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The Last Days of Pekin

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Title: The Last Days of Pekin

Author: Pierre Loti

Illustrator: Jessie B. Jones

Translator: Myrta Leonora Jones


        
Release date: June 3, 2015 [eBook #49121]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST DAYS OF PEKIN ***

THE LAST DAYS OF PEKIN

[Illustration:
_Copyright, 1901, by J. C. Hemment_
EMPEROR'S THRONE IN THE FORBIDDEN CITY]




  The Last Days of Pekin

  _Translated from the French of
  Pierre Loti_

  _By_
  MYRTA L. JONES

  _Illustrated from Photographs, and Drawings
  by Jessie B. Jones_

  Boston
  Little, Brown, and Company
  1902




  _Copyright, 1902_,
  BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

  _All rights reserved_

  Published November, 1902


  UNIVERSITY PRESS · JOHN WILSON
  AND SON · CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.




DEDICATION

  TO
  VICE-ADMIRAL POTTIER
  _Commander-in-Chief of the Squadron of the Far East_

  ADMIRAL:--

The notes which I sent to the "Figaro" from China are to be collected
in a volume which will be published in Paris before my return, so that
it will be impossible for me to look it over. I am therefore a little
uneasy as to how such a collection may turn out; it will doubtless
contain much repetition. Yet I beg that you will accept this dedication
as a token of the profound and affectionate respect of your first
aide-de-camp. You will be more indulgent than any one else, because
you know under what conditions it was written,--from day to day during
a painful campaign in the midst of the continual excitement of life
aboard ship.

I have restricted myself to noting the things which have come under my
own observation while undertaking the missions to which you assigned
me, and in the course of the journey which you allowed me to take into
a certain part of China hitherto almost unknown.

When we reached the Yellow Sea, Pekin had been taken, and the war was
over. I could, therefore, only observe our soldiers during the period
of peaceful occupation. Under these circumstances I have seen them
always kind and almost fraternal in manner toward the humblest of the
Chinese. May my book contribute its small part toward destroying the
shameful stories published against them!

Perhaps you may reproach me, Admiral, for saying almost nothing of
the sailors who remained on our ships, who were constantly toiling
with never a murmur or a loss of courage during our long and dangerous
sojourn in the waters of Petchili. Poor sequestered beings living
between steel walls! They did not have, to sustain them, as their
superiors had, any of the responsibilities which make up the interest
of life, or the stimulus that comes from having to decide serious
questions. They knew nothing, they saw nothing, not even the sinister
coast in the distance. In spite of the heat of a Chinese summer, fires
were burning day and night in their stifling quarters; they lived
bathed in a moist heat, dripping with perspiration, coming out only for
exhausting drill-work in small boats, in bad weather, and often in the
dead of night and on boisterous seas.

One needs but a glance at their thin pale faces now, to understand how
difficult their obscure rôle has been.

But if I had told of the monotony of their hardships, and of their
silent unending devotion, no one would have had the patience to read me.

  PIERRE LOTI.




TRANSLATOR'S NOTE


The account of his experiences in China, published by Pierre Loti under
the title of "Les Derniers Jours de Pékin," first appeared in the form
of letters written to the "Figaro" from China, from notes taken on the
spot during those memorable days when he was serving on board one of
the French warships.

Loti has written little of late, having had no end of trouble with his
naval superiors, through jealousy, it is said, of his literary success.

As Julian Viaud, Loti ranks in the navy as "Lieutenant de vaisseau."
Some time ago he was abruptly retired. He took his case before the
"Conseil d'état," which finally gave a verdict in his favor, and
he secured the nomination of officier d'ordonnance at the time of
the Chinese difficulties, during which he resumed his literary work
neglected in a measure on account of the tribulations connected with
his naval career.

His account of his experiences in China is very personal and very
national, yet, exotic that it is, it presents such a vivid picture of
certain phases of China that it is of value as the contribution of an
observer possessing sympathy, imagination, and knowledge, as well as
the literary sense, to the history of our own times.

