The Wonders of Pompeii | Page 7

house:
nothing remains of it but the lower walls, with nothing resting on them.
At a distance you would suppose it to be a collection of screens set up
for parlor theatricals. Here is a public square: you will now see in it
only bottom platforms, supports that hold up nothing, shafts of columns
without galleries, pedestals without statues, mute blocks of stone, space
and emptiness. I will lead you into more than one temple. You will see
there only an eminence of masonry, side and end walls, but no front, no
portico. Where is art? Where is the presiding deity of the place? The
ruins of your stable would 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