FOOTNOTE:

Monday, April 22.

My journey to the Tombs of the Emperors takes some time to organize. The replies that come to headquarters state that the country has been less safe for the past few days, that bands of Boxers have appeared in the province, and they are waiting further instructions before consenting to my departure.

In the meantime I make another visit in the hot spring sunshine to the horrors of the Christian cemeteries violated by the Chinese.

The confusion there is unchanged; there is the same chaos of melancholy marbles, of mutilated emblems, of steles fallen and broken. The human remains which the Boxers did not have time to destroy before they were routed lie in the same places; no pious hand has ventured to bury them again, for, according to Chinese ideas, it would be accepting the proffered injury to put them back in the ground; they must lie there, crying for vengeance, until the day of complete reparation. There is no change in this place of abomination, except that it is no longer frozen; the sun shines, and here and there yellow dandelions or violet gillyflowers are blossoming in the sandy soil.

As to the great yawning wells which had been filled with the bodies of the tortured, time hasbegun to do its work; the wind has blown the dust and dirt over them, and their contents have dried to such an extent that they now form a compact gray mass, although an occasional foot or hand or skull still protrudes above the rest.

In one of these wells, on the human crust that rises nearly to the top of the ground, lies the body of a poor Chinese baby, dressed in a torn little shirt and swathed in red cotton,—it is a recent corpse, hardly stiff as yet. No doubt it is a little girl, for the Chinese have the most atrocious scorn for girls; the Sisters pick them up like this along the roads every day, thrown while still alive upon some rubbish heap. So it was, no doubt, with this one. She may have been ill, or ill-favored, or simply one too many in a family. She lies there face downward, with extended arms and little doll-like hands. Her face, from which the blood has been running, is lying on the most frightful rubbish; a few of the feathers of a young sparrow lie on the back of her neck, over which the flies are meandering.

Poor little creature in her red woollen rags with her little hands outstretched! Poor little face hidden so that no one shall see it more before its final decomposition!

FOOTNOTE:[2]A few days later, by order of the superior officers, those accusing statues were withdrawn from the market and the models destroyed. Only the statuettes of the French remained on sale, and they have become very rare.

[2]A few days later, by order of the superior officers, those accusing statues were withdrawn from the market and the models destroyed. Only the statuettes of the French remained on sale, and they have become very rare.

Pekin, Friday, April 26, 1901.

At last the day has come for my departure for the sacred wood which encloses the imperial tombs.

At seven o'clock in the morning I leave the Palace of the North, taking with me my last autumn's servants, Osman and Renaud, as well as four African riflemen and a Chinese interpreter. We start on horseback on animals chosen for the journey, which will be transported by rail whenever we are.

First, two or three kilometres across Pekin in the beautiful morning light, along great thoroughfares magnificent in their desolation, the route of pageants and of emperors; through the triple red gates, between lions of marble and obelisks of marble, yellow as old ivory.

Now the railway station—it is in the centre of the city at the foot of the wall of the second enclosure, for the Western barbarians dared tocommit the sacrilege of piercing the ramparts in order to introduce their submersive system.

Men and horses go aboard. Then the train threads its way across the devastated Chinese City, and for three or four kilometres skirts the colossal gray wall of the Tartar City, which continues to unfold itself, always the same, with the same bastions, the same battlements, without a gate, without anything, to relieve its monotony and its immensity.

A breach in the outer wall casts us forth at last into the melancholy country.

And for three hours and a half it is a journey through the dust of the plain, past demolished stations, rubbish, ruins. According to the great plans of the allied nations, this line, which actually goes to Pao-Ting-Fu, is to be extended several hundred leagues, so as to unite Pekin and Hang-Chow, two enormous cities. It would thus become one of the great arteries of new China, scattering along its way the benefits of Occidental civilization.

At noon we alight at Tchou-Tchou, a great walled city, whose high battlemented ramparts and two twelve-storied towers are perceived as through a cloud of ashes. A man is scarcely recognizable at twenty paces, as in times of fog in the north, so filled with dust is the air; and thesun, though dimmed and yellow, reflects a heat that is overpowering.

The commandant and the officers of the French port, which has occupied Tchou-Tchou since the autumn, were kind enough to meet me and to take me for breakfast to their table in the comparative freshness of the big dark pagodas where they with their men were installed. The road to the tombs,[3]they tell me, which latterly has seemed quite safe, has been less so for a few days, a band of two hundred marauding Boxers having yesterday attacked one of the large villages through which I must pass, where they fought all the morning,—until the appearance of a French detachment who came to the aid of the villagers sent the Boxers flying like a flock of sparrows.

