The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain


"Doctor," I said, "you are going to invent authorities now and I'll leave
you, too. I always enjoy your conversation, notwithstanding the
luxuriance of your syllables, when the philosophy you offer rests on your
own responsibility; but when you begin to soar--when you begin to support
it with the evidence of authorities who are the creations of your own
fancy--I lose confidence."

That was the way to flatter the doctor. He considered it a sort of
acknowledgment on my part of a fear to argue with him. He was always
persecuting the passengers with abstruse propositions framed in language
that no man could understand, and they endured the exquisite torture a
minute or two and then abandoned the field. A triumph like this, over
half a dozen antagonists was sufficient for one day; from that time
forward he would patrol the decks beaming blandly upon all comers, and so
tranquilly, blissfully happy!

But I digress. The thunder of our two brave cannon announced the Fourth
of July, at daylight, to all who were awake. But many of us got our
information at a later hour, from the almanac. All the flags were sent
aloft except half a dozen that were needed to decorate portions of the
ship below, and in a short time the vessel assumed a holiday appearance.
During the morning, meetings were held and all manner of committees set
to work on the celebration ceremonies. In the afternoon the ship's
company assembled aft, on deck, under the awnings; the flute, the
asthmatic melodeon, and the consumptive clarinet crippled "The
Star-Spangled Banner," the choir chased it to cover, and George came in
with a peculiarly lacerating screech on the final note and slaughtered
it. Nobody mourned.

We carried out the corpse on three cheers (that joke was not intentional
and I do not endorse it), and then the President, throned behind a cable
locker with a national flag spread over it, announced the "Reader," who
rose up and read that same old Declaration of Independence which we have
all listened to so often without paying any attention to what it said;
and after that the President piped the Orator of the Day to quarters and
he made that same old speech about our national greatness which we so
religiously believe and so fervently applaud. Now came the choir into
court again, with the complaining instruments, and assaulted "Hail
Columbia"; and when victory hung wavering in the scale, George returned
with his dreadful wild-goose stop turned on and the choir won, of course.
A minister pronounced the benediction, and the patriotic little gathering
disbanded. The Fourth of July was safe, as far as the Mediterranean was
concerned.

At dinner in the evening, a well-written original poem was recited with
spirit by one of the ship's captains, and thirteen regular toasts were
washed down with several baskets of champagne. The speeches were bad
--execrable almost without exception. In fact, without any exception but
one. Captain Duncan made a good speech; he made the only good speech of
the evening. He said:

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:--May we all live to a green old age and be
prosperous and happy. Steward, bring up another basket of champagne."

It was regarded as a very able effort.

The festivities, so to speak, closed with another of those miraculous
balls on the promenade deck. We were not used to dancing on an even
keel, though, and it was only a questionable success. But take it all
together, it was a bright, cheerful, pleasant Fourth.

Toward nightfall the next evening, we steamed into the great artificial
harbor of this noble city of Marseilles, and saw the dying sunlight gild
its clustering spires and ramparts, and flood its leagues of environing
verdure with a mellow radiance that touched with an added charm the white
villas that flecked the landscape far and near. [Copyright secured
according to law.]

There were no stages out, and we could not get on the pier from the ship.
It was annoying. We were full of enthusiasm--we wanted to see France!
Just at nightfall our party of three contracted with a waterman for the
privilege of using his boat as a bridge--its stern was at our companion
ladder and its bow touched the pier. We got in and the fellow backed out
into the harbor. I told him in French that all we wanted was to walk
over his thwarts and step ashore, and asked him what he went away out
there for. He said he could not understand me. I repeated. Still he
could not understand. He appeared to be very ignorant of French. The
doctor tried him, but he could not understand the doctor. I asked this
boatman to explain his conduct, which he did; and then I couldn't
understand him. Dan said:

"Oh, go to the pier, you old fool--that's where we want to go!"

We reasoned calmly with Dan that it was useless to speak to this
foreigner in English--that he had better let us conduct this business in
the French language and not let the stranger see how uncultivated he was.

"Well, go on, go on," he said, "don't mind me. I don't wish to
interfere. Only, if you go on telling him in your kind of French, he
never will find out where we want to go to. That is what I think about
it."

We rebuked him severely for this remark and said we never knew an
ignorant person yet but was prejudiced. The Frenchman spoke again, and
the doctor said:

"There now, Dan, he says he is going to allez to the douain. Means he is
going to the hotel. Oh, certainly--we don't know the French language."

