‘The third day of the disastrous battle of Leipsic was drawing to a close, as the armies of the coalition made one terrible and fierce attack, in concert, against the Imperial forces. Never was anything before heard like the deafening thunder, as three hundred guns of heavy artillery opened their fire at once from end to end of the line, and three hundred thousand men advanced, wildly cheering, to the attack.
‘Wearied, worn out, and exhausted, the French army held their ground, like men prepared to die before their Emperor, but never desert him, when the fearful intelligence was brought to Napoleon that in three days the army had fired ninety-five thousand cannon-balls; that the reserve ammunition was entirely consumed, and but sixteen thousand cannon-balls remained, barely sufficient to maintain the fire two hours longer! What was to be done? No resources lay nearer than Magdeburg or Erfurt. To the latter place the Emperor at once decided on retiring, and at seven o’clock the order was given for the artillery waggons and baggage to pass the defile of Lindenau, and retreat over the Elster, the same order being transmitted to the cavalry and the other corps of the army. The defile was a long and difficult one, extending for two leagues, and traversing several bridges. To accomplish the retreat in safety, Napoleon was counselled to hold the allies in check by a strong force of artillery, and then set fire to the faubourg; but the conduct of the Saxon troops, however deserving of his anger, could not warrant a punishment so fearful on the monarch of that country, who, through every change of fortune, had stood steady in his friendship. He rejected the course at once, and determined on retreating as best he might.
‘The movement was then begun at once, and every avenue that led to the faubourg of Lindenau was crowded by troops of all arms, eagerly pressing onward—a fearful scene of confusion and dismay, for it was a beaten army that fled, and one which until now never had thoroughly felt the horrors of defeat. From seven until nine the columns came on at a quick step, the cavalry at a trot; defiling along the narrow gorge of lindenau, they passed a mill at the roadside, where at a window stood one with arms crossed and head bent upon his bosom. He gazed steadfastly at the long train beneath, but never noticed the salutes of the general officers as they passed along. It was the Emperor himself, pale and care-worn, his low chapeau pressed down far on his brows, and his uniform splashed and travel-stained. For over an hour he stood thus silent and motionless; then throwing himself upon a bed he slept. Yes; amid all the terrible events of that disastrous retreat, when the foundations of the mighty empire he had created were crumbling beneath him, when the great army he had so often led to victory was defiling beaten before him, he laid his wearied head upon a pillow and slept!
‘A terrible cannonade, the fire of seventy large guns brought to bear upon the ramparts, shook the very earth, and at length awoke Napoleon, who through all the din and clamour had slept soundly and tranquilly.
‘“What is it, Duroc?” said he, raising himself upon one arm, and looking up.
‘“It is Swartzenberg’s attack, sire, on the rampart of Halle.”
‘“Ha! so near?” said he, springing up and approaching the window, from which the bright flashes of the artillery were each moment discernible in the dark sky. At the same moment an aide-de-camp galloped up, and dismounted at the door; in another minute he was in the room.
‘The Saxon troops, left by the Emperor as a guard of honour and protection to the unhappy monarch, had opened a fire on the retreating columns, and a fearful confusion was the result. The Emperor spoke not a word. Macdonald’s corps and Poniatowskf s division were still in Leipsic; but already they had commenced their retiring movement on Lindenau. Lauriston’s brigade was also rapidly approaching the bridge over the Elster, to which now the men were hurrying madly, intent alone on flight. The bridge—the only one by which the troops could pass —had been mined, and committed to the charge of Colonel Montfort of the Engineers, with directions to blow it up when the enemy appeared, and thus gain time for the baggage to retreat.
‘As the aide-de-camp stood awaiting Napoleon’s orders in reply to a few lines written in pencil by the Duke of Tarento, another staff-officer arrived, breathless, to say that the allies had carried the rampart, and were already in Leipsic. Napoleon became deadly pale; then, with a motion of his hand, he signed to the officer to withdraw.
‘“Duroc,” said he, when they were alone, “where is Nansouty?”
‘“With the eighth corps, sire. They have passed an hour since.”
‘“Who commands the picket without?”
‘“Aubuisson, sire.”
‘“Send him to me, and leave us alone.”
‘In a few moments Colonel Aubuisson entered. His arm was in a sling from a sabre-wound he had received the morning before, but which did not prevent his remaining on duty. The stout soldier seemed as unconcerned and fearless in that dreadful moment as though it were a day of gala manoeuvres, and not one of disaster and defeat.
‘“Aubuisson,” said the Emperor, “you were with us at Alexandria?”
‘“I was, sire,” said he, as a deeper tinge coloured his bronzed features.
‘“The first in the rampart—I remember it well,” said Napoleon; “theordre du jourcommemorates the deed. It was at Moscow you gained the cross, I believe?” continued he, after a slight pause.
‘“I never obtained it, sire,” replied Aubuisson, with a struggle to repress some disappointment in his tone.
‘“How, never obtained it!—you, Aubuisson, an ancientbraveof the Pyramids! Come, come, there has been a mistake somewhere; we must look to this. Meanwhile,GeneralAubuisson, take mine.”
‘With that he detached his cordon from the breast of his uniform, and fastened it on the coat of the astonished officer, who could only mutter the words, “Sire, sire!” in reply.
‘“Now, then, for a service you must render me, and speedily, too,” said Napoleon, as he laid his hand on the general’s shoulder.
‘The Emperor whispered for some seconds in his ear, then looked at him fixedly in the face. “What!” cried he, “do you hesitate?”
‘“Hesitate, sire!” said Aubuisson, starting back. “Never! If your Majesty had ordered me to the mouth of a mortar—but I wish to know——”
‘Napoleon did not permit him to conclude, but drawing him closer, whispered again a few words in his ear. “And, mark me,” said he, aloud, as he finished, “mark me, Aubuisson! silence—pas un mot? silence à la mort!”
