Part 6

This is, then, what Hohenheim now is,--a place where you go and look about a little, walk through large empty halls and long corridors affording glimpses of the simple quarters of the students, see a pleasant landscape, and, in short, enjoy an hour of unquestionably temperate pleasure. What it was as the seat of the Hohenheim family, which is mentioned as early as the year 1100, we do not know; but under Duke Carl Eugen of Wuertemberg, in the last century, it was a sort of Versailles, if all accounts be true: magnificent parks and gardens, Roman ruins near Gothic towers and chapels, Egyptian pyramids and Swiss chalets, catacombs, artificial waterfalls, baths, hothouses, grottos with Corinthian pillars, a Flora temple with lovely arabesques on its silver walls, and the palace itself, rising proud and stately at the end of the park, furnished with every luxury, and filled with rare vases and pictures. Four colossal statues stand now in one of the halls, arrayed in garments which, in that freer time, they certainly could not boast. The raiment is of cloth, dipped, stiffened so that it resembles marble, unless you examine it too closely. No doubt it is more agreeable that those huge figures are somewhat clothed upon, but it does seem too absurd to think of ordering a new coat for "Apollo" when his old one gets shabby. Making minute investigations, we discovered he had already had several, wearing the last one outside of the others, as if to protect himself from the inclemency of the weather.

All the old magnificence was lavished by Herzog Carl upon Franciska von Hohenheim,--his "Franzel," as he called her in the soft Suabisch,--whose most romantic story is, _par excellence_, the thing of interest here, and the Suabians must love it, they tell it so very often.

From many narratives I gather the life-story of a woman who, in spite of the stain upon her name, is deeply revered in Wuertemberg for her strong, sweet influence upon its wild duke, for her wisdom and gentleness, and the good that through her came upon the realm.

She was a daughter of the Freiherr von Bernardin, a noble of ancient family and limited income. Franciska lived far removed from the gayety of courts, of which she and her sisters in their castle near Aalen rarely heard. When she was scarcely sixteen her father gave her hand to a Freiherr von Leutrum, a fussy, stuffy old man, who wrapped himself in furs even in summer, and was so conspicuously ugly the boys in the street would mock at him when he stood at his window. His great head, on a broad, humped back, scarcely reached the sill.

In addition, a small intellect, hot temper, and suspicious nature made him yet more of a monster; but Franciska was poor, and it appears it was considered then, as it would be now, a good match, as Von Leutrum was of an old family and rich. Whether the historians paint him blacker than he deserves in order to make Franciska white in contrast, is not easy to say. It certainly has that effect occasionally, however. Beauty, then, married the Beast. In 1770 Herzog Carl Eugen came to Pforzheim, where the nobles of the neighborhood, among them Baron von Leutrum, with his young wife, assembled to form his court.

Franciska was no famous beauty. She had, however, a tall, graceful figure, rich blond hair, and was very winning with her fresh, joyful ways, and a certain indescribable sweetness and gentleness of manner. The duke, from the first, singled her out by marked attention, which undoubtedly flattered her, coming from so famous, clever, and fascinating a man; and it is also probable that she made no especial effort to repulse the homage in which she could see no harm. He was then forty-two,--a man of stately beauty, one of the most renowned European princes of that time, with a strong and highly cultivated intellect, and of most winning manners where he cared to please. It also appears he could be a bear, a savage, and a tyrant when he willed.

It was, then, scarcely surprising that a girl married at sixteen to a fossil like Leutrum, who neglected and abused her, should be bewildered by the distinguished attention offered by her prince. Meanwhile Leutrum waxed more and more jealous, until one day in a rage, on account of remarks of the courtiers, he struck his wife in the face.

The duke, furious at this, insisted upon taking Franciska under his protection. But she, though agonized with fear and abhorrence of her husband, yet knowing too well her feeling for the duke, chose to leave the court at once and return with Leutrum to their castle.

Carl Eugen, never scrupulous as to means when he had anything to gain, caused a wheel of Leutrum's coach to be put into a state of precarious weakness, so that, going through some woods not far from Pforzheim, the carriage broke down, when the duke appeared, rode off with the trembling, miserable, happy Franciska, leaving Von Leutrum alone with his broken carriage and his rage.

The duke had been married for political reasons at eighteen to a princess of Bavaria, with whom he had lived but a year or two, their natures being strongly incompatible. He, however, a Roman Catholic, could not free himself from his first marriage until the death of his wife released him in 1784, when he married Franciska.

The remarkable thing in her history is, that the voice of no contemporary is raised against her. Noble ladies of unblemished name visited her as "Graefin von Hohenheim," and all testimony unites in praising her wisdom, sweetness, and grace, and her almost miraculous influence for good upon the duke.

