She shut herself up there, without company, and without
even a servant, and so abjured and forsook the world.
In her little bit of a kitchen she did her own cooking;
she wore a hair shirt next the skin, and castigated herself
with whips–these aids to grace are exhibited there yet.
She prayed and told her beads, in another little room,
before a waxen Virgin niched in a little box against the wall;
she bedded herself like a slave.
In another small room is an unpainted wooden table,
and behind it sit half-life-size waxen figures of the
Holy Family, made by the very worst artist that ever
lived, perhaps, and clothed in gaudy, flimsy drapery.
[1] The margravine used to bring her meals to this table
and DINE WITH THE HOLY FAMILY. What an idea that was!
What a grisly spectacle it must have been! Imagine it:
Those rigid, shock-headed figures, with corpsy complexions
and fish glass eyes, occupying one side of the table
in the constrained attitudes and dead fixedness that
distinquish all men that are born of wax, and this wrinkled,
smoldering old fire-eater occupying the other side,
mumbling her prayers and munching her sausages in the ghostly
stillness and shadowy indistinctness of a winter twilight.
It makes one feel crawly even to think of it.
1. The Savior was represented as a lad of about fifteen
years of age. This figure had lost one eye.
In this sordid place, and clothed, bedded, and fed like
a pauper, this strange princess lived and worshiped during
two years, and in it she died. Two or three hundred
years ago, this would have made the poor den holy ground;
and the church would have set up a miracle-factory there
and made plenty of money out of it. The den could be moved
into some portions of France and made a good property even now.
CHAPTER XXII
[The Black Forest and Its Treasures]
From Baden-Baden we made the customary trip into the
Black Forest. We were on foot most of the time. One cannot
describe those noble woods, nor the feeling with which they
inspire him. A feature of the feeling, however, is a deep
sense of contentment; another feature of it is a buoyant,
boyish gladness; and a third and very conspicuous feature
of it is one’s sense of the remoteness of the work-day
world and his entire emancipation from it and its affairs.
Those woods stretch unbroken over a vast region;
and everywhere they are such dense woods, and so still,
and so piney and fragrant. The stems of the trees are trim
and straight, and in many places all the ground is hidden
for miles under a thick cushion of moss of a vivid green color,
with not a decayed or ragged spot in its surface, and not
a fallen leaf or twig to mar its immaculate tidiness.
A rich cathedral gloom pervades the pillared aisles;
so the stray flecks of sunlight that strike a trunk
here and a bough yonder are strongly accented,
and when they strike the moss they fairly seem to burn.
But the weirdest effect, and the most enchanting is that
produced by the diffused light of the low afternoon sun;
no single ray is able to pierce its way in, then, but the
diffused light takes color from moss and foliage,
and pervades the place like a faint, greet-tinted mist,
the theatrical fire of fairyland. The suggestion of mystery
and the supernatural which haunts the forest at all times
is intensified by this unearthly glow.
We found the Black Forest farmhouses and villages
all that the Black Forest stories have pictured them.
The first genuine specimen which we came upon was
the mansion of a rich farmer and member of the Common
Council of the parish or district. He was an important
personage in the land and so was his wife also,
of course. His daughter was the “catch” of the region,
and she may be already entering into immortality as the
heroine of one of Auerbach’s novels, for all I know.
We shall see, for if he puts her in I shall recognize her
by her Black Forest clothes, and her burned complexion,