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of her being wheeled in her chair to the Kursaal, and sitting at her place at the table from the opening to the closing of the play, almost uninterruptedly, seven days each week during the whole season. Fabulous tales are told regarding her age, but, from her looks, she cannot be over seventy. Besides, her peculiar relations with the late Emperor Nicholas of Russia fix the date of her birth as being almost certainly since the beginning of the present century. Very large, very bent, very infirm, very bright-eyed, and very affable-such are the characteristics which now mark the appearance of this once world-famous beauty. Nicholas left her one hundred thousand florins a-year. The present Emperor has cut down this pension one half, and on the remainder, say $20,000 (in addition to her private fortune), the Countess manages, with strict economy, to live. Of course she cannot play very heavily. She is said to set aside forty thousand francs a-year to lose at play, saying that, in her youth and beauty, she spent more than that sum on dress and gayety; and, now that youth and beauty are gone, she must spend her time and money on the pleasures which are left her. Gaming, with her, is not a speculation, it is an occupation—a slight excitement, almost unconnected with hope and fear. In her favor it may be said that in Russia she is much respected. When she is in St. Petersburg, the street where she lives is blocked with the carriages of callers the best society, they say.

One of the nicest residence streets in Homburg is named for the CountessKisselef Strasse. There is something very naïve in thus calling the place after the person whose losses have given it existence. But they say that the Kisselef is a large shareholder as well as a main patron of the gaming-house company. "Who are the other owners of the establishment?" No one knows. No one is willing to acknowledge ownership. "Then gaming is disreputable, is it, among the best people, even here?" By no means. Even the best business-men in Frankfort play,

without any disguise; but as to owning gambling-house shares, that would be quite another thing. In other words, they are willing to be known as losing money in the way of amusement, but not as making money. That would place them in the class of professional gamblers.

The first charter of the Privelegirte Bank was given in 1842, and expired in 1866, at which time the second (also for twenty-four years), began. But there was a war in Germany in 1866, and, as one of the consequences thereof, Hesse Homburg has become Prussian, and Prussian laws forbid public gambling; so there is talk of closing the gamblingrooms next year. What will become of Homburg when that is done? Kurhaus means the house where people are cured, and it is not to be supposed that the mineral waters of the springs will lose their medicinal virtues in consequence of having become Prussian. This will be "Bad-Homburg" still, as long as the baths remain, though not with the double significance the word has now while the place is the greatest gaming-hell in the world. The Kurgardens will be lovely, green, shady parks, with innumerable walks, and drives, and ponds. The Kurhaus will still exist-a great and gorgeous edifice, as large as the New York City Hall. And in the Kurhaus, the salons de jeu must endure for many a year, beautiful rooms wherein time and neglect can only damage the glories of color, not the perfections of form and proportion. Who will come to be cured, when there remain to be administered only nature's remedies for bodily ills? We all know that the main attraction has been the fascinating phlebotomy of the gaming-table, so good for plethora of the pocket. It is money left here by the fortune-seekers that has built up this lovely little city for us simple health and pleasure seekers-graded and paved these model streets, smoothed, planted, and beautified the pleasuregrounds that surround the wells, instituted the lovely out-door flower-beds and tropical greenhouses, provided the

sweet and plentiful music daily given to the public, and the frequent balls to which all visitors are freely invited. All this, besides paying for the magnificent Kurhaus, and giving the shareholders dividends of fifty, seventy-five, and a hundred per cent. per annum! Yes, Homburg is a lovely place, and the Privelegirte Bank has done every thing for Homburg.

(Apropos to this, we may recall the fact that, according to Milton, hell has faultless and splendid architecture, and the devil has spared no pains nor expense in its construction and decoration.)

