MARK TWAIN IN EUROPE

Evening Star, Issue 8730, 23 January 1892, Page 1 (Supplement)

MARK TWAIN IN EUROPE

3 [Special Cokkehpondexce.J (All rttjhts reserved,J No. 1. THE PARADISE OF THE BHEUMATICS. _ Certainly Aix-lea-iiams is an eachanting placo. It ia a strong word, but 1 think the tacts justify it. True, there is a rabble of nobilities, big and little, here all the time, and often a king or two, but as these behave quite nicely, and also keep mainly to themseivea, tiiey are Utile or no annoyauee. And then a king makes the best advertisement there is, and the cheapest. All he costs is a reofplion at the station by the mayor and police in their Sunday uniforms, shop-front decorations along the route from station to hotel, brass baud at the hotel, fireworks in the evening, free bath in the morning. This is the wh.sle expense, aad in return for it he goes away from here with the broad of his back metaphorically stencilled over with display ade, which shouts to all the nations of the tarth —assisted by the telegraph— Rteuraitism routed at Aix-les-Rains ! Gout admonished, Nerves braced up! A!l diseases welcomed, and satisfaction given or the money returned at tha door Wo leave Nature's nob'e cliffs and craga undofiled and uninaalted by the advertiser's paint b.-ush ; we use the back of a king, whiw'h is better and propter, and mure effective too, for the cliff stays still and few tee it, but the king moves across the field of the world and i 3 visible from all points like a constellation. We are out of king? this week, but one wi'l be along aooa possibly His Satauic Majesty of Ruesia. There's a Colossus for you !—a mysterious and terrible form thit covers up into unsearchable space and casts a Bhadow across the universe like a planet in eclipse. There will be but one absorbing spectacle in this world when we stencil him and Btart him out.

thia is an old valley, this of Aix, both in the history of nun and tho geological records of its rocks, Its little lake of Bourget carries the human history back to the lako dwellers, furnishing seveu group? of their habitations, and Dr William Wakefield says, in his interesting local guidebook, that the mountains round about furnish, "geologically, a veritable epitome of the globe." The stratified chapters of the earth's history are clearly and permanently written on the sides of the soaring bulk of the Dent du Chat, but many of the layers of race, religion and government, which in turn have flourished and perished here between the lake dweller of several thousand years ago and the French republican of to day ara ill-defined and uniforming by comparison. There were several varieties of pagans; thty went their way, one after the other, down into night and oblivion, leaving no account of themselveß, no memorials. The Romans arrived twenty three hundred years ago; other parts of Franco are rich with remembrances of their eight centuries of occupation but not many are here. Other pagans followed the Romans. By-and-bye Christianity arrived, some four hundred yeirs after the time of Christ. The lone; procession of races, languages, religions, and dynasties demolished each other's monuments and obliterated each other's reoords —it is man's way, always. As a result, nothing is left ot the handiwork of tho remoter inhabitants of the region except the constructions of the lake dwellers and some Roman odds and ends. There is part of a small Roman temple, there is part of a Roman bath, there is a graceful and battered Roman arcb. It stands on a turfy level over the way from the present great bathhouse, is surrounded by magnolia trees, and is both a piotureique and suggestive object. It has stood there some sixteen hundred years. Its nearest neighbor, not twenty steps away, is a Catholic church. They are symbols of two chief eras in the history of Aix. Yes, and of the European world. I judge that the venerable arch is held in reverent esteem by everybody, and that this esteem is its sufficient protection from insult, for it is the only public structure I have yot seen in France which lacks tho sign: "It is forbidden to post bills here." Its neighbor the church has that sign on more than one of its aides—and other signs, too, forbidding cortaia other sorts of desecration. The aroh's next nearest neighbor—just at its elbow, like the church—is the telegraph offioe. So there you have the three great era bunched together—the era of War, the era of Theology, the era of Business. You paBB under the aroh, and the buried Cseaars seem to rise from the dust of the centuries and flit before you; you pass by the old battered church and are in touch with the Middle Ages; and with another step you can put down ten francs and shake hands with Oshkosh under the Atlantic It is curious to think what changes the last of the three symbols stands for; changes in men's ways and thoughts, changes in material civilisation, changes in the Deity—or in men's conception of the Deity, if that is an ezaoter way of potting it. The second of the symbols arrived in the earth at a time when the Deity's possessions consisted of a small sky freckled

