distance these rows seem to close
together like the ties of a railroad track, and then the mingling
together of the buds and blossoms of this marble garden forms a picture
that is very charming to the eye.
We descended and entered. Within the church, long rows of fluted
columns, like huge monuments, divided the building into broad aisles, and
on the figured pavement fell many a soft blush from the painted windows
above. I knew the church was very large, but I could not fully
appreciate its great size until I noticed that the men standing far down
by the altar looked like boys, and seemed to glide, rather than walk. We
loitered about gazing aloft at the monster windows all aglow with
brilliantly colored scenes in the lives of the Saviour and his followers.
Some of these pictures are mosaics, and so artistically are their
thousand particles of tinted glass or stone put together that the work
has all the smoothness and finish of a painting. We counted sixty panes
of glass in one window, and each pane was adorned with one of these
master achievements of genius and patience.
The guide showed us a coffee-colored piece of sculpture which he said was
considered to have come from the hand of Phidias, since it was not
possible that any other artist, of any epoch, could have copied nature
with such faultless accuracy. The figure was that of a man without a
skin; with every vein, artery, muscle, every fiber and tendon and tissue
of the human frame represented in minute detail. It looked natural,
because somehow it looked as if it were in pain. A skinned man would be
likely to look that way unless his attention were occupied with some
other matter. It was a hideous thing, and yet there was a fascination
about it some where. I am very sorry I saw it, because I shall always
see it now. I shall dream of it sometimes. I shall dream that it is
resting its corded arms on the bed's head and looking down on me with its
dead eyes; I shall dream that it is stretched between the sheets with me
and touching me with its exposed muscles and its stringy cold legs.
It is hard to forget repulsive things. I remember yet how I ran off from
school once, when I was a boy, and then, pretty late at night, concluded
to climb into the window of my father's office and sleep on a lounge,
because I had a delicacy about going home and getting thrashed. As I lay
on the lounge and my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I fancied I
could see a long, dusky, shapeless thing stretched upon the floor. A
cold shiver went through me. I turned my face to the wall. That did not
answer. I was afraid that that thing would creep over and seize me in
the dark. I turned back and stared at it for minutes and minutes--they
seemed hours. It appeared to me that the lagging moonlight never, never
would get to it. I turned to the wall and counted twenty, to pass the
feverish time away. I looked--the pale square was nearer. I turned
again and counted fifty--it was almost touching it. With desperate will
I turned again and counted one hundred, and faced about, all in a
tremble. A white human hand lay in the moonlight! Such an awful sinking
at the heart--such a sudden gasp for breath! I felt--I cannot tell what
I felt. When I recovered strength enough, I faced the wall again. But
no boy could have remained so with that mysterious hand behind him. I
counted again and looked--the most of a naked arm was exposed. I put my
hands over my eyes and counted till I could stand it no longer, and then
--the pallid face of a man was there, with the corners of the mouth drawn
down, and the eyes fixed and glassy in death! I raised to a sitting
posture and glowered on that corpse till the light crept down the bare
breastline by line--inch by inch--past the nipple--and then it disclosed
a ghastly stab!
I went away from there. I do not say that I went away in any sort of a
hurry, but I simply went--that is sufficient. I went out at the window,
and I carried the sash along with me. I did not need the sash, but it
was handier to take it than it was to leave it, and so I took it.--I was
not scared, but I was considerably agitated.
When I reached home, they whipped me, but I enjoyed it. It seemed
perfectly delightful. That man had been stabbed near the office that
afternoon, and they carried him in there to doctor him, but he only lived
an hour. I have slept in the same room with him often since then--in my
dreams.
Now we will descend into the crypt, under the grand altar of Milan
Cathedral, and receive an impressive sermon from lips that have been
silent and hands that have been gestureless for three hundred years.
The priest stopped in a small dungeon and held up his candle. This was
the last resting-place of a good man, a warm-hearted, unselfish man; a
man whose whole life was given to succoring the poor, encouraging the
faint-hearted, visiting the sick; in relieving distress, whenever and
wherever he found it. His heart, his hand, and his purse were always
open. With his story in one's mind he can almost see his benignant
countenance moving calmly among the haggard faces of Milan in the days
when the plague swept the city, brave where all others were cowards, full
of compassion where pity had been crushed out of all other breasts by the
instinct of self-preservation gone mad with terror, cheering all, praying
with all, helping all, with hand and brain and purse, at a time when
parents forsook their children, the friend deserted the friend, and the
brother turned away from the sister while her pleadings were still
wailing in his ears.
This was good St. Charles Borromeo, Bishop of Milan. The people idolized
him; princes lavished uncounted treasures upon him. We stood in his
tomb. Near by was the sarcophagus, lighted by the dripping candles. The
walls were faced with bas-reliefs representing scenes in his life done in
massive silver. The priest put on a short white lace garment over his
black robe, crossed himself, bowed reverently, and began to turn a
windlass slowly. The sarcophagus separated in two parts, lengthwise, and
the lower part sank down and disclosed a coffin of rock crystal as clear
as the atmosphere. Within lay the body, robed in costly habiliments
covered with gold embroidery and starred with scintillating gems. The
decaying head was black with age, the dry skin was drawn tight to the
bones, the eyes were gone, there was a hole in the temple and another in
the cheek, and the skinny lips were parted as in a ghastly smile! Over
this dreadful face, its dust and decay and its mocking grin, hung a crown
sown thick with flashing brilliants; and upon the breast lay crosses and
croziers of solid gold that were splendid with emeralds and diamonds.