"Two hundred Boxers," continued the commandant of the post, making a mental calculation; "let me see, two hundred Boxers: you will have to have at least ten men. You already have six horsemen; I will, if you wish, add four more."

I felt that I ought to make some suitable acknowledgment, to reply that it was too much, that he overpowered me. Then under the eyes of the Buddhas, who were watching us breakfast, we both began to laugh, struck all at once by the air of extravagant bluster in what we were saying. In truth it had the force of

"Paraissez, Navarrois, Maures et Castillans;"

and yet, ten men against two hundred Boxers are really all that are necessary. They are tenacious and terrible only behind walls, those fellows; but in a flat country—it is highly probable, moreover, that I shall not see the queue of one. I accept the reinforcement,—four brave soldiers, who will be delighted to accompany me; I accept so much the more readily, since my expedition will thus take on the proportions of a military reconnaissance, and this, it appears, will be a good thing just now.

At two o'clock we remount our horses, for we are to sleep in an old walled town twenty-five kilometres farther on, called Laï-Chow-Chien (Chinese cities seem to claim these names; we know of one called Cha-Ma-Miaou, and another, a very large, ancient capital, Chien-Chien).

We make a plunge and disappear at once in a cloud of dust which the wind chases over the plain,—the immense, suffocating plain. There is no illusion possible; it is the "yellow wind" which has arisen,—a wind which generally blows inperiods of three days, adding to the dust of China all that of the Mongolian desert.

Chinese Village Carts, the only Vehicle used in the North of China

No roads but deep tracks, paths several feet below the surface, which could only have been hollowed there in the course of centuries. A frightful country, which has, since the beginning of time, endured torrid heat and almost hyperborean cold. In this dry, powdery soil how can the new wheat grow, which here and there makes squares of really fresh green in the midst of the infinite grays? There are also from time to time a few sparse clumps of young elms and willows, somewhat different from ours, but nevertheless recognizable, just showing their first tiny leaves. Monotony and sadness; one would call it a poor landscape of the extreme north, lighted by an African sun,—a sun that has mistaken the latitude.

At a turn of the crooked road a band of laborers who see us suddenly spring up, are frightened, and throw down their spades to run away. But one of them stops the others, crying, "Fanko pink" (French soldiers). "They are French, do not be afraid." Then they bend again over the burning earth, and peaceably continue their work, looking at us as we pass by from the corners of their eyes. Their confidence speaks volumes on the somewhat exceptional kind of "barbarians" our brave soldiers have known how to be, in the course of a European invasion.

The few clumps of willows scattered over the plains almost always shelter under their sparse foliage the villages of tillers of the soil,—little houses of clay and of gray brick, absurd little pagodas, which are crumbling in the sunshine. Warned by watchmen, men and children come out as we pass to look at us in silence with naïve curiosity; bare to the waist, very yellow, very thin, and very muscular; pantaloons of the ever similar dark blue cotton. Out of politeness each one uncoils and allows to hang down his back his long plaited hair, for to keep it on the crown of the head would be a disrespect to me. No women; they remain concealed. These people must have much the same impression of us that the peasants of Gaul had when Attila, chief of the army, passed with his escort, except that they are less frightened. Everything about us is astonishing,—costumes, arms, and faces. Even my horse, which is an Arabian stallion, must seem to them a huge, unusual, superb animal beside their own little horses, with their big rough heads.

The frail willows, through which the sunlight sifts upon the houses and tiny pagodas of these primitive lives, scatter over us their blossoms, liketiny feathers or little tufts of cotton-wool, which fall in a shower, and mingle with the never-ending dust.

On the plain, which now begins again, level and always the same, I keep two or three hundred metres in advance of my little armed troop, to avoid the excessive dust raised by the trot of the horses' feet; a gray cloud behind me when I turn around shows me that they are following. The "yellow wind" continues to blow; we are powdered with it to such an extent that our horses, our moustaches, our uniforms have become of the color of ashes.

Toward five o'clock the old walled town where we are to pass the night appears before us. From afar it is almost imposing in the midst of the plain, with its high crenellated ramparts so sombre in color. Near by, no doubt, it would show but ruin and decrepitude, like the rest of China.

A horseman, bringing along with him the inevitable cloud of dust, comes out to meet me. It is the officer commanding the fifty men of the marine infantry who have occupied Laï-Chou-Chien since October. He informs me that the general has had the kindly thought of having me announced as one of the great mandarins of Occidental letters, so the mandarin of the town is coming out to meet me with an escort, and he hascalled together the neighboring villages for a fête which he is preparing for me.

