Chapter 8

The observations that I have had occasion to make on the character and life of the inhabitants will be more to the purpose at the Hague. I will only mention that in Rotterdam, as in other Dutch cities, no one, in speaking of their country's affairs, showed the least national vanity. The expressions, "Isn't it beautiful?" "What do you think of that?"--which one hears every moment in other countries, are never heard in Holland, even when the inhabitants are speaking of things that are universally admired. Every time that I told a citizen of Rotterdam that I liked the town he made a gesture of surprise. In speaking of their commerce and institutions they never let a vain expression escape them, nor even a boastful or complacent word. They always speak of what they are going to do, and never of what they have done. One of the first questions put to me when I named my country was, "What about its finances?" As to their own country, I observed that they know all that it is useful to know, and very little that it is simply a pleasure to know. A hundred things, a hundred parts of the city, which I had observed when I had been twenty-four hours at Rotterdam, many of the citizens had never seen; which proves that they are not in the habit of rambling about and looking at everything.

When I took my leave my acquaintances filled my pockets with cigars, counselled me to eat good nourishing dinners, and gave me advice on the subject of economical travelling. They parted from me quietly. There was no clamorous "What a pity you are going!" "Write soon!" "Come back quickly!" "Don't forget us!" which rang in my ears on leaving Spain. Here there was nothing but a hearty shake of the hand, a look, and a simple good-bye.

On the morning when I left Rotterdam I saw in the streets through which I passed to get to the Delft railway-station a novel spectacle, purely Dutch--the cleaning of the houses, which takes place twice a week in the early morning hours. All the servants in the city, dressed in flowered lilac-colored wrappers, white caps, white aprons, white stockings, and white wooden shoes, and with their sleeves turned up, were busily washing the doors, the walls, and the windows. Some sat courageously on the window-sills while they washed the panes of the windows with sponges, turning their backs to the street with half their bodies outside; others were kneeling on the pavement cleaning the stones with rough cloths; others were standing in the middle of the street armed with syringes, squirts, and pumps, with long rubber tubes, like those used for watering gardens, and were sending against the second-floor windows streams of water which were pouring down again into the street; others were mopping the windows with sponges and rags tied to the tops of long bamboo canes; others were burnishing the door-knobs, rings, and door-plates; some were cleaning the staircases, some the furniture, which they had carried out of the houses. The pavements were blocked with buckets and pitchers, with jugs, watering-pots, and benches; water ran down the walls and down the street; jets of water were gushing out everywhere. It is a curious thing that while labor in Holland is so slow and easy in all its forms, this work presented an appearance altogether different. All those girls with glowing faces were bustling indoors and hurrying out again, rushing up stairs and down, tucking up their sleeves hastily, assuming bold acrobatic attitudes and undergoing dangerous contortions. They took no notice of those who passed by except when with jealous eyes it was necessary to keep the profane race away from the pavement and walls. In short, it was a furious rivalry of cleanliness, a sort of general ablution of the city, which had about it something childish and festive, and which made one fancy that it was some rite of an eccentric religion which ordered its followers to cleanse the town from a mysterious infection sent by malicious spirits.

DELFT.

On my way from Rotterdam to Delft I saw for the first time the plains of Holland.

The country is perfectly flat--a succession of green and flower-decked meadows, broken by long rows of willows and clumps of alders and poplars. Here and there appear the tops of steeples, the turning arms of windmills, straggling herds of large black and white cattle, and an occasional shepherd; then, for miles, only solitude. There is nothing to attract the eye, there is neither hill nor valley. From time to time the sail of a ship is seen in the distance, but as the vessel is moving on an invisible canal, it seems to be gliding over the grass of the meadows as it is hidden for a moment behind the trees and then reappears. The wan light lends a gentle, melancholy influence to the landscape, while a mist almost imperceptible makes all things appear distant. There is a sense of silence to the eye, a peace of outline and color, a repose in everything, so that the vision grows dim and the imagination sleeps.

Not far from Rotterdam the town of Schiedam comes into view, surrounded by very high windmills, which give it the appearance of a fortress crowned with turrets; and far away can be seen the towers of the village of Vlaardingen, one of the principal stations of the herring-fisheries.

