Part 10
"It seemed," said Monsignor Favier, "as though Providence had counted the grains of rice."
Then he spoke once more of Ensign Henry. "The only time during the entire siege," he said, "the only time we wept was when he died. He remained on his feet giving his orders, although mortally wounded in two places. When the fight was over he came down from the breach and fell exhausted in the arms of two of the priests; then we all wept with the sailors, who had come up and surrounded him. He was so charming, simple, good, and gentle with even the humblest. To be a soldier such as he was, to make yourself loved like a little child, could there be anything more beautiful?" Then after a silence he added, "And he had faith; every morning he used to come with us to prayers and to communion, saying with a smile, 'One must be always ready.'"
It is quite dark before I take leave of the bishop, on whom I had intended to pay a short call. All around him now, of course, everything is desolate and in ruins; there are no houses left, and the streets cannot even be traced. I go away with my two servants, our revolvers and one little lantern; I go thinking of Ensign Henry, of his glory, of his deliverance, of everything rather than the insignificant detail of the road to be followed among the ruins. Besides, it is not far, scarcely a kilometre.
A violent wind extinguishes the candle in its paper sheath, and envelops us in dust so thick that we cannot see two steps in front of us; it is like a thick fog. So, never having been in this quarter before, we are lost, and go stumbling along over stones, over rubbish, over broken pottery, and human bones.
We can scarcely see the stars for the thick cloud of dust, and we don't know which way to go.
Suddenly we get the smell of a dead body and we recognize the ditch we discovered yesterday morning just in time to keep from falling into it. So all is well; only two hundred metres more and we shall be at home in our glass palace.
XI
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.
XII
SATURDAY, October 27.
I wanted to see the Violet City and its throne rooms once more before going away, and to enter it this time, not by round-about ways and back doors and secret posterns, but by the great avenues and gates that have been for centuries closed, so that I might try to imagine beneath the destruction of to-day what must have been in former times the splendor of the sovereigns' arrival.
No one of our European capitals has been conceived and laid out with such unity and audacity, with the idea of increasing the magnificence of a pageant always dominant, especially that of imparting an imposing effect to the appearance of the Emperor. The throne is here the central idea. This city, as regular as a geometrical figure, seems to have been created solely to enclose and glorify the throne of the Son of Heaven, ruler of four hundred millions of souls; to be its peristyle, to lead up to it by colossal avenues which recall Thebes or Babylon. It is easy to understand why the Chinese ambassadors, who came to visit our kings in the times when their immense country was flourishing, were not
## particularly dazzled by the sight of the Paris of those days, of the
Louvre or of Versailles.
The southern gate of Pekin, by which the processions arrive, lies in the axis of this throne, once so awe-inspiring, and six kilometres of avenues, with gateways and monsters, lead up to it. When one has crossed the wall of the Chinese City by this southern gate, first passing two huge sanctuaries,--the Temple of Agriculture and the Temple of Heaven,--one follows for half an hour the great artery that leads to a second boundary wall, that of the Tartar City, higher and more commanding than the first. An enormous gate looms up, surmounted by a black dungeon, and beyond this the avenue goes on, flawlessly straight and magnificent, to a third gate in a third wall of a blood-red color,--the wall of the Imperial City.
Even after entering the Imperial City it is still some distance to the throne to which one is advancing in a straight line,--to this throne which dominates everything and which formerly could never have been seen; but here its presence is indicated by the surroundings. From this point the number of marble monsters increases; lions of colossal size grin from their pedestals at right and at left; there are marble obelisks--monoliths encircled with dragons--with the same heraldic beast always seated at the summit,--a thin kind of jackal with long ears, which has the appearance of barking or howling in the direction of the extraordinary thing which is on ahead, namely, the throne of the Emperor. Walls are multiplied,--blood-colored walls thirty metres thick,--which cross the road, and are surmounted by queer roofs and pierced by low gates,--narrow ambushes that send a thrill of terror to your heart. The defending moats at the foot of the walls have marble bridges, triple like the gates, and from here on the road is paved with superb big slabs crossing one another at an angle, like the boards of a parquetry floor.
After it reaches the Imperial City, this avenue, already a league in length, is absolutely unfrequented, and goes on even wider than before between long regular buildings intended for soldiers' barracks. No more little gilded houses, no more small shops, no more crowds! At this last imprisoning rampart the life of the people stops, under the oppression of the throne; and at the very end of this solitary roadway, watched over by the slender marble beasts surmounting the obelisks, the forbidden centre of Pekin becomes visible, the retreat of the Son of Heaven.
The last wall which appears ahead of us--that of the Violet City--is, like the preceding ones, the color of dried blood; there are numerous watch-towers upon it, whose roofs of dark enamel curve up at the corners in wicked little points. The triple gates are too small, too low for the height of the wall, too deep and tunnel-like. Oh, the heaviness, the hugeness of it all, and the strangeness of the design of the roofs, so characteristic of the peculiarities of the yellow colossus!
* * * * *
Things must have begun to go to pieces here centuries ago; the red plaster of the walls has fallen in places, or it has become spotted with black; the marble of the obelisks and the great squinting lions could only have grown so yellow under the rains of innumerable seasons, and the green that pushes through wherever the granite is joined, marks with lines of velvet the design of the pavement.
The last triple gates, given over since the defeat to a detachment of American soldiers, will open to-day for any barbarian, such as I, who carries a properly signed permit.
Passing through the tunnels, one enters an immense marble whiteness,--a whiteness that is turning into ivory yellow and is stained by the autumn leaves and the wild growth that has invaded this deserted spot. The place is paved with marble, and straight ahead, rising like a wall, is an extraordinary marble terrace, on which stands the throne room, with its sturdy blood-red columns and its roof of old enamel. This white enclosure is like a cemetery--so much green has pushed its way up between the paving-stones,--where the silence is broken only by the magpies and the crows.
On the ground are ranged blocks of bronze all similar and cone-like in shape; they are simply placed there among the brown leaves and branches, and can be moved about as if they were ninepins. They are used during the formal entry of a procession to mark the line for the flags and the places where even the most magnificent visitors must prostrate themselves when the Son of Heaven deigns to appear, like a god, on top of the marble terrace, surrounded by banners, and in one of those costumes with breastplate of gold, monsters' heads on the shoulders, and gold wings in the headdress, whose superhuman splendor has been transmitted to us by means of the paintings in the Temple of Ancestors.
One mounts to these terraces by staircases of Babylonian proportions and by an "imperial path," reserved for the Emperor alone, that is to say, by an inclined plane made of one block of marble,--one of those untransportable blocks which men in the past possessed the secret of moving. The five-clawed dragon displays his sculptured coils from the top to the bottom of this stone, which cuts the big white staircase into two equal parts, of which it forms the centre, and extends right to the foot of the throne. No Chinese would dare to walk on this "path" by which the emperors descend, pressing the high soles of their shoes on the scales of the heraldic beast, in order not to slip.