In fact, here the procession comes, from out the crumbling old gates, advancing through the wasted fields, with red emblems and music.

Now it stops to await me, ranged in two lines on each side of the road. And following the usual ceremonial, some one, a servant of the mandarin, comes forward, fifty feet in advance of the others, with a large red paper, which is the visiting-card of his master. He himself, the timid mandarin, awaits, standing, with the people of his house, having come down from his palanquin out of deference. I extend my hand without dismounting, as I have been told to do, after which, in a cloud of gray dust, we make our way toward the great walls, followed by my cavaliers, and preceded by the procession of honor with music and emblems.

At the head are two big red parasols, surrounded with a fall of silk like the canopies in a procession; than a fantastic black butterfly, as large as an owl with extended wings, which is carried at the end of a stick by a child; then two rows of banners; then shields of red lacquered wood inscribed with letters of gold. As soon as we begin to march gongs commence to sound lugubriously at regular intervals as for a military salute, whilst heraldswith prolonged cries announce my arrival to the inhabitants of the village.

Here we are at the gate, which seems like the entrance to a cavern; on each side are hung five or six little wooden cages, each one containing a kind of black beast, motionless in the midst of a swarm of flies; their tails may be seen hanging outside the bars like dead things. What can it be that keeps itself rolled up like a ball, and has such a long tail? Monkeys? Ah, horrors, they are heads that have been severed from their bodies! Each one of these pretty cages contains a human head, beginning to grow black in the sunshine, with long, braided hair which has been intentionally uncoiled.

We are swallowed up by the big gate, and are received by the inevitable grinning old granite monsters which at right and at left raise their great heads with the squinting eyes. Motionless, against the inner wall of the tunnel, the people press to see me pass, huddled together, climbing one upon the other,—yellow nakedness, blue cotton rags, ugly faces. The dust fills and obscures this vaulted passage where men and horses press, enveloped in the same gloom.

We have entered old provincial China, belonging to another era entirely unknown to us.

Ruin and dilapidation within the walls, as I expected, not from any fault of the Boxers or of the Allies, for the war did not come near here, but as a result of decay, of the falling into dust of this old China, our elder by more than thirty centuries.

The gong in front of me continues to sound lugubriously at fixed intervals, and the heralds continue to announce me to the people by prolonged cries, resounding through the little powdery streets under the still burning evening sun. One sees unused land and cultivated fields. Here and there granite monsters, defaced, shapeless, half buried, worn by years, indicate what was formerly the entrance to a palace.

Before a door which surmounts a tricolored pavilion the procession stops, and I dismount. For seven or eight months our fifty soldiers of the marine infantry have been quartered here, spending a whole long winter at Laï-Chou-Chien, separated from the rest of the world by snow and icy steppes, and leading a Crusoe-like existence in the midst of the most perplexing surroundings.

It is a surprise and a joy to come among them, to see again their honest home faces, after all theyellow ones we have met along the road, darting sharp enigmatical glances at us. This French quarter is like a bit of life, gaiety, and youth in the midst of mummified old China.

It is plain that the winter has been good for our soldiers, for the look of health is on their cheeks. They have organized themselves with a comical and somewhat marvellous ingenuity, creating lavatories, douche rooms, a schoolroom where they teach French to the little Chinese, and even a theatre. Living in intimate comradeship with the people of the town, who will before long be unwilling to see them go, they cultivate vegetable gardens, raise chickens and sheep, and bring up little ravens by hand like orphan babies.

It is arranged that I should sleep at the house of the mandarin after having supped at the French post. So at nine o'clock they come for me to conduct me to the "Yamen" with lanterns of state, decorated in a very Chinese fashion and as big as barrels.

The Chinese Yamen is always of tremendous extent. In the cool night air, picking my way by the light of lanterns, amongst huge stones and between rows of servants, I pass through a series of courts two hundred metres long, with I don't know how many ruined porticoes and peristyles with shaky steps, before reaching the crumblingand dusty lodging which the mandarin intends for me,—a separate building in the midst of a sort of yard, and surrounded by old trees with shapeless trunks. There, under the smoky rafters, I have a great room, with whitewashed walls, containing in the centre a platform with seats like a throne, also some heavy ebony arm-chairs; and as wall decorations some rolls of silk spread out, on which poetry, in Manchou characters, is written. In the wing on the left is a small bedroom for my two servants, and on the right one for me with window-panes of rice paper. On a platform is a very hard bed with covers of red silk, and, lastly, an incense burner, in which little sticks of incense are burning. All this is rural, naïve, and superannuated, antiquated even for China.

