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Page 80
"No man," said he, "who has had the happy privilege of being born in the
Vosges, between Haut Bar, Nideck, and Geierstein has any business to
think of travelling. Where are there nobler forests, older fir and beech
trees, more lovely smiling valleys, wilder rocks? Where is the country
with richer possessions in memorable story? Here, in olden times, used
the high and powerful lords of Lutzelstein, Dagsberg, Leiningen, and
F�n�trange, to fight clad in mail from head to foot. Here the eldest son
of the Church and the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire exchanged blows in
the Middle Ages with swords two yards long. What are our wars compared
with those terrible battles where warriors fought hand to hand, where
they hammered upon each other's skulls with huge battle-axes, and drove
the dagger between the bars of the closed visor? Were not those heroic
feats of arms? was not that a courage worthy to be chronicled to all
posterity? But our young people want to see new things; they are not
satisfied with their own native land: they must wander through Germany,
make tours in France. Worse still, they abandon science and its noble
fields for trade, arts, industry, as if there had not been in the former
glorious days much more curious industrial arts and pursuits than in our
own day! Witness the Hanseatic League, the maritime enterprise of Venice,
Genoa, and the Levant, Flemish manufactures, Florentine art, the triumphs
in art of Rome and Antwerp! No! all that is laid aside; people now-a-days
pride themselves upon their ignorance of those glorious days; above all,
they neglect our dear old Alsace. Now, candidly, Theodore, don't all
those tourists remind you of husbands leaving their fair sweet lawful
wives to run after ugly coquettes?"
And Bernard Hertzog shook his learned head, his eyes rounded with wonder
and excitement, just as if he had been standing before the ruins of
Babylon.
His partiality to the usages and customs of old times accounted for his
having, for forty years past, worn the full-skirted plush coat, the
velvet breeches, the black silk stockings, and the silver shoe-buckles of
our grandfathers. He would have thought himself disgraced had he put on
trousers; and to cut off his pigtail would have been a profane deed.
So the worthy chronicler was going to Haslach on the 3rd of July, 1835,
to examine with his own eyes a little bronze Mercury recently unearthed
in the old cloister of the Augustins.
He trotted on with a tolerably elastic stop under a burning sun.
Mountains succeeded mountains, valleys sank into other valleys, the
footpath went up, then went down again, turned, now to the right, now to
the left, until Ma�tre Hertzog began to wonder how it was that he had not
caught sight of the village spire an hour ago.
The fact was that after leaving Saverne he had inclined to the right, and
was now penetrating into the Dagsberg woods with juvenile energy. At the
rate he was going, in five or six hours he would have reached Phramond,
eight leagues from his destination. But night was coming on apace, and
the path was now becoming fainter, and under the tall trees only an
indistinct track appeared.
The approach of night among the mountains is a melancholy sight; the
shadows lengthen in the valleys, the sun withdraws, one by one, his rays
from the darkening foliage, the silence deepens every minute. You look
behind you; the groups and clumps of trees assume colossal proportions;
a blackbird at the summit of a tree bids farewell to the parting day,
then silence covers all like a funeral pall. You can only hear now the
last year's dead leaves crisping under foot, and far, far, away a
waterfall filling the valley with its monotonous hum. Bernard Hertzog
began to pant a little; his clothes adhered to his skin with the running
perspiration. His legs were beginning to give hints of surrendering.
"Confound that foolish Mercury!" he cried. "At this moment I ought to
have been quiet at home in my own arm-chair, and Berbel, according to her
praiseworthy custom, ought to be bringing me up upon a tray a cup of
smoking hot coffee, while I am winding up my chapter upon the ancient
armoury at Nideck. Instead of which, here I am floundering in holes,
stumbling everywhere, and suppose I lost my way altogether and then broke
my neck! There!--I said so! Was that a tree I knocked against? A hundred
thousand bans and maledictions fall upon Mercury and Haas, the architect,
who sent for me to look at it! and the scoundrels, too, who dug it up!
I'll lay any wager that the boasted Mercury is nothing but some defaced
and corroded bit of stone, without either nose or legs--some shapeless
deformity like that little Hesus last year at Marienthal. Oh, you
architects! you architects!--you are always finding antiquities
everywhere. Luckily I had not my spectacles on, or I should have smashed
them against that tree; but now I shall be obliged to find a bed
somewhere among the bushes. What a road this is!--nothing but ruts, and
holes, and pits, and loose rocks and boulders!"
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