How poor, and cheap, and trivial these gew-gaws seemed in presence of the
solemnity, the grandeur, the awful majesty of Death! Think of Milton,
Shakespeare, Washington, standing before a reverent world tricked out in
the glass beads, the brass ear-rings and tin trumpery of the savages of
the plains!
Dead Bartolomeo preached his pregnant sermon, and its burden was: You
that worship the vanities of earth--you that long for worldly honor,
worldly wealth, worldly fame--behold their worth!
To us it seemed that so good a man, so kind a heart, so simple a nature,
deserved rest and peace in a grave sacred from the intrusion of prying
eyes, and believed that he himself would have preferred to have it so,
but peradventure our wisdom was at fault in this regard.
As we came out upon the floor of the church again, another priest
volunteered to show us the treasures of the church.
What, more? The furniture of the narrow chamber of death we had just
visited weighed six millions of francs in ounces and carats alone,
without a penny thrown into the account for the costly workmanship
bestowed upon them! But we followed into a large room filled with tall
wooden presses like wardrobes. He threw them open, and behold, the
cargoes of "crude bullion" of the assay offices of Nevada faded out of my
memory. There were Virgins and bishops there, above their natural size,
made of solid silver, each worth, by weight, from eight hundred thousand
to two millions of francs, and bearing gemmed books in their hands worth
eighty thousand; there were bas-reliefs that weighed six hundred pounds,
carved in solid silver; croziers and crosses, and candlesticks six and
eight feet high, all of virgin gold, and brilliant with precious stones;
and beside these were all manner of cups and vases, and such things, rich
in proportion. It was an Aladdin's palace. The treasures here, by
simple weight, without counting workmanship, were valued at fifty
millions of francs! If I could get the custody of them for a while, I
fear me the market price of silver bishops would advance shortly, on
account of their exceeding scarcity in the Cathedral of Milan.
The priests showed us two of St. Paul's fingers, and one of St. Peter's;
a bone of Judas Iscariot, (it was black,) and also bones of all the other
disciples; a handkerchief in which the Saviour had left the impression of
his face. Among the most precious of the relics were a stone from the
Holy Sepulchre, part of the crown of thorns, (they have a whole one at
Notre Dame,) a fragment of the purple robe worn by the Saviour, a nail
from the Cross, and a picture of the Virgin and Child painted by the
veritable hand of St. Luke. This is the second of St. Luke's Virgins we
have seen. Once a year all these holy relics are carried in procession
through the streets of Milan.
I like to revel in the dryest details of the great cathedral. The
building is five hundred feet long by one hundred and eighty wide, and
the principal steeple is in the neighborhood of four hundred feet high.
It has 7,148 marble statues, and will have upwards of three thousand more
when it is finished. In addition it has one thousand five hundred
bas-reliefs. It has one hundred and thirty-six spires--twenty-one more
are to be added. Each spire is surmounted by a statue six and a half
feet high. Every thing about the church is marble, and all from the
same quarry; it was bequeathed to the Archbishopric for this purpose
centuries ago. So nothing but the mere workmanship costs; still that is
expensive --the bill foots up six hundred and eighty-four millions of
francs thus far (considerably over a hundred millions of dollars,) and
it is estimated that it will take a hundred and twenty years yet to
finish the cathedral. It looks complete, but is far from being so. We
saw a new statue put in its niche yesterday, alongside of one which had
been standing these four hundred years, they said. There are four
staircases leading up to the main steeple, each of which cost a hundred
thousand dollars, with the four hundred and eight statues which adorn
them. Marco Compioni was the architect who designed the wonderful
structure more than five hundred years ago, and it took him forty-six
years to work out the plan and get it ready to hand over to the
builders. He is dead now. The building was begun a little less than
five hundred years ago, and the third generation hence will not see it
completed.
The building looks best by moonlight, because the older portions of it,
being stained with age, contrast unpleasantly with the newer and whiter
portions. It seems somewhat too broad for its height, but may be
familiarity with it might dissipate this impression.
They say that the Cathedral of Milan is second only to St. Peter's at
Rome. I cannot understand how it can be second to anything made by human
hands.
We bid it good-bye, now--possibly for all time. How surely, in some
future day, when the memory of it shall have lost its vividness, shall we
half believe we have seen it in a wonderful dream, but never with waking
eyes!
CHAPTER XIX.
"Do you wis zo haut can be?"
That was what the guide asked when we were looking up at the bronze
horses on the Arch of Peace. It meant, do you wish to go up there?
I give it as a specimen of guide-English. These are the people that make
life a burthen to the tourist. Their tongues are never still. They talk
forever and forever, and that is the kind of billingsgate they use.
Inspiration itself could hardly comprehend them. If they would only show
you a masterpiece of art, or a venerable tomb, or a prison-house, or a
battle-field, hallowed by touching memories or historical reminiscences,
or grand traditions, and then step aside and hold still for ten minutes
and let you think, it would not be so bad. But they interrupt every
dream, every pleasant train of thought, with their tiresome cackling.
Sometimes when I have been standing before some cherished old idol of
mine that I remembered years and years ago in pictures in the geography
at school, I have thought I would give a whole world if the human parrot
at my side would suddenly perish where he stood and leave me to gaze, and
ponder, and worship.