My timid host, in ceremonial costume, awaits me at the entrance, and makes me take a seat with him on the central throne, where he offers me the obligatory tea in porcelain a hundred years old. Then he had the discretion to bring the audience to a close and to bid me good-night. As he withdrew he told me not to be disturbed if I heard a good deal of coming and going over my head, as the space above was frequented by rats. Neither was I to be disturbed if I heard on the other side of my paper window-panes people walking up and down in the yard playing castanets; they wouldbe the night watchmen, thus informing me that they were not asleep, and were doing their duty.

"There are many brigands in this country," he added; "the city with its high walls closes its gates at sunset, but the workmen going to the fields before daybreak have made a hole in the ramparts,—this the brigands have discovered, and do not hesitate to enter by it."

When this deep-bowing mandarin was gone, and I was alone in the darkness of my dwelling, in the heart of an isolated city whose gates were guarded by human heads in cages, I felt myself at an infinite distance away, separated from my own world by immense space as well as by time, by ages; it seemed to me that I was going to sleep amongst a people at least a thousand years behind our era.

Saturday, April 27.

The crowing of cocks, the singing of little birds on my roof, awoke me in my strange old room; and by the light that came in through my paper panes I guessed that the warm sun was shining out of doors.

Osman and Renaud, who were up before me, came to tell me that they were hurriedly making great preparations in the courtyard of the Yamen in order to give me a fête, a morning fête, becausewe had to continue our route to the imperial tombs soon after the mid-day meal.

It began about nine o'clock. I was given a seat in an arm-chair beside the mandarin, who seemed weighed down beneath his silken gowns. In front of me, in the dazzling sunshine, was the series of courts with porticoes of irregular outline and old monsters on pedestals. A crowd of Chinese—always the men alone, it is understood—have assembled in their eternal blue rags. The yellow wind which had died down at night, as usual, begins to blow again, and to whiten the heavens with dust. The acacias and the monotonous willows, which are almost the only trees scattered over this northern China, show here and there on their slender old branches little pale-green leaves just barely out.

First comes the slow, the very slow, passing of a band with many gongs, cymbals, and bells all muffled; the melody seems to be carried by a sweet, melancholy, and persistent unison of flutes,—large flutes, with a deep tone, some of which have several tubes, and resemble sheaves of wheat. It is sweet and lulling, exquisite to hear.

Now the musicians seat themselves near us, in a circle, to open the fête. All at once the rhythm changes, grows more rapid, and becomes a dance. Then from afar, from the retirement of the courtsand the old porticoes, one sees above the heads of the crowd, through the dust that grows thicker and thicker, a troop of dancing creatures two or three times taller than men, swinging along, swinging in regular time and playing citherns, fanning themselves, and comporting themselves generally in an exaggerated, nervous epileptic manner.—Giants? Jumping Jacks? What can they be? They are approaching rapidly with long, leaping steps, and here they are in front of us. Ah, they are on stilts, enormously high stilts. They are taller on their wooden legs than the shepherds of the Landes, and they hop like big grasshoppers. They are in costume and made up,—painted, rouged. They have wigs, false beards; they represent gods, genii such as one sees on old pagodas; they represent princesses also, with beautiful robes of embroidered silk, with cheeks too pink and white, and with artificial flowers in their chignons,—princesses all very tall, fanning themselves in an exaggerated way, and swinging along like the rest of the company, with the same regular, continuous movement, as persistent as the pendulum of a clock.

All these stilt-walkers, it seems, are merely young men of a neighboring village, who have formed themselves into a gymnastic society, and who do this for amusement. In the smallest villagesin the interior of China, centuries, yes, thousands of years, before the custom reached us, the men—fathers and sons—began to devote themselves passionately to feats of strength and skill, founding rival societies, some becoming acrobats, others balancers, or jugglers, and organizing contests. It is especially during the long winters that they exercise, when all is frozen, and when each little human group must live alone in the midst of a desert of snow.

In fact, in spite of their white wigs and their centenarian beards, it is obvious that all these people are young, very young, with childlike smiles. They smile naïvely, these droll, pleasant princesses with the over-long legs, whose fan motions are so excited and who dance more and more disjointedly, bending, reversing, and shaking their heads and their bodies in a frenzy. They smile naïvely, these old men with children's faces; they play the cithern or the tambourine as though they were possessed. The persistent unison of the flutes seems to bewitch them, to put them into a special condition of madness, expressed by more and more convulsive movements.