‘“A la mort, sire!” repeated the general, while at the same moment Duroc hurried into the room, and cried out—
‘“They are advancing towards the Elster; Macdonald’s rear-guard is engaged——”
‘A motion of Napoleon’s hand towards the door and a look at Aubuisson was the only notice he took of the intelligence, and the officer was gone.
‘While Duroc continued to detail the disastrous events the last arrived news had announced, the Emperor approached the window, which was still open, and looked out. All was in darkness towards that part of the city near the defile. The attack was on the distant rampart, near which the sky was red and lurid. Still, it was towards that dark and gloomy part that Napoleon’s eyes were turned, and not in the direction where the fight was still raging. Peering into the dense blackness, he stood without speaking, when suddenly a bright gleam of light shot up from the gloom, and then came three tremendous reports, so rapidly, one after the other, as almost to seem like one. The same instant a blaze of fire flashed upwards towards the sky, and glittering fragments of burning timber were hurled into the air. Napoleon covered his eyes with his hand, and leaned against the side of the window.
‘“It is the bridge over the Elster!” cried Duroc, in a voice half wild with passion. “They’ve blown up the bridge before Macdonald’s division have crossed.”
‘“Impossible!” said the Emperor. “Go see quickly, Duroc, what has happened.”
‘But before the general could leave the room, a wounded officer rushed in, his clothes covered with the marks of recent fire.
‘“The Sappers, sire! the Sappers——-”
‘“What of them?” said the Emperor.
‘“They’ve blown up the bridge, and the fourth corps are still in Leipsic.”
‘The next moment Napoleon was on his horse, surrounded by his staff, and galloping furiously towards the river.
‘Never was a scene more awful than that which now presented itself there. Hundreds of men had thrown themselves headlong into the rapid river, where masses of burning timber were falling on every side; horse and foot all mixed up in fearful confusion struggled madly in the stream, mingling their cries with the shouts of those who came on from behind, and who discovered for the first time that the retreat was cut off. The Duke of Tarento crossed, holding by his horse’s mane. Lauriston had nearly reached the bank, when he sank to rise no more; and Poniatowski, the chivalrous Pole, the last hope of his nation, was seen for an instant struggling with the waves, and then disappeared for ever.
‘Twenty thousand men, sixty great guns, and above two hundred waggons were thus left in the power of the enemy. Few who sought refuge in flight ever reached the opposite bank, and for miles down, the shores of the Elster were marked by the bodies of French soldiers, who thus met their death on that fearful night.
‘Among the disasters of this terrible retreat was the fate of Reynier, of whom no tidings could be had; nor was it known whether he died in battle, or fell a prisoner into the hands of the enemy. He was the personal friend of the Emperor, who in his loss deplored not only the brave and valorous soldier, but the steady adherent to his fortunes through good and evil. No more striking evidence of the amount of this misfortune can be had than the bulletin of Napoleon himself. That document, usually devoted to the expression of vainglorious and exaggerated descriptions of the triumphs of the army—full of those high-flown narratives by which the glowing imagination of the Emperor conveyed the deeds of his soldiers to the wondering ears of France—was now a record of mournful depression and sad reverse of fortune.
‘“The French army,” said he, “continues its march on Erfurt—a beaten army. After so many brilliant successes, it is now in retreat.”
‘Every one is already acquainted with the disastrous career of that army, the greatest that ever marched from France. Each step of their return, obstinately contested against overwhelming superiority of force, however it might evidence the chivalrous spirit of a nation who would not confess defeat, brought them only nearer to their own frontiers, pursued by those whose countries they had violated, whose kings they had dethroned, whose liberties they had trampled on. The fearful Nemesis of war had come. The hour was arrived when all the wrongs they had wreaked on others were to be tenfold inflicted on themselves; when the plains of that “belle France,” of which they were so proud, were to be trampled beneath the feet of insulting conquerors; when the Cossack and the Uhlan were to bivouac in that capital which they so arrogantly styled “the centre of European civilisation.”
‘I need not dwell on these things; I will but ask you to accompany me to Erfurt, where the army arrived five days after. A court-martial was there summoned for the trial of Colonel Montfort of the Engineers, and the party under his command, who in violation of their orders had prematurely blown up the bridge over the Elster, and were thus the cause of that fearful disaster by which so many gallant lives were sacrificed, and the honour of a French army so grievously tarnished. Contrary to the ordinary custom, the proceedings of that court-martial were never made known; * the tribunal sat with closed doors, accessible only to the Emperor himself and the officers of his personal staff.
* The vicomte’s assertion is historically correct.
‘On the fourth day of the investigation, a messenger was despatched to Braunach, a distant outpost of the army, to bring up General Aubuisson, who, it was rumoured, was somehow implicated in the transaction. The general took his place beside the other prisoners, in the full uniform of his grade. He wore on his breast the cross the Emperor himself had given him, and he carried at his side the sabre of honour he had received on the battlefield of Eylau. Still, they who knew him well remarked that his countenance no longer wore its frank and easy expression, while in his eye there was a restless, anxious look, as he glanced from side to side, and seemed troubled and suspicious.
‘An order, brought by one of the aides-de-camp of the Emperor, commanded that the proceedings should not be opened that morning before his Majesty’s arrival, and already the court had remained an hour inactive, when Napoleon entered suddenly, and saluting the members of the tribunal with a courteous bow, took his place at the head of the table. As he passed up the hall he threw one glance upon the bench where the prisoners sat; it was short and fleeting, but there was one there who felt it in his inmost soul, and who in that rapid look read his own fate for ever.
‘“General Aubuisson,” said the President of the court-martial, “you were on duty with the peloton of your battalion on the evening of the 18th?”