with mustard-seed stars, and under it a patch of landed estate not bo big as the holdings of the Cz»r to-day, and all hia time was taken np in trying to keep a handful of Jews in some sort of order—exactly the same number of them that the Czar has lately been dealing with in a more abrupt and far less loving and long Buffering way. At a later time—a time within all old men's memories—the Deity was otherwise engaged. He was dreaming his eternities away in his Great White Throne, steeped ia the soft bliss of hymns of praise wafted aloft without oeasiug from choirs of raußomed souls Presbyterians and the rest. This was a deity proper enough to the size and condition of things; no doubt a provincial deity with provincial tastes. The change since has been ineoncaivab'y vast. His empire has been unirnaginubly enlarged. To-day he is master of a universe made up of myriads upon myriads of gigantic F.un?, and among them, lost in the limitless sea of light, floats that atom, the earth, which ouco seemed so good and satisfactory, and cost so many days of patient labor to build, a mere cork adrift in the waters of a shoreless Atlantic Thiß is the business era, and no doubt he is governing his huge empire now, not by dreaming the time away in the buzz of hymning choirs, with occasional explosions of arbitrary power disproportioned to the Has of the annoyance, but by applying laws of a sort proper and necessary to the sane and Buccsijeful management of a complex and prodigious establishment, and by seeing to it thai the exact and constant operation of therjo laws is not interfered with for the accommodation of any individual or political or religious faction or nation.

Mighty has been the advance of the nations and she liberalisation of thoughts. A result of it ia a changed deity, a deity of a dignity and sublimity proportioned to the majesty of hia office and the magnitude of hia empire, a deity who has been freed from a hundred fretting chain?, and will in time be freed from tha rest by the several ecclesiastical bodies who have these matters ia charge. It was without doubt a mistake, and a step backward, when the Presbyterian synods or America lately decided by vote to leave him still embarrassed with the dogma of infant damnation. Situated as we are, we cannot at present know with how much of unxiuty he watched the balloting, nor with how much of grieved disappointment lie observed tho remit.

Well, all theso eras above spoken of are modern—they are of last week, they are of yesterday, they are of this morning, so to ?peak. The springs—the healing waters that gush up from under this hillside village indeed are ancient; they indeed are a genuine ant!qu : ty. They antedate all those fresh humau matters by processions of centuries ; they were born with the fossils of the Dent du Chat. And they have been always limpid and always abundant. They furnished a million gallons a day to waßh the lake dwellers with, the same to wash the Cteiars with, no les3 to wash Balzic with, and have not diminished on my account. A million gillons a day 1 For how many days ? Figures cannot set forth the number. The delivery in the aggregate has amounted to an Atlantic And there is still an Atlantic down in there ; by J): Wakefield's calculation that Atlantic is three quarters of a mile down in the earth. The calculation is based upon the temperature of the water, which is 114deg to 117deg Fahrenheit, the natural law being that below a certain depth heat augments at the rate of ldeg for every 60ft of descent.

