Their Silver Wedding Journey - Volume 3 , livre ebook

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110 pages

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pubOne.info present you this new edition. At the first station where the train stopped, a young German bowed himself into the compartment with the Marches, and so visibly resisted an impulse to smoke that March begged him to light his cigarette. In the talk which this friendly overture led to between them he explained that he was a railway architect, employed by the government on that line of road, and was travelling officially. March spoke of Nuremberg; he owned the sort of surfeit he had suffered from its excessive mediaevalism, and the young man said it was part of the new imperial patriotism to cherish the Gothic throughout Germany; no other sort of architecture was permitted in Nuremberg. But they would find enough classicism at Ansbach, he promised them, and he entered with sympathetic intelligence into their wish to see this former capital when March told him they were going to stop there, in hopes of something typical of the old disjointed Germany of the petty principalities, the little paternal despotisms now extinct.

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	06 novembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819947950
Langue	English

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PART III.
XLVIII.
At the first station where the train stopped, ayoung German bowed himself into the compartment with the Marches,and so visibly resisted an impulse to smoke that March begged himto light his cigarette. In the talk which this friendly overtureled to between them he explained that he was a railway architect,employed by the government on that line of road, and was travellingofficially. March spoke of Nuremberg; he owned the sort of surfeithe had suffered from its excessive mediaevalism, and the young mansaid it was part of the new imperial patriotism to cherish theGothic throughout Germany; no other sort of architecture waspermitted in Nuremberg. But they would find enough classicism atAnsbach, he promised them, and he entered with sympatheticintelligence into their wish to see this former capital when Marchtold him they were going to stop there, in hopes of somethingtypical of the old disjointed Germany of the petty principalities,the little paternal despotisms now extinct.
As they talked on, partly in German and partly inEnglish, their purpose in visiting Ansbach appeared to the Marchesmore meditated than it was. In fact it was somewhat accidental;Ansbach was near Nuremberg; it was not much out of the way toHolland. They took more and more credit to themselves for areasoned and definite motive, in the light of their companion'senthusiasm for the place, and its charm began for them with thedrive from the station through streets whose sentiment was bothItalian and French, and where there was a yellowish cast in thegray of the architecture which was almost Mantuan. They restedtheir sensibilities, so bruised and fretted by Gothic angles andpoints, against the smooth surfaces of the prevailing classicisticfacades of the houses as they passed, and when they arrived attheir hotel, an old mansion of Versailles type, fronting on a longirregular square planted with pollard sycamores, they said that itmight as well have been Lucca.
The archway and stairway of the hotel were drapedwith the Bavarian colors, and they were obscurely flattered tolearn that Prince Leopold, the brother of the Prince-Regent of thekingdom, had taken rooms there, on his way to the manoeuvres atNuremberg, and was momently expected with his suite. They realizedthat they were not of the princely party, however, when they weretold that he had sole possession of the dining-room, and they wentout to another hotel, and had their supper in keeping delightfullynative. People seemed to come there to write their letters and makeup their accounts, as well as to eat their suppers; they called forstationery like characters in old comedy, and the clatter ofcrockery and the scratching of pens went on together; and fortuneoffered the Marches a delicate reparation for their exclusion fromtheir own hotel in the cold popular reception of the prince whichthey got back just in time to witness. A very small group ofpeople, mostly women and boys, had gathered to see him arrive, butthere was no cheering or any sign of public interest. Perhaps hepersonally merited none; he looked a dull, sad man, with his plain,stubbed features; and after he had mounted to his apartment, theofficers of his staff stood quite across the landing, and barredthe passage of the Americans, ignoring even Mrs. March's presence,as they talked together.
“Well, my dear, ” said her husband, “here you haveit at last. This is what you've been living for, ever since we cameto Germany. It's a great moment. ”
“Yes. What are you going to do? ”
“Who? I? Oh, nothing! This is your affair; it's foryou to act. ”
If she had been young, she might have withered themwith a glance; she doubted now if her dim eyes would have any suchpower; but she advanced steadily upon them, and then the officersseemed aware of her, and stood aside.
March always insisted that they stood asideapologetically, but she held as firmly that they stood asideimpertinently, or at least indifferently, and that the insult toher American womanhood was perfectly ideal. It is true that nothingof the kind happened again during their stay at the hotel; theprince's officers were afterwards about in the corridors and on thestairs, but they offered no shadow of obstruction to her going andcoming, and the landlord himself was not so preoccupied with hishighhotes but he had time to express his grief that she had beenobliged to go out for supper.