"He found in her womanly grace and devoted love, the deepest appreciation of the beautiful and good, exquisite taste and tact, a strong, warm interest in his career and calling, wise counsel given in her soft, womanly words, and a heart for his people.

"In love and sorrow, in matters earnest and light, in his difficult affairs of state, in enjoyment of the beautiful in art and nature, she was ever by his side, filled with perfect appreciation of all that moved him."

She taught him gradually his duty towards his folk, which the wild, haughty duke had sadly ignored, and she, herself, was always loved and revered by them.

She was graceful and sparkling in society, not wearing her sorrows upon her sleeve, but in her private life and letters are marks of lifelong grief.

"If I could tell you my whole story," she writes to a friend in 1783, "if you could know the solemnity and repentance with which I look back upon it, you would withhold from me neither your pity nor your prayers.... Had I had in my sixteenth year, when, utterly inexperienced, I entered society with not the slightest knowledge of the world, left entirely to myself, surrounded by scenes whose meaning I could not grasp,--had I then had one true friend to warn me, to advise me; had his reason, his heart, his pureness of deed, inspired my respect and trust, indeed--indeed--I might have been a better woman."

Later, after a delightful evening at the Princess of Dessau's, where Lavater also was, she wrote:--

"I was inexpressibly moved by your assurance that you thought of me in this circle. Could I have felt worthier of such society, the pleasure would undoubtedly have been more unalloyed. But, as it was--Still I must not complain."

Such, briefly, is her story. She lived with the duke at the Solitude as well as here, and Hohenheim he made for her as beautiful as a fairy palace. He troubled neither her nor himself with scruples. His conscience was, indeed, not tender, and his life with her was unquestionably so innocent and idyllic in comparison with his mad past, that, to him at least, it no doubt seemed blameless. He loved her faithfully till his death, wrote to her when absent for a day or two as his good angel, with utter reverence as well as tenderest love. The proud respected her; the poorest and humblest came to her with their wants and sorrows.

She died in 1811 in her small, quiet court at Kirchheim unter Teck, where she had resided after the death of the duke; but her story and the remembrance of her eventful life will always haunt quiet Hohenheim, and invest it with a romance it cannot otherwise claim for itself.

"NUREMBERG THE ANCIENT."

The breeze of morning stole in and kissed our cheeks and whispered, "You have a day and a half to spend in dear, delicious old Nuremberg,--be up and doing!" Only a day and a half, and yet how infinitely better than no day at all there! We came, we saw, and were conquered, even by the huge knockers with bronze wreaths of Cupids and dragons' heads, the ornate, intricate locks, the massive doors, before we were within the portals of those proud patrician palaces with their stately inner courts and galleries, their frescos, painted windows and faded tapestries, time-stained grandeur, and all their relics of mediaeval magnificence.

O, we stretched our day and a half well, and filled it full of treasures, and our hearts with lovely thoughts and pictures of the unique old town, its high quaint gables, stone balconies, beautiful fountains, double line of walls, and seventy sentinel towers; its castle and wide moat, where now great trees grow and prim little gardens; its arched bridges and streams, with shadows of the drooping foliage on the banks; its oriel windows; its narrow, shady ways and odd corners; its memories of Albrecht Duerer and Hans Sachs, of Kaiser and knight and Meistersinger,--its Nurembergishness!

The St. Lorenz Church was our first halting-place. The whole world knows that its portal and painted windows are beautiful, and that it retains all the rich old objects of the Roman ritual; that being the condition under which Nuremberg pranced over in a twinkling to Protestantism, and people were ordered by the municipal authorities to believe to-day what they had disbelieved yesterday; and most of the world, perhaps, has seen the tabernacle for the vessels of the sacrament, but they who have not can never know from words how it rests on the bowed forms of its sculptor, Adam Kraft, and his two pupils and assistants, and rises like frozen spray sixty-four feet in the choir, with the warm light from the painted windows coloring its exquisite traceries and carvings. It looks like a holy thought or a hymn of praise caught in stone, aspiring heavenwards.

We saw there heavy gold chalices from old, old times, and some Gobelin tapestry only recently discovered hidden away; one scene represented the weighing of the soul of St. Lawrence to see if it were too light for heaven. The saint's soul had a shape, in fact was an infant's body, and the Devil was crouching near by, and St. Lawrence, full-grown, stood waiting, anxious to know his fate.