At a given signal each one stands on a single stilt, the other leg raised, the second stilt thrown back over the shoulder; and by prodigies of balancing they dance harder than ever, like marionetteswhose springs are out of order, whose mechanism is about to break down. Then bars two metres high are brought in, and they jump over them, every one taking part, including the princesses, the old men, and the genii, all keeping up an incessant play of fans and a beating of tambourines.

At last, when they can hold out no longer and go and lean against the porticoes among the old acacias and willows, another company just like the first comes forward and begins again, to the same tune, a similar dance. They represent the same persons, the same genii, the same long-bearded gods, the same beautiful mincing dames. In their accoutrements, so unknown to us, and with their curiously wrinkled faces, these dancers are the incarnation of ancient mythological dreams dreamed long ago in the dark ages by human beings at an infinite distance from us; and these customs are handed down from generation to generation, and from one end of the country to the other in that unchanging way in which rites, forms, and property in China are invariably transmitted.

This fête, this dance, extremely novel as it is, retains its village, its rustic character, and is as simple as any truly rural entertainment.

They finally cease jumping the bars, and nowtwo terrible beasts come forth, one red and one green. They are big, heraldic dragons at least twenty metres long, with the raised heads, the yawning mouths, the horns, and claws, and horrible squinting eyes that everybody knows. They advance rapidly, throwing themselves onto the shoulders of the crowd with the undulations of a reptile; they are light, however, made of pasteboard, covered with some sort of stuff, and each beast is supported in the air by means of sticks, by a dozen skilful young men who have a subtle knack of giving to their movements a serpentine effect. A sort of master of the ballet precedes them, holding in his hand a ball which they never lose sight of, and which he uses as the leader of an orchestra uses his baton, to guide the writhings of the monsters.

The two great creatures content themselves with dancing before me, to the sound of flutes and gongs, in the centre of the circle of Chinese, which is extended in order to make room for them. At length the struggle becomes quite terrible, while the gongs and cymbals rage. They become entangled, they roll on top of one another, they drag their long rings in the dust, and then, all at once, with a bound they get up, as though in a passion, and stand shaking their enormous heads at one another, trembling with rage. The ballet master,nervously moving his director's ball, throws himself about and rolls his ferocious eyes.

The dust on the crowd grows thicker and thicker, and on the invisible dragon-bearers; it rises in clouds, rendering this battle between the red beast and the green beast almost fantastic. The sun burns as in a tropical country, and yet the sad Chinese April, anæmic from such a drought following the frozen winter, is barely heralded by the tender color of the few tiny leaves on the old willows and acacias of the court.

After breakfast some of the mandarins of the plain from the neighboring villages arrive, preceded by music and bringing me pastoral offerings,—baskets of preserved grapes, baskets of pears, live chickens in cages, and a jar of rice-wine. They wear the official winter head-dress, with a raven's quill, and have on gowns of dark silk with squares of gold embroidery, in the centre of which is depicted, surrounded by clouds, the invariable stork flying toward the moon. They are nearly all dried-up old men with gray beards and drooping gray moustaches. We have greattchinchinswith them, profound bows, extravagant compliments, handshakings in which one feels the scratch of over-long nails, the touch of thin old fingers.

At two o'clock I remount with my men and start off through the dilapidated streets, preceded by thesame procession as upon my arrival. The gongs are muffled, the heralds sound their cries. Behind me my host, the mandarin, follows in his palanquin, accompanied by the troop on stilts and by the enormous dragons.

As we leave the village, and enter the deep tunnelled gateway where the crowd is already assembled to see us, the whole procession is engulfed with us,—the long, striding princesses, the gods who play the cithern or the tambourine, the red beast, and the green beast. In the semi-obscurity of the arched way, to the noise of all the citherns and of all the gongs, in the clouds of black dust which blind us, there is a compactmêlée, where our horses prance and jump, troubled by the noise and terrified by the two frightful monsters undulating above our heads.

After conducting us a quarter of a league beyond the walls, the procession leaves us at last, and we find silence again on the burning plain, where we have about twenty kilometres to go through the dust and the "yellow wind" before reaching Y-Tchou, another old walled city which is to be our halting-place for the night.

Not until to-morrow do we arrive at the tombs.

