The Combustible Captain of Vienna
Our guide in Vienna was the most stupid human being I ever saw. He was
profoundly ignorant on a tremendously wide range of subjects; he had a
most complete repertoire of ignorance. He must have spent years of study
to store up so much interesting misinformation. This guide was much
addicted to indulgence of a peculiar form of twisted English and at
odd moments given to the consumption of a delicacy of strictly Germanic
origin, known in the language of the Teutons as a rollmops. A rollmops
consists of a large dilled cucumber, with a pickled herring coiled round
it ready to strike, in the design of the rattlesnake-and-pinetree flag
of the Revolution, the motto in both instances being in effect: "Don't
monkey with the buzz saw!" He carried his rollmops in his pocket and
frequently, in art galleries or elsewhere, would draw it out and nibble
it, while disseminating inaccuracies touching on pictures and statues
and things.
Among other places, he took us to the oldest church in Vienna. As I now
recollect it was six hundred years old. No; on second thought I will say
it must have been older than that. No church could possibly become so
moldy and mangy looking as that church in only six hundred years. The
object in this church that interested me most was contained in an ornate
glass case placed near the altar and alongside the relics held to be
sacred. It did not exactly please me to gaze at this article; but the
thing had a fascination for me; I will not deny that.
It seems that a couple of centuries ago there was an officer in Vienna,
a captain in rank and a Frenchman by birth, who, in the midst of
disorders and licentiousness, lived so godly and so sanctified a life
that his soldiers took it into their heads that he was really a saint,
or at least had the making of a first-rate saint in him, and, therefore,
must lead a charmed life. So--thus runs the tale--some of them laid a
wager with certain Doubting Thomases, also soldiers, that neither
by fire nor water, neither by rope nor poison, could he take harm to
himself. Finally they decided on fire for the test. So they waited until
he slept--those simple, honest, chuckle-headed chaps--and then they
slipped in with a lighted torch and touched him off.
Well, sir, the joke certainly was on those soldiers. He burned up with
all the spontaneous enthusiasm of a celluloid comb. For qualities of
instantaneous combustion he must have been the equal of any small-town
theater that ever was built--with one exit. He was practically a total
loss and there was no insurance.
They still have him, or what is left of him, in that glass case. He
did not exactly suffer martyrdom--though probably he personally did
not notice any very great difference--and so he has not been canonized;
nevertheless, they have him there in that church. In all Europe I only
saw one sight to match him, and that was down in the crypt under the
Church of the Capuchins, in Rome, where the dissected cadavers of four
thousand dead--but not gone--monks are worked up into decorations. There
are altars made of their skulls, and chandeliers made of their thigh
bones; frescoes of their spines; mosaics of their teeth and dried
muscles; cozy corners of their femurs and pelves and tibiae. There are
two classes of travelers I would strongly advise not to visit the crypt
of the Capuchins' Church--those who are just about to have dinner and
want to have it, and those who have just had dinner and want to keep on
having it.
At the royal palace in Vienna we saw the finest, largest, and gaudiest
collection of crown jewels extant. That guide of ours seemed to think he
had done his whole duty toward us and could call it a day and knock
off when he led us up to the jewel collections, where each case was
surrounded by pop-eyed American tourists taking on flesh at the sight of
all those sparklers and figuring up the grand total of their valuation
in dollars, on the basis of so many hundreds of carats at so many
hundred dollars a carat, until reason tottered on her throne--and did
not have so very far to totter, either.
The display or all those gems, however, did not especially excite me.
There were too many of them and they were too large. A blue Kimberley
in a hotel clerk's shirtfront or a pigeonblood ruby on a faro dealer's
little finger might hold my attention and win my admiration; but where
jewels are piled up in heaps like anthracite in a coal bin they thrill
me no more than the anthracite would. A quart measure of diamonds of the
average size of a big hailstone does not make me think of diamonds but
of hailstones. I could remain as calm in their presence as I should in
the presence of a quart of cracked ice; in fact, calmer than I should
remain in the presence of a quart of cracked ice in Italy, say, where
there is not that much ice, cracked or otherwise. In Italy a bucketful
of ice would be worth traveling miles to see. You could sell tickets for
it.
In one of the smaller rooms of the palace we came on a casket containing
a necklace of great smoldering rubies and a pair of bracelets to match.
They were as big as cranberries and as red as blood--as red as arterial
blood. And when, on consulting the guidebook, we read the history of
those rubies the sight of them brought a picture to our minds, for they
had been a part of the wedding dowry of Marie Antoinette. Once on a time
this necklace had spanned the slender white throat that was later to
be sheared by the guillotine, and these bracelets had clasped the same
white wrists that were roped together with an ell of hangman's hemp on
the day the desolated queen rode, in her patched and shabby gown, to the
Place de la Revolution.
I had seen paintings in plenty and read descriptions galore of that
last ride of the Widow Capet going to her death in the tumbril, with the
priest at her side and her poor, fettered arms twisted behind her, and
her white face bared to the jeers of the mob; but the physical presence
of those precious useless baubles, which had cost so much and yet had
bought so little for her, made more vivid to me than any picture or
any story the most sublime tragedy of The Terror--the tragedy of those
two bound hands.