This was a crusher, as Jack would say. It silenced further criticism
from the disaffected member. We coasted past the sharp bows of a navy of
great steamships and stopped at last at a government building on a stone
pier. It was easy to remember then that the douain was the customhouse
and not the hotel. We did not mention it, however. With winning French
politeness the officers merely opened and closed our satchels, declined
to examine our passports, and sent us on our way. We stopped at the
first cafe we came to and entered. An old woman seated us at a table and
waited for orders. The doctor said:

"Avez-vous du vin?"

The dame looked perplexed. The doctor said again, with elaborate
distinctness of articulation:

"Avez-vous du--vin!"

The dame looked more perplexed than before. I said:

"Doctor, there is a flaw in your pronunciation somewhere. Let me try
her. Madame, avez-vous du vin?--It isn't any use, Doctor--take the
witness."

"Madame, avez-vous du vin--du fromage--pain--pickled pigs' feet--beurre
--des oeufs--du boeuf--horseradish, sauerkraut, hog and hominy--anything,
anything in the world that can stay a Christian stomach!"

She said:

"Bless you, why didn't you speak English before? I don't know anything
about your plagued French!"

The humiliating taunts of the disaffected member spoiled the supper, and
we dispatched it in angry silence and got away as soon as we could. Here
we were in beautiful France--in a vast stone house of quaint
architecture--surrounded by all manner of curiously worded French signs
--stared at by strangely habited, bearded French people--everything
gradually and surely forcing upon us the coveted consciousness that at
last, and beyond all question, we were in beautiful France and absorbing
its nature to the forgetfulness of everything else, and coming to feel
the happy romance of the thing in all its enchanting delightfulness--and
to think of this skinny veteran intruding with her vile English, at such
a moment, to blow the fair vision to the winds! It was exasperating.

We set out to find the centre of the city, inquiring the direction every
now and then. We never did succeed in making anybody understand just
exactly what we wanted, and neither did we ever succeed in comprehending
just exactly what they said in reply, but then they always pointed--they
always did that--and we bowed politely and said, "Merci, monsieur," and
so it was a blighting triumph over the disaffected member anyway. He was
restive under these victories and often asked:

"What did that pirate say?"

"Why, he told us which way to go to find the Grand Casino."

"Yes, but what did he say?"

"Oh, it don't matter what he said--we understood him. These are educated
people--not like that absurd boatman."

"Well, I wish they were educated enough to tell a man a direction that
goes some where--for we've been going around in a circle for an hour.
I've passed this same old drugstore seven times."

We said it was a low, disreputable falsehood (but we knew it was not).
It was plain that it would not do to pass that drugstore again, though
--we might go on asking directions, but we must cease from following
finger-pointings if we hoped to check the suspicions of the disaffected
member.

A long walk through smooth, asphaltum-paved streets bordered by blocks of
vast new mercantile houses of cream-colored stone every house and every
block precisely like all the other houses and all the other blocks for a
mile, and all brilliantly lighted--brought us at last to the principal
thoroughfare. On every hand were bright colors, flashing constellations
of gas burners, gaily dressed men and women thronging the sidewalks
--hurry, life, activity, cheerfulness, conversation, and laughter
everywhere! We found the Grand Hotel du Louvre et de la Paix, and wrote
down who we were, where we were born, what our occupations were, the
place we came from last, whether we were married or single, how we liked
it, how old we were, where we were bound for and when we expected to get
there, and a great deal of information of similar importance--all for the
benefit of the landlord and the secret police. We hired a guide and
began the business of sightseeing immediately. That first night on
French soil was a stirring one. I cannot think of half the places we
went to or what we particularly saw; we had no disposition to examine
carefully into anything at all--we only wanted to glance and go--to move,
keep moving! The spirit of the country was upon us. We sat down,
finally, at a late hour, in the great Casino, and called for unstinted
champagne. It is so easy to be bloated aristocrats where it costs
nothing of consequence! There were about five hundred people in that
dazzling place, I suppose, though the walls being papered entirely with
mirrors, so to speak, one could not really tell but that there were a
hundred thousand. Young, daintily dressed exquisites and young,
stylishly dressed women, and also old gentlemen and old ladies, sat in
couples and groups about innumerable marble-topped tables and ate fancy
suppers, drank wine, and kept up a chattering din of conversation that
was dazing to the senses. There was a stage at the far end and a large
orchestra; and every now and then actors and actresses in preposterous
comic dresses came out and sang the most extravagantly funny songs, to
judge by their absurd actions; but that audience merely suspended its
chatter, stared cynically, and never once smiled, never once applauded!
I had always thought that Frenchmen were ready to laugh at any thing.