Chinese Peasant cultivating Rice Fields with Native Plow

The plain resembles that of yesterday, yet it is a little more green and wooded. The wheat, sown in rows, as with us, grows miraculously in this soil, made up of dust and cinders though it apparently is. Everything seems less desolate as one gets farther away from the region of Pekin, and ascends almost imperceptibly towards those great mountains of the west, which are appearing with greater and greater distinctness in front of us. The "yellow wind," too, blows with less severity, and when it dies down for a few moments, when the blinding dust decreases, it is like the country in the north of France, with its ploughed fields and clumps of elms and willows. One forgets that this is the heart of China, on the other side of the globe, and one expects to see peasants from home pass along the paths. But the few toilers who are bending over the earth have long braids, coiled about their heads like crowns, and their bare backs are saffron-colored.

All is peace in these sunshine-flooded fields, in these villages built in the scanty shade of the willows. The people seem to live happily, cultivating the friendly soil in primitive fashion, guided by the customs of five thousand years ago. Aside from the possible exactions of a few mandarins,—and there are many who are kind,—these Chinese peasants still live in the Golden Age, and I can hardly conceive of their accepting the joys of the "New China" dreamed of by Occidental reformers. Up to this time, it is true, the invasion has scarcely reached them; in this part of the country, occupied solely by the French, our troops have never played any other rôle than that of defender of the villagers against pillaging Boxers. Ploughing, sowing, all the work of the fields, has been quietly done in season, and it is impossible not to be struck with the very different look of other parts of the country which I will not designate, where there has been a reign of terror, and where the fields have been destroyed and have become desert steppes.

At about half-past four, against a background of mountains which are beginning to look tall to us, a village appears, the first sight of which, like that of yesterday, is rather formidable with its high crenellated ramparts.

A horseman comes out to meet me once more, like yesterday, and again it is the captain in command of the post of marine infantry stationed there since last autumn.

Watchers stationed on the walls have perceivedus from afar by the cloud of dust our horses raise on the plain. As soon as we approach we see emerging from the old gates the official procession coming to meet us, with the same emblems as at Laï-Chou-Chien,—the same big butterfly, the same red parasols, the same shields and banners. Each Chinese ceremonial has been for centuries regulated by unvarying usages.

However, the people who receive me to-day are much more elegant and undoubtedly richer than those of yesterday. The mandarin, who comes down from his sedan chair to await me at the side of the road, having sent his red paper visiting-card on before him a hundred feet or so, stands surrounded by a group of important-looking persons in sumptuous silk robes. He himself is a distinguished-looking old man, who wears in his hat the peacock feather and the sapphire button. There is an enormous crowd waiting to see me make my entrance to the funereal sound of the gongs and the prolonged cries of the heralds. On the top of the ramparts figures may be seen peering through the battlements with their small oblique eyes, and even in the dim gateways double rows of yellow men crowd against the walls. My interpreter confesses, however, that there is a general disappointment. "If he is a man of letters," they ask, "why is he dressed like a colonel?"(The scorn of the Chinese for the military profession is well known.) My horse, however, somewhat restores my prestige. Tired as the poor Algerian animal is, he still has a certain carriage of the head and tail when he feels that he is observed, and especially if he hears the sound of the gong.

Y-Tchou, the city wherein we find ourselves, shut in by walls thirty feet high, still contains fifteen thousand inhabitants in spite of its deserted districts and its ruins. There is a great crowd along our route, in all the little streets and in front of the little old shops where antediluvian occupations are carried on. It was from this very place that the terrible movement of hatred against foreigners was launched last year. In a convent of Bonze nuns in the neighboring mountain the war of extermination was first preached, and these people who receive me so kindly were the first Boxers. Ardent converts for the moment to the French cause, they cheerfully decapitate those of their own people who refuse to come to terms, and put their heads in the little cages which adorn the gates of their city; but if the wind should change to-morrow, I should see myself cut up by them to the tune of the same old gongs and with the same enthusiasm which they put into my reception. When I have taken possession of the house set apart for me, back of the residence ofthe mandarin at the end of an interminable avenue of old porticoes, and monsters who show me their teeth in tiger-like smiles, a half-hour of daylight still remains, and I go to pay a visit to a young prince of the imperial family, stationed at Y-Tchou in the interests of the venerable tombs.

First comes his garden, melancholy in the April twilight. It lies between walls of gray brick, and is very much shut in for a town already so walled. Gray also is the rockwork outlining the small squares or lozenges, where big red, lavender, and pink peonies flourish. These, unlike our own, are very fragrant, and to-night fill the air of this gloomy enclosure with an excessive odor. There are also rows of little porcelain jars inhabited by tiny fish—regular monstrosities—red fish or black fish with cumbersome fins and extravagant tails, giving the effect of a flounced petticoat; fish with enormous terrifying eyes, which protrude like those of the heraldic dragons and which are the result of I do not know what mysterious form of breeding. The Chinese, who torture the feet of their women, also deform their trees, so that they remain dwarfed and crooked. They train their fruits to resemble animals, and their animals to look like the chimæras of a dream.

