It is a relief to get out of Holland and into a country nearer to hills.
The people also seem more obliging. In Cologne, a brown-cheeked girl
pointed us out the way without waiting for a kreuzer. Perhaps the women
have more to busy themselves about in the cities, and are not so
curious about passers-by. We rarely see a reflector to exhibit us to the
occupants of the second-story windows. In all the cities of Belgium
and Holland the ladies have small mirrors, with reflectors, fastened
to their windows; so that they can see everybody who passes, without
putting their heads out. I trust we are not inverted or thrown out
of shape when we are thus caught up and cast into my lady's chamber.
Cologne has a cheerful look, for the Rhine here is wide and promising;
and as for the “smells,” they are certainly not so many nor so vile as
those at Mainz.
Our windows at the hotel looked out on the finest front of the
cathedral. If the Devil really built it, he is to be credited with one
good thing, and it is now likely to be finished, in spite of him. Large
as it is, it is on the exterior not so impressive as that at Amiens;
but within it has a magnificence born of a vast design and the most
harmonious proportions, and the grand effect is not broken by any
subdivision but that of the choir. Behind the altar and in front of the
chapel, where lie the remains of the Wise Men of the East who came to
worship the Child, or, as they are called, the Three Kings of Cologne,
we walked over a stone in the pavement under which is the heart of Mary
de Medicis: the remainder of her body is in St. Denis near Paris. The
beadle in red clothes, who stalks about the cathedral like a converted
flamingo, offered to open for us the chapel; but we declined a sight of
the very bones of the Wise Men. It was difficult enough to believe they
were there, without seeing them. One ought not to subject his faith to
too great a strain at first in Europe. The bones of the Three Kings,
by the way, made the fortune of the cathedral. They were the greatest
religious card of the Middle Ages, and their fortunate possession
brought a flood of wealth to this old Domkirche. The old feudal lords
would swear by the Almighty Father, or the Son, or Holy Ghost, or by
everything sacred on earth, and break their oaths as they would break
a wisp of straw: but if you could get one of them to swear by the Three
Kings of Cologne, he was fast; for that oath he dare not disregard.
The prosperity of the cathedral on these valuable bones set all the
other churches in the neighborhood on the same track; and one can
study right here in this city the growth of relic worship. But the most
successful achievement was the collection of the bones of St. Ursula and
the eleven thousand virgins, and their preservation in the church on the
very spot where they suffered martyrdom. There is probably not so large
a collection of the bones of virgins elsewhere in the world; and I am
sorry to read that Professor Owen has thought proper to see and say that
many of them are the bones of lower orders of animals. They are built
into the walls of the church, arranged about the choir, interred in
stone coffins, laid under the pavements; and their skulls grin at you
everywhere. In the chapel the bones are tastefully built into the wall
and overhead, like rustic wood-work; and the skulls stand in rows, some
with silver masks, like the jars on the shelves of an apothecary's shop.
It is a cheerful place. On the little altar is the very skull of
the saint herself, and that of Conan, her lover, who made the holy
pilgrimage to Rome with her and her virgins, and also was slain by the
Huns at Cologne. There is a picture of the eleven thousand disembarking
from one boat on the Rhine, which is as wonderful as the trooping of
hundreds of spirits out of a conjurer's bottle. The right arm of St.
Ursula is preserved here: the left is at Bruges. I am gradually getting
the hang of this excellent but somewhat scattered woman, and bringing
her together in my mind. Her body, I believe, lies behind the altar
in this same church. She must have been a lovely character, if Hans
Memling's portrait of her is a faithful one. I was glad to see here one
of the jars from the marriage-supper in Cana. We can identify it by a
piece which is broken out; and the piece is in Notre Dame in Paris.
It has been in this church five hundred years. The sacristan, a very
intelligent person, with a shaven crown and his hair cut straight across
his forehead, who showed us the church, gave us much useful information
about bones, teeth, and the remains of the garments that the virgins
wore; and I could not tell from his face how much he expected us to
believe. I asked the little fussy old guide of an English party who had
joined us, how much he believed of the story. He was a Protestant, and
replied, still anxious to keep up the credit of his city, “Tousands is
too many; some hundreds maybe; tousands is too many.”