CHAPTER XI.

We are getting foreignized rapidly and with facility. We are getting
reconciled to halls and bedchambers with unhomelike stone floors and no
carpets--floors that ring to the tread of one's heels with a sharpness
that is death to sentimental musing. We are getting used to tidy,
noiseless waiters, who glide hither and thither, and hover about your
back and your elbows like butterflies, quick to comprehend orders, quick
to fill them; thankful for a gratuity without regard to the amount; and
always polite--never otherwise than polite. That is the strangest
curiosity yet--a really polite hotel waiter who isn't an idiot. We are
getting used to driving right into the central court of the hotel, in the
midst of a fragrant circle of vines and flowers, and in the midst also of
parties of gentlemen sitting quietly reading the paper and smoking. We
are getting used to ice frozen by artificial process in ordinary bottles
--the only kind of ice they have here. We are getting used to all these
things, but we are not getting used to carrying our own soap. We are
sufficiently civilized to carry our own combs and toothbrushes, but this
thing of having to ring for soap every time we wash is new to us and not
pleasant at all. We think of it just after we get our heads and faces
thoroughly wet or just when we think we have been in the bathtub long
enough, and then, of course, an annoying delay follows. These
Marseillaises make Marseillaise hymns and Marseilles vests and Marseilles
soap for all the world, but they never sing their hymns or wear their
vests or wash with their soap themselves.

We have learned to go through the lingering routine of the table d'hote
with patience, with serenity, with satisfaction. We take soup, then wait
a few minutes for the fish; a few minutes more and the plates are
changed, and the roast beef comes; another change and we take peas;
change again and take lentils; change and take snail patties (I prefer
grasshoppers); change and take roast chicken and salad; then strawberry
pie and ice cream; then green figs, pears, oranges, green almonds, etc.;
finally coffee. Wine with every course, of course, being in France.
With such a cargo on board, digestion is a slow process, and we must sit
long in the cool chambers and smoke--and read French newspapers, which
have a strange fashion of telling a perfectly straight story till you get
to the "nub" of it, and then a word drops in that no man can translate,
and that story is ruined. An embankment fell on some Frenchmen
yesterday, and the papers are full of it today--but whether those
sufferers were killed, or crippled, or bruised, or only scared is more
than I can possibly make out, and yet I would just give anything to know.

We were troubled a little at dinner today by the conduct of an American,
who talked very loudly and coarsely and laughed boisterously where all
others were so quiet and well behaved. He ordered wine with a royal
flourish and said:

"I never dine without wine, sir" (which was a pitiful falsehood), and
looked around upon the company to bask in the admiration he expected to
find in their faces. All these airs in a land where they would as soon
expect to leave the soup out of the bill of fare as the wine!--in a land
where wine is nearly as common among all ranks as water! This fellow
said: "I am a free-born sovereign, sir, an American, sir, and I want
everybody to know it!" He did not mention that he was a lineal
descendant of Balaam's ass, but everybody knew that without his telling
it.

We have driven in the Prado--that superb avenue bordered with patrician
mansions and noble shade trees--and have visited the chateau Boarely and
its curious museum. They showed us a miniature cemetery there--a copy of
the first graveyard that was ever in Marseilles, no doubt. The delicate
little skeletons were lying in broken vaults and had their household gods
and kitchen utensils with them. The original of this cemetery was dug up
in the principal street of the city a few years ago. It had remained
there, only twelve feet underground, for a matter of twenty-five hundred
years or thereabouts. Romulus was here before he built Rome, and thought
something of founding a city on this spot, but gave up the idea. He may
have been personally acquainted with some of these Phoenicians whose
skeletons we have been examining.

