It seems no very great distance from Annecy,
in Haute-Savoie, to this place — you make it in
less
than thirty hours by these continental express
trains — but the changes in the scenery are great ; they
are quite out of proportion to the distance covered.
From Annecy by Aix to Geneva, you have blue
lakes,
with bold mountains springing from their borders,
and far glimpses of snowy wastes lifted against the
horizon beyond, while all about you is a garden
cultivated to the last possibility of grace and
beauty
— a cultivation which doesn't stop with the handy
lower levels, but is carried right up the sheer
steeps
and propped there with ribs of masonry, and made
to stay there in spite of Newton's law. Beyond
Geneva — beyond Lausanne, at any rate —
you have
for a while a country which noticeably resembles
New England, and seems out of place and like an
intruder — an intruder who is wearing his every -
day
clothes at a fancy-dress ball.
Next day you have the lake of Zurich,
and presently the Rhine is swinging by you. How
clean it is! How clear it is! How blue it is! How
green it is! How svnd and rollicking and insolent
are its gait and style! How vivid and splendid its
colors — beautiful wreck and chaos of all the soap
bubbles in the universe! A person born on the
Rhine must worship it.
I saw the blue Rhine sweep along; I heard, or
seemed to hear,
The German songs we used to sing in chorus
sweet and clear.
Yes, that is where his heart would be, that is
where his last thoughts would be, the "soldier of
the legion" who "lay dying in Algiers."
And by and by you are in a German region, which
you discover to be quite different from the recent
Swiss lands behind you. You have a sea before you,
that is to say; the green land goes rolling away, in
ocean swells, to the horizon. And there is another
new feature. Here and there at wide intervals you
have islands, hills two hundred and three hundred
feet high, of a haystack form, that rise abruptly out
of the green plain, and are wooded solidly to the top.
On the top there is just room for a ruined
castle, and there it is. every time; above the summit
you see the crumbling arches and broken towers
projecting.
MARIENBAD—A HEALTH FACTORY
Beyond Stuttgart, next day, you find other changes
still. By and by, approaching and leaving Nurem-
berg and down by Newhaus, your landscape is
humped everywhere with scattered knobs of rock,
unsociable crags of a rude, towerlike look, and
thatched with grass and vines and bushes. And
now and then you have gorges, too, of a modest
pattern as to size, with precipice walls curiously
carv^ed and honeycombed by — I don't know wjiat
— but water, no doubt.
The changes are not done yet, for the instant the
country finds it is out of Wurttemberg and into
Bavaria it discards one more thickness of soil to go
with previous disrobings, and then nothing remains
over the bones but the shift. There may be a poorer
soil somewhere, but it is not likely.
A couple of hours from Bayreuth you cross into
Bohemia, and before long you reach this Marienbad,
and recognize another sharp change, the change
from the long ago to to-day ; that is to say from the
very old to the spick and span new; from an archi-
tecture totally without shapeliness or ornament to
an architecture attractively equipped w4th both;
from universal dismalness as to color to universal
brightness and beauty as to tint ; from a town which
seems made up of prisons to a txDwn which is made
up of gracious and graceful mansions proper to the
Hght of heart and crimeless. It is like jumping out
of Jerusalem into Chicago.
The more I think of these many changes, the more
surprising the thing seems. I have never made so
picturesque a journey before, and there cannot beanother trip of like length in the world that can
furnish so much variety and of so charming and
interesting a sort.
There are only two or three streets here in this
snug pocket in the hemlock hills, but they are hand-
some. When you stand at the foot of a street and
look up at the slant of it you see only block fronts of
graceful pattern, with happily broken lines and the
pleasant accent of bay projections and balconies in
orderly disorder and harmonious confusion, and
always the color is fresh and cheery, various shades
of cream, with softly contrasting trimmings of white,
and now and then a touch of dim red. These blocks
are all thick walled, solid, massive, tall for this
Europe; but it is the brightest and newest looking
town on the Continent, and as pretty as anybody
could require. The steep hills spring high aloft from
their very back doors and are clothed densely to
their tops with hemlocks.
In Bavaria everybody is in uniform, and you
wonder where the private citizens are, but here in
Bohemia the uniforms are very rare. Occasionally
one catches a glimpse of an Austrian officer, but it
is only occasionally. Uniforms are so scarce that
we seem to be in a republic. Almost the only strik-
ing figure is the Polish Jew. He is very frequent.
He is tall and of grave countenance and wears a
coat that reaches to his ankle bones, and he has a
little wee curl or two in front of each ear. He has
a prosperous look, and seems to be as much respected
as anybody. music time twice a day are fashionably dressed after
the Parisian pattern, and they look a good deal
alike, but they speak a lot of languages which you
have not encountered before, and no ignorant person
can spell their names, and they can't pronounce them
themselves.
MariEnBad — Mary's Bath. The Mary is the Vir-
gin. She is the patroness of these curative springs.