  MYRTA L. JONES.




CONTENTS


                                          PAGE

     I. ARRIVAL IN THE YELLOW SEA            1
    II. AT NING-HIA                          9
   III. ON THE WAY TO PEKIN                 18
    IV. IN THE IMPERIAL CITY                81
     V. RETURN TO NING-HIA                 196
    VI. PEKIN IN SPRINGTIME                202
   VII. THE TOMBS OF THE EMPERORS          226
  VIII. THE LAST DAYS OF PEKIN             274




ILLUSTRATIONS


  Emperor's Throne in the Forbidden City          _Frontispiece_
  French Cavalry Orderly with Despatches        _Facing Page_ 11
  Transports on the Pei-Ho                            "       21
  The Great Wall surrounding the Outer City
    of Pekin                                          "       57
  Chen-Mun Gate to Pekin                              "       73
  The Temple of Heaven                                "       79
  Marble Bridge over Moat before Southern
    Gate of the Forbidden City                        "       85
  The Big Tower or Wall Entrance of Tartar
    City                                              "      103
  The Executive Palace of the Emperor in
    the Forbidden City                                "      145
  An Imperial Palace                                  "      167
  Priceless Porcelains and Bronzes in the
    Third Palace, Forbidden City                      "      181
  The Mouth of the Pei-Ho                             "      202
  Chinese Village Carts, the only Vehicle used
    in the North of China                             "      230
  Non-commissioned Officers and Men of
    French Artillery and Marines                      "      235
  Chinese Peasants cultivating Rice Fields
    with Native Plow                                  "      246
  The Lake and Southern View of Summer
    Palace                                            "      275




The Last Days of Pekin


I

THE ARRIVAL IN THE YELLOW SEA


  MONDAY, Sept. 24, 1900.

Very early morning, on a calm sea and under a starry sky. A light on
the eastern horizon shows that day is about to break, yet it is still
night. The air is soft and moist.--Is it the summer of the North, or
the winter of a warm climate? Nothing in sight on any side, no land, no
light, no sail, no indication of any place--just a marine solitude in
ideal weather and in the mystery of the wavering dawn.

Like a leviathan which conceals itself in order to surprise, the big
iron-clad advances silently with determined slowness, its engines
barely revolving.

It has just covered five thousand miles almost without pausing to
breathe, constantly making forty-eight turns of the screw to a minute,
accomplishing without stopping and without damage of any sort, and
without much wear and tear of its substantial machinery, the longest
journey, at the highest rate of sustained speed, that a monster of
its size has ever undertaken, thus defeating in this important test
ships reputed to be faster, and which at first sight might be thought
superior in speed.

This morning it has arrived at the end of its journey, it is about to
reach a part of the world whose name but yesterday was unknown, but
toward which the eyes of Europe are now turning. This sea, where the
morning light is calmly breaking, is the Yellow Sea, it is the gulf of
Petchili, from which one reaches Pekin. An immense fighting squadron
must already be assembled very near us, although as yet nothing
indicates its vicinity.

We have been two or three days crossing this Yellow Sea in beautiful
September weather. Yesterday and the day before, junks with sails of
matting have crossed our route, on their way to Corea; shores and
islands more or less distant have appeared, but at the present moment
the entire circle of the horizon is empty.

Since midnight we have been moving slowly, in order that our expected
arrival in the midst of this fleet of ships--which is to be attended
with obligatory military pomp--should not take place at too early an
hour.

       *       *       *       *       *

Five o'clock. Out of the semi-obscurity sounds the music of the
reveille, the gay trumpeting, which each morning arouses the sailors.
It is earlier than usual, so that there may be ample time to perform
the toilet of the iron-clad, which has lost some of its freshness
during forty-five days at sea. We still see nothing but empty space,
and yet the lookout, from his post aloft, reports black smoke on the
horizon. This small cloud of coal smoke, which from below looks like
nothing, betokens a formidable presence; it is produced by great steel
ships, it is the breath of this unprecedented squadron which we are
about to join.

