Perhaps it may not interest you to know how we moved, that is, changed
our apartments. I did not see it mentioned in the cable dispatches, and
it may not be generally known, even in Germany; but then, the cable is
so occupied with relating how his Serenity this, and his Highness that,
and her Loftiness the other one, went outdoors and came in again, owing
to a slight superfluity of the liquid element in the atmosphere, that it
has no time to notice the real movements of the people. And yet, so
dry are some of these little German newspapers of news, that it is
refreshing to read, now and then, that the king, on Sunday, walked out
with the Duke of Hesse after dinner (one would like to know if they also
had sauerkraut and sausage), and that his prospective mother-in-law,
the Empress of Russia, who was here the other day, on her way home from
Como, where she was nearly drowned out by the inundation, sat for an
hour on Sunday night, after the opera, in the winter garden of the
palace, enjoying the most easy family intercourse.
But about moving. Let me tell you that to change quarters in the face
of a Munich winter, which arrives here the 1st of November, is like
changing front to the enemy just before a battle; and if we had perished
in the attempt, it might have been put upon our monuments, as it is upon
the out-of-cannon-cast obelisk in the Karolina Platz, erected to
the memory of the thirty thousand Bavarian soldiers who fell in the
disastrous Russian winter campaign of Napoleon, fighting against all the
interests of Germany,--“they, too, died for their Fatherland.” Bavaria
happened also to fight on the wrong side at Sadowa and I suppose that
those who fell there also died for Fatherland: it is a way the Germans
have of doing, and they mean nothing serious by it. But, as I was
saying, to change quarters here as late as November is a little
difficult, for the wise ones seek to get housed for the winter by
October: they select the sunny apartments, get on the double windows,
and store up wood. The plants are tied up in the gardens, the fountains
are covered over, and the inhabitants go about in furs and the heaviest
winter clothing long before we should think of doing so at home. And
they are wise: the snow comes early, and, besides, a cruel fog, cold as
the grave and penetrating as remorse, comes down out of the near Tyrol.
One morning early in November, I looked out of the window to find snow
falling, and the ground covered with it. There was dampness and frost
enough in the air to make it cling to all the tree-twigs, and to take
fantastic shapes on all the queer roofs and the slenderest pinnacles
and most delicate architectural ornamentations. The city spires had a
mysterious appearance in the gray haze; and above all, the round-topped
towers of the old Frauenkirche, frosted with a little snow, loomed up
more grandly than ever. When I went around to the Hof Garden, where I
late had sat in the sun, and heard the brown horse-chestnuts drop on
the leaves, the benches were now full of snow, and the fat and friendly
fruit-woman at the gate had retired behind glass windows into a little
shop, which she might well warm by her own person, if she radiated heat
as readily as she used to absorb it on the warm autumn days, when I have
marked her knitting in the sunshine.
But we are not moving. The first step we took was to advertise our wants
in the “Neueste Nachrichten” (“Latest News “) newspaper. We desired, if
possible, admission into some respectable German family, where we should
be forced to speak German, and in which our society, if I may so express
it, would be some compensation for our bad grammar. We wished also
to live in the central part of the city,--in short, in the immediate
neighborhood of all the objects of interest (which are here very much
scattered), and to have pleasant rooms. In Dresden, where the people
are not so rich as in Munich, and where different customs prevail, it
is customary for the best people, I mean the families of university
professors, for instance, to take in foreigners, and give them tolerable
food and a liberal education. Here it is otherwise. Nearly all families
occupy one floor of a building, renting just rooms enough for the
family, so that their apartments are not elastic enough to take in
strangers, even if they desire to do so. And generally they do not.
Munich society is perhaps chargeable with being a little stiff and
exclusive. Well, we advertised in the “Neueste Nachrichten.” This is
the liberal paper of Munich. It is a poorly printed, black-looking daily
sheet, folded in octavo size, and containing anywhere from sixteen to
thirty-four pages, more or less, as it happens to have advertisements.