Then came a few hours in the German Museum, where, as usual in such places, the weary lagged behind, the elegant looked _blase_, the contrary-minded saw the wrong thing first, the energetic pushed valiantly on, striving to see all and remember all, from earliest forms of sculpture down through the ages,--all the gold and silver and carvings and costumes, the immense square green stoves, with the warm, cosy seat for the old grandmother in the corner; to glance at rare old lace without neglecting the ancient caps and combs and gewgaws; to look long at a few of the pictures,--the great one of Duerer's, "Otto at the Grave of Charlemagne," is here, you know,--and so our straggling party wandered on through corridor and chamber and staircase, past knights in effigy, some of whom looked like such jolly old souls, with gallons of wine beneath their breastplates, past a memorial tablet to a baby prince who died dim ages ago, to whom a small death-angel is offering an apple; and then, after seeing the bear, who guards a glass case of precious things in gold and silver, lowered down to his domain every night, and after sprinkling beer on his nose to see if he were of German parentage, we gathered ourselves together and wondered if we quite liked museums. You see so much more than you can comprehend; you see so much more than you want to see; you feel so astoundingly ignorant; you have information thrust upon you so ruthlessly. One wilful maiden says, "I'll go and live on a desert island, provided no one will show me an object of interest." Then in the shady cloisters we drank foaming beer with our German friends, and gathered strength for our next onslaught; and I beg no one to be captious about the length and out-of-breath character of this paragraph, for it is quite in keeping with our Nuremberg visit, with worlds to see in a little day and a half.

There was the old Rath Haus with the Duerer frescos and the Duerer house and pictures, which everybody mentions; and the rude, dark little den of a kitchen, which nobody to my knowledge has ever deigned to mention, where Mrs. Xantippe Duerer used to rattle her sauce-pans and scold her _Mann_. There was the Fraumkirche and St. Sebald, rich in painted windows and sculpture. In one room, so rich and dark with its oak wainscoting and Gobelin tapestry, we involuntarily searched behind the arras for Polonius, and then stared silently and felt quite flippant before the antique candelabra and Persian rugs and hopelessly indescribable ever-to-be-coveted furniture within those memory-laden walls. An antique, impressive writing-table was a model of rich, quaint beauty. Poems and romances would feel proud and pleased to simply write themselves under its aegis, and what a delicious aroma of the past would cling to them!

We visited the castle, of course, and streams of information about the Hohenzollerns were poured upon us. We were wicked enough to enjoy ourselves particularly among the instruments of torture,--exhibited by the jolliest, fattest, most _debonair_ Mrs. Jarley in the world. She regaled us with awful tales, that sounded worse than the "Book of Martyrs," and we were not disgusted, neither did we faint or scream. There was a lamentable want of feeling, and a marked inclination to laugh prevailed in our party. Indeed, we saw some sweet things there,--a hideous dragon's head, worn by women who beat their husbands; a kind of yoke in which two quarrelsome women were harnessed; a huge collar, with a bell attached, for gossips; and an openwork iron mask, with a great protruding, rattling tongue, for inveterate slanderers. We made liberal proposals to our jolly show-woman for a few of these articles, thinking we might be able to send them where they were needed, and strongly inclined to favor their readoption. An iron nose a foot long was worn by thieves, and the article stolen hung on the end of it.

It is grievous to think there will come a time when people who visit Nuremberg will see no walls and towers and moats. They are pulling down the walls at present, for they are as inconvenient as they are picturesque. Heavy teams and people on foot seeking egress and ingress at one time through the narrow passages in the massive structure, the city cramped, its growth retarded, dangerous accidents, as well as the most reasonable grounds in a commercial point of view, lead the wise to destroy something selfish tourists would fain preserve intact. But "if I were king of France, or, still better, pope of Rome," or emperor of Germany, I'd let the commerce go elsewhere where there is room for it, and guard old Nuremberg jealously as a precious, beautiful memorial and heirloom from ancestors who have slept for centuries.

The Johannes Cemetery here is the only lovely one I have yet seen in Germany. It is not beautiful in itself, as our cemeteries are; but the solemnity, the dignity of death is here, and no gaudy colors and tinsel wreaths jar upon your mood and pain you. Only great flat, gray stones, tablets with the arms in bronze of the old Nuremberg patricians, tell us wanderers who lies beneath. It was like a solemn poem to be there deciphering the proud armorial bearings on the great blocks placed there centuries ago, and the sweet-brier blooming all around with such an unconscious air on its pale pink blossoms, like fair young faces. One of Columbus's crew lies there. So many old names and dates!

We plucked a few leaves from Duerer's grave:--

"_Emigravit_ is the inscription on the tombstone where he lies, Dead he is not, but departed, for the artist never dies; Fairer seems the ancient city, and the sunshine seems more fair, That he once has trod its pavement, that he once has breathed its air."

