Part 8

I am going to take breakfast to-day with the French officers at the extreme north end of the imperial wood, at the Temple of the Silkworm. This, too, is an admirable old sanctuary, preceded by sumptuous courts with marble terraces and bronze vases. This Yellow City is a complete world of temples and palaces set in green. Up to last month the travellers who thought they were seeing China, and to whom all this remained closed, forbidden, could have no idea of the marvellous city opened to us by the war.

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When I start back to my Palace of the Rotunda, about two o'clock, a burning sun is shining on the dark cedars and willows; one seeks shade as if it were summer, and the willows are losing many of their leaves. At the entrance to the Marble Bridge, not far from my gate, the two bodies in blue gowns which lie among the lotus are bathed in an ironical splendor of light.

After the soldiers on guard have closed the low postern by which one gains access to my high garden, I am again alone in the silence until the sun's rays, falling oblique and red upon my writing-table, announce the coming of the melancholy evening.

I am scarcely seated at my work before a friendly head, discreetly rubbed against my leg to attract my attention, announces the visit of the cat. I am not unprepared for this visit, for I now expect it every day.

An hour of ideal quiet goes by, broken only by two or three ravens' cries. Then I hear the noise of cavalry galloping over the stone pavements at the foot of my wall; it proves to be Field-Marshal von Waldersee, followed by an escort of soldiers with small flags at the tips of their spears. He is returning to the palace where he lives, not far from here, one of the most sumptuous of all the residences of the Empress. My eyes follow the cavalcade as it crosses the Marble Bridge, turns to the left, and is lost behind the trees. Then the silence returns, absolute as before.

From time to time I go out to walk on my high terrace, and always discover there something new. There are enormous tam-tams under my cedars, with which to call upon the gods; there are beds of yellow chrysanthemums and Indian-yellow carnations, upon which the frost has left a few flowers; there is a kind of daïs of marble and faience supporting an object quite indefinite at first sight,--one of the largest blocks of jade in the world, cut in imitation of an ocean wave with monsters struggling in the foam.

I visit some deserted kiosks,--still furnished with ebony thrones, divans, and yellow silk cushions,--which seem like little clandestine love nests. There is no doubt that the beautiful sovereign, passionate still, though aging, used to isolate herself here with her favorites among the imperial silks in these protecting shadows.

* * * * *

My only companion in my palace of dreams to-day is the big alabaster goddess robed in gold, who perpetually smiles upon broken vases and withered flowers; her temple, where the sun never enters, is always cold and grows dark before it should.

But now real night has come, and I begin to feel chilly. The sun, which in France is at its meridional apogee, is sinking; sinking here, a big red ball without light or heat, going down behind the Lake of the Lotus in a wintry mist.

The chill of the night comes on suddenly, giving me the sensation of an abrupt descent into a cave of ice and a furtive little feeling of anguish at being exiled so far from home.

I greet my two servants like friends when they come for me, bringing a cape for me to wear on the way back to the palace.

VI

WEDNESDAY, October 24.

The same glorious sunshine in gallery, garden, and wood. Each day the work of our soldiers with their gangs of Chinese laborers goes on in the nave of the Cathedral; they carefully separate such treasures as have remained intact, or nearly so, from what is irreparably injured. There is a continual coming and going across our court of furniture and precious bronzes in hand-barrows; all that is taken out of the church is put in places not at present needed for our troops, to await its final transportation to the Ancestors' Palace, where it is to remain under lock and key.

We have seen so many of these magnificent things that we are satiated and worn with them. The most remarkable discoveries made from the depths of the oldest cases have ceased to astonish us; there is nothing now that we want for the decoration--oh, so fleeting--of our apartments; nothing is sufficiently beautiful for our Heliogabalean fancies. There will be no to-morrow, for the inventory must be finished within a few days, and then our long galleries will be parcelled out for officers' rooms and offices.

In the way of discoveries, we came this morning upon a pile of bodies,--the last defenders of the Imperial City, who fell all in a heap and have remained in positions indicative of extreme agony. The crows and the dogs have gone down into the ditch where they lie and have devoured eyes, chests, and intestines; there is no flesh left on their bones, and their red spinal columns show through their ragged raiment. Shoes are left, but no hair; Chinamen have evidently descended into the deep hole with the dogs and the crows, and have scalped the dead in order to make false queues.

* * * * *

To-day I leave the Palace of the North early and for all day, as I must go over to the European quarter to see our Minister at the Spanish legation, where he was taken in; he is still in bed, but convalescing so that at last I can make to him the communications which I undertook on behalf of the admiral.

