There is a faint odor of tea in the dark room, an odor of I know not
what beside,--of dried flowers and old silks.
There is no way of getting more light in this curious room, which
opens into a big gloomy salon, for its windows receive only half-light
because of the rice paper in all the panes; they open onto a yard
that is no doubt surrounded by triple walls. The alcove-bed, large
and low, which seems to be set into an inner wall thick as a rampart,
has silk curtains and a cover of dark blue,--the color of the sky at
night. There are no seats, indeed there would scarcely be room for
any; neither are there any books, nor could one very well see to read.
On the dark wooden chests which serve as tables, stand melancholy
bibelots in glass cases; small vases of bronze or of jade containing
very stiff artificial bouquets, with petals made of mother-of-pearl and
ivory. A thick layer of dust over everything shows that the room is not
occupied.
[Illustration:
_Copyright, 1901, by J. C. Hemment_
THE BIG TOWER OR WALL ENTRANCE OF TARTAR CITY]
At first sight there is nothing to mark the place or the time,--unless,
possibly, the fineness of the ebony carving of the upper part of the
bed reveals the patience of the Chinese. Everything is sombre and
gloomy, with straight, austere lines.
Where are we, then, in what obscure, closed, clandestine dwelling?
Has some one lived here in our time or was it in the distant past?
How many hours--or how many centuries--has he been gone, and who could
he have been, the occupant of the abandoned room?
Some sad dreamer evidently, to have chosen this shadowy retreat; some
one very refined, to have left behind him this distinguished fragrance,
and very weary, to have been pleased with this dull simplicity and this
eternal twilight.
One feels stifled by the smallness of the windows, whose panes are
veiled with silky paper, and which never can be opened to admit
light or air because they are sealed into the wall. And besides, you
recall the weary way you must take to get here, and the obstacles you
encounter, and that disturbs you.
First, there is the big black Babylonian wall, the superhuman ramparts
of a city more than ten leagues around, which to-day is a mass of
ruins, half empty, and strewn with corpses; then a second wall, painted
blood-red, which forms a second city enclosed in the first. Then a
third wall, more magnificent still, and also the color of blood; this
is the wall that surrounds the great mysteries of the place, and before
the days of the war and the fall of the city no European had ever gone
beyond it; to-day we were detained for more than an hour, in spite of
passes, signed and countersigned; through the keyhole of a great gate
guarded by soldiers and barricaded from within, we were compelled to
threaten and argue at length with the guards inside, who sought to
hide and to escape. These gates once opened, another wall appeared,
separated from the former one by a road going all the way around the
enclosure; here tattered garments were scattered about, and dogs were
playing with the bones of the dead. This wall was of the same red,
but still more splendid, and was crowned along its entire length by a
horned ornamentation and by monsters made of a golden yellow faience.
When we had finally passed this third wall, queer old beardless persons
came to meet us with distrustful greetings, and guided us through a
maze of little courts and small gardens, walled and walled again, in
which old trees were growing amongst rockwork and jars. All of it was
separate, concealed, distressing; all of it protected and peopled by
monsters and chimæras in bronze or marble, by a thousand faces, whose
grimaces signified ferocity and hatred, by a thousand unknown symbols.
And every time each gate in the red walls with the yellow faience
tops closed behind us, as in horrible dreams the doors of a series of
passageways close upon one, nevermore to permit one to go out.
Now, after our long journey which seems like a nightmare, we feel,
as we look at the anxious group who have conducted us, walking
noiselessly on their paper soles, that we have committed some supreme
and unheard-of profanation in their eyes, in penetrating to this
modest room; they stand there in the doorway, peering obliquely at
our every gesture; the crafty eunuchs in silken robes, and the thin
mandarins, wearing along with the red button of their headdresses, the
melancholy raven's quill. They were compelled to yield, they did not
wish to; they tried by every ruse to lead us to some other part of
the immense labyrinth of this palace of Heliogabalus; to interest us
in the luxurious salons farther on, in the great courts, and in the
marble balconies, which we shall see later; in a whole Versailles some
distance farther on, now overgrown by weeds, and where no sound is
heard but the song of the crows.
