FRIDAY, October 26.
Leaving my palace a little late, I hasten to keep the appointment made
for me by Li-Hung-Chang for nine o'clock in the morning.
An African chasseur accompanies me. Following a Chinese outrider sent
to guide us, we start off at a rapid trot through the dust and silence
under the sun's white rays, along the great walls and marshy moats of
the Emperor's Palace.
When we get outside of the Yellow City noise and life begin again.
After the magnificent solitude to which we have become accustomed,
whenever we return to everybody's Pekin, we are surprised to find
such a roar among these humble crowds; it is hard to realize that the
woods, the lakes, the horizons, which play at being the real country,
are artificial things surrounded on all sides by the most swarming of
cities.
It is incontestable that the people are returning in crowds to Pekin.
(According to Monsignor Favier, the Boxers in particular are returning
in all kinds of costumes and disguises.) From day to day the number of
silk gowns, blue cotton gowns, slanting eyes, and queues increases.
We must move faster in spite of all the people, for it seems it is
still some distance, and time is passing. Our outrider appears to be
galloping. We cannot see him, for here the streets are even dustier
than in the Yellow City; we see only the cloud of dust that envelops
his little Mongolian horse, and we follow that.
At the end of half an hour's rapid riding the dust cloud stops in front
of a ramshackle old house in a narrow street that leads nowhere. Is it
possible that Li-Hung-Chang, rich as Aladdin, the owner of palaces and
countless treasures, one of the most enduring favorites of the Empress
and one of the glories of China, lives here?
* * * * *
For reasons unknown to me, the entrance is guarded by Cossack soldiers
in poor uniforms but with naïve rosy faces. The room into which I am
taken is dilapidated and untidy; there is a table in the middle of it
and two or three rather well-carved ebony chairs; but that is all. At
one end is a chaos of trunks, bags, packages, and bedding, all tied
up as though in preparation for flight. The Chinese who comes to the
door, in a beautiful gown of plum-colored silk, gives me a seat and
offers me tea. He is the interpreter, and speaks French correctly, even
elegantly. He tells me that some one has gone to announce me to his
Highness.
At a sign from another Chinese he presently conducts me into a second
court, and there, at the door leading into a reception-room, a tall
old man advances to meet me. At his right and his left are silk-robed
servants, both a whole head shorter than he is, on whose shoulders he
leans. He is colossal, with very prominent cheek-bones, and small, very
small, quick and searching eyes. He is an exaggeration of the Mongolian
type, with a certain beauty withal, and the air of a great personage,
although his furry gown of an indefinite color is worn and spotted. (I
have been forewarned that in these days of abomination his Highness
believes that he should affect poverty.) The large shabby room where he
receives me is, like the first one, strewn with trunks and packages. We
take arm-chairs opposite each other, while servants place cigarettes,
tea, and champagne on a table between us. At first we stare at each
other like two beings from different worlds.
After inquiring as to my age and the amount of my income (one of the
rules of Chinese politeness), he bows again, and conversation begins.
* * * * *
When we have finished discussing the burning questions of the day,
Li-Hung-Chang expresses sympathy for China and for ruined Pekin.
"Having visited the whole of Europe," he says, "I have seen the museums
of all your great capitals. Pekin had her own also, for the whole
Yellow City was a museum begun centuries ago, and may be compared with
the most beautiful of your own. And now it is destroyed."
He questions me as to what we are doing over in the Palace of the
North, informs himself by adroit questioning as to whether we are
injuring anything there. He knows as well as I do what we are
doing, for he has spies everywhere, even among our workmen; yet his
enigmatical face shows some satisfaction when I confirm his knowledge
of the fact that we are destroying nothing.