SOME WUeRTEMBERG TOWNS.

The gardener gave it to the milkmaid and the milkmaid gave it to the errand-boy, the errand-boy gave it to the cook, who gave it to the head-waiter, who sold it to the individual who presented it to me. "It" was a bunch of great, sweet, half-blown June roses, that hung glowing on their stalks in their native garden at dawn, and before noon had experienced this life of change and adventure. It all happened in Wasseralfingen, a little town, where nothing else so momentous occurred during our brief visit, because it was Sunday, but where usually the celebrated iron-works make an immense disturbance, and interest visitors of a practical turn of mind. Our German friends bewailed the absence of the noise of the machinery on our account; believing that every American is born with a passionate devotion to mechanics, which increases through life, to the exclusion of a love of the beautiful. Recently, after relating a romantic story about a place on the Rhine, a German gentleman concluded his tale of love and chivalry by telling us that the Princess Somebody had established a girls' school there,--"which will interest you as Americans more than the story," he added, with perfect honesty and naivete.

"And why?" we meekly ask.

"Because Americans are practical and like useful things," he responds cheerfully, with as thorough a conviction as if he had said that two and two made four.

We made no useless effort to induce him to believe that the thought of sixty or eighty bread-and-butter misses does not enhance for us the charm of a tradition-haunted spot, nor did we struggle to impress our friends' minds in Wasseralfingen that its Sabbath stillness was more agreeable to us than the stir and rush of the works. There are some fixed ideas in the mind of the average German which a potent hand ought to seize and shake out. "Why don't you write letters to Germans about America, instead of to Americans about Germany?" suggests a clever German friend. "They seem to be more needed." It might really be worth while if Teutonic tenacity of opinion were not too huge a thing for a feeble weapon to slay.

To return to our Wasseralfingen,--most curious name!--it was pretty enough to look upon, as indeed most places in Wuertemberg are. It has its nicely-laid-out little park or _Anlagen_, with a statue in the middle of it; and this is what small manufacturing towns at home are not apt to waste much time upon, unfortunately for their children and their children's children. An inn nestled among the trees, with irregular wings and low, broad roofs, and a very broad landlord, who looked like a beer-mug, gave us comfortable shelter for a night, and supper and breakfast in its garden,--supper with lights and pipes and beer-bottles, and cheerful conversation all around.

A short trip by rail brought us to Heidenheim, past fields of waving grain and pretty hills, shadows of great trees falling on velvety meadows, oats rising and falling like billows in the morning breeze, and scarlet seas of poppies. Never anywhere have I seen such a glory of poppies! Miles of them on both sides of the road, gleaming and glowing as the sunlight kissed them.

And then Heidenheim, a pretty town given to manufactures, to factories and mills, with the ruins of its castle Hellenstein on the height, and its memories reaching far back to Roman times. Here lived knights who were princes of profligacy, and gloried in their extravagance; who shod their steeds with silver and gold, and flung jewels away like water. One of them longed to have his whole estate transformed into a strawberry, that he could swallow it all in one instant. Of course this family came to a bad end. It spent all its money, and its castles got out of repair; the last of its armor was sold for old iron, and the last of the race died a pauper.

The ruins retain traces of Roman architecture in the earliest walls, with various additions in later times, and are not especially interesting upon close acquaintance. The old well sunk deep in the foundation of natural rock, where you pay ten cents and see a woman drop a stone three hundred and eighty-five feet, and wait breathlessly until you hear the dull plash deep down in the darkness, is their most exciting feature. The woman offered to give us some water, but it requires a whole hour to get it up, and we felt suspicious of what might be lying in those uncanny depths.

On the shady side of the castle, with broad reaches of fertile field and belts of wood lying before our contented gaze, we listened to Volkslieder, so old and sweet they carried our hearts back into dim ages, and we strongly felt the tie that binds us to the race where such strains have their birth. Suddenly, as our singers ceased, a group of village children sitting on a block of stone at a short distance took up the refrain,--an irregular row of flaxen heads against the light, their forms prominent against the deep, peaceful background, singing away with such zest we could only be silent and listen. Song after song, in praise of their loved land, they sang; all sweet, whether the smallest ones could always keep in tune or not. They told how Eberhard im Bart could lay his head on the knee of his poorest peasant and sleep in peace till morning broke, and many another sweet, old story; and, keeping time with their heads and making daisy-chains with their hands, they shouted,--

"Beautiful Suabia is our _Heimath Land_!"

Truly you can forgive the Germans for a multitude of sins when you hear how and what their common people sing.

IN A GARDEN.