It was Christmas Eve in a great Bavarian town. A joyous crowd pushed
its way through the streets white with snow, in the confusion of
the fog, the rumble of carriages, and the clamor of bells, toward
the booths, stalls, and cook-shops in the open air. Great fir-trees
bedecked with dangling gewgaws were being carried about, grazing the
ribbons and flowers of the booths and towering above the crowd like
shadows of Thuringian forests,--a breath of Nature in the artificial
life of winter.
It is twilight. The lingering lights of sunset, sending a crimson
glow through the fog, can still be seen from the gardens beyond the
Residence; and in the town the very air is so full of animation
and festivity that every light which blinks through a window-pane
seems to be dangling from a Christmas-tree. For this is not an
ordinary Christmas. It is the year of our Lord 1870; and the birth of
Christ is but an additional pretext for drinking the health of the
illustrious Von der Than, and celebrating the triumph of Bavarian
warriors. Christmas! Christmas! The Jews of the lower town themselves
have joined in the general merriment. Here comes old Augustus Cahn,
hurrying around the corner of "The Bunch of Blue Grapes." There is
an unusual light in his ferret eyes. His little bushy pigtail was
never known to wriggle so merrily. Over his sleeve, worn shiny by the
rope handles of his wallet, he carries an honest basket, quite full,
covered with a brown linen napkin, from under which peep the neck of
a bottle and a twig of holly.
What the deuce is the old usurer up to? Can he too be celebrating
Christmas? Has he assembled his friends and family to drink to
the Vaterland? Impossible. Everybody knows that old Cahn has no
Fatherland but his money-safe. Neither has he relatives nor friends;
he has only creditors. His sons, or rather his partners, have been
away for three months with the army. They are trading yonder behind
the luggage-vans of the landwehr, selling brandy, buying clocks,
ripping the knapsacks fallen by the wayside, and searching the
pockets of the dead at night on the battle-field. Father Cahn,
too old to follow his children, has remained in Bavaria, where
he is doing a flourishing business with the French prisoners. He
hovers about the quarters, loans money on watches, buys epaulets,
medals, and money-orders. He ferrets his way through hospitals and
ambulances, and creeps noiselessly to the bedside of the wounded,
inquiring in his hideous jargon,--
"Aff you zumting to zell?"
And now he is trotting along hurriedly with his basket on his arm,
because the military hospital closes at five, and because two
Frenchmen are waiting for him there, in that great gloomy building
behind the iron grating of narrow windows, where Christmas finds
nothing to cheer its vigil but the pale lamps that burn at the
bedside of the dying.