Before the ship's toilet comes that of the crew. Barefooted and
bare-chested, the sailors splash in the water in the dawning light.
In spite of continual hard work, they are no more tired than the ship
that carries them. The _Redoutable_ is, of all the ships that departed
so suddenly, the only one which has had neither death nor sickness on
board, even in crossing the Red Sea.

Now the sun has risen clear above the horizon, a yellow disk which
slowly climbs upward from behind the quiet waters. For us, who have
just left equatorial regions, this rising, luminous as it is, has I
know not what of melancholy and of dulness, which savors of autumn and
a northern climate. Really in two or three days the sun has changed.
Now it no longer burns, it is no longer dangerous, we cease to fear it.

In front of us, from out the cloud of coal smoke, far-off objects begin
to emerge, perceptible only to the eye of the mariner; a forest of
spears, one should say, planted away off at the end of space, almost
beyond the range of vision. We know what they are,--the giant chimneys,
the heavy fighting masts, the terrible paraphernalia of warfare, which,
with the smoke, reveal from afar the modern squadron. When our morning
cleaning is over, when everything has been washed with buckets of sea
water, the _Redoutable_ increases her speed to the average of eleven
and a half knots an hour, which she has maintained since her departure
from France. And while the sailors are busy making the brass and copper
shine, she begins again to trace her deep furrow through the tranquil
waters.

Objects on the smoky horizon line begin to stand forth and take
shape. Below the innumerable masts, masses of every form and color
are distinguishable. These are the ships themselves. Between the calm
water and the pale sky lies the whole terrible company, an assemblage
of strange monsters, some white and yellow, others white and black,
others the color of slime or of fog, in order to make them less easily
distinguishable. Their backs are humped and their sides half submerged
and hidden like big uneasy turtles. Their structures vary according
to the conceptions of different persons in regard to engines of
destruction, but all alike breathe forth horrible coal smoke, which
dulls the morning light.

No more of the coast of China is visible than if we were a thousand
leagues away or than if it did not exist. Yet we are close to Taku,
the meeting-place toward which for so many days our minds have been
bent. It is China, close by although invisible, which attracts by its
nearness this herd of beasts of prey, and which keeps them as immovable
as fallow deer at bay, at this precise point on the seas, until some
one speaks the word.

The water, here where it is less deep, has lost its beautiful blue,
to which we have so long been accustomed, and has become troubled and
yellow, and the sky, although cloudless, is decidedly melancholy. Our
first impression of this whole scene, of which we shall undoubtedly for
a long time form a part, is one of sadness.

But now as we draw nearer and the sun rises there is a change, and
the beautiful shining iron-clads with their many-colored flags begin
to stand out. It is indeed a remarkable squadron that here represents
Europe,--Europe armed against gloomy old China. It occupies an infinite
amount of space, the whole horizon seems crowded with ships, and
small boats--little steam tugs--hurry like busy people among the big
motionless vessels.

Now cannon on all sides begin a military welcome for our admiral,
beneath the heavy curtain of black smoke; the gay light smoke from
powder blossoms like sheaves and goes off in white masses, while up
and down the iron masts the tricolor rises and falls in our honor.
Everywhere trumpets sound, foreign bands play our Marseillaise,--one
is more or less intoxicated with this ceremonial, always the same yet
always superb, which here borrows an unaccustomed magnificence on
account of the display of the fleet.

And now the sun is at last awake and shining, adding to the day of our
arrival a last illusion of midsummer heat, in this country of extreme
seasons; in two months' time it will begin to freeze up for a long
winter.