Between Schiedam and Delft I observed the windmills with great attention. Dutch windmills do not at all resemble the decrepit mills I had seen in the previous year at La Mancha, which seemed to be extending their thin arms to implore the aid of heaven and earth. The Dutch mills are large, strong, and vigorous, and Don Quixote would certainly have hesitated before running atilt at them. Some are built of stone or bricks, and are round or octagonal like mediaeval towers; others are of wood, and look like boxes stuck on the summits of pyramids. Most of them are thatched. About midway between the roof and the ground they are encircled by a wooden platform. Their windows are hung with white curtains, their doors are painted green, and on each door is written the use which it serves. Besides drawing water, the windmills do a little of everything: they grind grain, pound rags, crumble lime, crush stones, saw wood, press olives, and pulverize tobacco. A windmill is as valuable as a farm, and it takes a considerable fortune to build one and provide it with colza, grain, flour, and oil to keep it working, and to sell its products. Consequently, in many places the riches of a proprietor are measured by the number of mills he owns; an inheritance is counted by mills, and they say of a girl that she has so many windmills as dowry, or, even better, so many steam-mills; and fortune-hunters, who are to be found everywhere, sue for the maiden's hand to marry the mill. These countless winged towers scattered through the country give the landscape a singular appearance; they animate the solitude. At night in the midst of the trees they have a fantastic appearance, and look like fabulous birds gazing at the sky. By day in the distance they look like enormous pieces of fireworks; they turn, stop, curb and slacken their speed, break the silence by their dull and monotonous tick-tack, and when by chance they catch fire--which not infrequently happens, especially in the case of flour-mills--they form a wheel of flame, a furious rain of burning meal, a whirlwind of smoke, a tumult, a dreadful magnificent brilliance that gives one the idea of an infernal vision.

In the railway-carriage, although it was full of people, I had no opportunity of speaking or of hearing a word spoken. The passengers were all middle-aged men with serious faces, who looked at each other in silence, puffing out great clouds of smoke at regular intervals as if they were measuring time by their cigars. When we arrived at Delft I greeted them as I passed out, and some of them responded by a slight movement of the lips.

"Delft," says Lodovico Guicciardini, "is named after a ditch, or rather the canal of water which leads from the Meuse, since in the vulgar tongue a ditch is generally called _delft_. It is distant two leagues from Rotterdam, and is a town truly great and most beautiful in every part, having goodly and noble edifices and wide streets, which are lively withal. It was founded by Godfrey, surnamed the Hunchback, duke of Lorraine, he who for the space of four years occupied the country of Holland."

Delft is the city of disaster. Toward the middle of the sixteenth century it was almost entirely destroyed by fire; in 1654 the explosion of a powder-magazine shattered more than two hundred houses; and in 1742 another catastrophe of the same kind occurred. Besides these calamities, William the Silent was assassinated there in the year 1584. Moreover, there followed the decline and almost the extinction of that industry which once was the glory and riches of the city, the manufacture of Delft ware. In this art at first the Dutch artisans imitated the shapes and designs of Chinese and Japanese china, and finally succeeded in doing admirable work by uniting the Dutch and Asiatic styles. Dutch pottery became famous throughout Northern Europe, and it is nowadays as much sought after by lovers of this art as the best Italian products.

At present Delft is not an industrial or commercial city, and its twenty-two thousand inhabitants live in profound peace. But it is one of the prettiest and most characteristic towns of Holland. The wide streets are traversed by canals shaded by double rows of trees. On either side are red, purple, and pink cottages with white pointing, which seem content in their cleanliness. At every crossway two or three corresponding bridges of stone or of wood, with white railings, meet each other; the only thing to be seen is some barge lying motionless and apparently enjoying the delight of idleness; there are few people stirring, the doors are closed, and all is still.

I took my way toward the new church, looking around to see if I could discover any of the famous storks' nests, but there were none visible. The tradition of the storks of Delft is still alive, and no traveller writes about this city without mentioning it. Guicciardini calls it "a memorable fact of such a nature that peradventure there is no record of a like event in ancient or modern times." The circumstance took place during the great fire which destroyed nearly the whole city. There were in Delft a countless number of storks' nests. It must be remembered that the stork is the favorite bird of Holland, the bird of good augury, like the swallow. Storks are much in demand, as they make war on toads and rats, and the peasants plant perches surmounted by large wooden disks to attract them to build their nests there. In some towns they are to be seen walking through the streets. Well, at Delft there were innumerable nests. When the fire began, on the 3d of May, the young storks were well grown, but they could not yet fly. When they saw the fire approaching, the parent storks tried to carry their little ones into a place of safety, but they were too heavy, and after every sort of desperate effort the poor birds, worn and terrified, had to abandon the attempt. They might yet have saved themselves by leaving the young to their fate, as human beings generally do under similar circumstances. But, instead, they remained on their nests, pressing their little ones round them, and shielding them with their wings, as though to delay their destruction for at least a moment. Thus they awaited their death, and were found lifeless in this attitude of love and devotion. Who knows whether during the horrible terror and panic of the fire the example of that sacrifice, the voluntary martyrdom of those poor mothers, may not have given courage to some weaker soul about to abandon those who had need of him?