‘A short nod of the head was the only reply. “It is alleged,” continued the President, “that a little after nine o’clock you appeared on the bridge over the Elster, and held a conversation with Colonel Montfort, the officer commanding the post; the court now desires that you will recapitulate the circumstances of that conversation, as well as inform it generally on the reasons of your presenting yourself at a post so remote from your duty.”
‘The general made no reply, but fixed his eyes steadfastly on the face of the Emperor, whose cold glance met his own, impassive and unmoved.
‘“Have you heard the question of the court?” said the President, in a louder tone, “or shall I repeat it?”
‘The prisoner turned upon him a look of vacancy. Like one suddenly awakened from a frightful dream, he appeared struggling to remember something which no effort of his mind could accomplish. He passed his hand across his brow, on which now the big drops of sweat were standing, and then there broke from him a sigh, so low and plaintive it was scarcely audible.
‘“Collect yourself, general,” said the President, in a milder tone; “we wish to hear from your own lips your account of this transaction.”
‘Aubuisson cast his eyes downwards, and with his hands firmly clasped, seemed to reflect. As he stood thus, his look fell upon the cross of the Legion which he wore on his bosom; with a sudden start he pressed his hand upon it, and drawing himself up to his full height, exclaimed, in a wild and broken voice—
‘“Silence—silence à la mort!”
‘The members of the court-martial looked from one to the other in amazement, while after a pause of a few minutes the President repeated his question, dwelling patiently on each word, as if desirous to suit the troubled intellect of the prisoner.
‘“You are asked,” said he, “to remember why you appeared at the bridge of the Elster.”
‘“Hush!” replied the prisoner, placing his finger upon his lips, as if to instil caution; “not a word!”
‘“What can this mean?” said the President, “his mind appears completely astray.”
‘The members of the tribunal leaned their heads over the table, and conversed for some moments in a low tone, after which the President resumed the interrogatory as before.
‘“Que voulez-vous?” said the Emperor, rising, while a crimson spot on his cheek evinced his displeasure; “Que voulez-vous, messieurs! do you not see the man is mad?”
‘“Silence!” reiterated Aubuisson, in the same solemn voice; “silence à la mort!”
‘There could no longer be any doubt upon the question. From whatever cause proceeding, his intellect was shaken, and his reason gone. Some predominant impression, some all-powerful idea, had usurped the seat of both judgment and memory, and he was a maniac.
‘In ten days after, General Aubuisson—the distinguished soldier of the Republic, thebraveof Egypt, and the hero of many a battle in Germany, Poland, and Russia—was a patient of Charenton. A sad and melancholy figure, wasted and withered like a tree reft by lightning, the wreck of his former self, he walked slowly to and fro; and though at times his reason would seem to return free and unclouded, suddenly a dark curtain would appear to drop over the light of his intellect, and he would mutter the words, “Silence! silence à la mort!” and speak not again for several hours after.’
The Vicomte de Berlemont, from whom I heard this sad story, was himself a member of the court-martial on the occasion. For the rest, I visited Paris about a fortnight after I heard it, and determining to solve my doubts on a subject of such interest I paid an early visit to Charenton. On examining the registry of the institution, I found the name of ‘Gustave Guillaume Aubuisson, native of Dijon, aged thirty-two. Admitted at Charenton the 31st of October, 1813. Incurable.’ And on another page was the single line, ‘Aubuisson escaped from Charenton, June 16, 1815. Supposed to have been seen at Waterloo on the 18th.’
One more fact remains to be mentioned in this sad story. The old tower still stands, bleak and desolate, on the mountains of the Vesdre; but it is now uninhabited save by the sheep that seek shelter within its gloomy walls, and herd in that spacious chimney. There is another change, too, but so slight as scarcely to be noticed: a little mound of earth, grass-grown and covered with thistles, marks the spot where ‘Lazare the shepherd’ takes his last rest. It is a lone and dreary spot, and the sighing night-winds as they move over the barren heath seem to utter his lastconsigne, and his requiem—‘Silence! silence à la mort!’
‘Summa diligentia,’ as we used to translate it at school, ‘on the top of the diligence,’ I wagged along towards the Rhine. A weary and a lonely way it is; indeed, I half believe a frontier is ever thus—a kind of natural barrier to ambition on either side, where both parties stop short and say, ‘Well, there’s no temptation there, anyhow!’
Reader, hast ever travelled in thebanquetteof a diligence? I will not ask you, fair lady; for how could you ever mount to that Olympus of trunks, carpet-bags, and hat-boxes; but my whiskered friend with the cheroot yonder, what says he? Never look angry, man—there was no offence in my question; better men than either of us have done it.
First, if the weather be fine, the view is a glorious thing; you are not limited, like your friends in thecoupé, to the sight of the conductor’s gaiters, or the leather disc of the postillion’s ‘continuations.’ No; your eye ranges away at either side over those undulating plains which the Continent presents, unbroken by fence or hedgerow—one stretch of vast cornfields, great waving woods, interminable tracts of yellowish pasture-land, with here and there a village spire, or the pointed roof of some château rising above the trees. A yellow-earthy byroad traverses the plain, on which a heavy waggon plods along, the eight huge horses, stepping as free as though no weight restrained them; their bells are tinkling in the clear air, and the merry chant of the waggoner chimes in pleasantly with them. It is somewhat hard to fancy how the land is ever tilled; you meet few villages; scarcely a house is in sight—yet there are the fragrant fields; the yellow gold of harvest tints the earth, and the industry of man is seen on every side. It is peaceful, it is grand, too, from its very extent; but it is not homelike. No; our own happy land alone possesses that attribute.Itis the country of the hearth and home. The traveller in France or Germany catches no glances as he goes of the rural life of the proprietors of the soil. A pale white château, seemingly uninhabited, stands in some formal lawn, where the hot sun darts down his rays unbroken, and the very fountain seems to hiss with heat. No signs of life are seen about; all is still and calm, as though the moon were shedding her yellow lustre over the scene. Oh how I long for the merry schoolboy’s laugh, the clatter of the pony’s canter, the watch-dog’s bark, the squire breathing the morning air amid his woods, that tell of England! How I fancy a peep into that large drawing-room, whose windows open to the greensward, letting in a view of distant mountains and far-receding foreground, through an atmosphere heavy with the rose and the honeysuckle! Lovely as is the scene, with foliage tinted in every hue, from the light sprayey hazel to the dull pine or the dark copper beech—how I prefer to look within wheretheyare met who call this ‘home!’ And what a paradise is such a home!——
But I must think no more of these things. I am a lone and solitary man; my happiness is cast in a different mould, nor shall I mar it by longings which never can be realised.