Perhaps another class of visitors will come, who are now really kept away from here by the dissipation. It will be a dull watering-place, instead of a gay one. A cheaper place, for visitors who do not play, it can scarcely be. A large portion of their expenses are paid by those who do play. The streets are beautifully kept. One walks quite indifferently on the carriage-way or the foot-way. They seem to be swept in the night, and often, in the early walk to and from the springs, one finds the streets so clean that a neat man, who has so much as a cigar-end to throw away, will instinctively carry it some distance to find a corner where it will not be a conspicuous blemish to the neatness around him. Who pays the expense of an administration so efficient as this good order indicates? Nobody asks the visitor to pay any taxes, and no heavy assessments can be included in the two dollars a-day which his living (in lodgings) costs him. His taxes are paid by his neighbors-our friends who walk up so generously, uninvited, to the table of the green cloth with cabalistic figures, and lay down their money with such zeal and perseverance. It is their sacrifices at the shrine of Fortune which accrue to the benefit of those who know the fickle goddess too well to join in the throng of her worshippers.

How few are those who never pay any tribute at the insatiable shrine! Listen to the case of our pious, praiseworthy, exemplary friend, and most potent,

sor.

grave, and reverend senior, the ProfesWe were dining al fresco on the fine portico attached to the Kurhaus, where one may listen to the music while refreshing the inner man; or rather, we had dined. The fact of its being the Professor's birthday suddenly occurred to him, and he proposed a bottle of Veuve Cliquot as the appropriate libation. No waiter being in sight, the Professor himself disappeared withindoors to give the order. Soon he reappeared, and sat down. The wine did not come. "What can be the matter?" "I do not know. I paid the money." Patient waiting brought no further developments. "Shall I go, Professor, and inquire?" “Oh, no. It will be all right; I paid the money." More patience; more waiting; more surprise. "Where did you pay the money, Professor?" "I put it on the table with the green cloth, and the man raked it in."

There was much laughter-whether at our expense who went without our champagne, or at that of the Professor who so quietly gambled away four florins, and also the good example which had previously reinforced his precepts, it is difficult to say.

The great rock on which the gamblers all split, is an illogical calculation of chances. They start with the selfevident proposition that it is not likely that the red (or the black, as the case may be) will come up two, three, four, or five times in succession. But they fail to perceive, what is equally true, that after the color has come up four times in succession, the chances are perfectly equal that it will come up the fifth. And as the bank never bets that any color will come up twice or more times in succession, but always simply that it will not come up once (taking the odds, say, of 103 to 100), all calculations are baseless and foolish; and, in the long run, the bank makes just about 103 winnings to 100 losses. As my w wise American friend says, "When a man plays here and there, as the fancy strikes him, he will probably lose something, or may possibly win something; but when you see any one to keep on a card a

record of the game, and play on a system accordingly, you may set him down as a ruined man. He is sure to go on till his pocket is drained. The best way, however, is not to play at all." Which good advice his sweet wife earnestly reechoes.

Now, shall I tell you what Rumor says of the practice of this sage preceptor? what disposition is made of the great monthly American remittances he receives? what tales of distress and anxiety the mild-eyed wife could reveal? No, I had better not; for it might suggest some unfounded suspicions as to the experience of the very person who has been volunteering so much of good advice and information as this article contains.

We have said nothing about the immorality and impropriety of the system of public gambling. It does not need preaching against-it preaches against itself:

"A creature of so foul a mien,

That to be hated needs but to be seen."

It is only

"When seen too oft, familiar with the face,

We first endure, then pity, then embrace." And it is our first impressions of the creature that we have presented. America, though it furnishes a large part of the pleasure-travel of Europe, furnishes only a very small part of the gamblinghouse gains. These come from persons who get their money more easily than do most Americans. Such a fat, dull, sensualist as Mustapha Pasha, who travels openly with a shameless woman, and who sold his right of succession to the throne of Egypt for ten million francs, is the very man to squander those millions on the gaming-table; and whatever is natural to him is almost sure to be unnatural to an American-so diametrically opposite and unlike are they in every particular of nature and character. As another instance: a man to whom debt is a second nature, and "duns" public nuisances and necessary evils, excites no surprise or contempt in the artificial society of Europe, though in America he would be considered a kind of thief, as he is-one who gets and

keeps what has been earned by and belongs to another. Such a man is very likely to risk his easily-gotten gains at the rouge-et-noir, while the "dun," the real owner, knows too well the value of money to so throw it away.

