Lippincotts Magazine, January 1875 | Page 2

the great spectre,
retired with a valet's bow. Observing that Charlemagne had lost most of
his nose, he caused it to be replaced in gold very delicately chiseled and
enchased. The sacrilege was repeated by Frederick Barbarossa in 1165,
who went farther and forced Charlemagne to get up from his chair
before him. The corpse, in rising, fell in pieces, which have been
dispersed through Europe as relics. We saw such of them as remain
here at the Chapelle. I was allowed, for about the equivalent of an
American dollar, to measure the Occidental emperor's leg--they call it
his arm. And then, as a makeweight in the bargain, the venal sacristan

placed in my hands the head of Charlemagne.
I thought Hohenfels would have sunk to the ground with disgust. He
colored deeply and dragged me into the air. "I am ashamed of every
drop of German blood in my veins," he cried. "What are we to think of
the commerce of these wretches, for whom the very wounds of Cæsar
are the lips of a money-box?"
I had given back the skull, as Hamlet returns the skull of Yorick to the
grave-digger, and was dusting my fingers with a handkerchief, as
hundreds of Hamlets have dusted theirs. I said, "'Thrift, thrift,
Horatio.'"
"At Kreutzberg there are twenty monks on the counter! This morning,
at St. Ursula's, it was the eleven thousand virgins, their skulls ranged
like Dutch cheeses above our heads or in rows around the walls, with a
battery-full of them in the neighboring apartment, like a
cheesemonger's reserved magazine. Here, the very leader of modern
ideas, the creator of our form of civilization, is shown for so many
pennies to any grocer who wants to weigh the head of a king!
Profanation! Barbarians! Philistines!"
[Illustration: THE SKELETON IN ARMOR.]
I turned rather hastily, while my hands were yet clammy with the skull,
thinking that this accusation of Philistinism was aimed at me. But
Hohenfels thought of nothing less than of a personality, being in his
cloudiest mood of generalization. So I only concealed the handkerchief,
while I said, as easily as I might, "You need not accuse your German
blood, for I have lived long enough in my American's Paradise to know
that civilized Paris is considerably worse in this particular respect, with
the addition of a certain goblin levity particularly French. How often
have I seen babies frightened by the skulls in the dentists' windows,
with their cynical chewing action! It is said that a child sat next a
dentist's apprentice once in an omnibus, and was observed to turn rigid,
fixed and white, but unable to speak: he had sat on one of these skulls,
and it had bitten him. Silver-mounted skulls set as goblets, in imitation
of Byron, are to be seen at any of the china-shops rubbing against the
chaste cheeks of the old maid's teacup. Skeletons are sold, bleached and
with gilded hinges, to the medical students, who buy the pale horrors as
openly as meerschaum pipes. Have I not often found young Grandstone
supping among his doctors' apprentices of the Ober restaurant after

theatre-hours, a skeleton in the corner filled with umbrellas like a
hall-rack, and crowned with the triple or quintuple tiara of the girls'
best bonnets? Ay, Mimi Pinson's cap has known what it is to perch on
the bony head of Death. The juxtaposition is but an emblem. The
sewing-girl, like Hood's shirtmaker, scarcely fears the 'phantom of
grisly bone.' Poor Francine! where have you taken your artisanne's cap
to, I wonder? Are you left alone, all alone again, and thinking of the
pretty solitude you have left behind you at Carlsruhe? Who uses those
polished keys now?"
Hohenfels interrupted me, complaining that my monologue was
uninteresting and diffuse, and was interfering with the railway
time-table. But I finished it in the car: "And the railway! What has a
person of fixed and independent habits to do with railways but to growl
at them? Before I was tempted upon the railway by that impertinent
engineer at Noisy, I got up and sat down when I liked, ate wholesome
food at my own hours, and was contented at home. Confusion to him
who made me the victim of his engineering calculations! Confusion to
Grandstone and his nest of serpents at Épernay! Did they not introduce
me to Fortnoye, who has doubly destroyed my peace? Where are the
conspirators, that I may pulverize them with my maledictions?"
[Illustration: BRUSSELS.]
This question--which Hohenfels called peevish as he buried himself in
his book--was not answered until we had passed Verviers,
Chaudfontaine and Liège. I was aroused from a sulky slumber in the
station at Brussels by Hohenfels, who said, in his musical scolding way,
like the busy wheeze of a clicking music-box, "You may