       *       *       *       *       *

When evening comes, our eyes, which will weary of it soon enough,
are feasted upon a grand fairy-like spectacle, given for us by the
squadron. Suddenly electric lights appear on all sides, white, or
green, or red, twinkling and sparkling in a dazzling manner; the big
ships, by means of a play of lights, converse with one another, and the
water reflects thousands of signals, thousands of lights, while the
rockets race for the horizon or pass through the sky like delirious
comets. One forgets all that breeds death and destruction in this
phantasmagoria, and for the moment feels oneself in the midst of a
great city, with towers, minarets, palaces, improvised in this part of
the world especially for this extravagant nocturnal celebration.


  September 25.

It is only the next day and yet everything is different. A breeze came
up in the morning,--hardly a breeze, just enough to spread over the sea
big vague plumes of smoke. Already furrows are being made in this open
and not very deep roadstead, and the small boats, continually going and
coming, bob up and down bathed in spray.

A ship with the German colors appears upon the horizon just as we
appeared yesterday; it is immediately recognized as the _Herta_,
bringing Field-Marshal von Waldersee, the last one of the military
commanders expected at this meeting-place of the Allies. The salutes
that yesterday were for us, begin anew for him, the whole magnificent
ceremony is repeated. Again the cannon give forth clouds of smoke,
mingling tufts of white with the denser variety, and the national air
of Germany is taken up by all the bands, and borne on the rising wind.

The wind whistles stronger, stronger and colder; a bad autumn wind,
that plays about the whalers and the tugs, which yesterday circulated
readily among the various groups of the squadron.

It presages difficult days for us, for in this uncertain harbor, which
in an hour's time becomes dangerous, we shall have to land thousands of
soldiers sent from France and thousands of tons of war supplies. Many
people and many things must be moved over this rough water, in barges
or in small boats, in the cold and even in the night, and must be taken
to Taku across the river's changing bar.

To organize this long and perilous undertaking is to be our task--that
of the marines--during the first few months, an austere, exhausting,
and obscure rôle without apparent glory.




II

AT NING-HIA


  Oct. 3, 1900.

In the gulf of Petchili on the beach at Ning-Hia, lighted by the rising
sun. Here are sloops, tugs, whalers, junks, their prows in the sand,
landing soldiers and war supplies at the foot of an immense fort whose
guns are silent. On this shore there is a confusion and a babel such as
has been seen in no other epoch of history. From these boats where so
many people are disembarking, float pell-mell all the flags of Europe.

The shore is wooded with birches and willows, and in the distance
mountains with strange outlines raise their peaks to the clear sky.
There are only northern trees, showing that the winters in this country
are cold, and yet the morning sun is already burning; the far-off peaks
are magnificently violet, the sun shines as in Provence. Standing about
among the sacks of earth collected for the erection of hasty defences,
are all kinds of people. There are Cossacks, Austrians, Germans,
English midshipmen, alongside of our armed sailors; little Japanese
soldiers, with a surprisingly good military bearing in their new
European uniforms; fair ladies of the Russian Red-Cross Society, busy
unpacking material for the ambulances; and Bersaglieri from Naples, who
have put their cock-feathers onto colonial caps.

There is something about these mountains in this sunshine, in this
limpid air, that recalls the shores of the Mediterranean on autumn
mornings. Not far away an old gray structure rises among the trees,
twisted, crooked, bristling with dragons and monsters. It is a pagoda.
The interminable line of ramparts which winds about and finally loses
itself behind the summits of the mountains in the distance, is the
Great Wall of China, which forms the boundary of Manchuria.

The soldiers who disembark barefooted in the sand, gaily calling out to
one another in all tongues, seem to be the sort who are easily amused.
What they are doing to-day is called "a peaceful capture," and it
seems more like a celebration of universal fusion, of universal peace,
yet not far from here, in the vicinity of Tien-Tsin and of Pekin, the
country is in ruins and is strewn with the dead.

[Illustration:
_Copyright, 1901, by J. C. Hemment_
FRENCH CAVALRY ORDERLY WITH DESPATCHES]

The necessity for occupying Ning-Hia, of holding it as a base of
supplies, had been impressed upon the admirals of the international
squadron, and day before yesterday all the ships had prepared for a
struggle, knowing that the forts on the shore were well armed; but
the Chinese who lived here, warned by an official that a formidable
company of cuirassiers would appear at daybreak, preferred to leave the
place--so we found it deserted on our arrival.

