WEDNESDAY, October 24.
The same glorious sunshine in gallery, garden, and wood. Each day the
work of our soldiers with their gangs of Chinese laborers goes on in
the nave of the Cathedral; they carefully separate such treasures as
have remained intact, or nearly so, from what is irreparably injured.
There is a continual coming and going across our court of furniture and
precious bronzes in hand-barrows; all that is taken out of the church
is put in places not at present needed for our troops, to await its
final transportation to the Ancestors' Palace, where it is to remain
under lock and key.
We have seen so many of these magnificent things that we are satiated
and worn with them. The most remarkable discoveries made from the
depths of the oldest cases have ceased to astonish us; there is
nothing now that we want for the decoration--oh, so fleeting--of our
apartments; nothing is sufficiently beautiful for our Heliogabalean
fancies. There will be no to-morrow, for the inventory must be finished
within a few days, and then our long galleries will be parcelled out
for officers' rooms and offices.
In the way of discoveries, we came this morning upon a pile of
bodies,--the last defenders of the Imperial City, who fell all in a
heap and have remained in positions indicative of extreme agony. The
crows and the dogs have gone down into the ditch where they lie and
have devoured eyes, chests, and intestines; there is no flesh left on
their bones, and their red spinal columns show through their ragged
raiment. Shoes are left, but no hair; Chinamen have evidently descended
into the deep hole with the dogs and the crows, and have scalped the
dead in order to make false queues.
* * * * *
To-day I leave the Palace of the North early and for all day, as I must
go over to the European quarter to see our Minister at the Spanish
legation, where he was taken in; he is still in bed, but convalescing
so that at last I can make to him the communications which I undertook
on behalf of the admiral.
For four days I have not been outside the red walls of the Imperial
City, have not left our superb solitude. So when I find myself once
more among the ugly gray ruins of the commonplace streets of the Tartar
City, in everybody's Pekin, in the Pekin known to all travellers, I
appreciate better the unique peculiarities of our great wood, of our
lake, and of all our forbidden glories.
However, this city of the people seems less forlorn than on the day of
my arrival in the wind and snow. The people are beginning to return, as
I have been told; Pekin is being repopulated, the shops are opening,
houses are rebuilding, and already a few humble and entertaining trades
have been taken up along the streets, on tables, under tents, and under
parasols. The warm sunshine of the Chinese autumn is the friend of many
a poor wretch who has no fire.