They were determined we should not come here, and it was by observing
the dilation of the pupils of their frightened eyes that we guessed
which way to go.
Who lived here, then, sequestered behind so many walls,--walls more
terrible by far than those of our western prisons? Who could he have
been, the man who slept in this bed under these silken covers of
nocturnal blue, and in his times of revery, at nightfall or at dawn, on
glacial winter days, was obliged to contemplate these pensive little
bouquets under glass, ranged so symmetrically along the black chests?
It was he, the invisible Emperor, Son of Heaven, childish and feeble;
he whose empire is vaster than all Europe, and who reigns like a vague
phantom over four or five hundred millions of subjects.
It is the same person in whose veins the vigor of half-deified
ancestors is exhausted, who has too long remained inactive, concealed
in this palace more sacred than a temple; the same who neglects and
envelops in twilight the diminishing place where he is pleased to live.
The immense setting in which former emperors lived frightens him and
he abandons it all; grass and brushwood grow on the majestic marble
railings and in the grand courtyards; crows and pigeons by the hundreds
make their nests in the gilded vaults of the throne room, covering with
dirt and dung the rich and curious rugs left there to be ruined. This
inviolable palace, a league in circumference, which no foreigner has
ever seen, of which one can learn nothing, guess nothing, has in store
for Europeans who enter it for the first time the surprise of mournful
dilapidation and the silence of a tomb.
The pale Emperor never occupied the throne rooms. No, what suited him
was the quarter where the small gardens were, and the enclosed yards,
the quaint quarter where the eunuchs tried to prevent our going. The
alcove-bed in its deep recess, with its curtains like the blue of
night, indicates fear.
The small private apartments behind this gloomy chamber extend
like subterranean passages into still deeper shadows; ebony is the
prevailing wood; everything is intentionally sombre, even the mournful
mummified bouquets under their glass cases. There is a soft-toned piano
which the young Emperor was learning to play, in spite of his long,
brittle nails; a harmonium, and a big music-box that gives Chinese airs
with a tone that seems to come from beneath the waters of a lake.
Beyond this comes what was doubtless his most cherished retreat,--it is
narrow and low like the cabin of a ship, and exhales the fine odor of
tea and dried rose-leaves.
There, in front of a small airhole covered with rice paper, through
which filters a little sombre light, lies a mattress, covered with
imperial golden-yellow silk, which seems to retain the imprint of a
body habitually extended upon it. A few books, a few private papers,
are scattered about. Fastened to the wall are two or three unimportant
pictures, not even framed, representing colorless roses, and written in
Chinese characters underneath are the last orders of the physician for
this chronic invalid.
What was the real character of this dreamer, who shall ever say? What
distorted views of life had been bequeathed to him of the things of
this world and of the world beyond? What do all these gruesome symbols
signify to him? The emperors, the demigods, from whom he descends, made
old Asia tremble; tributary sovereigns came from great distances to
prostrate themselves, filling this place with banners and processions
more magnificent than our imaginations can picture; within these same
walls, so silent to-day, how and under what passing phantasmagoric
aspects did he retain the stamp of the wonderful past?
And what confusion must have entered his unfathomable little brain
when the unprecedented act was accomplished, and events occurred which
he never in his wildest fears could have anticipated! His palace,
with its triple walls, violated to its most secret recesses; he, the
Son of Heaven, torn from the dwelling where twenty generations of his
ancestors had lived inaccessible; obliged to flee, and in his flight to
permit himself to be seen, to act in the light of day like other men,
perhaps even to implore and to wait!
* * * * *
Just as we are leaving the abandoned room our orderlies, who purposely
remained behind, laughingly throw themselves on the bed with the
nocturnal blue curtains, and I hear one of them remark gaily in an
aside and with a Gascon accent: "Now, old fellow, we can say that we
have lain on the bed of the Emperor of China."