For four days I have not been outside the red walls of the Imperial City, have not left our superb solitude. So when I find myself once more among the ugly gray ruins of the commonplace streets of the Tartar City, in everybody's Pekin, in the Pekin known to all travellers, I appreciate better the unique peculiarities of our great wood, of our lake, and of all our forbidden glories.

However, this city of the people seems less forlorn than on the day of my arrival in the wind and snow. The people are beginning to return, as I have been told; Pekin is being repopulated, the shops are opening, houses are rebuilding, and already a few humble and entertaining trades have been taken up along the streets, on tables, under tents, and under parasols. The warm sunshine of the Chinese autumn is the friend of many a poor wretch who has no fire.

VII

THE TEMPLE OF THE LAMAS

The Temple of the Lamas, the oldest sanctuary in Pekin, and one of the most curious in the world, contains a profusion of marvellous work of the old Chinese gold and silver smiths, and a library of inestimable value.

This precious temple has seldom been seen, although it has been in existence for centuries. Before this year's European invasion, access to it was strictly forbidden to "outside barbarians," and even since the Allies have had possession of Pekin, very few have ever gone there. It is protected by its location in an angle of the Tartar wall in quite a lifeless part of the city whose different quarters are dying from century to century as old trees lose their branches one by one.

Going there to-day on a pilgrimage with the members of the French legation, we find that we are all there for the first time.

In order to reach it we first cross the eastern market-place, three or four kilometres through a sunless and desolate Pekin,--a Pekin that bears the marks of war and defeat, and where things are spread out for sale on the filth and ashes of the ground. Some matchless objects transmitted by one generation of mandarins to another are to be found among the rags and old iron; ancient palaces, as well as the houses of the poor, have emptied here some of their most astonishing contents; the sordid and the marvellous lie side by side,--here some pestilential rags, there a bibelot three thousand years old. Along the walls of the houses as far as one can see, the cast-off garments of dead men and women are hung. It is a place for the sale of extravagant clothing without end, opulent furs from Mongolia stolen from the rich, gay costumes of a courtesan, or magnificent heavy silk robes which belonged to great ladies who have disappeared. The Chinese populace, who have done a hundred times more than the invaders in the way of pillage, burning, and destruction in Pekin, the uniformly dirty populace, dressed in blue cotton, with squinting, evil eyes, swarm and crawl about, eagerly searching and raising a perfect cloud of microbes and dust. Ignoble scoundrels with long queues circulate amongst the crowd, offering robes of ermine or blue-fox, or admirable sables for a few piasters, in their eagerness to be rid of stolen goods.

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As we approach the object of our journey it grows more quiet; the busy, crowded streets are gradually succeeded by streets that have perished of old age, where there are no passers; grass grows on the thresholds and behind abandoned walls; we see trees with branches knotted like the arms of the aged.

We dismount before a crumbling entrance which seems to open into a park which might be a ghosts' walk; and this is the entrance to the temple.

What sort of a reception shall we have in this mysterious enclosure? We do not know; and at first there is no one to receive us. But the chief of the Lamas soon appears, bowing, with his keys, and we follow him across the funereal park.

With a violet dress, a shaven head, and a face like old wax, at once smiling, frightened, and hostile, he conducts us to a second door, opening into an immense court paved with white stones, completely surrounded by the curious walls of the first buildings of the temple. Their foundations are massive, their roofs curved and forked, the walls themselves awe-inspiring on account of their size, and hermetically sealed; and all this is the color of ochre and rust, with golden reflections thrown on the high roofs by the evening sun.

The court is deserted, the grass grows between the paving-stones. On the white marble balustrades in front of the closed doors of these great temples are ranged "prayer-mills," which are conical thrones made of bronze, and engraved with secret symbols, which the priests turn and turn while murmuring words unintelligible to men of our day.

In old Asia, which is our ancestor, I have penetrated to the heart of ancient sanctuaries, trembling meanwhile with indefinable anguish before symbols whose meaning has been lost for centuries. This kind of anguish has never been so tinged with melancholy as to-night, standing before this row of silent "prayer-mills" in the cold, the wind, the solitude, the dilapidation of this court, with its white grass-grown pavement and mysterious yellow walls.

Young Lamas appear one after the other as noiselessly as shadows, and even Lama children, for they begin to instruct them quite young in the old rites no longer understood by any one.