No, we did not "wis zo haut can be." We wished to go to La Scala, the
largest theater in the world, I think they call it. We did so. It was a
large place. Seven separate and distinct masses of humanity--six great
circles and a monster parquette.
We wished to go to the Ambrosian Library, and we did that also. We saw a
manuscript of Virgil, with annotations in the handwriting of Petrarch,
the gentleman who loved another man's Laura, and lavished upon her all
through life a love which was a clear waste of the raw material. It was
sound sentiment, but bad judgment. It brought both parties fame, and
created a fountain of commiseration for them in sentimental breasts that
is running yet. But who says a word in behalf of poor Mr. Laura? (I do
not know his other name.) Who glorifies him? Who bedews him with tears?
Who writes poetry about him? Nobody. How do you suppose he liked the
state of things that has given the world so much pleasure? How did he
enjoy having another man following his wife every where and making her
name a familiar word in every garlic-exterminating mouth in Italy with
his sonnets to her pre-empted eyebrows? They got fame and sympathy--he
got neither. This is a peculiarly felicitous instance of what is called
poetical justice. It is all very fine; but it does not chime with my
notions of right. It is too one-sided--too ungenerous.
Let the world go on fretting about Laura and Petrarch if it will; but as
for me, my tears and my lamentations shall be lavished upon the unsung
defendant.
We saw also an autograph letter of Lucrezia Borgia, a lady for whom I
have always entertained the highest respect, on account of her rare
histrionic capabilities, her opulence in solid gold goblets made of
gilded wood, her high distinction as an operatic screamer, and the
facility with which she could order a sextuple funeral and get the
corpses ready for it. We saw one single coarse yellow hair from
Lucrezia's head, likewise. It awoke emotions, but we still live. In
this same library we saw some drawings by Michael Angelo (these Italians
call him Mickel Angelo,) and Leonardo da Vinci. (They spell it Vinci and
pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.)
We reserve our opinion of these sketches.
In another building they showed us a fresco representing some lions and
other beasts drawing chariots; and they seemed to project so far from the
wall that we took them to be sculptures. The artist had shrewdly
heightened the delusion by painting dust on the creatures' backs, as if
it had fallen there naturally and properly. Smart fellow--if it be smart
to deceive strangers.
Elsewhere we saw a huge Roman amphitheatre, with its stone seats still in
good preservation. Modernized, it is now the scene of more peaceful
recreations than the exhibition of a party of wild beasts with Christians
for dinner. Part of the time, the Milanese use it for a race track, and
at other seasons they flood it with water and have spirited yachting
regattas there. The guide told us these things, and he would hardly try
so hazardous an experiment as the telling of a falsehood, when it is all
he can do to speak the truth in English without getting the lock-jaw.
In another place we were shown a sort of summer arbor, with a fence
before it. We said that was nothing. We looked again, and saw, through
the arbor, an endless stretch of garden, and shrubbery, and grassy lawn.
We were perfectly willing to go in there and rest, but it could not be
done. It was only another delusion--a painting by some ingenious artist
with little charity in his heart for tired folk. The deception was
perfect. No one could have imagined the park was not real. We even
thought we smelled the flowers at first.
We got a carriage at twilight and drove in the shaded avenues with the
other nobility, and after dinner we took wine and ices in a fine garden
with the great public. The music was excellent, the flowers and
shrubbery were pleasant to the eye, the scene was vivacious, everybody
was genteel and well-behaved, and the ladies were slightly moustached,
and handsomely dressed, but very homely.
We adjourned to a cafe and played billiards an hour, and I made six or
seven points by the doctor pocketing his ball, and he made as many by my
pocketing my ball. We came near making a carom sometimes, but not the
one we were trying to make. The table was of the usual European style
--cushions dead and twice as high as the balls; the cues in bad repair.
The natives play only a sort of pool on them. We have never seen any
body playing the French three-ball game yet, and I doubt if there is any
such game known in France, or that there lives any man mad enough to try
to play it on one of these European tables. We had to stop playing
finally because Dan got to sleeping fifteen minutes between the counts
and paying no attention to his marking.
Afterward we walked up and down one of the most popular streets for some
time, enjoying other people's comfort and wishing we could export some of
it to our restless, driving, vitality-consuming marts at home. Just in
this one matter lies the main charm of life in Europe--comfort. In
America, we hurry--which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go
on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry
our business cares to bed with us, and toss and worry over them when we
ought to be restoring our racked bodies and brains with sleep. We burn
up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into
a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime
in Europe. When an acre of ground has produced long and well, we let it
lie fallow and rest for a season; we take no man clear across the
continent in the same coach he started in--the coach is stabled somewhere
on the plains and its heated machinery allowed to cool for a few days;
when a razor has seen long service and refuses to hold an edge, the
barber lays it away for a few weeks, and the edge comes back of its own
accord. We bestow thoughtful care upon inanimate objects, but none upon
ourselves. What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be,
if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our
edges!