It is already dark in the prince's apartment, which looks out on this prison-like garden, andone sees little, on first entering, but draperies of red silk, long canopies falling from numerous "parasols of honor," which are open and standing upright on wooden supports. The air is heavy, saturated with opium and musk. There are deep red divans with silver pipes lying about for smoking the poison of which China is in a fair way to perish. The prince, who is twenty or twenty-two years old, is of a sickly ugliness, with divergent eyes; he is perfumed to excess, and dressed in pale silk in tones of mauve or lilac.

In the evening dinner with the mandarin, where the commandant of the French post, the prince, two or three notables, and one of my "confrères," a member of the Academy of China,—a mandarin with a sapphire button,—are the guests. Seated in heavy square arm-chairs, there are six or seven of us around a table decorated with small, exquisite, and unusual bits of old porcelain, so tiny as to seem to be part of a doll service. Red candles in high copper chandeliers give us our light.

This very morning the entire province had orders to leave off the winter head-dress and to put on the summer one,—a conical affair, resembling a lamp-shade, from which fall tufts of reddish horse-hair or peacock's or crow's feathers,according to the rank of the wearer. And since it is the style to wear them at dinner, hats of this description make grotesque figures of the guests.

As for the ladies of the house, they, alas, remain invisible, and it would be the worst possible breach of good form to ask for them or to refer to them in any way. It is well known that a Chinaman compelled to speak of his wife must refer to her in an indirect way, using, whenever possible, a qualifying term, devoid of all compliment, as, for example, "my offensive" or "my nauseating" wife.

The dinner begins with preserved prunellas and a great variety of dainty sweetmeats, which are eaten with little chop-sticks. The mandarin makes excuses for not offering me sea-swallows' nests, but Y-Tchou is so far from the coast that it is difficult to secure what one would like. But to make up for this lack, there is a dish of sharks' fins, another of the bladder of the sperm whale, another still of hinds' nerves, besides a ragout of water-lily roots with shrimps' eggs.

The inevitable odor of opium and musk mingled with the flavor of strange sauces pervades the room, which is white with a black ceiling. Its walls are decorated with water-colors on long strips of precious yellow paper, containing representations of animals or of huge flowers. A scoreof servants flock about us with the same sort of head-dress as their masters, and clad in beautiful silk gowns with velvet corselets. At my right my "confrère" of the Chinese Academy discourses to me of another world. He is old and quite withered-looking from the abuse of the fatal drug; his small face, shrivelled to a mere nothing, is obliterated by his conical hat and by his big blue goggles.

"Is it true," he inquires, "that the Middle Empire occupies the top of the territorial globe, and that Europe hangs on one side at an uncomfortable angle?"

It appears that he has at the ends of his fingers more than forty thousand characters in writing, and that he is able to improvise sweet poetry on any subject you may choose. From time to time I am aghast at the sight of his skeleton-like arm emerging from sleeves like pagodas, and stretching out toward some dish. His object is to secure with his own two-tined fork some choice morsel for me, which compels me to resort to perpetual and difficult jugglery in order not to have to eat the things.

After several preposterous light dishes, boned ducks appear, then a copious variety of viands succeed one another until the guests announce that they really have had enough. Then theybring opium pipes and cigarettes, and soon it is time to take a palanquin for the nocturnal festival they are arranging for me.

Outside, in the long avenue of porticoes, under the starry sky, all the servants of the Yamen await us with big paper lanterns, painted with bats and chimæras. A hundred friendly Boxers are also there, holding torches to light us better. Each of us gets into a palanquin, and the bearers trot off with us, while flaming torches run along beside us, and gongs, also running, begin the noise of battle at the head of our procession.

By the light of dancing torches we file rapidly past the open stalls, past the groups of natives assembled to watch us, past the grimacing monsters ranged along our route.

At the rear of an immense court stands a new building, where by the light of the torches we read the astonishing inscription, "Parisiana of Y-Tchou." "Parisiana" in this ultra-Chinese town, which until the previous autumn had never seen a European approach its walls! Our bearers stop there, and we find it is a theatre improvised this winter by our sixty soldiers to help pass away the glacial evenings.