While I sat thus musing, my companion of thebanquette, of whom I had hitherto seen nothing but a blue-cloth cloak and a travelling-cap, came ‘slap down’ on me with a snort that choked him, and aroused me.
‘I ask your pardon, sir,’ said he in a voice that betrayed Middlesex most culpably. ‘Je suis—that is, j’ai——’
‘Never mind, sir; English will answer every purpose,’ cried I. ‘You have had a sound sleep of it.’
‘Yes, Heaven be praised! I get over a journey as well as most men. Where are we now—do you happen to know?’
‘That old castle yonder, I suspect, is the Alten Burg,’ said I, taking out my guidebook and directory. ‘The Alten Burg was built in the year 1384, by Carl Ludwig Graf von Löwenstein, and is not without its historic associations——-’
‘Damn its historic associations!’ said my companion, with an energy that made me start. ‘I wish the devil and his imps had carried away all such trumpery, or kept them to torture people in their own hot climate, and left us free here. I ask pardon, sir! I beseech you to forgive my warmth; you would if you knew the cause, I’m certain.’
I began to suspect as much myself, and that my neighbour being insane, was in no wise responsible for his opinions; when he resumed—
‘Most men are made miserable by present calamities; some feel apprehensions for the future; but no one ever suffered so much from either as I do from the past. No, sir,’ continued he, raising his voice, ‘I have been made unhappy from those sweet souvenirs of departed greatness which guidebook people and tourists gloat over. The very thought of antiquity makes me shudder; the name of Charlemagne gives me the lumbago; and I’d run a mile from a conversation about Charles the Bold or Philip van Artevelde. I see what’s passing in your mind; but you ‘re all wrong. I’m not deranged, not a bit of it; though, faith, I might be, without any shame or disgrace.’
The caprices of men, of Englishmen in particular, had long ceased to surprise me; each day disclosed some new eccentricity or other. In the very last hotel I had left there was a Member of Parliament planning a new route to the Rhine, avoiding Cologne, because in the coffee-room of the ‘Grossen Rheinberg’ there was a double door that everybody banged when he went in or out, and so discomposed the honourable and learned gentleman that he was laid up for three weeks with a fit of gout, brought on by pure passion at the inconvenience.
I had not long to wait for the explanation in this case. My companion appeared to think he owed it to himself to ‘show cause’ why he was not to be accounted a lunatic; and after giving me briefly to understand that his means enabled him to retire from active pursuits and enjoy his ease, he went on to recount that he had come abroad to pass the remainder of his days in peace and tranquillity. But I shall let him tell his own story in his own words.
‘On the eighth day after my arrival at Brussels, I told my wife to pack up; for as Mr. Thysens the lawyer, who promised to write before that time, had not done so, we had nothing to wait for. We had seen Waterloo, visited the Musée, skated about in listed slippers through the Palais d’Orange, dined at Dubos’s, ate ice at Velloni’s, bought half the old lace in the Rue de la Madelaine, and almost caught an ague in the Allée Verte. This was certainly pleasure enough for one week; so I ordered my bill, and prepared “to evacuate Flanders.” Lord help us, what beings we are! Had I gone down to the railroad by the Boulevards and not by the Montagne de la Cour, what miseries might I not have been spared! Mr. Thysens’s clerk met me, just as I emerged from the Place Royale, with a letter in his hand. I took it, opened, and read:—
‘“Sir,—I have just completed the purchase of the beautiful Château of Vanderstradentendonk, with all its gardens, orchards, pheasantries, piscinae, prairies, and forest rights, which are now your property. Accept my most respectful congratulations upon your acquisition of this magnificent seat of ancient grandeur, rendered doubly precious by its having been once the favourite residence and château of the great Van Dyck.”
‘Here followed a long encomium upon Rubens and his school, which I did not half relish, knowing it was charged to me in my account; the whole winding up with a pressing recommendation to hasten down at once to take possession, and enjoy the partridge shooting, then in great abundance.
‘My wife was in ecstasy to be the Frow Vanderstradentendonk, with a fish-pond before the door, and twelve gods and goddesses in lead around it. To have a brace of asthmatic peacocks on a terrace, and a dropsical swan on an island, were strong fascinations—not to speak of the straight avenues leading nowhere, and the winds of heaven blowing everywhere; a house with a hundred and thirty windows and half as many doors, none of which would shut close; a garden, with no fruit but crab-apples; and a nursery, so called, because the playground of all the brats for a league round us. No matter, I had resolved to live abroad for a year or two, and one place would do just as well as another; at least, I should have quietness—that was something; there was no neighbourhood, no town, no highroad, no excuse for travelling acquaintances to drop in, or rambling tourists to bore one with letters of introduction. Thank God! there was neither a battlefield, a cathedral, a picture, nor a great living poet for ten miles on any side.