I do envy these Europeans the comfort they take. When the work of the
day is done, they forget it. Some of them go, with wife and children, to
a beer hall and sit quietly and genteelly drinking a mug or two of ale
and listening to music; others walk the streets, others drive in the
avenues; others assemble in the great ornamental squares in the early
evening to enjoy the sight and the fragrance of flowers and to hear the
military bands play--no European city being without its fine military
music at eventide; and yet others of the populace sit in the open air in
front of the refreshment houses and eat ices and drink mild beverages
that could not harm a child. They go to bed moderately early, and sleep
well. They are always quiet, always orderly, always cheerful,
comfortable, and appreciative of life and its manifold blessings. One
never sees a drunken man among them. The change that has come over our
little party is surprising. Day by day we lose some of our restlessness
and absorb some of the spirit of quietude and ease that is in the
tranquil atmosphere about us and in the demeanor of the people. We grow
wise apace. We begin to comprehend what life is for.
We have had a bath in Milan, in a public bath-house. They were going to
put all three of us in one bath-tub, but we objected. Each of us had an
Italian farm on his back. We could have felt affluent if we had been
officially surveyed and fenced in. We chose to have three bathtubs, and
large ones--tubs suited to the dignity of aristocrats who had real
estate, and brought it with them. After we were stripped and had taken
the first chilly dash, we discovered that haunting atrocity that has
embittered our lives in so many cities and villages of Italy and France
--there was no soap. I called. A woman answered, and I barely had time to
throw myself against the door--she would have been in, in another second.
I said:
"Beware, woman! Go away from here--go away, now, or it will be the worse
for you. I am an unprotected male, but I will preserve my honor at the
peril of my life!"
These words must have frightened her, for she skurried away very fast.
Dan's voice rose on the air:
"Oh, bring some soap, why don't you!"
The reply was Italian. Dan resumed:
"Soap, you know--soap. That is what I want--soap. S-o-a-p, soap;
s-o-p-e, soap; s-o-u-p, soap. Hurry up! I don't know how you Irish spell
it, but I want it. Spell it to suit yourself, but fetch it. I'm freezing."
I heard the doctor say impressively:
"Dan, how often have we told you that these foreigners cannot understand
English? Why will you not depend upon us? Why will you not tell us what
you want, and let us ask for it in the language of the country? It would
save us a great deal of the humiliation your reprehensible ignorance
causes us. I will address this person in his mother tongue: 'Here,
cospetto! corpo di Bacco! Sacramento! Solferino!--Soap, you son of a
gun!' Dan, if you would let us talk for you, you would never expose your
ignorant vulgarity."
Even this fluent discharge of Italian did not bring the soap at once, but
there was a good reason for it. There was not such an article about the
establishment. It is my belief that there never had been. They had to
send far up town, and to several different places before they finally got
it, so they said. We had to wait twenty or thirty minutes. The same
thing had occurred the evening before, at the hotel. I think I have
divined the reason for this state of things at last. The English know
how to travel comfortably, and they carry soap with them; other
foreigners do not use the article.
At every hotel we stop at we always have to send out for soap, at the
last moment, when we are grooming ourselves for dinner, and they put it
in the bill along with the candles and other nonsense. In Marseilles
they make half the fancy toilet soap we consume in America, but the
Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they
have obtained from books of travel, just as they have acquired an
uncertain notion of clean shirts, and the peculiarities of the gorilla,
and other curious matters. This reminds me of poor Blucher's note to the
landlord in Paris:
PARIS, le 7 Juillet. Monsieur le Landlord--Sir: Pourquoi don't you
mettez some savon in your bed-chambers? Est-ce que vous pensez I
will steal it? La nuit passee you charged me pour deux chandelles
when I only had one; hier vous avez charged me avec glace when I had
none at all; tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other
on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice.
Savon is a necessary de la vie to any body but a Frenchman, et je
l'aurai hors de cet hotel or make trouble. You hear me. Allons.
BLUCHER.
I remonstrated against the sending of this note, because it was so mixed
up that the landlord would never be able to make head or tail of it; but
Blucher said he guessed the old man could read the French of it and
average the rest.
Blucher's French is bad enough, but it is not much worse than the English
one finds in advertisements all over Italy every day. For instance,
observe the printed card of the hotel we shall probably stop at on the
shores of Lake Como:
"NOTISH."
"This hotel which the best it is in Italy and most superb, is
handsome locate on the best situation of the lake, with the most
splendid view near the Villas Melzy, to the King of Belgian, and
Serbelloni. This hotel have recently enlarge, do offer all
commodities on moderate price, at the strangers gentlemen who whish
spend the seasons on the Lake Come."
How is that, for a specimen? In the hotel is a handsome little chapel
where an English clergyman is employed to preach to such of the guests of
the house as hail from England and America, and this fact is also set
forth in barbarous English in the same advertisement. Wouldn't you have
supposed that the adventurous linguist who framed the card would have
known enough to submit it to that clergyman before he sent it to the
printer?
Here in Milan, in an ancient tumble-down ruin of a church, is the
mournful wreck of the most celebrated painting in the world--"The Last
Supper," by Leonardo da Vinci. We are not infallible judges of pictures,
but of course we went there to see this wonderful painting, once so
beautiful, always so worshipped by masters in art, and forever to be
famous in song and story. And the first thing that occurred was the
infliction on us of a placard fairly reeking with wretched English. Take
a morsel of it: "Bartholomew (that is the first figure on the left hand
side at the spectator,) uncertain and doubtful about what he thinks to
have heard, and upon which he wants to be assured by himself at Christ
and by no others."
Good, isn't it? And then Peter is described as "argumenting in a
threatening and angrily condition at Judas Iscariot."