But

As you approach the field of battle you begin meeting the "killed and wounded " returning from the fell conflict. The earliest exhausted get their quietus in time to return to Frankfort by the 3 P. M. train, and from that time till midnight the crest-fallen procession of the unfortunates is continual. the next morning inevitably brings up fresh troops of victims to the great holocaust. The sight is grimly amusing, but not, if you will credit the personal experience of an American observer, enticing or seductive. Beyond a few coins thrust laughingly on the tables with the positive expectation of seeing them raked in, we Yankees, in nine cases out of ten (or more), come off scot-free. Where one is rather more heavily bitten, it is usually in the insane pursuit of the phantom "to just make up losses." This is a dangerous mirage, but its victims, after all, are few, and, for the most part, easily cured.

It is with an effort that one recalls the thought of the ruin, at those tables, of countless thousands of fortunes great and small. When one gets any thing like a realizing sense of them, then the lovely Kursaal seems like a great fatal Upas-tree, with gorgeous foliage shading heaps of bones. As I look now at its great roof looming through the night, above the trees opposite my window, its outline faintly shown by the light of the gas burning in and around it, I can fancy it to be like the horrible slaveship, surrounded by its own phosphorescent atmosphere of decay, as if even darkness and fog avoided it as something too loathsome and repulsive to touch.

But it is doubtful if this open play is worse than the private gambling of some other nations. England has no public gambling-houses, but England is one great gambling-house! Every thing is the subject of bets, from a parliament

ary election to a rubber of whist in a clergyman's library; from a horse-race or a yacht-race to the progress of two rain-drops down a window-pane. Is this worse, or better? Each must judge for himself.

Either is bad-bad as bad can be. The moral to be drawn from it all is,

that no money is well used except that which is well earned; and further, that the financial virtue and honesty of Europe and of the world exists among the middle and lower classes-the industrious-and not among the members of any hereditary aristocracy, whether of rank or of wealth.

PRIVATE BOHEMIAS.

IN speaking of Bohemia, I have no reference to that country whose capital is Prague; whose inhabitants use a language closely resembling that of angry horses; where, it would seem from all accounts, wounded prisoners of war do not find that their lines (of battle) have fallen in pleasant places-a region of which I know little. Neither do I allude to that universal empire, whose spiritual capital is supposed to be Paris; whose law is liberty; whose inhabitants live by their wit or their wits; whose moral code is scarcely the Ten Commandments-an empire of which I know still less. My reference is to private possessions, held by steadygoing, proper, pious citizens, whose social habits are modelled to a sufficient degree upon those of the lark and the lamb; who pay their bakers' bills, and whose washerwomen do not go away sorrowing; who are sometimes pillars of church and state, and who would generally be shocked by the bare suggestion of their ownership of such property.

It is to these I wish to make known the nature of their own rich estates; it is to these, who seeing see not, I write. Let me explain.

A private Bohemia, I take to be that small portion of time or space into which a man may transfer himself from out of his fixed relations with the external world, his habits and ordinary frame of mind. Entering it, is a mental process somewhat akin to Sydney Smith's idea of taking off your flesh and sitting in your bones. It is remov

ing the harness from the working horse, and turning him out to gambol and graze in the green fields. It is slightly divorcing one's self from one's self. Escaping into his own small nook of fairy-land, the soldier ceases to be a soldier; another inner self, as it were, develops, and he becomes an artist, perhaps, with an eye for all lovely color, or an ear for all harmonious sound. The lawyer, by the same process, sloughs off the mortal coil to such a degree that he emerges for the moment a poet, with only rhyme and rhythm swaying thought and word, with memories of the sweet singers of every time and land returning to him and flowing from his lips. The merchant forgets his stocks, and the builder his stones, becoming joyous and jovial, "good fellows" in the best sense of the words. Each one changes to something which he apparently is not.