When the audience is over, and we have shaken hands, Li-Hung-Chang,
still leaning on his two servants, comes with me as far as the centre
of the court. As I turn at the threshold to make my final bow, he
courteously recalls to my memory my offer to send him my account of
my stay in Pekin,--if ever I find time to write it. In spite of the
perfect grace of his reception of me, due especially to my title of
"Mandarin of Letters," this old prince of the Chinese Arabian Nights'
tales, in his threadbare garments and in his wretched surroundings, has
not ceased to seem to me disturbing, inscrutable, and possibly secretly
disdainful and ironical, all the time disguising his real self.
I now make my way across two kilometres of rubbish to the quarters of
the European legations in order to take leave of the French minister,
who is still ill in bed, and to get from him his commissions for the
admiral, for I must leave Pekin not later than the day after to-morrow,
and go back to my ship.
Just as I was mounting my horse again, after this visit, to return to
the Yellow City, some one from the legation came out and very kindly
gave me some precise and very curious information which will enable
me this evening to purloin two tiny shoes that once belonged to the
Empress of China, and to take them away as a part of the pillage. On a
shady island in the southern part of the Lake of the Lotus is a frail,
almost hidden palace, where the sovereign slept that last agonizing
night before her frantic flight, disguised as a beggar. _The second
room to the left, at the back of the second court_ of this palace, was
her room, and there, it seems, under a carved bed, lie two little red
silk shoes embroidered with butterflies and flowers, which must have
belonged to her.
[Illustration: AN IMPERIAL PALACE]
I return to the Yellow City as fast as I can, breakfast hurriedly in
the glass gallery,--whence the wonderful treasures are already being
carried to their new quarters to make way for the carpenters, who soon
begin their work here,--and straightway depart with my two faithful
servants, on foot this time, in search of the island, the palace, and
the pair of small shoes.
The one o'clock sun is burning the dry paths, and the cedars overhead
are gray with dust. About two kilometres to the south of our residence
we find the island without difficulty. It is in a region where the
lake divides into various little arms, spanned by marble bridges with
marble railings entwined with green. The palace stands there light and
charming, half concealed among the trees, on a terrace of white marble.
The roofs of green faience touched with gilt and the openwork walls
shine forth with new and costly ornamentation from amid the dusty green
of the old cedars. It must have been a marvel of grace and daintiness,
and it is adorable as it is, deserted and silent.
Through the doors opening onto the white steps that lead up to it, a
perfect cascade of débris of all kinds is tumbling,--boxes of imperial
porcelains, boxes of gold lacquer, small bronze dragons upside
down, bits of rose-colored silk, and bunches of artificial flowers.
Barbarians have been this way,--but which? Surely not our soldiers, for
this part of the Yellow City was never placed in their hands; they are
not familiar with it.
The interior courts, from which at our approach a flock of crows rise,
are in the same condition. The pavement is strewn with delicate, rather
feminine things, which have been ruthlessly destroyed. And so recent is
this destruction that the light stuffs, the silk flowers, the parts of
costumes have not even lost their freshness.
"At the back of the second court, the second room to the left!" Here it
is! There remains a throne, some arm-chairs, and a big, low bed, carved
by the hand of genius. Everything has been ransacked. The window-glass,
through which the sovereign could gaze upon the reflections of the
lake and the pink blossoms of the lotus, the marble bridges, the
islands, the whole landscape devised and realized for her eyes, has
been broken; and a fine white silk, with which the walls were hung, and
on which some exquisite artist had painted in pale tints, larger than
nature, other lotus blossoms, languishing, bent by the autumn wind, and
strewing their petals, has been torn in shreds.
Under the bed, where I look immediately, is a pile of manuscript and
charming bits of silk. My two servants, foraging with sticks, like
rag-pickers, soon succeed in finding what I seek,--the two comical
little red shoes, one after the other.
They are not the absurd, doll-like shoes worn by the Chinese women who
compress their toes; the Empress, being a Tartar princess, did not
deform her feet, which were, however, very small by nature. No, these
are embroidered slippers of natural shape, whose extravagance lies
in the heels, which are thirty centimetres high and extend over the
entire sole, growing larger at the bottom, like the base of a statue,
to prevent the wearer from falling; they are little blocks of white
leather of the most improbable description.