This paragraph recalls the picture. "The Last Supper" is painted on the
dilapidated wall of what was a little chapel attached to the main church
in ancient times, I suppose. It is battered and scarred in every
direction, and stained and discolored by time, and Napoleon's horses
kicked the legs off most the disciples when they (the horses, not the
disciples,) were stabled there more than half a century ago.
I recognized the old picture in a moment--the Saviour with bowed head
seated at the centre of a long, rough table with scattering fruits and
dishes upon it, and six disciples on either side in their long robes,
talking to each other--the picture from which all engravings and all
copies have been made for three centuries. Perhaps no living man has
ever known an attempt to paint the Lord's Supper differently. The world
seems to have become settled in the belief, long ago, that it is not
possible for human genius to outdo this creation of da Vinci's. I
suppose painters will go on copying it as long as any of the original is
left visible to the eye. There were a dozen easels in the room, and as
many artists transferring the great picture to their canvases. Fifty
proofs of steel engravings and lithographs were scattered around, too.
And as usual, I could not help noticing how superior the copies were to
the original, that is, to my inexperienced eye. Wherever you find a
Raphael, a Rubens, a Michelangelo, a Carracci, or a da Vinci (and we see
them every day,) you find artists copying them, and the copies are always
the handsomest. Maybe the originals were handsome when they were new,
but they are not now.
This picture is about thirty feet long, and ten or twelve high, I should
think, and the figures are at least life size. It is one of the largest
paintings in Europe.
The colors are dimmed with age; the countenances are scaled and marred,
and nearly all expression is gone from them; the hair is a dead blur upon
the wall, and there is no life in the eyes. Only the attitudes are
certain.
People come here from all parts of the world, and glorify this
masterpiece. They stand entranced before it with bated breath and parted
lips, and when they speak, it is only in the catchy ejaculations of
rapture:
"Oh, wonderful!"
"Such expression!"
"Such grace of attitude!"
"Such dignity!"
"Such faultless drawing!"
"Such matchless coloring!"
"Such feeling!"
"What delicacy of touch!"
"What sublimity of conception!"
"A vision! A vision!"
I only envy these people; I envy them their honest admiration, if it be
honest--their delight, if they feel delight. I harbor no animosity
toward any of them. But at the same time the thought will intrude itself
upon me, How can they see what is not visible? What would you think of a
man who looked at some decayed, blind, toothless, pock-marked Cleopatra,
and said: "What matchless beauty! What soul! What expression!" What
would you think of a man who gazed upon a dingy, foggy sunset, and said:
"What sublimity! What feeling! What richness of coloring!" What would
you think of a man who stared in ecstasy upon a desert of stumps and
said: "Oh, my soul, my beating heart, what a noble forest is here!"
You would think that those men had an astonishing talent for seeing
things that had already passed away. It was what I thought when I stood
before "The Last Supper" and heard men apostrophizing wonders, and
beauties and perfections which had faded out of the picture and gone, a
hundred years before they were born. We can imagine the beauty that was
once in an aged face; we can imagine the forest if we see the stumps; but
we can not absolutely see these things when they are not there. I am
willing to believe that the eye of the practiced artist can rest upon the
Last Supper and renew a lustre where only a hint of it is left, supply a
tint that has faded away, restore an expression that is gone; patch, and
color, and add, to the dull canvas until at last its figures shall stand
before him aglow with the life, the feeling, the freshness, yea, with all
the noble beauty that was theirs when first they came from the hand of
the master. But I can not work this miracle. Can those other uninspired
visitors do it, or do they only happily imagine they do?
After reading so much about it, I am satisfied that the Last Supper was a
very miracle of art once. But it was three hundred years ago.
It vexes me to hear people talk so glibly of "feeling," "expression,"
"tone," and those other easily acquired and inexpensive technicalities of
art that make such a fine show in conversations concerning pictures.
There is not one man in seventy-five hundred that can tell what a
pictured face is intended to express. There is not one man in five
hundred that can go into a court-room and be sure that he will not
mistake some harmless innocent of a juryman for the black-hearted
assassin on trial. Yet such people talk of "character" and presume to
interpret "expression" in pictures. There is an old story that Matthews,
the actor, was once lauding the ability of the human face to express the
passions and emotions hidden in the breast. He said the countenance
could disclose what was passing in the heart plainer than the tongue
could.
"Now," he said, "observe my face--what does it express?"
"Despair!"
"Bah, it expresses peaceful resignation! What does this express?"
"Rage!"
"Stuff! It means terror! This!"
"Imbecility!"
"Fool! It is smothered ferocity! Now this!"
"Joy!"
"Oh, perdition! Any ass can see it means insanity!"
Expression! People coolly pretend to read it who would think themselves
presumptuous if they pretended to interpret the hieroglyphics on the
obelisks of Luxor--yet they are fully as competent to do the one thing as
the other. I have heard two very intelligent critics speak of Murillo's
Immaculate Conception (now in the museum at Seville,) within the past few
days. One said:
"Oh, the Virgin's face is full of the ecstasy of a joy that is complete
--that leaves nothing more to be desired on earth!"
The other said:
"Ah, that wonderful face is so humble, so pleading--it says as plainly as
words could say it: 'I fear; I tremble; I am unworthy. But Thy will be
done; sustain Thou Thy servant!'"