The evidence furnished by history on the subject of private Bohemias is very full, and well worthy of consideration.

The administration of the kingdom of Prussia under Frederic William would scarcely suggest that its monarch could possibly claim such a dominion as I have described. In those days all Prussian souls wore uniforms, physically or metaphorically; they walked between straight lines, generally of bayonets; they improved each shining hour to a most painful degree; and the law of the land was a mixture of the multiplication table and the right-angled triangle. Yet the man who personified this whole system, from whom it was

evolved, could only live under it by periodically escaping from it. He could not "polish his stanza," as Mr. Carlyle has it, without constantly throwing down his pen and rushing out to stretch his limbs and draw a breath of fresh air. Hence his tobacco-college; which impresses me as the natural and necessary Bohemia of this rough, if royal, member of the brotherhood. Let us hope that it was as peculiar to himself as many of his habits and customs; let us still more hope that his unfortunate subjects had likewise their own means of escaping from the yoke of such a life-some little resting-place for soul or body sacred from recollections of Potsdam guards and uplifted walking-sticks. Their continued existence is a guarantee that such must have been the case-that in this manner was the wind tempered to these shorn Prussian lambs.

When Frederic the Great inherited the crown, this portion of his father's domain did not descend to him in form. But in a singularly different guise he still possessed it. There has always been, to me, something pathetic in his lifelong exertions to share his private Bohemia with kindred spirits, in his undiminished faith and labors to establish it as a visible kingdom. From those early days, when he sought to enthrone Voltaire as its crowned head, to old age, he seems never to have surrendered this hope. Poet, philosopher, and wit he wooed, but never permanently won. They seemed divided by some invisible barrier, which neither could pass. The electric chord would not bind them, the divine fire which each possessed failed to fuse their souls in one. My own supposition is, that he did not recognize where alone his real kingdom lay, he did not realize that his true Bohemia was secreted in a flute. To him that hollow stick was the enchanter's wand. Though fighting the whole world, though worn by sickness and trouble, though overwhelming defeat and national famine stared him in the face-he had but to take out that small instrument and breathe upon it, and about him lay the fair and sunny

land where the sky is ever blue, where the flowers ever bloom, and the waters murmur and sparkle in light. The musician's soul which slept within him, which he carried about armored by the nature and habits of the hard-pressed, practical soldier, then spread its wings and bore him far away to another country above the pain and shadow of that in which he usually lived and had his being.

Louis XVI. of France was another royal fugitive from himself and his surroundings; though his refuge in a locksmithy does not strike one at first sight as being a private Bohemia. Yet such, I am sure, it was to him. It is only another instance of extremes meeting. In the surcharged atmosphere of a time and place which contained an unborn French Revolution, one can imagine that the perfectly prosaic would be a relief and comfort to a man who felt himself totally unequal to that which was present and that which was to come. Under the circumstances, the exact reversal of all precedents was a necessary result. I confess, also, that the possession of such a very superior wife strikes me as, in itself, demanding of Providence some special compensating support and alleviation. Marie Antoinette was undoubtedly a very beautiful woman, who went to the guillotine with uncommon grace and dignity (that seeming to be what she was chiefly fitted for), but I suspect she must have been a trial to ordinary nerves, at ordinary times and seasons. Thinking of this, as of many other phases in the unfortunate king's existence, it has always been a great comfort to me to remember the locksmithy.

Americans, with their natures and habits as fluent and changeful as the sea itself, are such thorough Bohemians in every sense, that it seems singular that the greatest of them is the very man of all others with whom it is most impossible to connect such an idea. The most vigorous imagination must stand in confessed weakness before the effort to endow General Washington with a private Bohemia. I simply recommend the attempt, as a more con

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