Monsieur Maurice | Page 2

enjoyment; while for companions and playmates I had old Karl,
my aunt's gardener, a pigeon-house full of pigeons, three staid elderly
cats, and a tortoise. In the way of education I fared scantily enough,
learning just as little as it pleased my aunt to teach me, and having that
little presented to me under its driest and most unattractive aspect.
Such was my life till I went away with my father in the Autumn of
1819. I was then between nine and ten years of age--having lost my
mother in earliest infancy, and lived with aunt Martha Baur ever since I
could remember.
The change from Nuremberg to Brühl was for me like the transition
from Purgatory to Paradise. I enjoyed for the first time all the delights

of liberty. I had no lessons to learn; no stern aunt to obey; but, which
was infinitely pleasanter, a kind-hearted Rhenish Mädchen, with a
silver arrow in her hair, to wait upon me; and an indulgent father whose
only orders were that I should be allowed to have my own way in
everything.
And my way was to revel in the air and the sunshine; to roam about the
park and pleasure-grounds; to watch the soldiers at drill, and hear the
band play every day, and wander at will about the deserted
state-apartments of the great empty Château.
Looking back upon it from this distance of time, I should pronounce
the Electoral Residenz at Brühl to be a miracle of bad taste; but not
Aladdin's palace if planted amid the gardens of Armida could then have
seemed lovelier in my eyes. The building, a heavy many-windowed
pile in the worst style of the worst Renaissance period, stood, and still
stands, in a fat, flat country about ten miles from Cologne, to which
city it bears much the same relation that Hampton Court bears to
London, or Versailles to Paris. Stucco and whitewash had been
lavished upon it inside and out, and pallid scagliola did duty
everywhere for marble. A grand staircase supported by agonised
colossi, grinning and writhing in vain efforts to look as if they didn't
mind the weight, led from the great hall to the state apartments; and in
these rooms the bad taste of the building may be said to have
culminated. Here were mirrors framed in meaningless arabesques,
cornices painted to represent bas-reliefs, consoles and pilasters of mock
marble, and long generations of Electors in the tawdriest style of
portraiture, all at full length, all in their robes of office, and all too
evidently by one and the same hand. To me, however, they were all
majestic and beautiful. I believed in themselves, their wigs, their
armour, their ermine, their high-heeled shoes and their stereotyped
smirk, from the earliest to the latest.
But the gardens and grounds were my chief delight, as indeed they
were the main attraction of the place, making it the focus of a holiday
resort for the townsfolk of Cologne and Bonn, and a point of interest
for travellers. First came a great gravelled terrace upon which the
ground-floor windows opened--a terrace where the sun shone more
fiercely than elsewhere, and orange-trees in tubs bore golden fruit, and
great green, yellow, and striped pumpkins, alternating with beds of

brilliant white and scarlet geraniums, lay lazily sprawling in the
sunshine as if they enjoyed it. Beyond this terrace came vast flats of
rich green sward laid out in formal walks, flower-beds and fountains;
and beyond these again stretched some two or three miles of finely
wooded park, pierced by long avenues that radiated from a common
centre and framed in exquisite little far-off views of Falkenlust and the
blue hills of the Vorgebirge.
We were lodged at the back, where the private gardens and offices
abutted on the village. Our own rooms looked upon our own garden,
and upon the church and Franciscan convent beyond. In the warm dusk,
when all was still, and my father used to sit smoking his meerschaum
by the open window, we could hear the low pealing of the chapel-organ,
and the monks chanting their evening litanies.
A happy time--a pleasant, peaceful place! Ah me! how long ago!

2
A whole delightful Summer and Autumn went by thus, and my new
home seemed more charming with every change of season. First came
the gathering of the golden harvest; then the joyous vintage-time, when
the wine-press creaked all day in every open cellar along the village
street, and long files of country carts came down from the hills in the
dusk evenings, laden with baskets and barrels full of white and purple
grapes. And then the long avenues and all the woods of Brühl put on
their Autumn robes of crimson, and flame-colour, and golden brown;
and the berries reddened in the