The reader can see the picture in any drawing-room; it can be easily
recognized: the Virgin (the only young and really beautiful Virgin that
was ever painted by one of the old masters, some of us think,) stands in
the crescent of the new moon, with a multitude of cherubs hovering about
her, and more coming; her hands are crossed upon her breast, and upon her
uplifted countenance falls a glory out of the heavens. The reader may
amuse himself, if he chooses, in trying to determine which of these
gentlemen read the Virgin's "expression" aright, or if either of them did
it.
Any one who is acquainted with the old masters will comprehend how much
"The Last Supper" is damaged when I say that the spectator can not really
tell, now, whether the disciples are Hebrews or Italians. These ancient
painters never succeeded in denationalizing themselves. The Italian
artists painted Italian Virgins, the Dutch painted Dutch Virgins, the
Virgins of the French painters were Frenchwomen--none of them ever put
into the face of the Madonna that indescribable something which proclaims
the Jewess, whether you find her in New York, in Constantinople, in
Paris, Jerusalem, or in the empire of Morocco. I saw in the Sandwich
Islands, once, a picture copied by a talented German artist from an
engraving in one of the American illustrated papers. It was an allegory,
representing Mr. Davis in the act of signing a secession act or some such
document. Over him hovered the ghost of Washington in warning attitude,
and in the background a troop of shadowy soldiers in Continental uniform
were limping with shoeless, bandaged feet through a driving snow-storm.
Valley Forge was suggested, of course. The copy seemed accurate, and yet
there was a discrepancy somewhere. After a long examination I discovered
what it was--the shadowy soldiers were all Germans! Jeff Davis was a
German! even the hovering ghost was a German ghost! The artist had
unconsciously worked his nationality into the picture. To tell the
truth, I am getting a little perplexed about John the Baptist and his
portraits. In France I finally grew reconciled to him as a Frenchman;
here he is unquestionably an Italian. What next? Can it be possible
that the painters make John the Baptist a Spaniard in Madrid and an
Irishman in Dublin?
We took an open barouche and drove two miles out of Milan to "see ze
echo," as the guide expressed it. The road was smooth, it was bordered
by trees, fields, and grassy meadows, and the soft air was filled with
the odor of flowers. Troops of picturesque peasant girls, coming from
work, hooted at us, shouted at us, made all manner of game of us, and
entirely delighted me. My long-cherished judgment was confirmed. I
always did think those frowsy, romantic, unwashed peasant girls I had
read so much about in poetry were a glaring fraud.
We enjoyed our jaunt. It was an exhilarating relief from tiresome
sight-seeing.
We distressed ourselves very little about the astonishing echo the guide
talked so much about. We were growing accustomed to encomiums on wonders
that too often proved no wonders at all. And so we were most happily
disappointed to find in the sequel that the guide had even failed to rise
to the magnitude of his subject.
We arrived at a tumble-down old rookery called the Palazzo Simonetti--a
massive hewn-stone affair occupied by a family of ragged Italians.
A good-looking young girl conducted us to a window on the second floor
which looked out on a court walled on three sides by tall buildings. She
put her head out at the window and shouted. The echo answered more times
than we could count. She took a speaking trumpet and through it she
shouted, sharp and quick, a single "Ha!" The echo answered:
"Ha!--ha!----ha!--ha!--ha!-ha! ha! h-a-a-a-a-a!" and finally went off
into a rollicking convulsion of the jolliest laughter that could be
imagined. It was so joyful--so long continued--so perfectly cordial and
hearty, that every body was forced to join in. There was no resisting
it.
Then the girl took a gun and fired it. We stood ready to count the
astonishing clatter of reverberations. We could not say one, two, three,
fast enough, but we could dot our notebooks with our pencil points almost
rapidly enough to take down a sort of short-hand report of the result.
My page revealed the following account. I could not keep up, but I did
as well as I could.
I set down fifty-two distinct repetitions, and then the echo got the
advantage of me. The doctor set down sixty-four, and thenceforth the
echo moved too fast for him, also. After the separate concussions could
no longer be noted, the reverberations dwindled to a wild, long-sustained
clatter of sounds such as a watchman's rattle produces. It is likely
that this is the most remarkable echo in the world.
The doctor, in jest, offered to kiss the young girl, and was taken a
little aback when she said he might for a franc! The commonest gallantry
compelled him to stand by his offer, and so he paid the franc and took
the kiss. She was a philosopher. She said a franc was a good thing to
have, and she did not care any thing for one paltry kiss, because she had
a million left. Then our comrade, always a shrewd businessman, offered
to take the whole cargo at thirty days, but that little financial scheme
was a failure.
CHAPTER XX.
We left Milan by rail. The Cathedral six or seven miles behind us; vast,
dreamy, bluish, snow-clad mountains twenty miles in front of us,--these
were the accented points in the scenery. The more immediate scenery
consisted of fields and farm-houses outside the car and a monster-headed
dwarf and a moustached woman inside it. These latter were not
show-people. Alas, deformity and female beards are too common in Italy
to attract attention.
We passed through a range of wild, picturesque hills, steep, wooded,
cone-shaped, with rugged crags projecting here and there, and with
dwellings and ruinous castles perched away up toward the drifting clouds.
We lunched at the curious old town of Como, at the foot of the lake, and
then took the small steamer and had an afternoon's pleasure excursion to
this place,--Bellaggio.