They try to cure ever>'thing — gout, rheumatism,
leanness, fatness, dyspepsia, and all the rest. The
whole thing is the property of a convent, and has
been for six or seven hundred years. However,
there was never a boom here until a quarter of a
century ago.
If a person has the gout, this i^ what they do
with him: they have him out at 5.30 in the morning,
and give him an egg and let him look at a cup of
tea. At SLX he must be at his particular spring, with
his tumbler hanging at his belt — and he will have
plenty of company there. At the first note of the
orchestra he must lift his tumbler and begin to sip
his dreadful water w^th the rest. He must sip slowly
and be a long time at it. Then he must tramp about
the hills for an hour or so, and get all the exercise
and fresh air possible. Then he takes his tub or
wallows in his mud, if mud baths are his sort. By
noon he has a fine appetite, and the rules allow him
to turn himself loose and satisfy it, so long as he is
careful and eats only such things as he doesn't
want. He puts in the afternoon walking the hills
and filling up with fresh air. At night he is allowed
to take three ounces of any kind of food he doesn't
like and drink one glass of any kind of liquor that
he has a prejudice against; he may also smoke one
pipe if he isn't used to it. At half past nine sharp
he must be in bed and his candle out. Repeat the
whole thing the next day. I don't see any advantage
in this over having the gout.
In the case of most diseases that is about what
one is required to undergo, and if you have any
pleasant habit that you value, they want that. They
want that the first thing. They make you drop
ever>'thing that gives an interest to life. Their idea
is to reverse your whole system of existence and
make a regenerating revolution. If you are a Repub-
lican, they make you talk free trade. If you are a
Democrat they make you talk protection; if you
are a Prohibitionist, you have got to go to bed
drunk every night till you get well. They spare
nothing, they spare nobody. Reform, reform, that
is the whole song. If a person is an orator, they gag
him; if he likes to read, they won't let him; if he
wants to sing, they make him whistle. They say
they can cure any ailment, and they do seem to do
it ; but why should a patient come all the way here ?
Why shouldn't he do these things at home and save
the money? No disease would stay with a person
who treated it like that.
I didn't come here to take baths, I only came to
look around. But first one person, then another
began to throw out hints, and pretty soon I was a
good deal concerned about myself. One of these
goutees here said I had a gouty look about the eye;
next a person who has catarrh of the intestines asked
ii8
-MARIENBAD— A HEALTH FACTORY
me if I didn't notice a dim sort of stomach ache
when I sneezed. I hadn't before, but I did seem to
notice it then. A man that's here for heart disease
said he wouldn't come downstairs so fast if he had
my build and aspect. A person with an old-gold
complexion said a man died here in the mud bath
last week that had a petrified liver — good deal such
a looking man as I am, and the same initials, and
so on, and so on.
Of course, there was nothing to be uneasy about,
and I wasn't what you may call really uneasy; but
I was not feeling ver>^ well — that is, not brisk — and
I went to bed. I suppose that that was not a good
idea, because then they had me. I started in at the
supper end of the mill and went through. I am said
to be all right now, and free from disease, but this
does not surprise me. What I have been through
in these two weeks would free a person of pretty
much ever\'thing in him that wasn't nailed there —
any loose thing, any unattached fragment of bone,
or meat or morals, or disease or propensities or
accomplishments, or what not. And I don't say
but that I feel well enough, I feel better than I would
if I was dead, I reckon. And, besides, they say I
am going to build up now and come right along and
be all right. I am not sa^^ng anything, but I wish
I had enough of my diseases back to make me aware
of myself, and enough of my habits to make it
worth while to live. To have nothing the matter
with you and no habits is pretty tame, pretty color-
less. It is just the way a saint feels, I reckon ; it is
at least the way he looks. I never could stand a
119
MARK TWAIN
saint. That reminds me that you see ver>^ few
priests around here, and yet, as I have already said,
this whole big enterprise is owned and managed by
a convent. The few priests one does see here are
dressed like human beings, and so there may be
more of them than I imagine. Fifteen priests dressed
like these could not attract as much of your atten-
tion as would one priest at Aix-les-Bains. You can-
not pull your eye loose from the French priest as
long as he is in sight, his dress is so fascinatingly
ugly. I seem to be wandering from the subject,
but I am not. This is about the coldest place I ever
saw, and the wettest, too. This August seems like
an English November to me. Rain? Why, it seems
to like to rain here. It seems to rain every time
there is a chance. You are strictly required to be
out airing and exercising whenever the sun is shining,
so I hate to see the sun shining because I hate air
and exercise — duty air and duty exercise taken for
medicine. It seems un genuine, out of season,
degraded to sordid utilities, a subtle spiritual some-
thing gone from it which one can't describe in
words, but — don't you understand?
With that gone
what is left but canned air, canned exercise, and
you don't want it.
When the sun does shine for a few moments or
a few hours these
people swarm out and flock through
the streets and over the hills and through the pine
woods, and make the most of the chance,
and I have
flocked out, too, on some of these occasions,
but as a rule I stay in and try to get warm.
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