‘Here, thought I, I shall have that peace Piccadilly cannot give. Cincinnatus-like, I’ll plant my cabbages, feed my turkeys, let my beard grow, and nurse my rental. Solitude never bored me; I could bear anything but intrusive impertinence. So far did I carry this feeling, that on reading Robinson Crusoe I laid down the volume in disgust on the introduction of his man Friday!
‘It mattered little, therefore, that thecouleur de rosepicture the lawyer had drawn of the château had little existence out of his own florid imagination; the quaint old building, with its worn tapestries and faded furniture, suited the habit of my soul, and I hugged myself often in the pleasant reflection that my London acquaintances would be puzzling their brains for my whereabouts, without the slightest clue to my detection. Now, had I settled in Florence, Frankfort, or Geneva, what a life I must have led! There is always some dear Mrs. Somebody going to live in your neighbourhood, who begs you ‘ll look out for a house for her—something very eligible; eighteen rooms well furnished; a southern aspect; in the best quarter; a garden indispensable; and all for some forty pounds a year—or some other dear friend who desires you ‘ll find a governess, with more accomplishments than Malibran and more learning than Porson, with the temper of five angels, and a “vow in heaven” to have no higher salary than a college bed-maker. Then there are the Thompsons passing through, whom you have taken care never to know before; but who fall upon you now as strangers in a foreign land, and take the “benefit” of the “Alien Act” in dinners at your house during their stay. I stop not to enumerate the crying wants of the more lately arrived resident, all of which are refreshed for your benefit; the recommendations to butlers who don’t cheat, to moral music-masters, grave dancing-masters, and doctors who never take fees—every infraction by each of these individuals in his peculiar calling being set down as a just cause of complaint against yourself, requiring an animated correspondence in writing, and concluding with an abject apology and a promise to cut the delinquent that day, though you owe him a half-year’s bill. These are all pleasant; not to speak of the curse of disjointed society, ill-assorted, ill-conceived, unreasonable pretension, vulgar impertinence, and fawning toadyism on every side, and not one man to be found to join you in laughing at the whole thing, which would amply repay one for any endurance. No, thought I, I ‘ve had enough of this! I ‘ll try my barque in quieter waters, and though it’s only a punt, yet I’ll hold the sculls myself, and that’s something.
‘So much for the self-gratulation I indulged in, as the oldchaise de posterattled over the heavy pavement, and drew up short at the portico of my future dwelling. My wife was charmed with the procession of villagers who awaited us on the steps, and (although an uglier population never trod their mother earth in wooden slippers) fancied she could detect several faces of great beauty and much interest in the crowd. For my part, I saw nothing but an indiscriminate haze of cotton nightcaps, striped jackets, blouses, black petticoats and sabots; so, pushing my way through them, I left the bassoon and the burgomaster to the united delights of their music and eloquence, and shutting the hall door threw myself on a seat, and thanked Heaven that my period of peace and tranquillity was at length to begin.
‘Peace and tranquillity! What airy visions! Had I selected the post of cad to an omnibus, a steward to a Greenwich steamer, were I a guide to the Monument or a waiter at Long’s my life had been one of dignified repose in comparison with my present existence.
‘I had not been a week in the château when a travelling Englishman sprained his ankle within a short distance of the house. As a matter of course he was brought there, and taken every care of for the few days of his stay. He was fed, housed, leeched, and stuped, and when at length he proceeded upon his journey was profuse in his acknowledgments for the services rendered him; and yet what was the base return of the ungrateful man? I have scarcely temper to record it. During the very moment when we were most lavish in our attention to him, he was sapping the very peace of his benefactors. He learned from the Flemish servants of the house that it had formerly been the favourite residence of Van Dyck; that the very furniture was unchanged since his time; the bed, the table, the chair he had sat on were all preserved. The wretch—am I not warranted in calling him so?—made notes of all this; before I had been three weeks in my abode, out came aWalk in Flanders, in two volumes, with a whole chapter about me, headed “Château de Van Dyck.” There we were, myself and my wife, in every window of the Row: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Blue, had bought us at a price, and paid for us; there we were—we, who courted solitude and retirement—to be read of by every puppy in the West End, and every apprentice in Cheapside. Our hospitality was lauded, as if I kept open house for all comers, with “hot chops and brown gravy” at a moment’s notice. The antiquary was bribed to visit me by the fascinations of a spot “sacred to the reveries of genius”; the sportsman, by the account of my “preserves”; the idler, to say he had been there; and the guide-bookmaker and historical biographer, to vamp up details for a new edition ofBelgium as it was, orVan Dyck and his Contemporaries.
‘From the hour of the publication of that horrid book I never enjoyed a moment’s peace or ease. The whole tide of my travelling countrymen—and what a flood it is!—came pouring into Ghent. Post-horses could not be found sufficient for half the demand; the hotels were crowded; respectable peasants gave up their daily employ to become guides to the château; and little busts of Van Dyck were hawked about the neighbourhood by children of four years old. The great cathedral of Ghent, Van Scamp’s pictures, all the historic remains of that ancient city were at a discount; and they who formerly exhibited them as a livelihood were now thrown out of bread. Like the dancing-master who has not gone up to Paris for the last pirouette, or the physician who has not taken up the stethoscope, they were reputed old-fashioned andpassé; and if they could not describe the Château de Van Dyck, were voted among the bygones.
‘The impulse once given, there was no stopping; the current was irresistible. The double lock on the gate of the avenue, the bulldog at the hall door, the closed shutters, the cut-away bell-rope, announced a firm resolution in the fortress not to surrender; but we were taken by assault, escaladed, and starved out in turns.