In the great square, where stands the new church, I again saw some shops like those I had seen in Rotterdam, in which all the articles which can be strung together are hung up either outside the door or in the room, so forming wreaths, festoons, and curtains--of shoes, for example, or of earthen pots, watering-cans, baskets, and buckets--which dangle from the ceiling to the ground, and sometimes almost hide the floor. The shop signs are like those at Rotterdam--a bottle of beer hanging from a nail, a paint-brush, a box, a broom, and the customary huge heads with wide-open mouths.

The new church, founded toward the end of the fourteenth century, is to Holland what Westminster Abbey is to England. It is a large edifice, sombre without and bare within--a prison rather than a house of God. The tombs are at the end, behind the enclosure of the benches.

I had scarcely entered before I saw the splendid mausoleum of William the Silent, but the sexton stopped me before the very simple tomb of Hugh Grotius, the _prodigium Europae_, as the epitaph calls him, the great jurisconsult of the seventeenth century--that Grotius who wrote Latin verses at the age of nine, who composed Greek odes at eleven, who at fourteen indited philosophical theses, who three years later accompanied the illustrious Barneveldt in his embassy to Paris, where Henry IV. presented him to his court, saying, "Behold the miracle of Holland!" that Grotius who at eighteen years of age was illustrious as a poet, as a theologian, as a commentator, as an astronomer, who had written a poem on the town of Ostend which Casaubon translated into Greek measures and Malesherbes into French verse; that Grotius who when hardly twenty-four years old occupied the post of advocate-general of Holland and Zealand, and composed a celebrated treatise on the _Freedom of the Seas_; who at thirty years of age was an honorary councillor of Rotterdam. Afterward, when, as a partisan of Barneveldt, he was persecuted, condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and shut up in the castle of Loewestein, he wrote his treatise on the _Rights of Peace and War_, which for a long time was the code of all the publicists of Europe. He was rescued in a marvellous way by his wife, who managed to be carried into the prison inside a chest supposed to be full of books, and sent back the chest with her husband inside, while she remained in prison in his place. He was then sheltered by Louis XIII., was appointed ambassador to France by Christina of Sweden, and finally returned in triumph to his native land, and died at Rostock crowned with glory and a venerable old age.

The mausoleum of William the Silent is in the middle of the church. It is a little temple of black and white marble, heavy with ornament and supported by slender columns, in the midst of which rise four statues representing Liberty, Prudence, Justice, and Religion. Above the sarcophagus is a recumbent statue of the prince in white marble, and at his feet the effigy of the little dog that saved his life at Mechlin by barking one night, when he was sleeping under a tent, just as two Spaniards were advancing stealthily to kill him. At the foot of this statue rises a beautiful bronze figure, a Victory, with outspread wings, resting lightly on her left foot. At the opposite side of the little temple is another bronze statue representing William seated. He is clad in armor, with his head uncovered and his helmet at his feet. An inscription in Latin tells that this monument was consecrated by the States of Holland "to the eternal memory of that William of Nassau whom Philip II., the terror of Europe, feared, yet whom he could neither subdue nor overthrow, but whom he killed by execrable fraud." William's children are laid by his side, and all the princes of his dynasty are buried in the crypt under his tomb.

Before this monument even the most frivolous and careless visitor remains silent and thoughtful.

It is well to recall the tremendous struggle of which the hero lies in that tomb.

On one side was Philip II., on the other William of Orange. Philip II., shut up in the dull solitude of the Escurial, lived in the midst of an empire which included Spain, North and South Italy, Belgium, and Holland, and, in Africa, Oran, Tunis, the archipelagoes of the Cape Verde and Canary Islands; in Asia the Philippine Islands; and the Antilles, Mexico, and Peru in America. He was the husband of the queen of England, the nephew of the emperor of Germany, who obeyed him as if he were a vassal; he was the lord, one may say, of all Europe, for the neighboring states were all weakened by political and religious disorders; he had at his command the best disciplined soldiers in Europe, the greatest generals of the age, American gold, Flemish industries, Italian science, an army of spies scattered through all the courts--men chosen from all countries fanatically devoted to him, conscious or unconscious tools of his will. He was the most sagacious, most mysterious prince of his age; he had everything that enchains, corrupts, alarms, and attracts the world--arms, riches, glory, genius, religion. While every one else was bowing low before this formidable man, William of Orange stood erect.