They satisfied the passion for the little obsoletecapital which had been growing upon them by strolling past the oldResident at an hour so favorable for a first impression. It loomedin the gathering dusk even vaster than it was, and it was reallyvast enough for the pride of a King of France, much more a Margraveof Ansbach. Time had blackened and blotched its coarse limestonewalls to one complexion with the statues swelling and strutting inthe figure of Roman legionaries before it, and standing out againstthe evening sky along its balustraded roof, and had softened to theright tint the stretch of half a dozen houses with mansard roofsand renaissance facades obsequiously in keeping with the Versaillesideal of a Resident. In the rear, and elsewhere at fit distancefrom its courts, a native architecture prevailed; and at no greatremove the Marches found themselves in a simple German town again.There they stumbled upon a little bookseller's shop blinking in aquiet corner, and bought three or four guides and small historiesof Ansbach, which they carried home, and studied between drowsingand waking. The wonderful German syntax seems at its mostenigmatical in this sort of literature, and sometimes they lostthemselves in its labyrinths completely, and only made their wayperilously out with the help of cumulative declensions, pastarticles and adjectives blindly seeking their nouns, tolong-procrastinated verbs dancing like swamp-fires in the distance.They emerged a little less ignorant than they went in, and betterqualified than they would otherwise have been for their secondvisit to the Schloss, which they paid early the next morning.
They were so early, indeed, that when they mountedfrom the great inner court, much too big for Ansbach, if not forthe building, and rung the custodian's bell, a smiling maid who letthem into an ante-room, where she kept on picking over vegetablesfor her dinner, said the custodian was busy, and could not be seentill ten o'clock. She seemed, in her nook of the pretentious pile,as innocently unconscious of its history as any hen-sparrow who hadbuilt her nest in some coign of its architecture; and her friendly,peaceful domesticity remained a wholesome human background to thetragedies and comedies of the past, and held them in a picturesquerelief in which they were alike tolerable and even charming.
The history of Ansbach strikes its roots in the soilof fable, and above ground is a gnarled and twisted growth of goodand bad from the time of the Great Charles to the time of the GreatFrederick. Between these times she had her various rulers,ecclesiastical and secular, in various forms of vassalage to theempire; but for nearly four centuries her sovereignty was in thehands of the margraves, who reigned in a constantly increasingsplendor till the last sold her outright to the King of Prussia in1791, and went to live in England on the proceeds. She had takenher part in the miseries and glories of the wars that desolatedGermany, but after the Reformation, when she turned from theancient faith to which she owed her cloistered origin under St.Gumpertus, her people had peace except when their last prince soldthem to fight the battles of others. It is in this last transactionthat her history, almost in the moment when she ceased to have ahistory of her own, links to that of the modern world, and that itcame home to the Marches in their national character; for twothousand of those poor Ansbach mercenaries were bought up byEngland and sent to put down a rebellion in her Americancolonies.
Humanly, they were more concerned for the LastMargrave, because of certain qualities which made him the BestMargrave, in spite of the defects of his qualities. He was the sonof the Wild Margrave, equally known in the Ansbach annals, who maynot have been the Worst Margrave, but who had certainly a bad trickof putting his subjects to death without trial, and in cases wherethere was special haste, with his own hand. He sent his son to theuniversity at Utrecht because he believed that the republicaninfluences in Holland would be wholesome for him, and then he senthim to travel in Italy; but when the boy came home looking frailand sick, the Wild Margrave charged his official travellingcompanion with neglect, and had the unhappy Hofrath Meyer hangedwithout process for this crime. One of the gentlemen of his realm,for a pasquinade on the Margrave, was brought to the scaffold; hehad, at various times, twenty-two of his soldiers shot with arrowsand bullets or hanged for desertion, besides many whose penaltieshis clemency commuted to the loss of an ear or a nose; a Hungarianwho killed his hunting-dog, he had broken alive on the wheel. Asoldier's wife was hanged for complicity in a case of desertion; ayoung soldier who eloped with the girl he loved was brought toAnsbach from a neighboring town, and hanged with her on the samegallows. A sentry at the door of one of the Margrave's castlesamiably complied with the Margrave's request to let him take hisgun for a moment, on the pretence of wishing to look at it. Forthis breach of discipline the prince covered him with abuse andgave him over to his hussars, who bound him to a horse's tail anddragged him through the streets; he died of his injuries. Thekennel-master who had charge of the Margrave's dogs was accused ofneglecting them: without further inquiry the Margrave rode to theman's house and shot him down on his own threshold. A shepherd whomet the Margrave on a shying horse did not get his flock out of theway quickly enough; the Margrave demanded th