I had no idea that a woman's shoes could take up so much space. How
to get them away without looking like pillagers in the eyes of the
servants and guards we meet on the way back is the question?
Osman suggests suspending them by strings to Renaud's belt so that
they will hang concealed by his long winter coat. This is an admirable
scheme; he can even walk--we make him try it--without giving rise to
suspicion. I feel no remorse, and I fancy that if she, from afar, could
witness the scene, the still beautiful Empress would be the first to
smile.
We now hasten our steps back to the Palace of the Rotunda, where I have
scarcely two hours of daylight for my work before the cold and the
night come on.
Each time that I return to this palace I am charmed with the sonorous
silence of my high esplanade and with the top of the crenellated wall
surrounding it,--an artificial spot whence one commands an extended
view of artificial landscape, the sight of which has always been
forbidden, and which, until lately, no European has ever seen.
Everything about the place is so Chinese that one feels as though
it were the heart of the yellow country, the very quintessence of
China. These high gardens were a favorite resort for the ultra-Chinese
reveries of an uncompromising Empress who possibly dreamed of shutting
her country off from the rest of the world, as in olden times, but who
to-day sees her empire crumbling at her feet, rotten to the core, like
her myriads of temples and gilded wooden gods.
The magical hour here is when the enormous red ball, which the Chinese
sun appears to be on autumn evenings, lights up the roofs of the Violet
City before it disappears. I never fail to leave my kiosk at this hour
to see once more these effects, unique in all the world.
Compared to this, what barbaric ugliness is offered by a bird's-eye
view of one of our European cities,--a mass of ugly gables, tiles, and
dirty roofs full of chimneys and stove-pipes, and, as a last horror,
electric wires forming a black network! In China, where they are all
too scornful of pavements and sewers, everything which rises into the
air, into the domain of the ever-watchful and protecting spirits, is
always impeccable. And this immense Imperial retreat, empty to-day, now
displays for me alone the splendor of its enamelled roofs.
In spite of their age, these pyramids of yellow faience, carved with
a grace unknown to us, are still brilliant under the red sun. At each
of the corners of the topmost one the ornaments simulate great wings;
lower down, toward the outside, are rows of monsters in poses which
are copied and recopied, century after century, sacred and unchanging.
These pyramids of yellow faience are brilliant. From far off, against
the ashy blue sky, clouded by the everlasting dust, it looks like a
city of gold; then, as the sun sinks, like a city of copper.
First the silence of it all; then the croakings that begin the moment
the ravens go to rest; then the death-like cold that wraps this
magnificence of enamel as in a winding-sheet as soon as the sun goes
down.
To-night again, when we leave the Rotunda Palace, we pass the Palace of
the North without stopping, and go on to Monsignor Favier's.
He receives me in the same white room, where valises and
travelling-bags are lying about on the furniture. The bishop leaves
to-morrow for Europe, which he has not seen for twelve years. He is
going to Rome to see the Pope, and then to France, to raise money
for his suffering missions. His great work of over forty years is
annihilated, fifteen thousand of his Christian converts massacred; his
churches, chapels, hospitals, schools, are all destroyed, razed to the
ground; his cemeteries have been violated, and yet, discouraged at
nothing, he wishes to begin all over again.
As he conducts me across his garden I admire the beautiful energy with
which he says, pointing to the damaged cathedral with its broken cross,
which is the only building left standing, gloomily outlined against the
evening sky: "I will rebuild, larger and higher, all the churches they
have thrown down, and I hope that each movement of violence and hatred
against us may carry Christianity one step further on in their country.
Possibly they will again destroy my churches; who knows? If so, I will
build them up again, and we shall see whether they or I will be the
first to weary of it."
He seems very great to me in his determination and in his faith, and I
understand that China must reckon with this apostle of the vanguard.