When we walked ashore, a party of policemen (people whose cocked hats and
showy uniforms would shame the finest uniform in the military service of
the United States,) put us into a little stone cell and locked us in. We
had the whole passenger list for company, but their room would have been
preferable, for there was no light, there were no windows, no
ventilation. It was close and hot. We were much crowded. It was the
Black Hole of Calcutta on a small scale. Presently a smoke rose about
our feet--a smoke that smelled of all the dead things of earth, of all
the putrefaction and corruption imaginable.
We were there five minutes, and when we got out it was hard to tell which
of us carried the vilest fragrance.
These miserable outcasts called that "fumigating" us, and the term was a
tame one indeed. They fumigated us to guard themselves against the
cholera, though we hailed from no infected port. We had left the cholera
far behind us all the time. However, they must keep epidemics away
somehow or other, and fumigation is cheaper than soap. They must either
wash themselves or fumigate other people. Some of the lower classes had
rather die than wash, but the fumigation of strangers causes them no
pangs. They need no fumigation themselves. Their habits make it
unnecessary. They carry their preventive with them; they sweat and
fumigate all the day long. I trust I am a humble and a consistent
Christian. I try to do what is right. I know it is my duty to "pray for
them that despitefully use me;" and therefore, hard as it is, I shall
still try to pray for these fumigating, maccaroni-stuffing
organ-grinders.
Our hotel sits at the water's edge--at least its front garden does--and
we walk among the shrubbery and smoke at twilight; we look afar off at
Switzerland and the Alps, and feel an indolent willingness to look no
closer; we go down the steps and swim in the lake; we take a shapely
little boat and sail abroad among the reflections of the stars; lie on
the thwarts and listen to the distant laughter, the singing, the soft
melody of flutes and guitars that comes floating across the water from
pleasuring gondolas; we close the evening with exasperating billiards on
one of those same old execrable tables. A midnight luncheon in our ample
bed-chamber; a final smoke in its contracted veranda facing the water,
the gardens, and the mountains; a summing up of the day's events. Then
to bed, with drowsy brains harassed with a mad panorama that mixes up
pictures of France, of Italy, of the ship, of the ocean, of home, in
grotesque and bewildering disorder. Then a melting away of familiar
faces, of cities, and of tossing waves, into a great calm of
forgetfulness and peace.
After which, the nightmare.
Breakfast in the morning, and then the lake.
I did not like it yesterday. I thought Lake Tahoe was much finer.
I have to confess now, however, that my judgment erred somewhat, though
not extravagantly. I always had an idea that Como was a vast basin of
water, like Tahoe, shut in by great mountains. Well, the border of huge
mountains is here, but the lake itself is not a basin. It is as crooked
as any brook, and only from one-quarter to two-thirds as wide as the
Mississippi. There is not a yard of low ground on either side of it
--nothing but endless chains of mountains that spring abruptly from the
water's edge and tower to altitudes varying from a thousand to two
thousand feet. Their craggy sides are clothed with vegetation, and white
specks of houses peep out from the luxuriant foliage everywhere; they are
even perched upon jutting and picturesque pinnacles a thousand feet above
your head.
Again, for miles along the shores, handsome country seats, surrounded by
gardens and groves, sit fairly in the water, sometimes in nooks carved by
Nature out of the vine-hung precipices, and with no ingress or egress
save by boats. Some have great broad stone staircases leading down to
the water, with heavy stone balustrades ornamented with statuary and
fancifully adorned with creeping vines and bright-colored flowers--for
all the world like a drop curtain in a theatre, and lacking nothing but
long-waisted, high-heeled women and plumed gallants in silken tights
coming down to go serenading in the splendid gondola in waiting.
A great feature of Como's attractiveness is the multitude of pretty
houses and gardens that cluster upon its shores and on its mountain
sides. They look so snug and so homelike, and at eventide when every
thing seems to slumber, and the music of the vesper bells comes stealing
over the water, one almost believes that nowhere else than on the lake of
Como can there be found such a paradise of tranquil repose.
From my window here in Bellaggio, I have a view of the other side of the
lake now, which is as beautiful as a picture. A scarred and wrinkled
precipice rises to a height of eighteen hundred feet; on a tiny bench
half way up its vast wall, sits a little snowflake of a church, no bigger
than a martin-box, apparently; skirting the base of the cliff are a
hundred orange groves and gardens, flecked with glimpses of the white
dwellings that are buried in them; in front, three or four gondolas lie
idle upon the water--and in the burnished mirror of the lake, mountain,
chapel, houses, groves and boats are counterfeited so brightly and so
clearly that one scarce knows where the reality leaves off and the
reflection begins!
The surroundings of this picture are fine. A mile away, a grove-plumed
promontory juts far into the lake and glasses its palace in the blue
depths; in midstream a boat is cutting the shining surface and leaving a
long track behind, like a ray of light; the mountains beyond are veiled
in a dreamy purple haze; far in the opposite direction a tumbled mass of
domes and verdant slopes and valleys bars the lake, and here indeed does
distance lend enchantment to the view--for on this broad canvas, sun and
clouds and the richest of atmospheres have blended a thousand tints
together, and over its surface the filmy lights and shadows drift, hour
after hour, and glorify it with a beauty that seems reflected out of
Heaven itself. Beyond all question, this is the most voluptuous scene we
have yet looked upon.