Aix is handsome, and is handsomely situated, too, on its hill-slope, with its stately prospect of mountain range and plain spread out before it and about it. The streets are imin'y narrow and steep and crooked and interesting, and offer considerable variety in the way of names. On the corner of one of them you read this: "Rue da Puits d'Eiifer " (Pit of Hell street). Some of the sidt-walks are only eighteen inches wide; they are fsr cats, probably. There is a pleasant park, and there are spacious and beautiful grounds connected with the two great pleasure resorts, the Cercle aud the Villa de 3 Fleurs. The town consists of big hotels, little hoteb, and pensions. The Beaaon lasts about six months, beginning with May. When it is at its height there are thousands of visitors here, and in the course of the season as many as 20,009 in the aggregate come and go. These arc not all here for the baths ; some come for the gambling facilities and eome for the climate, It is a climate where the field strawberry flourishes through the spring, summer, and fall. It is hot in tho summer, and hot in earnest, but this is only in the day timo ; it is not so at night. The English season is May and June ; thfy get a good deal of rain then and they lik« it. The Americans take July, and the French tike August. By the Ist of July the open air miiiic and the evening concerts and operas i-.nd plays are fairly under way, and from that time onward tho rush of pleasure has a steadily increasing boom. It is said that in August the great grounds and the gambling rooms are crowded all the time, aod no eud of ottineible fun is going on. It is a gcoi place far rest and sleep and general recuperation of forces. The book of D; Wakefiold says there is something about this atmosphere which is the deadly enemy of insomnia, and I think this must be true ; fcr, if I am any judge, this town is at timss tho noisest one in Europe, and yet a body gets more sleep here than be could at home, I don't care where his home is. Now we aro living at a most comfortable and satisfactory pension, with a garden of shade trees and flowers and shrubs, and a convincing air of quiet and repose. Bat just across the narrow street ia the little market squire, and at a corner of that is that church that is neighbor to the Roman arch ; and that narrow street and' that billiard table of a market place, and that church, are able on a bet to turn out more noise to the cubic yard at the wrong time than any other similar combination in the earth or out of it. In the street you have the skull-bursting thunder of the passing hack, a volume of sound not producible by six hacks anywhere ehe. On the hask ia a lunatic with a whip, which he cracks to notify the public to get out of his way. This crack is as keen and sharp and penetrating and car-splitting as a pistol-shot at close range, and the lunatic delivers it in volleys, not single shots. You think you will not be able to live till ho gets by; and when he does get by he only leaves a vacancy for the bindit who sells ' Lo Petit Journal' to fill with hia strange and awful yell. He arrives with the early morning and the market people, and there is a dog that arrives at about the same time, and barks steadily at nothing till he dies, and they fetch another dog just like him. The bark of this breed is the twin of the whip-volley, and stabs like a knife. By-and bye, what is lett of you the church bell getß, There are many bells, and apparently six or seven thousand town clocks, and aB they are all five minutes apart—probably by law—there are no intervals; some of them are striking all the time. At least after yon go to bed they are, There is one clock that strikes the hour, and then strikes it over again to see if it was right. Then for evenings and Sundays there is a chime—a chime that starts in pleasantly and musically, then suddenly breaks into a frantio roar and boom and crash of warring sounds that makes you think Paris is up and the Revolution come again. And yet, as I have said, one sleeps here—sleeps like the dead. Once he gets his grip on his sleep, neither hack nor whip nor news fiend, nor dog nor bell cyclone, nor all of them together, can wrench it loose or mar its deep and tranquil continnity. Yes, there is indeed something in this air that is death to insomnia. The buildings of the Cercle and the Villa des Fleurs are huge in size, and each has a theatre in it, and a great restaurant, also conveniences for gambling and general and variegated entertainments, They stand in ornamental grounds of great extent and beauty. The multitudes of fashionable folk Bit at sun-all refreshment tables in the open air, afternoons, and listen to the music, and it is there that they miinly go to break the Sabbath.

To get the privilege of entering these grounds and buildings you bay a ticket for a few francs, which is good for the whole season. You are then free to go and oome at all hours, attend the plays and concerts free except on special occasions, gamble, buy refreshments, and make yourself symmetrically comfortable. Nothing oan be handier than those two little theatres. The cnrtain doesn't rise until half-past eight, and between the (tots