In the great Zoological Gardens we found specimens of all the animals the
world produces, I think, including a dromedary, a monkey ornamented with
tufts of brilliant blue and carmine hair--a very gorgeous monkey he was
--a hippopotamus from the Nile, and a sort of tall, long-legged bird with a
beak like a powder horn and close-fitting wings like the tails of a dress
coat. This fellow stood up with his eyes shut and his shoulders stooped
forward a little, and looked as if he had his hands under his coat
tails. Such tranquil stupidity, such supernatural gravity, such
self-righteousness, and such ineffable self-complacency as were in the
countenance and attitude of that gray-bodied, dark-winged, bald-headed,
and preposterously uncomely bird! He was so ungainly, so pimply about
the head, so scaly about the legs, yet so serene, so unspeakably
satisfied! He was the most comical-looking creature that can be
imagined. It was good to hear Dan and the doctor laugh--such natural and
such enjoyable laughter had not been heard among our excursionists since
our ship sailed away from America. This bird was a godsend to us, and I
should be an ingrate if I forgot to make honorable mention of him in
these pages. Ours was a pleasure excursion; therefore we stayed with
that bird an hour and made the most of him. We stirred him up
occasionally, but he only unclosed an eye and slowly closed it again,
abating no jot of his stately piety of demeanor or his tremendous
seriousness. He only seemed to say, "Defile not Heaven's anointed with
unsanctified hands." We did not know his name, and so we called him "The
Pilgrim." Dan said:

"All he wants now is a Plymouth Collection."

The boon companion of the colossal elephant was a common cat! This cat
had a fashion of climbing up the elephant's hind legs and roosting on his
back. She would sit up there, with her paws curved under her breast, and
sleep in the sun half the afternoon. It used to annoy the elephant at
first, and he would reach up and take her down, but she would go aft and
climb up again. She persisted until she finally conquered the elephant's
prejudices, and now they are inseparable friends. The cat plays about
her comrade's forefeet or his trunk often, until dogs approach, and then
she goes aloft out of danger. The elephant has annihilated several dogs
lately that pressed his companion too closely.

We hired a sailboat and a guide and made an excursion to one of the small
islands in the harbor to visit the Castle d'If. This ancient fortress
has a melancholy history. It has been used as a prison for political
offenders for two or three hundred years, and its dungeon walls are
scarred with the rudely carved names of many and many a captive who
fretted his life away here and left no record of himself but these sad
epitaphs wrought with his own hands. How thick the names were! And
their long-departed owners seemed to throng the gloomy cells and
corridors with their phantom shapes. We loitered through dungeon after
dungeon, away down into the living rock below the level of the sea, it
seemed. Names everywhere!--some plebeian, some noble, some even
princely. Plebeian, prince, and noble had one solicitude in common--they
would not be forgotten! They could suffer solitude, inactivity, and the
horrors of a silence that no sound ever disturbed, but they could not
bear the thought of being utterly forgotten by the world. Hence the
carved names. In one cell, where a little light penetrated, a man had
lived twenty-seven years without seeing the face of a human being--lived
in filth and wretchedness, with no companionship but his own thoughts,
and they were sorrowful enough and hopeless enough, no doubt. Whatever
his jailers considered that he needed was conveyed to his cell by night
through a wicket.

This man carved the walls of his prison house from floor to roof with all
manner of figures of men and animals grouped in intricate designs. He
had toiled there year after year, at his self-appointed task, while
infants grew to boyhood--to vigorous youth--idled through school and
college--acquired a profession--claimed man's mature estate--married and
looked back to infancy as to a thing of some vague, ancient time, almost.
But who shall tell how many ages it seemed to this prisoner? With the
one, time flew sometimes; with the other, never--it crawled always. To
the one, nights spent in dancing had seemed made of minutes instead of
hours; to the other, those selfsame nights had been like all other nights
of dungeon life and seemed made of slow, dragging weeks instead of hours
and minutes.

One prisoner of fifteen years had scratched verses upon his walls, and
brief prose sentences--brief, but full of pathos. These spoke not of
himself and his hard estate, but only of the shrine where his spirit fled
the prison to worship--of home and the idols that were templed there.
He never lived to see them.

The walls of these dungeons are as thick as some bed-chambers at home are
wide--fifteen feet. We saw the damp, dismal cells in which two of Dumas'
heroes passed their confinement--heroes of "Monte Cristo." It was here
that the brave Abbe wrote a book with his own blood, with a pen made of a
piece of iron hoop, and by the light of a lamp made out of shreds of
cloth soaked in grease obtained from his food; and then dug through the
thick wall with some trifling instrument which he wrought himself out of
a stray piece of iron or table cutlery and freed Dantes from his chains.
It was a pity that so many weeks of dreary labor should have come to
naught at last.

