The Wonders of Pompeii | Page 7

not be more naked a thousand years hence. Stones on all sides, tufa, bricks, lava, here and there some slabs of marble and travertine, then traces of destruction--paintings defaced, pavements disjointed and full of gaps and cracks--and then marks of spoliation, for all the precious objects found were carried off to the museum at Naples, and I can show you now nothing but the places where once stood the Faun, the statue of Narcissus, the mosaic of Arbelles and the famous blue vase. Such is the Pompeii that awaits the traveller who comes thither expecting to find another Paris, or, at least, ruins arranged in the Parisian style, like the tower of St. Jacques, for instance.
[Illustration: Clearing out a Narrow Street in Pompeii.]
You will say, perhaps, good reader, that I disenchant you; on the contrary, I prevent your disenchantment. Do not prepare the way for your own disappointment by unreasonable expectations or by ill-founded notions; this is all that I ask of your judgment. Do not come hither to look for the relics of Roman grandeur. Other impressions await you at Pompeii. What you are about to see is an entire city, or at all events the third of an ancient city, remote, detached from every modern town, and forming in itself something isolated and complete which you will find nowhere else. Here is no Capitol rebuilt; no Pantheon consecrated now to the God of Christianity; no Acropolis surmounting a Danish or Bavarian city; no Maison Carrée (as at Nismes) transformed to a gallery of paintings and forming one of the adornments of a modern Boulevard. At Pompeii everything is antique and eighteen centuries old; first the sky, then the landscape, the seashore, and then the work of man, devastated undoubtedly, but not transformed, by time. The streets are not repaired; the high sidewalks that border them have not been lowered for the pedestrians of our time, and we promenade upon the same stones that were formerly trodden by the feet of Sericus the merchant and Epaphras the slave. As we enter these narrow streets we quit, perforce, the year in which we are living and the quarter that we inhabit. Behold us in a moment transported to another age and into another world. Antiquity invades and absorbs us and, were it but for an hour, we are Romans. That, however, is not all. I have already repeatedly said that Vesuvius did not destroy Pompeii--it has preserved it.
The structures that have been exhumed crumble away in the air in a few months--more than they had done beneath the ashes in eighteen centuries. When first disinterred the painted walls reappear fresh and glowing as though their coloring were but of yesterday. Each wall thus becomes, as it were, a page of illustrated archeology, unveiling to us some point hitherto unknown of the manners, customs, private habits, creeds and traditions; or, to sum all up in a word, of the life of the ancients.
The furniture one finds, the objects of art or the household utensils, reveal to us the mansion; there is not a single panel which, when closely examined, does not tell us something. Such and such a pillar has retained the inscription scratched upon it with the point of his knife by a Pompeian who had nothing else to do; such a piece of wall on the street set apart for posters, presents in huge letters the announcement of a public spectacle, or proclaims the candidature of some citizen for a contested office of the state.
I say nothing of the skeletons, whose attitudes relate, in a most striking manner, the horrors of the catastrophe and the frantic struggles of the last moment. In fine, for any one who has the faculty of observation, every step is a surprise, a discovery, a confession won concerning the public and private life of the ancients. Although at first sight mute, these blocks of stone, when interrogated, soon speak and confide their secrets to science or to the imagination that catches a meaning with half a word; they tell, little by little, all that they know, and all the strange, mysterious things that took place on these same pavements, under this same sky, in those miraculous times, the most interesting in history, viz.: the eighth century of Rome and the first of the Christian era.
[Footnote A: The money accruing from this sale is applied to the Pompeian library mentioned elsewhere.]

II.
THE FORUM.
DIOMED'S INN.--THE NICHE OF MINERVA.--THE APPEARANCE AND THE MONUMENTS OF THE FORUM.--THE ANTIQUE TEMPLE.--THE PAGAN EX-VOTO OFFERINGS.--THE MERCHANTS' CITY EXCHANGE AND THE PETTY EXCHANGE.--THE PANTHEON, OR WAS IT A TEMPLE, A SLAUGHTER-HOUSE, OR A TAVERN?--THE STYLE OF COOKING AND THE FORM OF RELIGION.--THE TEMPLE OF VENUS.--- THE BASILICA.--THE INSCRIPTIONS OF PASSERS-BY UPON THE WALLS.--THE FORUM REBUILT.
As you alight at the station, in the first