I had promised to assist at a gala performance given for me by these grown-up children this evening. And of all the charming receptions that havebeen tendered me here and there all over the world, none has moved me more than this one arranged by a few soldiers exiled in a lost corner of China. Their reserved smiles of welcome, the few words one of them undertook to say for all, were more touching than any banquet or formal address, and I was glad to press the hands of the brave soldiers who dared not offer them.

In order that I might have a souvenir of their evening's hospitality at Y-Tchou, they got up a subscription and presented me with a very local gift,—one of those red silk parasols with long falling draperies, which it is the custom in China to carry in front of men of mark. And cumbrous as the thing is, even when folded, it is needless to say that I shall take it with great care to France.

They next gave me an illustrated programme, on which the name of each actor figured, followed by a pompous title,—"Monsieur the soldier so-and-so of the Comédie-Française," or "Monsieur the corporal so-and-so of the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt." We take our places. It is a real theatre that they have made, with a raised stage, scenery, and a curtain.

In the Chinese arm-chairs, which are placed in the first row, their captain is seated next to me; then come the mandarin, the prince of the blood, and two or three other notables, with long queues.Behind us are the under-officers and the soldiers; several yellow babies in ceremonial toilettes mingle familiarly with them, even climbing up on their knees. They are pupils from their school. For they have started a school, like the one at Laï-Chou-Chien, to teach French to the children of the neighborhood. A sergeant presented me to an inimitable youngster of not more than six, dressed for the occasion in a beautiful gown, his little short, thick queue tied with red silk, who recited for me the beginning of "Maître corbeau sur un arbre perché," in a deep voice, rolling his eyes to the ceiling the while.

Three taps and the curtain rises. First comes a farce, by I know not whom, but certainly much retouched by themselves with an unexpected turn of wit which is irresistible. The ladies, the mothers-in-law, with false hair made of oakum, are indescribable. Then more comic scenes and songs from the "Black Cat." The Chinese guests on their throne-like chairs remain as impassive as the Buddhas of the pagodas. What do their Asiatic brains make of all this French gaiety?

Before the last numbers on the programme are over the sudden thundering of gongs is heard outside, the playing of citherns, and the clashing of cymbals, and of all the rest of the iron instruments of China. It is the prelude to the fêtewhich the mandarin is to give me, which is to take place in the courtyard of the army quarters, and in which our soldiers naturally are to take part.

A profusion of lanterns illumines the court, together with the flaming torches of a hundred Boxers. First there is a stilt dance, then follow all the gymnastic societies of the adjoining district in their specialties. Little country boys twelve years old, costumed like lords of old dynasties, have a sham battle, flourishing their swords and jumping about like kittens, prodigies of quickness and lightness. Then come the young men of another village, who throw off their garments and begin to twirl pitchforks all around their naked bodies; by a twist of the wrist or by an imperceptible movement of the foot they are turned so rapidly that very soon they are no longer forks to our eyes, but a row of endless serpents about the breasts of the men. Then suddenly, more deftly than in the best managed circus, a horizontal bar is placed before us, and acrobats, naked to the waist, and superbly muscular, give a performance. They belong to the mandarin, and are the very men who just now served us at the table in beautiful silken robes.

It all ended with very long and noisy fireworks. When the pieces attached to invisiblebamboo stems exploded in the air, delicate and luminous paper pagodas floated off across the starry sky, fabrics of a Chinese dream, trembling, imponderable, which suddenly took fire and disappeared in smoke.

It is late when we return through the little dark streets, now all asleep. Our bearers trot along, escorted by a thousand dancing lights from torches and lanterns.

Toward midnight I am at last alone, in the depths of the Yamen, in my separate dwelling, the avenue leading to it guarded by motionless, crouching beasts. On my centre-table they have placed a luncheon of all the kinds of cakes known to China. Trees in fruit, in flower, and without leaves, decorate my small tables,—dwarf trees, of course, grown in porcelain jars, and so tortured as to become unnatural. A little pear-tree has assumed the regular form of a lyre composed of white blossoms; a small peach-tree resembles a crown made of pink flowers. Everything in my room, except these fresh spring plants, is old, warped, worm-eaten, and at the holes in a ceiling that was once white appear the faces of innumerable rats, whose eyes follow me about the room. As soon as I put out my light and lie down in my great bed with carvings representing horrible animals,I hear all these rats come down, move about among the fine porcelains, and gnaw at my cakes. Then from out the more and more profound stillness of my surroundings the night watchmen with muffled steps begin discreetly to use their castanets.

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