They showed us the noisome cell where the celebrated "Iron Mask"--that
ill-starred brother of a hardhearted king of France--was confined for a
season before he was sent to hide the strange mystery of his life from
the curious in the dungeons of Ste. Marguerite. The place had a far
greater interest for us than it could have had if we had known beyond all
question who the Iron Mask was, and what his history had been, and why
this most unusual punishment had been meted out to him. Mystery! That
was the charm. That speechless tongue, those prisoned features, that
heart so freighted with unspoken troubles, and that breast so oppressed
with its piteous secret had been here. These dank walls had known the
man whose dolorous story is a sealed book forever! There was fascination
in the spot.




CHAPTER XII.

We have come five hundred miles by rail through the heart of France.
What a bewitching land it is! What a garden! Surely the leagues of
bright green lawns are swept and brushed and watered every day and their
grasses trimmed by the barber. Surely the hedges are shaped and measured
and their symmetry preserved by the most architectural of gardeners.
Surely the long straight rows of stately poplars that divide the
beautiful landscape like the squares of a checker-board are set with line
and plummet, and their uniform height determined with a spirit level.
Surely the straight, smooth, pure white turnpikes are jack-planed and
sandpapered every day. How else are these marvels of symmetry,
cleanliness, and order attained? It is wonderful. There are no
unsightly stone walls and never a fence of any kind. There is no dirt,
no decay, no rubbish anywhere--nothing that even hints at untidiness
--nothing that ever suggests neglect. All is orderly and beautiful--every
thing is charming to the eye.

We had such glimpses of the Rhone gliding along between its grassy banks;
of cosy cottages buried in flowers and shrubbery; of quaint old red-tiled
villages with mossy medieval cathedrals looming out of their midst; of
wooded hills with ivy-grown towers and turrets of feudal castles
projecting above the foliage; such glimpses of Paradise, it seemed to us,
such visions of fabled fairyland!

We knew then what the poet meant when he sang of: "--thy cornfields
green, and sunny vines, O pleasant land of France!"

And it is a pleasant land. No word describes it so felicitously as that
one. They say there is no word for "home" in the French language. Well,
considering that they have the article itself in such an attractive
aspect, they ought to manage to get along without the word. Let us not
waste too much pity on "homeless" France. I have observed that Frenchmen
abroad seldom wholly give up the idea of going back to France some time
or other. I am not surprised at it now.

We are not infatuated with these French railway cars, though. We took
first-class passage, not because we wished to attract attention by doing
a thing which is uncommon in Europe but because we could make our journey
quicker by so doing. It is hard to make railroading pleasant in any
country. It is too tedious. Stagecoaching is infinitely more
delightful. Once I crossed the plains and deserts and mountains of the
West in a stagecoach, from the Missouri line to California, and since
then all my pleasure trips must be measured to that rare holiday frolic.
Two thousand miles of ceaseless rush and rattle and clatter, by night and
by day, and never a weary moment, never a lapse of interest! The first
seven hundred miles a level continent, its grassy carpet greener and
softer and smoother than any sea and figured with designs fitted to its
magnitude--the shadows of the clouds. Here were no scenes but summer
scenes, and no disposition inspired by them but to lie at full length on
the mail sacks in the grateful breeze and dreamily smoke the pipe of
peace--what other, where all was repose and contentment? In cool
mornings, before the sun was fairly up, it was worth a lifetime of city
toiling and moiling to perch in the foretop with the driver and see the
six mustangs scamper under the sharp snapping of the whip that never
touched them; to scan the blue distances of a world that knew no lords
but us; to cleave the wind with uncovered head and feel the sluggish
pulses rousing to the spirit of a speed that pretended to the resistless
rush of a typhoon! Then thirteen hundred miles of desert solitudes; of
limitless panoramas of bewildering perspective; of mimic cities, of
pinnacled cathedrals, of massive fortresses, counterfeited in the eternal
rocks and splendid with the crimson and gold of the setting sun; of dizzy
altitudes among fog-wreathed peaks and never-melting snows, where
thunders and lightnings and tempests warred magnificently at our feet and
the storm clouds above swung their shredded banners in our very faces!
But I forgot. I am in elegant France now, and not scurrying through the
great South Pass and the Wind River Mountains, among antelopes and
buffaloes and painted Indians on the warpath. It is not meet that I
should make too disparaging comparisons between humdrum travel on a
railway and that royal summer flight across a continent in a stagecoach.
I meant in the beginning to say that railway journeying is tedious and
tiresome, and so it is--though at the time I was thinking particularly of
a dismal fifty-hour pilgrimage between New York and St. Louis. Of course
our trip through France was not really tedious because all its scenes and
experiences were new and strange; but as Dan says, it had its
"discrepancies."