one can idle for half an hoar In the other departments of the building, damaging hie appetite in the restaurants or his pocket book'in the baooarat room. The Dingers and aotors are from Paris, and their performance is beyond praise. I was never in a fashionable gambling hell until I oame here. I had read several millions of descriptions of such places, but the reality was new to me. I very much wsnfcod to see this animal, especially the now historic game of baccarat, and this was a good place, for Air ranks next to Monte Carlo for high play and plenty of it. Bet the result was what I might have expected —the interest of the looker-on perishes with the novelty of the spectacle; that is to say, in a few minutes. A permanent and intense interest is acquirable in baccarat, or in any other game, but you have to buy it; yon don't get it by standing around looking on. The baccarat table is covered with green cloth, and is marked off in divisions with chalk cr something. The banker sits in the middle, the croupier opposite. The customers fill all the chairs at the table, and the rest of the crowd are masaed at thair backs, and leaning over them to deposit chips or gold coins. Constantly money and chips are flung upon the table, and the game seems to consist in the croupier's reaching for thoEe things with a flexible i sculling oar and raking them home. It apI peared to be a rational enough game for him, and if I could have borrowed bis oar I would have stayed; but I didn't see where the entertainment of the others came in. Tl.is was bcciuee I saw without perceiving, and observed without understanding. For the widow and the orphan and tho others do win money there. Once an old grey mother in Israel or elsewhere pulled out, and I beard her say to her daughter or her grand-daughter as they passed me: " There, I've won sir louis, and I'm going to quit while I'm ahead." Also there was this statistic A friend pointed to a young man with the dead stub of a cigar in his mouth, which he kept munching nervously all the time and pitching hundreddollar chips on the board, while two sweet young girls reached down over his shoulders to deposit modest little gold pieces, and said : " He's only fanning now; wasting a few hundreds to pass the time—waiting for tbo 'gold room' to oren, you know, which won't be till well after midnight. Tnen you'll see him bet. He won L 14.000 there last night. They don't bet anything there but big money." The thiug I chiefly missed was tho haggard people with the intense eye, the hunted look, the desperate mien, candidates for suicide and the pauper's grave. They are in the descriptions as a rule, but they were off duty that night. All the gambles, male and female, old and young, looked abnormally cheerful and prosperous. However, all the nations were there, clothed richly, and speaking all the languages. Some of the women were painted, and were evidently 6haky as t-> character. These items tallied with the descriptions well enough. The etiquette of the place was difficult to master. la the brilliant and populous halls and con id on you don't smoke, and you wear your hat no matter how many ladies are in tho thick throng of drifting humanity; but the moment you cross the sacred threshold and enter the gambling hall off tho hat must come, and everybody lights his cigar and goes to suffocating the ladies.

Bat what I came here for five weeks ago was the baths. My right arm was dieabled with rheumatism, To sit at hom9 in America, and guess out the European bath best fitted for a particular ailment, cr combination of ailments, is not possible, and it would not be a good idea to experiment in that way, anyhow. There are a great many curative baths on the Continent, and Borne are good for one disease but bad for another. So it is necessary to let a physician name your bath for you. As a rulo, Americans go to London to get this advice, and South Americans go to Paris for it. Now and then an economist chooses his bath himself and dees a thousand miles of railroading to get to it, and then the local physiciais till him he has come to the wrong place. Re sees that he has lost time and money and strength, and almost the minute that he realises this he loses his temper. I had the rhenmatism, and was advised to go to Aix not so much because I had that disease as because I had tije promise of certain others. What they were was not explained to ine, but they are either in the following menu or I have been sent to tho wrong plaoo. Dr Wakefield's book says:—" We know that the class of maladies benefited by the water and baths at Aix are those due to defect of nutrition, debility of the nervous system, or to a gouty, rheumatic, herpetic, or scrofulous diathesis—all diseases extremely debilitating, and requiring a tonic, and not a depressing action of the remedy. Thtß it seems to find here, as recorded experiences and daily action can testify. . . . According to the line

of treatment, followed particularly with due regard to the temperature, the action of the Aix waters can be made sedative, exciting, derivative, or alterative and tonic."

The "Establishment" ia the property of Frauce, and all the officers and servants are employed of the French Government. The bath house is a huge and massive pile of white marble masonry, and looks more like a temple than anything; else. It has several fi>ore, and eaoh is full of bath cabinets. There is every kind of bath—for the nose, the car?, the throat, vapor baths, tube bathe, swimming b.tth, and all people's favorite, the douche. It is a good building to get lost in, when you are not familiar Mich it, From early morning until nearly noon people are streaming in and btreirrvng out without halt, The maj >rity come afoot, but great numbers are brought in eedao chairs, a sufficiently ugly contrivance, whose cover 18 a steep little tent made of striped canvas. You see nothing of the patient in tt.ii diving bell ai the bearers tramp along, except a glimpse of his ankles, bound together and swathed around with blankets or towels to that generous degree that the result suggests a sore piano leg, By attention and practice the pall-bearers have got so that they can keep out of step all the time—and they do it. As a consequence their veiled churn goes rocking, tilting, swaying along like a bell-buoy in a ground swell. It makes the oldest sailor seasick to look at that spectacle.