They are young, but they have no appearance of youth; senility is upon them as well as a look of I know not what of mystical dulness; their gaze seems to have come from past centuries and to have lost its clearness on the way. Whether from poverty or renunciation, the yellow gowns that cover their thin bodies are faded and torn. Their faces and their dress, as well as their religion and their sanctuary, are covered, so to speak, with the ashes of time.

They are glad to show us all that we wish to see in their old buildings; and we begin with the study-rooms, where so many generations of obscure and unprogressive priests have been slowly formed.

By looking closely, it is plain that all these walls, now the color of the oxydized metal, were once covered with beautiful designs in lacquer and gilt; to harmonize them all into the present old-bronze shades has required an indefinite succession of burning summers and glacial winters, together with the dust,--the incessant dust blown across Pekin from the deserts of Mongolia.

Their study-rooms are very dark,--anything else would have surprised us; and this explains why their eyes protrude so from their drooping lids. Very dark these rooms are, but immense; sumptuous still, in spite of their neglect, and conceived on a grand scale, as are all the monuments of this city, which was in its day the most magnificent in the world. The high ceilings are supported by lacquered columns. There are small seats for the students, and carved desks by the hundred, all arranged in rows and worn and defaced by long use. Gods in golden robes are seated in the corners. The wall hangings of priceless old work represent the joys of Nirvana. The libraries are overflowing with old manuscripts, some in the form of books, and others in great rolls wrapped up in colored silks.

We are shown into the first temple, which, as soon as the door is opened, shines with a golden glow,--the glow of gold used discreetly, and with the warm, reddish tones which lacquer takes on in the course of centuries. There are three golden altars, on which are enthroned in the midst of a pleiad of small golden gods three great ones, with downcast eyes. The straight stems of the gold flowers standing in gold vases in front of the altars are of archaic stiffness. The repetition, the persistent multiplication of the same objects, attitudes, and faces, is one of the characteristics of the unchanging art of pagodas. As is the case with all the temples of the past, there is here no opening for the light; only the light that comes in through the half-opened doors illumines from below the smile of the great seated idols, and shows dimly the decorations of the ceiling. Nothing has been touched, nothing taken away, not even the admirable cloisonné vases where sticks of incense are burning,--evidently this place has been ignored.

Behind this temple, behind its dusty dependencies, in which the tortures of the Buddhist hell are depicted, the Lamas conduct us to a second court, paved in white stones, similar in every way to the first; the same dilapidation, the same solitude, the same coppery-yellow walls.

After this second court comes another temple, identical with the first, so much so that one wonders if one is not the victim of an illusion; the same figures, the same smiles, the same gold bouquets in vases of gold,--a patient and servile reproduction of the same magnificence.

After this second temple there is a third court, and a third temple exactly like the two others. But the sun is now lower, and lights only the extreme tips of the faience roofs and the thousands of small monsters of yellow enamel which seem to be chasing one another over the tiling. The wind increases, and we shiver with cold. The pigeons in the carved cornice begin to seek their nests, and the silent owls wake up and begin to fly about.

As we expected, this last temple--possibly the oldest, certainly the most dilapidated--is only a repetition of the other two, save for an idol in the centre, which, instead of being seated and life-sized, is colossal and standing. The gold ceiling rises from about half the height of the statue into a cupola, also gilded, which forms a sort of box enclosing the upper part of the figure. To see the face one must go close to the altars and look up between the rigid flowers and the incense-burners. It then looks like a Titanic mummy in its case, with a downcast look that makes one nervous. But on looking steadily, it exercises a sort of spell; one is hypnotized and held by that smile so impartially bestowed upon all this entourage of dying splendor, gold, dust, cold, twilight, ruins, silence.

VIII

CONFUCIUS

There was still a half-hour of sunshine after we left the ghostly Lamas, so we went to pay a call on Confucius, who dwells in the same quarter,--the same necropolis, one might say,--in an abandonment equally depressing.

The big worm-eaten door slips off its hinges and falls down as we attempt to enter, and an owl who was asleep there takes fright and flies away. Behold us in a sort of mortuary wood, walking over the brown autumn grass.

A triumphal arch is the first thing we come across, built to pay homage to some great Chinese thinker. It is of a charming design, although very peculiar, with three little bell-towers of yellow enamel, which crown the whole, their curved roofs decorated with monsters at each one of the corners.

It stands there like some precious bibelot lost among the ruins. Its freshness is surprising where all else is so dilapidated. One realizes its great age from the archaic nature of its details; but it is made of such enduring materials that the wear and tear of centuries in this dry climate has not affected it. The base is white marble, the rest is of faience,--faience both yellow and green, with lotus leaves, clouds, and chimæras in bold relief.