Last night the scenery was striking and picturesque. On the other side
crags and trees and snowy houses were reflected in the lake with a
wonderful distinctness, and streams of light from many a distant window
shot far abroad over the still waters. On this side, near at hand, great
mansions, white with moonlight, glared out from the midst of masses of
foliage that lay black and shapeless in the shadows that fell from the
cliff above--and down in the margin of the lake every feature of the
weird vision was faithfully repeated.
Today we have idled through a wonder of a garden attached to a ducal
estate--but enough of description is enough, I judge.
I suspect that this was the same place the gardener's son deceived the
Lady of Lyons with, but I do not know. You may have heard of the passage
somewhere:
"A deep vale,
Shut out by Alpine hills from the rude world,
Near a clear lake margined by fruits of gold
And whispering myrtles:
Glassing softest skies, cloudless,
Save with rare and roseate shadows;
A palace, lifting to eternal heaven its marbled walls,
From out a glossy bower of coolest foliage musical with birds."
That is all very well, except the "clear" part of the lake. It certainly
is clearer than a great many lakes, but how dull its waters are compared
with the wonderful transparence of Lake Tahoe! I speak of the north
shore of Tahoe, where one can count the scales on a trout at a depth of a
hundred and eighty feet. I have tried to get this statement off at par
here, but with no success; so I have been obliged to negotiate it at
fifty percent discount. At this rate I find some takers; perhaps the
reader will receive it on the same terms--ninety feet instead of one
hundred and eighty. But let it be remembered that those are forced
terms--Sheriff's sale prices. As far as I am privately concerned, I
abate not a jot of the original assertion that in those strangely
magnifying waters one may count the scales on a trout (a trout of the
large kind,) at a depth of a hundred and eighty feet--may see every
pebble on the bottom--might even count a paper of dray-pins. People talk
of the transparent waters of the Mexican Bay of Acapulco, but in my own
experience I know they cannot compare with those I am speaking of. I
have fished for trout, in Tahoe, and at a measured depth of eighty-four
feet I have seen them put their noses to the bait and I could see their
gills open and shut. I could hardly have seen the trout themselves at
that distance in the open air.
As I go back in spirit and recall that noble sea, reposing among the
snow-peaks six thousand feet above the ocean, the conviction comes strong
upon me again that Como would only seem a bedizened little courtier in
that august presence.
Sorrow and misfortune overtake the legislature that still from year to
year permits Tahoe to retain its unmusical cognomen! Tahoe! It suggests
no crystal waters, no picturesque shores, no sublimity. Tahoe for a sea
in the clouds: a sea that has character and asserts it in solemn calms at
times, at times in savage storms; a sea whose royal seclusion is guarded
by a cordon of sentinel peaks that lift their frosty fronts nine thousand
feet above the level world; a sea whose every aspect is impressive, whose
belongings are all beautiful, whose lonely majesty types the Deity!
Tahoe means grasshoppers. It means grasshopper soup. It is Indian, and
suggestive of Indians. They say it is Pi-ute--possibly it is Digger.
I am satisfied it was named by the Diggers--those degraded savages who
roast their dead relatives, then mix the human grease and ashes of bones
with tar, and "gaum" it thick all over their heads and foreheads and
ears, and go caterwauling about the hills and call it mourning. These
are the gentry that named the Lake.
People say that Tahoe means "Silver Lake"--"Limpid Water"--"Falling
Leaf." Bosh. It means grasshopper soup, the favorite dish of the Digger
tribe,--and of the Pi-utes as well. It isn't worth while, in these
practical times, for people to talk about Indian poetry--there never was
any in them--except in the Fenimore Cooper Indians. But they are an
extinct tribe that never existed. I know the Noble Red Man. I have
camped with the Indians; I have been on the warpath with them, taken part
in the chase with them--for grasshoppers; helped them steal cattle; I
have roamed with them, scalped them, had them for breakfast. I would
gladly eat the whole race if I had a chance.
But I am growing unreliable. I will return to my comparison of the
lakes. Como is a little deeper than Tahoe, if people here tell the
truth. They say it is eighteen hundred feet deep at this point, but it
does not look a dead enough blue for that. Tahoe is one thousand five
hundred and twenty-five feet deep in the centre, by the state geologist's
measurement. They say the great peak opposite this town is five thousand
feet high: but I feel sure that three thousand feet of that statement is
a good honest lie. The lake is a mile wide, here, and maintains about
that width from this point to its northern extremity--which is distant
sixteen miles: from here to its southern extremity--say fifteen miles--it
is not over half a mile wide in any place, I should think. Its snow-clad
mountains one hears so much about are only seen occasionally, and then in
the distance, the Alps. Tahoe is from ten to eighteen miles wide, and
its mountains shut it in like a wall. Their summits are never free from
snow the year round. One thing about it is very strange: it never has
even a skim of ice upon its surface, although lakes in the same range of
mountains, lying in a lower and warmer temperature, freeze over in
winter.
It is cheerful to meet a shipmate in these out-of-the-way places and
compare notes with him. We have found one of ours here--an old soldier
of the war, who is seeking bloodless adventures and rest from his
campaigns in these sunny lands.--[Colonel J. HERON FOSTER, editor of a
Pittsburgh journal, and a most estimable gentleman. As these sheets are
being prepared for the press I am pained to learn of his decease shortly
after his return home--M.T.]
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