The "coarse" is usually fifteen douche baths and five tub baths. You take the douche three days io succession, then knock off and take a tub. You keep up this distribution through the oourse. If one course does not cure you, you take another one after an interval. You seek a local physician, and he examines your oase and prescribes the kind of bath required for it, with various other particulars, then yon buy your oourse tickets and pay for them in advance—9dol. With the ticket you get a memorandum book with your dates and hours all set down in it. The doctor takes you into the bath the first morning and gives some instructions to the two doucbeurs who are to handle you through the course. The pour botres are about ten cent 9 to each of tho men for each bath, payable at the end of the oourse. Also, at the end of the course you piy three or four franos to the superintendent of your department of the bathhouse. These are useful particulars to know, and are not to be found in the books, A servant of your hotel carries your towels and sheet to the bath daily and brings them away again, They are the property of the hotel; the French Government doesn't famish these.

You meet all kinds of people at a place liko this, and if you give them a chance they will submerge you under their experiences, for they are either very glad or very sorry they came, and they want to spread their feelings out and enjoy them. One of these said to me:

" It's great, these baths. I didn't oome here' for my health ; I only came to find out if there was anything the matter with me. The doctor told me if there was the symptoms would soon appear. After the first douche I had sharp pains in all my muscles. The doctor said it was different varieties of rheumatism, and the best varieties there were, too. After my second bath I bad aohes in my bones aud skull and around. The doctor said it was different varieties of neuralgia, and the best in the market, anybody would tell me ■o. I got many new kinds of pains out of my third douche. These were in my joints. The dootor laid it was gout, eompli. oated with heart disease, and encouraged me to go on, Then we had the fourth douche, and J oame ant on. a stretcher tbat time,

and fetched with me one vast, diversified, undulating continental kind of pais, with horizons to it, and zones, and parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude, and isothermal belts, and variations of the oompass—oh, everything tidy and right np to tbo latest developments, yoa know. The doctor said it was inflammation Of the sonl, and just the very thing. Well, I went on gathering them in—toothache, liver complaint, softening of the brain, nostalgia, bronchitis, osteology, fits, celeoptere, hydrangea, cyclopedia britannica, delirium tremens, and a lot of other things that I've got down in my listlthat 111 show yon, and you can keep is if you like and tally off the bric-a-brac as yon lay it in. " The doctor said T. was a grand proof of what theso baths could do; said I had : oome here as innocent of disease as a grindstone, and inside of three weeks these baths bad sluiced out of me every important ailment known to medical science, along with considerable more that were entirely new and potentable. Why, he wanted to exhibit me in his bay window." There seemed to be a great many liars this year. I began to take the baths, and found them most enjoyable; so enjoyable that if I hadn't had a disease I wonld have borrowed one, just to have a pretext for going on. They took me into a stonefloored basin about 14ft square which had enough strange-looking pipes and things in it to make it look like a torture chamber. The two half-naked mea seated me on a pine stool, and kept a couple of warm water jets as thick as one's wrist playing upon me while they kneaded me, stroked me, twisted me, and applied all the other details of the scientific massage to me, for seven or eight minutes. Then they stood me up and played a powerful jet upon me, all around, for another minute. The cold shower bath came next, and the thing was over. I came out of the bath-house a few minutes later feeling younger and fresher and finer than I felt since I was a boy. The spring and cheer and delight of this exaltation luted three hours, and the same uplifting effect has followed the twenty douohes wbioh I have taken since.

After my first douche I went to the chemifet's on the corner, as per instructions, and asked for half a glass of Challe water. It comes from a spring sixteen miles from here. It was furnished me, bat, perceiving that there was something the matter with it, I offered to wait till they could get some that was fresh, but they said it always smelt that way. They said that the reason that this was so much ranker than the sulphur water of the bath was that this contained thirty-two times as mnch sulphur as that. It may be true, but in my opinion that water comes from a cemetery, and not a freßh cemetery either. History says that one of the early Roman generals lost an army down there somewhere. If he wonld come back now, I think this water wonld help him to find it again. However, I drank the Challe, and hare drunk it once or twice every day since. I suppose it is all right, but I wißh I knew what was the matter with those Romans.

