<h2> <SPAN name="ch10" id="ch10"></SPAN>CHAPTER X. </h2>
<p>We passed the Fourth of July on board the Quaker City, in mid-ocean. It
was in all respects a characteristic Mediterranean day—faultlessly
beautiful. A cloudless sky; a refreshing summer wind; a radiant sunshine
that glinted cheerily from dancing wavelets instead of crested mountains
of water; a sea beneath us that was so wonderfully blue, so richly,
brilliantly blue, that it overcame the dullest sensibilities with the
spell of its fascination.</p>
<p>They even have fine sunsets on the Mediterranean—a thing that is
certainly rare in most quarters of the globe. The evening we sailed away
from Gibraltar, that hard-featured rock was swimming in a creamy mist so
rich, so soft, so enchantingly vague and dreamy, that even the Oracle,
that serene, that inspired, that overpowering humbug, scorned the dinner
gong and tarried to worship!</p>
<p>He said: "Well, that's gorgis, ain't it! They don't have none of them
things in our parts, do they? I consider that them effects is on account
of the superior refragability, as you may say, of the sun's diramic
combination with the lymphatic forces of the perihelion of Jubiter. What
should you think?"</p>
<p>"Oh, go to bed!" Dan said that, and went away.</p>
<p>"Oh, yes, it's all very well to say go to bed when a man makes an argument
which another man can't answer. Dan don't never stand any chance in an
argument with me. And he knows it, too. What should you say, Jack?"</p>
<p>"Now, Doctor, don't you come bothering around me with that dictionary
bosh. I don't do you any harm, do I? Then you let me alone."</p>
<p>"He's gone, too. Well, them fellows have all tackled the old Oracle, as
they say, but the old man's most too many for 'em. Maybe the Poet Lariat
ain't satisfied with them deductions?"<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>The poet replied with a barbarous rhyme and went below.</p>
<p>"'Pears that he can't qualify, neither. Well, I didn't expect nothing out
of him. I never see one of them poets yet that knowed anything. He'll go
down now and grind out about four reams of the awfullest slush about that
old rock and give it to a consul, or a pilot, or a nigger, or anybody he
comes across first which he can impose on. Pity but somebody'd take that
poor old lunatic and dig all that poetry rubbage out of him. Why can't a
man put his intellect onto things that's some value? Gibbons, and
Hippocratus, and Sarcophagus, and all them old ancient philosophers was
down on poets—"</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:—May we all live to a green old age and be
prosperous and happy. Steward, bring up another basket of champagne."</p>
<p>It was regarded as a very able effort.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.]</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>"Oh, go to the pier, you old fool—that's where we want to go!"</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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.<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>The doctor said: "Avez-vous du vin?"</p>
<p>The dame looked perplexed. The doctor said again, with elaborate
distinctness of articulation:</p>
<p>"Avez-vous du—vin!"</p>
<p>The dame looked more perplexed than before. I said:</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>"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!"</p>
<p>She said:</p>
<p>"Bless you, why didn't you speak English before? I don't know anything
about your plagued French!"</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>"What did that pirate say?"</p>
<p>"Why, he told us which way to go to find the Grand Casino."</p>
<p>"Yes, but what did he say?"</p>
<p>"Oh, it don't matter what he said—we understood him. These are
educated people—not like that absurd boatman."<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>"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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<h2> <SPAN name="ch11" id="ch11"></SPAN>CHAPTER XI. </h2>
<p>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.<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>"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.<br/>
<br/> <br/></p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br/> <br/>
<br/></p>
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<p>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:</p>
<p>"All he wants now is a Plymouth Collection."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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