‘Scarcely was the tea-urn on the breakfast-table when they began to pour in—old and young, the halt, the one-eyed, the fat, the thin, the melancholy, the merry, the dissipated, the dyspeptic, the sentimental, the jocose, the blunt, the ceremonious, the courtly, the rude, the critical, and the free and easy. One came forty miles out of his way, and pronounced the whole thing an imposition, and myself a humbug; another insisted upon my getting up at dinner, that he might sit down in my chair, characterised by the confounded guides as “le fauteuil de Van Dyck”; a third went so far as to propose lying down in our great four-post bed, just to say he had been there, though my wife was then in it. I speak not of the miserable practice of cutting slices off all the furniture as relics. John Murray took an inventory of the whole contents of the house for a new edition of his guidebook; and Holman, the blind traveller,feltme all over with his hand as I sat at tea with my wife; and last of all, a respectable cheesemonger from the Strand, after inspecting the entire building from the attics to the cellar, pressed sixpence into my hand at parting, and said, “Happy to see you, Mr. Van Dyck, if you come into the city!”
‘Then the advice and counsel I met with, oral and written, would fill a volume, and did; for I was compelled to keep an album in the hall for the visitors’ names. One suggested that my desecration of the temple of genius would be less disgusting if I dined in my kitchen, and left the ancient dining-room as the great artist had left it. Another hinted that my presence in my own house destroyed all the illusion of its historic associations. A third, a young lady—to judge by the writing—proposed my wearing a point-beard and lace ruffles, with trunk hose and a feather in my hat, probably to favour the “illusion” so urgently mentioned by the other writer, and, perhaps, to indulge visitors like my friend the cheesemonger. Many pitied me—well might they!—as one insensible to the associations of the spot; while my very servants, regarding me only as a show part of the establishment, neglected their duties on every side, and betook themselves to ciceroneship, each allocating his peculiar territory to himself, like the people who show the lions and the armour in the Tower.
‘No weather was either too hot or too cold, too sultry or too boisterous; no hour too late or too early; no day was sacred. If the family were at prayers or at dinner or at breakfast or in bed, it mattered not; they had come many miles to see the chateau, and see it they would. “Alas!” thought I, “if, as some learned persons suppose, individuals be recognisable in the next world, what a melancholy time of it will be yours, poor Van Dyck! If they make all this hubbub about the house you lived in, what will they do about your fleshy tabernacle?”
‘As the season advanced, the crowds increased; and as autumn began, the conflicting currents to and from the Rhine all met in my bedroom. There took place all the rendezvous of Europe. Runaway daughters there first repented in papa’s arms, and profligate sons promised amendment for the future. Myself and my wife were passed by unnoticed and disregarded amid this tumult of recognition and salutation. We were emaciated like skeletons; our meals we ate when we could, like soldiers on a retreat; and we slept in our clothes, not knowing at what moment the enemy might be upon us. Locks, bolts, and bars were ineffectual; our resistance only increased curiosity, and our garrison was ever open to bribery.
‘It was to no purpose that I broke the windows to let in the north wind and acute rheumatism; to little good did I try an alarm of fire every day about two, when the house was fullest; and I failed signally in terrifying my torturers when I painted the gardener’s wife sky-blue, and had her placed in the hall, with a large label over the bed, “collapsed cholera.” Bless your heart! the tourist cares for none of these; and I often think it would have saved English powder and shot to have exported half a dozen of them to the East for the siege of Seringapatam. Had they been only told of an old picture, a teapot, a hearth-brush, or a candlestick that once belonged to Godfrey de Bouillon or Peter the Hermit, they would have stormed it under all the fire of Egypt! Well, it’s all over at last; human patience could endure no longer. We escaped by night, got away by stealth to Ghent, took post-horses in a feigned name, and fled from the Château de Van Dyck as from the plague. Determined no longer to trust to chances, I have built a cottage myself, which has no historic associations further back than six weeks ago; and fearful even of being known as theci-devantpossessor of the château, I never confess to have been in Ghent in my life; and if Van Dyck be mentioned, I ask if he is not the postmaster at Tervueren.
‘Here, then, I conclude my miseries. I cannot tell what may be the pleasure that awaits thelive“lion,” but I envy no man the delights that fall to his lot who inhabits the den of thedeadone.’
When I look at the heading of this chapter, and read there the name of a little town upon the Rhine—which, doubtless, the majority of my readers has visited—and reflect on how worn the track, how beaten the path I have been guiding them on so long, I really begin to feel somewhat faint-hearted. Have we not all seen Brussels and Antwerp, Waterloo and Quatre Bras? Are we not acquainted with Belgium, as well as we are with Middlesex; don’t we know the whole country, from its cathedrals down to Sergeant Cotton?—and what do we want with Mr. O’Leary here? And the Rhine—bless the dear man!—have we not steamed it up and down in every dampschiffe of the rival companies? The Drachenfels and St. Goar, the Caub and Bingen, are familiar to our eyes as Chelsea and Tilbury Fort. True, all true, mesdames and messieurs—I have been your fellow-traveller myself. I have watched you pattering along, John Murray in hand, through every narrow street and ill-paved square, conversing with your commissionaire in such French as it pleased God, and receiving his replies in equivalent English. I have seen you at table d’hôte, vainly in search of what you deemed eatable—hungry and thirsty in the midst of plenty; I have beheld you yawning at the opera, and grave at the Vaudeville; and I knew you were making your summer excursion of pleasure, ‘doing your Belgium and Germany,’ like men who would not be behind their neighbours. And still, with all this fatigue of sea and land, this rough-riding and railroading, this penance of short bed and shorter board, though you studied your handbook from the Scheldt to Schaffhausen, you came back with little more knowledge of the Continent than when you left home. It is true, your son Thomas—that lamblike scion of your stock, with light eyes and hair—has been initiated into the mysteries ofrouge et noirandroulette; madame, your wife, has obtained a more extravagant sense of what is becoming in costume; your daughter has had her mind opened to the fascinations of a Frenchescrocor a ‘refugee Pole’; and you, yourself, somewhat the worse for your change of habits, have found the salads of Germany imparting a tinge of acidity to your disposition. These are, doubtless, valuable imports to bring back—not the less so, that they are duty free. Yet, after all, ‘joy’s recollection is no longer joy’; and I doubt if the retrospect of your wanderings be a repayment for their fatigues.