My first baths developed plenty of pain, but the subsequent ones removed almost all of it. I have got back the u:e of my arm theße last few days, and I am going away now.

There are many beautiful drives about Aix, many interesting places to visit, and much pleasure to be found in paddling around the little Lake Bonrget on the small steamers, bat the excursion which satisfied me best was a trip to Annecy and its neighborhood. You go to Annecy in an hoar by rail, through a garden land that has not had its equal for beauty, perhaps, since Eden, and certainly no Eden was cultivated as thJB garden is. The charm and loveliness of the whole region are bewildering. Pioturesque rocks, forest-clothed hills, slopes richly bright in the cleanest and greenest gras3, fields of grain without fleck or flaw, dainty of color and as shiny and shimmery aB silk, old grey mansions and towers half buiied in foliage, and sunny eminences, deep chaams with precipitous walls, and a swift stream of pale blue water between, with now and then a tumbling cascade, and always noble mountains in view, with vagrant white clouds curling about their summits. Then at the end of an hour yon come to Annecy and rattle through its old crooked lanes, built solidly up with carious old houses that are a dream of the Middle Ages; and presently you come to the main object of your trip—Lake Annecy. It is a revelation; it is a miracle. It brings the tears to a body's eyes, it is so enchanting. That is to ssy, it affects yon just as all things that you instantly reoognise aB perfect affect you perfect music, perfect eloquence, perfect art, perfect joy, perfect grief. It stretches itself out there in the caressing sunlight, and away toward Ita border of majestic mountains a orisped and radiant plain of water of the divisest blue that csn be imagined. All the blues are there, from the faintest shoal-water suggestion of ths color, detectiblo only in the shadow of some overhanging object, all the way through, a little bine and a little bluer still, and again a shade bluer, till you strike the deep rich Mediterranean splendor which breaks the heart in your bosom, it is so beautiful.

And the mountains, as you skim along on the steamboat ! flow stately their forms, bow noble their proportions, bow green their velvet slopes, how soft the mottlings of sun and shadow that play about the rocky ramparts that crown them, how opaline the vast upheavals of snow banked sgainst the sky in the remoteness beyond— Mont Blanc and the others—how shall anybody describe ? Why, not even the painter can quite do it, and the most the pen can da is to suggest.

Up the lake there Is an old abbey— Talioires—relic of the Middle Ages. We stopped there ; stepped from the sparkling water and rash and boom, and fret and fever of the nineteenth century into the solemnity and the silence and the soft gloom, and the brooding mystery of a remote antiquity. The stone step at the water's edge had the traces of a worn-out inscription on it. The wide flight of stone steps that led up to the front door was polished smooth by the passing feet of forgotten oentnries, and there was not an unbroken stone among them all. Within the pile was the old square cloister with covered arcade all around it where the monks of the ancient times used to sit and meditate, and now and then welcome to their hospitalities the wandering knight with his tin breeches on ; and in the middle of the equare court (open to the sky) was a stone well-curb, oracked and slick with age and use, and all about it was weeds, and amongst the weeds mouldy briokbati that the crusaders used to throw at eaoh other. A passage at the farther side of the oloieter led to another weedy and roofless little enclosure beyond, where there was a rained wall clothed to the top with nneeej of ivy, and flanking it was a battered and plctnreeque arch. All over the building there were comfortable rooms and comfortable beds, and clean plank floors with no oarpets on them. In one bedroom upstairs were half a dozen portraits, dimming relics of the vanished centuries—portraits of abbots who used to be as grand as prints, in their old day, and very rich, and muoh worshipped and very holy; and in the nert room there was a howling cLromo and an electric bell. Downstairs there was an ancient wood carving with a Latin word commanding silence, and there was a brand new piano close by. Two elderly French women with the kindest and honestett and siaoerest faces have the abbey now, and they board and lodge people who are tired of the roar of cities and want to be where the dead silence and serenity and peace of this old nest will heal their blistered spirits, and patch up their ragged mindß. They fed as well, they slept us well, and I wish I could have stayed there a few yean and got a solid rest. Mabk Twain.