It sometimes will not have more than two or three pages of reading
matter. There will be a scrap or two of local news, the brief telegrams
taken from the official paper of the day before, a bit or two of other
news, and perhaps a short and slashing editorial on the ultramontane
party. The advantage of printing and folding it in such small leaves is,
that the size can be varied according to the demands of advertisements
or news (if the German papers ever find out what that is); so that the
publisher is always giving, every day, just what it pays to give that
day; and the reader has his regular quantity of reading matter, and does
not have to pay for advertising space, which in journals of unchangeable
form cannot always be used profitably. This little journal was started
something like twenty years ago. It probably spends little for news, has
only one or, at most, two editors, is crowded with advertisements, which
are inserted cheap, and costs, delivered, a little over six francs a
year. It circulates in the city some thirty-five thousand. There is
another little paper here of the same size, but not so many leaves,
called “The Daily Advertiser,” with nothing but advertisements,
principally of theaters, concerts, and the daily sights, and one page
devoted to some prodigious yarn, generally concerning America, of
which country its readers must get the most extraordinary and frightful
impression. The “Nachrichten” made the fortune of its first owner, who
built himself a fine house out of it, and retired to enjoy his wealth.
It was recently sold for one hundred thousand guldens; and I can see
that it is piling up another fortune for its present owner. The Germans,
who herein show their good sense and the high state of civilization
to which they have reached, are very free advertisers, going to the
newspapers with all their wants, and finding in them that aid which all
interests and all sorts of people, from kaiser to kerl, are compelled,
in these days, to seek in the daily journal. Every German town of any
size has three or four of these little journals of flying leaves, which
are excellent papers in every respect, except that they look like badly
printed handbills, and have very little news and no editorials worth
speaking of. An exception to these in Bavaria is the “Allgerneine
Zeitung” of Augsburg, which is old and immensely respectable, and is
perhaps, for extent of correspondence and splendidly written editorials
on a great variety of topics, excelled by no journal in Europe except
the London “Times.” It gives out two editions daily, the evening one
about the size of the New York “Nation;” and it has all the telegraphic
news. It is absurdly old-grannyish, and is malevolent in its pretended
conservatism and impartiality. Yet it circulates over forty thousand
copies, and goes all over Germany.
But were we not saying something about moving? The truth is, that the
best German families did not respond to our appeal with that alacrity
which we had no right to expect, and did not exhibit that anxiety for
our society which would have been such a pleasant evidence of their
appreciation of the honor done to the royal city of Munich by the
selection of it as a residence during the most disagreeable months of
the year by the advertising undersigned. Even the young king, whose
approaching marriage to the Russian princess, one would think, might
soften his heart, did nothing to win our regard, or to show that he
appreciated our residence “near” his court, and, so far as I know, never
read with any sort of attention our advertisement, which was composed
with as much care as Goethe's “Faust,” and probably with the use of more
dictionaries. And this, when he has an extraordinary large Residenz, to
say nothing about other outlying palaces and comfortable places to live
in, in which I know there are scores of elegantly furnished apartments,
which stand idle almost the year round, and might as well be let to
appreciative strangers, who would accustom the rather washy and fierce
frescoes on the walls to be stared at. I might have selected rooms, say
on the court which looks on the exquisite bronze fountain, Perseus with
the head of Medusa, a copy of the one in Florence by Benvenuto Cellini,
where we could have a southern exposure. Or we might, so it would seem,
have had rooms by the winter garden, where tropical plants rejoice in
perennial summer, and blossom and bear fruit, while a northern winter
rages without. Yet the king did not see it “by those lamps;” and I
looked in vain on the gates of the Residenz for the notice so frequently
seen on other houses, of apartments to let. And yet we had responses.
The day after the announcement appeared, our bell ran perpetually; and
we had as many letters as if we had advertised for wives innumerable.
The German notes poured in upon us in a flood; each one of them
containing an offer tempting enough to beguile an angel out of paradise,
at least, according to our translation: they proffered us chambers that
were positively overheated by the flaming sun (which, I can take my
oath, only ventures a few feet above the horizon at this season), which
were friendly in appearance, splendidly furnished and near to every
desirable thing, and in which, usually, some American family had long
resided, and experienced a content and happiness not to be felt out of
Germany.
I spent some days in calling upon the worthy frauen who made these
alluring offers. The visits were full of profit to the student of human
nature, but profitless otherwise. I was ushered into low, dark chambers,
small and dreary, looking towards the sunless north, which I was assured
were delightful and even elegant. I was taken up to the top of tall
houses, through a smell of cabbage that was appalling, to find empty and
dreary rooms, from which I fled in fright. We were visited by so many
people who had chambers to rent, that we were impressed with the idea
that all Munich was to let; and yet, when we visited the places offered,
we found they were only to be let alone. One of the frauen who did us
the honor to call, also wrote a note, and inclosed a letter that she had
just received from an American gentleman (I make no secret of it that
he came from Hartford), in which were many kindly expressions for her
welfare, and thanks for the aid he had received in his study of German;
and yet I think her chambers are the most uninviting in the entire city.