‘Would he have us stay at home, Pa?’ lisps out, in pouting accents of impatience, some fair damsel, whose ringlets alone would make a furore at Paris.
Nothing of the kind, my dear. Travel by all means. There’s nothing will improve your French accent like a winter abroad; and as to your carriage and air, it is all-essential you should be pressed in the waltz by some dark-moustached Hungarian or tight-laced Austrian. Your German will fall all the more trippingly off your tongue that you have studied it in the land of beer and beetroot; while, as a safeguard against those distressing sensations of which shame and modesty are the parents, the air of the Rhine is sovereign, and its watering-places an unerring remedy. All I bargain for is, to be of the party. Let there be a corner in a portmanteau, or an imperial, a carriage-pocket, or a courier’s sack for me, and I’m content. If ‘John’ be your guide, let Arthur be your mentor. He’ll tell you of the roads; I, of the travellers.
To him belong pictures and statues, churches, châteaux, and curiosities;myprovince is the people—the living actors of the scene, the characters who walk the stage in prominent parts, and without some knowledge of whom your ramble would lose its interest. Occasionally, it is true, they may not be the best of company. Que voulez-vous? ‘If ever you travel, you mustn’t feel queer,’ as Mathews said or sung—I forget which. I shall only do my endeavour to deal more with faults than vices, more with foibles than failings. The eccentricities of my fellow-men are more my game than their crimes; and therefore do not fear that in my company I shall teach you bad habits, nor introduce you to low acquaintances; and above all, no disparagement—and it is with that thought I set out—no disparagement of me that I take you over a much-travelled track. If it be so, there’s the more reason you should know the company whom you are in the habit of visiting frequently; and secondly, if you accompany me here, I promise you better hereafter; and lastly, one of the pleasantest books that ever was written was theVoyage autour de ma Chambre. Come, then, is it agreed—are we fellow-travellers? You might do worse than take me. I’ll neither eat you up, like your English footmen, nor sell you to the landlord, like your German courier, nor give you over to brigands, like your Italian valet. It’s a bargain, then; and here we are at Bonn.
It is one o’clock, and you can’t do better than sit down to the table d’hôte: call it breakfast, if your prejudices run high, and take your place. I have supposed you at ‘Die Sterne’ (The Star), in the little square of the town; and, certes, you might be less comfortably housed. The cuisine is excellent, both French and German, and the wines delicious. The company at first blush might induce you to step back, under the impression that you had mistaken the salon, and accidentally fallen upon a military mess. They are nearly all officers of the cavalry regiments garrisoned at Bonn, well-looking and well-dressed fellows, stout, bronzed, and soldierlike, and wearing their moustaches like men who felt hair on the upper lip to be a birthright. If a little too noisy and uproarious at table, it proceeds not from any quarrelsome spirit: the fault, in a great measure, lies with the language. German, except spoken by a Saxon madchen, invariably suggests the idea of a row to an uninterested bystander; and if Goethe himself were to recite his ballads before an English audience, I’d venture long odds they’d accuse him of blasphemy. Welsh and Irish are soft zephyrs compared to it.
A stray Herr Baron or two, large, portly, responsible-looking men, with cordons at their button-holes, and pipe-sticks projecting from their breast-pockets, and a sprinkling of students of the higher class—it is too dear for the others—make up the party. Of course, there are English; but my present business is not with them.
By the time you have arrived at the ‘Rae-braten, with capers’—which on a fair average, taken in the months of spring and summer, may be after about an hour and a half’s diligent performance—you’ll have more time to survey the party, who by this time are clinking their glasses, and drinking hospitably to one another in champagne; for there is always some newly returned comrade to be feted, or a colonel’s birthday or a battle, a poet or some sentimentalism about the Rhine or the Fatherland, to be celebrated. Happy, joyous spirits, removed equally from the contemplation of vast wealth or ignominious poverty! The equality so much talked of in France is really felt in Germany; and however the exclusives of Berlin and Vienna, or the still more exalted coteries of Baden or Darmstadt, rave of the fourteen quarterings which give theentréeto their salons, the nation has no sympathy with these follies. The unaffected, simple-minded, primitive German has no thought of assuming an air of distance to one his inferior in rank; and I have myself seen a sovereign prince take his place at table d’hôte beside the landlord, and hobnob with him cordially during dinner.
I do not mean to say that the German has no respect for rank; on the contrary, none more than he looks up to aristocracy, and reveres its privileges; but he does so from its association with the greatness of the Fatherland. The great names of his nobles recall those of the heroes and sages of whom the traditions of the country bear record; they are the watchwords of German liberty or German glory; they are the monuments of which he feels proudest. His reverence for their descendants is not tinged with any vulgar desire to be thought their equal or their associate; far from it, he has no such yearnings. His own position could never be affected by anything in theirs. The skipper of the fishing-craft might join convoy with the great fleet, but he knows that he only commands a shallop after all.
