CHAPTER XXI
[Insolent Shopkeepers and Gabbling Americans]
Baden-Baden sits in the lap of the hills, and the natural and artificialbeauties of the surroundings are combined effectively and charmingly.The level strip of ground which stretches through and beyond the town islaid out in handsome pleasure grounds, shaded by noble trees and adornedat intervals with lofty and sparkling fountain-jets. Thrice a day a fineband makes music in the public promenade before the ConversationHouse, and in the afternoon and evening that locality is populous withfashionably dressed people of both sexes, who march back and forth pastthe great music-stand and look very much bored, though they make ashow of feeling otherwise. It seems like a rather aimless and stupidexistence. A good many of these people are there for a real purpose,however; they are racked with rheumatism, and they are there to stew itout in the hot baths. These invalids looked melancholy enough, limpingabout on their canes and crutches, and apparently brooding over allsorts of cheerless things. People say that Germany, with her damp stonehouses, is the home of rheumatism. If that is so, Providence must haveforeseen that it would be so, and therefore filled the land with thehealing baths. Perhaps no other country is so generously supplied withmedicinal springs as Germany. Some of these baths are good for oneailment, some for another; and again, peculiar ailments are conqueredby combining the individual virtues of several different baths. Forinstance, for some forms of disease, the patient drinks the native hotwater of Baden-Baden, with a spoonful of salt from the Carlsbad springsdissolved in it. That is not a dose to be forgotten right away.
They don't _sell_ this hot water; no, you go into the great Trinkhalle,and stand around, first on one foot and then on the other, while two orthree young girls sit pottering at some sort of ladylike sewing-workin your neighborhood and can't seem to see you--polite as three-dollarclerks in government offices.
By and by one of these rises painfully, and "stretches"--stretches fistsand body heavenward till she raises her heels from the floor, at thesame time refreshing herself with a yawn of such comprehensiveness thatthe bulk of her face disappears behind her upper lip and one is able tosee how she is constructed inside--then she slowly closes hercavern, brings down her fists and her heels, comes languidly forward,contemplates you contemptuously, draws you a glass of hot water and setsit down where you can get it by reaching for it. You take it and say:
"How much?"--and she returns you, with elaborate indifference, abeggar's answer:
"_Nach beliebe_" (what you please.)
This thing of using the common beggar's trick and the common beggar'sshibboleth to put you on your liberality when you were expecting asimple straightforward commercial transaction, adds a little to yourprospering sense of irritation. You ignore her reply, and ask again:
"How much?"
--and she calmly, indifferently, repeats:
"_Nach Beliebe_."
You are getting angry, but you are trying not to show it; you resolveto keep on asking your question till she changes her answer, or at leasther annoyingly indifferent manner. Therefore, if your case be like mine,you two fools stand there, and without perceptible emotion of any kind,or any emphasis on any syllable, you look blandly into each other'seyes, and hold the following idiotic conversation:
"How much?"
"_Nach beliebe_."
"How much?"
"_Nach beliebe_."
"How much?"
"NACH BELIEBE."
"How much?"
"_Nach beliebe_."
"How much?"
"_Nach beliebe_."
"How much?"
"_Nach beliebe_."
I do not know what another person would have done, but at this point Igave up; that cast-iron indifference, that tranquil contemptuousness,conquered me, and I struck my colors. Now I knew she was used toreceiving about a penny from manly people who care nothing about theopinions of scullery-maids, and about tuppence from moral cowards; butI laid a silver twenty-five cent piece within her reach and tried toshrivel her up with this sarcastic speech:
"If it isn't enough, will you stoop sufficiently from your officialdignity to say so?"
She did not shrivel. Without deigning to look at me at all, shelanguidly lifted the coin and bit it!--to see if it was good. Then sheturned her back and placidly waddled to her former roost again, tossingthe money into an open till as she went along. She was victor to thelast, you see.
I have enlarged upon the ways of this girl because they are typical;her manners are the manners of a goodly number of the Baden-Badenshopkeepers. The shopkeeper there swindles you if he can, and insultsyou whether he succeeds in swindling you or not. The keepers of bathsalso take great and patient pains to insult you. The frowsy woman whosat at the desk in the lobby of the great Friederichsbad and sold bathtickets, not only insulted me twice every day, with rigid fidelityto her great trust, but she took trouble enough to cheat me out of ashilling, one day, to have fairly entitled her to ten. Baden-Baden'ssplendid gamblers are gone, only her microscopic knaves remain.