This man, without a kingdom and without an army, was nevertheless more powerful than the king. Like him, he had been a disciple of Charles V., and had learned the art of elevating thrones and hurling them down; like him, he was cunning and inscrutable, and yet he divined the future with keener intellectual vision than Philip. Like his enemy, he had the power of reading men's souls, but he also had the ability to win their hearts. He had a good cause to uphold, but he was acquainted with all the artifices that are used to maintain bad causes. Philip II., who spied into every one's affairs, was spied on in his turn and had his purposes divined by William. The designs of the great king were discovered and thwarted before they were put into execution; mysterious hands ransacked his drawers and pockets and investigated his secret papers. William in Holland read the mind of Philip in the Escurial; he anticipated, hindered, and embroiled all his plots; he dug the ground from beneath his feet, provoked him, and then escaped, only to return before his eyes like a phantom which he saw and could not seize, which he seized and could not destroy. At last William died, but even when dead the victory was his, and the enemy who survived was defeated. Holland remained for a short time without a head, but the Spanish monarchy had received such a blow that it was not able to rise again.

In this wonderful struggle the figure of the Great King gradually dwindles until it entirely disappears, while that of William of Orange becomes greater and greater by slow degrees until it grows to be the most glorious figure of his age. From the day when, as a hostage to the king of France, he discovered Philip's design of establishing the Inquisition in the Netherlands he devoted himself to defend the liberty of his country, and throughout his life he never wavered for a moment on the road he had entered. The advantages of his noble birth, a regal fortune, peace, and the splendid life which by habit and nature were dear to him, all these he sacrificed to the cause; he was reduced to poverty and exiled, yet in both poverty and exile he constantly refused the offers of pardon and of favor that were made from many sides and in many ways by the enemy who hated and feared him. Surrounded by assassins, made the target of the most atrocious calumnies, accused of cowardice before the enemy, and charged with the assassination of a wife whom he adored, sometimes regarded with distrust, slandered, and attacked by the very people he was defending,--he bore it all patiently and in silence. He did not swerve from the straight course to the goal, facing infinite perils with quiet courage. He did not bend before his people nor did he flatter them; he did not permit himself to be led away by the passions of his country; it was he who always guided; he was always at the head, always the first. All gathered around him; he was the mind, the conscience, and the strength of the revolution, the hearth that burned and kept the warmth of life in his fatherland. Great by reason alike of his audacity and prudence, he continued upright in a time full of perjury and treachery; he remained gentle in the midst of violent men; his hands were spotless when all the courts of Europe were stained with blood. With an army collected at random, with feeble or uncertain allies, checked by internal discords between Lutherans and Calvinists, nobles and commoners, magistrates and the people, with no great general to aid him, he was obliged to combat the municipal spirit of the provinces, which would none of his authority and escaped from his control; yet he triumphed in a conflict which seemed beyond human strength. He wore out the Duke of Alva, Requesens, Don John of Austria, and Alexander Farnese. He overthrew the conspiracies of those foreign princes who wished to help his country in order to subdue it. He gained friends and obtained aid from every part of Europe, and, after achieving one of the noblest revolutions in history, he founded a free state in spite of an empire which was the terror of the universe.

This man, who in the eyes of the world was so terrible and so great, was an affectionate husband and father, a pleasant friend and companion, who loved merry social gatherings and banquets, and was an elegant and polite host. He was a man of learning, and spoke, besides his native language, French, German, Spanish, Latin, and Italian, and conversed in a scholarly manner on all subjects. Although called the Silent (rather because he kept to himself the secret discovered at the French court than from a habit of silence), he was one of the most eloquent men of his time. His manners were simple and his dress plain; he loved his people and was beloved by them. He walked about the streets of the cities bareheaded and alone, and chatted with workmen and fishermen, who offered him drink out of their glasses; he listened to their discourses, settled their quarrels, entered their homes to restore domestic concord. Every one called him "Father William," and, in fact, he was the father rather than a son of his country. The feeling of admiration and gratitude which still lives for him in the hearts of the Hollanders has all the intimacy and tenderness of filial affection; his reverend name is still in every mouth; his greatness, stripped of every ornament and veil, remains entire, spotless, and steadfast like his work.

After seeing the tomb of the Prince of Orange I went to look upon the place where he was assassinated.

In 1580, Philip II. published an edict in which he promised a reward of twenty-five thousand golden pieces and a title of nobility to the man who would assassinate the Prince of Orange. This infamous edict, which stimulated covetousness and fanaticism, caused crowds of assassins to gather from every side, who surrounded William under false names and with concealed weapons, awaiting their opportunity. A young man from Biscay, Jaureguy by name, a fervent Catholic, who had been promised the glory of martyrdom by a Dominican friar, made the first attempt. He prepared himself by prayer and fasting, went to Mass, took the communion, covered himself with sacred relics, entered the palace, and, drawing near to the prince in the attitude of one presenting a petition, fired a pistol at his head. The ball passed through the jaw, but the wound was not mortal. The Prince of Orange recovered. The assassin was slain in the act by sword and halberd thrusts, then quartered on the public square, and the parts were hung up on one of the gates of Antwerp, where they remained until the Duke of Parma took possession of the town, when the Jesuits collected them and presented them as relics to the faithful.