There were people who were willing to teach us German, without rooms or
board; or to lodge us without giving us German or food; or to feed us,
and let us starve intellectually, and lodge where we could.
But all things have an end, and so did our hunt for lodgings. I chanced
one day in my walk to find, with no help from the advertisement, very
nearly what we desired,--cheerful rooms in a pleasant neighborhood,
where the sun comes when it comes out at all, and opposite the Glass
Palace, through which the sun streams in the afternoon with a certain
splendor, and almost next door to the residence and laboratory of the
famous chemist, Professor Liebig; so that we can have our feelings
analyzed whenever it is desirable. When we had set up our household
gods, and a fire was kindled in the tall white porcelain family
monument, which is called here a stove,--and which, by the way, is
much more agreeable than your hideous black and air-scorching cast-iron
stoves,--and seen that the feather-beds under which we were expected to
lie were thick enough to roast the half of the body, and short enough to
let the other half freeze, we determined to try for a season the regular
German cookery, our table heretofore having been served with food cooked
in the English style with only a slight German flavor. A week of the
experiment was quite enough. I do not mean to say that the viands served
us were not good, only that we could not make up our minds to eat them.
The Germans eat a great deal of meat; and we were obliged to take meat
when we preferred vegetables. Now, when a deep dish is set before you
wherein are chunks of pork reposing on stewed potatoes, and another
wherein a fathomless depth of sauerkraut supports coils of boiled
sausage, which, considering that you are a mortal and responsible being,
and have a stomach, will you choose? Herein Munich, nearly all the bread
is filled with anise or caraway seed; it is possible to get, however,
the best wheat bread we have eaten in Europe, and we usually have it;
but one must maintain a constant vigilance against the inroads of the
fragrant seeds. Imagine, then, our despair, when one day the potato,
the one vegetable we had always eaten with perfect confidence, appeared
stewed with caraway seeds. This was too much for American human nature,
constituted as it is. Yet the dish that finally sent us back to our
ordinary and excellent way of living is one for which I have no name.
It may have been compounded at different times, have been the result of
many tastes or distastes: but there was, after all, a unity in it
that marked it as the composition of one master artist; there was
an unspeakable harmony in all its flavors and apparently ununitable
substances. It looked like a terrapin soup, but it was not. Every dive
of the spoon into its dark liquid brought up a different object,--a junk
of unmistakable pork, meat of the color of roast hare, what seemed to be
the neck of a goose, something in strings that resembled the rags of a
silk dress, shreds of cabbage, and what I am quite willing to take my
oath was a bit of Astrachan fur. If Professor Liebig wishes to add to
his reputation, he could do so by analyzing this dish, and publishing
the result to the world.
And, while we are speaking of eating, it may be inferred that the
Germans are good eaters; and although they do not begin early, seldom
taking much more than a cup of coffee before noon, they make it up
by very substantial dinners and suppers. To say nothing of the
extraordinary dishes of meats which the restaurants serve at night, the
black bread and odorous cheese and beer which the men take on board
in the course of an evening would soon wear out a cast-iron stomach in
America; and yet I ought to remember the deadly pie and the corroding
whisky of my native land. The restaurant life of the people is,
of course, different from their home life, and perhaps an evening
entertainment here is no more formidable than one in America, but it
is different. Let me give you the outlines of a supper to which we were
invited the other night: it certainly cannot hurt you to read about it.
We sat down at eight. There were first courses of three sorts of cold
meat, accompanied with two sorts of salad; the one, a composite, with
a potato basis, of all imaginable things that are eaten. Beer and bread
were unlimited. There was then roast hare, with some supporting dish,
followed by jellies of various sorts, and ornamented plates of something
that seemed unable to decide whether it would be jelly or cream; and
then came assorted cake and the white wine of the Rhine and the red of
Hungary. We were then surprised with a dish of fried eels, with a sauce.
Then came cheese; and, to crown all, enormous, triumphal-looking loaves
of cake, works of art in appearance, and delicious to the taste. We
sat at the table till twelve o'clock; but you must not imagine that
everybody sat still all the time, or that, appearances to the contrary
notwithstanding, the principal object of the entertainment was eating.
The songs that were sung in Hungarian as well as German, the poems that
were recited, the burlesques of actors and acting, the imitations
that were inimitable, the take-off of table-tipping and of prominent
musicians, the wit and constant flow of fun, as constant as the
good-humor and free hospitality, the unconstrained ease of the whole
evening, these things made the real supper which one remembers when the
grosser meal has vanished, as all substantial things do vanish.