An English gentleman who had been living there several years, said:
"If you could disguise your nationality, you would not find anyinsolence here. These shopkeepers detest the English and despise theAmericans; they are rude to both, more especially to ladies of yournationality and mine. If these go shopping without a gentleman ora man-servant, they are tolerably sure to be subjected to pettyinsolences--insolences of manner and tone, rather than word, thoughwords that are hard to bear are not always wanting. I know of aninstance where a shopkeeper tossed a coin back to an American lady withthe remark, snappishly uttered, 'We don't take French money here.' AndI know of a case where an English lady said to one of these shopkeepers,'Don't you think you ask too much for this article?' and he replied withthe question, 'Do you think you are obliged to buy it?' However, thesepeople are not impolite to Russians or Germans. And as to rank, theyworship that, for they have long been used to generals and nobles. Ifyou wish to see what abysses servility can descend, present yourselfbefore a Baden-Baden shopkeeper in the character of a Russian prince."
It is an inane town, filled with sham, and petty fraud, and snobbery,but the baths are good. I spoke with many people, and they were allagreed in that. I had the twinges of rheumatism unceasingly during threeyears, but the last one departed after a fortnight's bathing there,and I have never had one since. I fully believe I left my rheumatism inBaden-Baden. Baden-Baden is welcome to it. It was little, but it wasall I had to give. I would have preferred to leave something that wascatching, but it was not in my power.
There are several hot springs there, and during two thousand years theyhave poured forth a never-diminishing abundance of the healing water.This water is conducted in pipe to the numerous bath-houses, and isreduced to an endurable temperature by the addition of cold water. Thenew Friederichsbad is a very large and beautiful building, and in it onemay have any sort of bath that has ever been invented, and with allthe additions of herbs and drugs that his ailment may need or that thephysician of the establishment may consider a useful thing to put intothe water. You go there, enter the great door, get a bow graduated toyour style and clothes from the gorgeous portier, and a bath ticket andan insult from the frowsy woman for a quarter; she strikes a bell anda serving-man conducts you down a long hall and shuts you into acommodious room which has a washstand, a mirror, a bootjack, and a sofain it, and there you undress at your leisure.
The room is divided by a great curtain; you draw this curtain aside, andfind a large white marble bathtub, with its rim sunk to the level of thefloor, and with three white marble steps leading down to it. This tubis full of water which is as clear as crystal, and is tempered to 28degrees Re'aumur (about 95 degrees Fahrenheit). Sunk into the floor, bythe tub, is a covered copper box which contains some warm towels and asheet. You look fully as white as an angel when you are stretched outin that limpid bath. You remain in it ten minutes, the first time,and afterward increase the duration from day to day, till you reachtw
enty-five or thirty minutes. There you stop. The appointments of theplace are so luxurious, the benefit so marked, the price so moderate,and the insults so sure, that you very soon find yourself adoring theFriederichsbad and infesting it.
We had a plain, simple, unpretending, good hotel, in Baden-Baden--theH?tel de France--and alongside my room I had a giggling, cackling,chattering family who always went to bed just two hours after me andalways got up two hours ahead of me. But this is common in Germanhotels; the people generally go to bed long after eleven and get uplong before eight. The partitions convey sound like a drum-head, andeverybody knows it; but no matter, a German family who are all kindnessand consideration in the daytime make apparently no effort to moderatetheir noises for your benefit at night. They will sing, laugh, and talkloudly, and bang furniture around in a most pitiless way. If you knockon your wall appealingly, they will quiet down and discuss the mattersoftly among themselves for a moment--then, like the mice, they fall topersecuting you again, and as vigorously as before. They keep cruellylate and early hours, for such noisy folk.
Of course, when one begins to find fault with foreign people's ways, heis very likely to get a reminder to look nearer home, before he gets farwith it. I open my note-book to see if I can find some more informationof a valuable nature about Baden-Baden, and the first thing I fall uponis this:
"_Baden-Baden_ (no date). Lot of vociferous Americans at breakfastthis morning. Talking _at_ everybody, while pretending to talk amongthemselves. On their first travels, manifestly. Showing off. The usualsigns--airy, easy-going references to grand distances and foreignplaces. 'Well _good_-by, old fellow--if I don't run across you in Italy,you hunt me up in London before you sail.'"
The next item which I find in my note-book is this one:
"The fact that a band of 6,000 Indians are now murdering ourfrontiersmen at their impudent leisure, and that we are only ableto send 1,200 soldiers against them, is utilized here to discourageemigration to America. The common people think the Indians are in NewJersey."