This, be it remarked, is a very different feeling from what we occasionally see nearer home. I have seen a good deal of student-life in Germany, and never witnessed anything approaching that process so significantly termed ‘tuft-hunting’ with us. Perhaps it may be alleged in answer that rank and riches, so generally allied in this country, are not so there; and that consequently much of what the world deems the prestige of condition is wanting to create that respect. Doubtless this is, to a certain extent, true; but I have seen the descendants of the most distinguished houses in Germany mixing with the students of a very humble walk on terms the most agreeable and familiar, assuming nothing themselves, and certainly receiving no marks of peculiar favour or deference from their companions. When one knows something of German character, this does not surprise one. As a people, highly imaginative and poetic in temperament, dreamy and contemplative, falling back rather on the past than facing the future, they are infinitely more assailable by souvenirs than promises; and in this wise the ancient fame of a Hohenstauffen has a far firmer hold on the attachment of a Prussian than the hopes he may conceive from his successor. It was by recalling to the German youth the former glories of the Fatherland, that the beautiful queen of that country revived the drooping spirit of the nation. It was over the tomb of the Great Frederick that the monarch swore to his alliance with Alexander against the invading legions of France. The songs of Uhland and Goethe, the lyrics of Burger and Korner, have their source and spirit in the heartfelt patriotism of the people. The great features of the land, and the more striking traits of national character, are inextricably woven in their writings, as if allied to each other; and the Rhine and the male energy of German blood, their native mountains and their native virtues, are made to reciprocate with one another; and thus the eternal landmarks of Germany are consecrated as the altars of its faithfulness and its truth.
The students are a means of perpetuating these notions. The young German is essentially romantic. A poet and a patriot, his dreams are of the greatness of his Fatherland, of its high mission among the nations of Europe; and however he may exaggerate the claims of his country or overrate his own efforts in her cause, his devotion is a noble one; and when sobered down by experience and years, it gives to Germany that race of faithful and high-souled people, the best guardians of her liberty and the most attached defenders of her soil.
A great deal ofmauvaise plaisanteriehas been expended by French and English authors on the subject of the German student. The theme was perhaps an inviting one. Certainly nothing was easier than to ridicule absurdities in their manner and extravagances in their costume—their long pipes and their long beards, their long skirts and long boots and long sabres, their love of beer and their law-code of honour. Russell, in his little work on Germany—in many respects the only English book worth reading on that country—has been most unjustly severe upon them. As to French authors, one never expects truth fromthem, except it slip out unconsciously in a work of fiction. Still, they have displayed a more than common spirit of detraction when speaking of the German student. The truth is, they cannot forget the part these same truths performed in repelling the French invasion of their country. The spirit evoked by Kôrner, and responded to from the Hartz to the Black Forest, was the death-note to the dominant tyranny of France. The patriotism which in the Basque provinces called into existence the wild Guerillas, and in the Tyrol created the Jager-bund, in more cultivated Germany elicited that race of poets and warriors whose war-songs aroused the nation from its sleep of slavery, and called them to avenge the injuries of their nation.
Laugh, then, if you will, at the strange figures whose uncouth costumes of cap and jack-boot bespeak them a hybrid between a civilian and a soldier. The exterior is, after all, no bad type of what lies within; its contradictions are indeed scarcely as great. The spectacles and moustaches, the note-book beneath the arm and the sabre at the side, the ink-bottle at the button-hole and the spurs jingling at the heels, are all the outward signs of that extraordinary mixture of patient industry and hot-headed enthusiasm, of deep thought and impetuous rashness, of matter-of-fact shrewdness and poetic fervour, and, lastly, of the most forgiving temper allied to an unconquerable propensity for duelling. Laugh if you will at him, but he is a fine fellow for all that; and despite all the contrarieties of his nature he has the seed of those virtues which in the peaceful life of his native country grow up into the ripe fruits of manly truth and honesty.
I wish you then to think well of the Bursche, and forgive the eccentricities into which a college life and a most absurd doctrine of its ordinances will now and then lead him. That wild-looking youth, for all that he has a sabre-wound across his cheek, and wears his neck bare like a Malay, despite his savage moustache and his lowering look, has a soft heart, though it beats behind that mass of nonsensical braiding. He could recite you for hours long the ballads of Schiller and the lyrics of Uhland; ah! and sing for you, too, with no mean skill, the music of Spohr and Weber, accompanying himself the while on the piano, with a touch that would make your heart thrill. And I am not sure that even in his wildest moments of enthusiastic folly he is not nearly as much an object of hope to his country as though he were making a book on the Derby, or studying ‘the odds’ among the ‘legs’ at Tattersall’s.
Above all things, I would beg of you not to be too hasty in judging him. Put not much trust in half what English writers lay to his charge; believe not one syllable of any Frenchman on the subject—no, not even that estimable Alexandre Dumas, who represents the ‘Student’ as demanding alms on the highroad—thus confounding him with the Lehr-Junker (the travelling apprentice), who by the laws of Germany is obliged to spend two years in wandering through different countries before he is permitted to reside permanently in his own. The blunder would have been too gross for anything but a Frenchman and a Parisian; but the Rue St. Denis covers a multitude of mistakes, and the Boulevard de Montmartre is a dispensation to all truth. Howitt, if you can read a heavy book, will tell you nearly everything abookcan tell; but setting a Quaker to describe Burschen life, was pretty much like sending a Hindu to report at a county meeting.
Now, all this time we have been wandering from Bonn and its gardens, sloping down into the very Rhine, and its beautiful park, the former pleasure-ground of that palace which now forms the building of the University. There are few sweeter spots than this. You have escaped from the long, low swamps of Holland, you have left behind you the land of marsh and fog, and already the mountainous region of Germany breaks on the view; the Sieben Gebirge are in sight, and the bold Drachenfels, with its ruined tower on its summit, is an earnest of the glorious scenery to come. The river itself looks brighter and fresher; its eddies seem to sparkle with a lustre they know not when circling along the swampy shores of Nimmegen.
Besides, there is really something in a name, and the sound of Deutschland is pleasanter than that of the country of ‘dull fogs and dank ditches’; and although I would not have you salute it, like Voltaire—