Farther on is a large rotunda which gives evidence of extreme antiquity; this appears to be the color of dirt or ashes, and is surrounded by a moat where the lotus and the reeds are dying. This is a retreat where wise men may come to meditate upon the vanities of life; the object of the moat is to isolate it and make it more quiet.

It is reached by an arched bridge of marble, with railings that vaguely suggest a succession of animals' heads. Inside, it is deserted, abandoned, crumbling away, and the gold ceiling is full of birds' nests. A really magnificent desk is left, with an arm-chair and a table. It seems as though a kind of fine clay had been scattered by handfuls over everything; the ground is covered with it too, so that one's feet sink into it and one's steps are muffled. We soon discover that there is still a carpet underneath, and that it is really nothing but dust which has been accumulating for centuries,--the thick and ever-present dust which the Mongolian winds blow across Pekin.

After a short walk under the old trees we reach the temple itself, which is preceded by a court surrounded by tall marble pillars. This looks exactly like a cemetery, and yet there are no dead lying under these stele, which are there merely to glorify the memory of the departed. Philosophers who in bygone centuries made this region illustrious by their presence and by their dreams, profound thinkers, lost to us forever, have their names as well as some few of their most transcendent utterances, perpetuated on these stele.

On either side of the white steps leading to the sanctuary, blocks of marble are arranged in the form of a tam-tam. These are so old as to make one's head swim; and upon them maxims intelligible only to a few erudite mandarins have been written in primitive Chinese characters, in letters contemporary with and sisters to the hieroglyphs of Egypt.

This is the temple of disinterestedness, of abstract thought, and of cold speculation. One is struck at once by its absolute simplicity, for which, up to this point, nothing in China has prepared us. Very large, very high as to ceilings, very grand and of a uniform blood-red color, it is magnificently empty and supremely quiet. The columns and walls are red, with a few discreet decorations in gold, dimmed by time and dust. In the centre is a bouquet of gigantic lotus in a colossal vase, and that is all. After the profusion, the debauch of monsters and idols, the multiplication of human and animal forms in the usual Chinese pagoda, this absence of figures of any sort is a comfort and a relief.

In the niches all along the wall there are stele, red like the rest of the place, and consecrated to the memory of persons still more eminent than those of the entrance court, with quotations from their writings carved upon them. The stele of Confucius himself, which is larger than the others, and has longer quotations, occupies the position of honor in the centre of this severe Pantheon, and is placed on a kind of altar.

Properly speaking, this is not a temple; it is not a place for prayer or service. It is rather an academy, a meeting-place for calm, philosophic discussion. In spite of its dust and its abandoned air, it seems that newly elected members of the Academy of Pekin (which is even more than our own the conservator of form and ceremony, I am assured) are still bound to give a conference here.

Besides various maxims of renunciation and wisdom written from top to bottom of the stele, Confucius has left to this sanctuary certain thoughts on literature which have been engraved in letters of gold in such a way as to form pictures hung on the walls.

Here is one which I transcribe for young western scholars who are preoccupied with classification and inquiry. They will find in it a reply twice two thousand years old to one of their favorite questions: "The literature of the future will be the literature of compassion."

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It is almost five o'clock when the gloomy, red, autumn sun goes down behind great China on Europe's side, and we leave the temples and the grove behind. I separate from my companions, for they live in the legation quarter in the southern part of the Tartar City, while I go to the Imperial City, far from here.

I have no idea how to get out of this dead region, all new to me, where we have spent the day, and through the lonely labyrinthine streets of Pekin. I have as a guide a "mafou," who has been lent to me, and I only know that I have more than a mile to go before reaching my sumptuous, deserted quarters.

My companions gone, I walk for a few moments in the silent old uninhabited streets before reaching one of the long, broad avenues where blue cotton dresses and long-queued yellow faces begin to appear. There is an interminable row of low houses, wretched, gray things, on either side of the street, where the tramp of horses raises the black friable dust in infectious clouds.

The street is so wide and the houses so low that almost the whole of the twilight sky is visible above our heads; and so suddenly does the cold come on after sunset that in a moment we freeze.

The crowds are dense about the food-shops, and the air is fetid in the neighborhood of the butchers, where dog-meat and roasted grasshoppers are sold. But what good nature in all these people of the streets, who on the day after battle and bombardment permit me to pass without so much as an evil look! What could I do, with my borrowed "mafou" and my revolver, if my appearance did not happen to please them?