This is a new and peculiar argument against keeping our army down to aridiculous figure in the matter of numbers. It is rather a strikingone, too. I have not distorted the truth in saying that the facts inthe above item, about the army and the Indians, are made use of todiscourage emigration to America. That the common people should berather foggy in their geography, and foggy as to the location of theIndians, is a matter for amusement, maybe, but not of surprise.
There is an interesting old cemetery in Baden-Baden, and we spentseveral pleasant hours in wandering through it and spelling out theinscriptions on the aged tombstones. Apparently after a man has laidthere a century or two, and has had a good many people buried on topof him, it is considered that his tombstone is not needed by him anylonger. I judge so from the fact that hundreds of old gravestones havebeen removed from the graves and placed against the inner walls of thecemetery. What artists they had in the old times! They chiseled angelsand cherubs and devils and skeletons on the tombstones in the mostlavish and generous way--as to supply--but curiously grotesque andoutlandish as to form. It is not always easy to tell which of thefigures belong among the blest and which of them among the oppositeparty. But there was an inscription, in French, on one of those oldstones, which was quaint and pretty, and was plainly not the work of anyother than a poet. It was to this effect:
Here Reposes in God, Caroline de Clery, a Religieuse of St. Denis aged83 years--and blind. The light was restored to her in Baden the 5th ofJanuary, 1839
We made several excursions on foot to the neighboring villages, overwinding and beautiful roads and through enchanting woodland scenery.The woods and roads were similar to those at Heidelberg, but notso bewitching. I suppose that roads and woods which are up to theHeidelberg mark are rare in the world.
Once we wandered clear away to La Favorita Palace, which is severalmiles from Baden-Baden. The grounds about the palace were fine; thepalace was a curiosity. It was built by a Margravine in 1725, andremains as she left it at her death. We wandered through a great manyof its rooms, and they all had striking peculiarities of decoration.For instance, the walls of one room were pretty completely coveredwith small pictures of the Margravine in all conceivable varieties offanciful costumes, some of them male.
The walls of another room were covered with grotesquely and elaboratelyfigured hand-wrought tapestry. The musty ancient beds remained in thechambers, and their quilts and curtains and canopies were decorated withcurious handwork, and the walls and ceilings frescoed with historicaland mythological scenes in glaring colors. There was enough crazy androtten rubbish in the building to make a true brick-a-bracker green withenvy. A painting in the dining-hall verged upon the indelicate--but thenthe Margravine was herself a trifle indelicate.
It is in every way a wildly and picturesquely decorated house, andbrimful of interest as a reflection of the character and tastes of thatrude bygone time.
In the grounds, a few rods from the palace, stands the Margravine'schapel, just as she left it--a coarse wooden structure, wholly barrenof ornament. It is said that the Margravine would give herself up todebauchery and exceedingly fast living for several months at a time,and then retire to this miserable wooden den and spend a few months inrepenting and getting ready for another good time. She was a devotedCatholic, and was perhaps quite a model sort of a Christian asChristians went then, in high life.
Tradition says she spent the last two years of her life in the strangeden I have been speaking of, after having indulged herself in one final,triumphant, and satisfying spree. She shut herself up there, withoutcompany, and without even a servant, and so abjured and forsook theworld. In her little bit of a kitchen she did her own cooking; she worea hair shirt next the skin, and castigated herself with whips--theseaids to grace are exhibited there yet. She prayed and told her beads,in another little room, before a waxen Virgin niched in a little boxagainst the wall; she bedded herself like a slave.
In another small room is an unpainted wooden table, and behind it sithalf-life-size waxen figures of the Holy Family, made by the very worstartist that ever lived, perhaps, and clothed in gaudy, flimsy drapery.[1] The margravine used to bring her meals to this table and _dine withthe holy family_. What an idea that was! What a grisly spectacle it musthave been! Imagine it: Those rigid, shock-headed figures, with corpsycomplexions and fish glass eyes, occupying one side of the table in theconstrained attitudes and dead fixedness that distinguish all men thatare born of wax, and this wrinkled, smoldering old fire-eater occupyingthe other side, mumbling her prayers and munching her sausages in theghostly stillness and shadowy indistinctness of a winter twilight. Itmakes one feel crawly even to think of it.
[1] The Savior was represented as a lad of about fifteen years of age.This figure had lost one eye.
In this sordid place, and clothed, bedded, and fed like a pauper, thisstrange princess lived and worshiped during two years, and in it shedied. Two or three hundred years ago, this would have made the poor denholy ground; and the church would have set up a miracle-factory thereand made plenty of money out of it. The den could be moved into someportions of France and made a good property even now.