The fort which overlooks the shore and which forms the terminus of the
Great Wall at its sea end, has been declared international.

The flags of the seven allied nations float there together,
arranged in alphabetical order at the end of long poles guarded by
pickets,--Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Russia.

The other forts scattered over the surrounding heights have been
apportioned, the one belonging to France being situated about a mile
from the shore. It is reached by a dusty road, bordered with birches
and frail willows, which crosses gardens and orchards turning brown at
the same season as our own,--gardens exactly like ours, with modest
rows of cabbages and pumpkins and long lines of lettuce. The little
wooden houses too, scattered here and there among the trees, resemble
those of our villages, with red tiled roofs, vines trained in garlands,
and little beds of zinnias, asters, and chrysanthemums. It is a
country which should be peaceful, happy, yet which has in two days'
time become depopulated through fear of the approach of the invaders
from Europe.

On this fresh October morning the sailors and soldiers of all nations
are hurrying and skurrying along the shaded road that leads to the
French fort, seeking the pleasures of discovery; amusing themselves in
a conquered land, catching chickens and pilfering salads and pears from
the gardens. The Russians are taking down the Buddhas and gilded vases
from a pagoda. The English are driving with sticks the cattle captured
in the fields. The Dalmatians and the Japanese--fast friends of an
hour's standing--are making their toilet together on the banks of a
stream, and two Bersaglieri who have caught a little donkey are riding
it astride, almost bursting with laughter.

And yet the sad exodus of Chinese peasants which began yesterday still
continues; in spite of the assurance given them that no harm would
be done to any one, those who were left felt themselves too near and
preferred to flee. Whole families departed with bowed heads; men,
women, children, all dressed alike in blue cotton gowns, and loaded
with baggage, even the babies resignedly carrying their little pillows
and mattresses.

One scene was heart-breaking. An old Chinese woman--very, very old,
perhaps a hundred years old--who could scarcely stand up, was going,
God knows where, driven from her home, where a company of Germans
had established themselves; she went away, dragging herself along
with the help of two young lads who may have been her grandsons and
who supported her as best they could, looking at her with infinite
respect and tenderness. Seeming not to see us and looking as though
she had nothing further to expect from any one, she passed slowly
by, her poor face filled with despair, with supreme and irremediable
distress, whilst the soldiers behind her were throwing away with shouts
of laughter the unpretentious images from the altar of her ancestors.
The beautiful sunshine of the autumn morning shone calmly on her
well-cared-for little garden, blooming with zinnias and asters.

The fort which fell to the lot of the French occupies almost the
space of a town with all its dependencies, lodgings for mandarins
and soldiers, electrical work-shops, stables, and powder magazines.
In spite of the dragons that adorn the gates and in spite of the
clawed monster painted on a stone slab in front of the entrance, it
is constructed upon the most recent principles--plastered, casemated,
and provided with Krupp guns of the latest models. Unfortunately for
the Chinese, who had accumulated in the vicinity of Ning-Hia some
terrifying defences,--mines, torpedoes, fougades, and intrenched
camps,--nothing was finished, nothing completed anywhere; the movement
against foreigners began six months too soon, before they had gotten
into working order all the material Europe had sold to Li-Hung-Chang.

A thousand Zouaves who are to arrive to-morrow are to occupy this fort
during the winter; while awaiting their arrival we have simply brought
along a score of sailors to take possession.

It is curious to go among these houses, abandoned in haste and terror,
and to find ourselves in the midst of the disorder of precipitate
flight; broken furniture and dishes, clothing, guns, bayonets,
ballistic books, boots with paper soles, umbrellas, and ambulance
supplies are piled pell-mell before the doors. In the kitchens dishes
of rice are ready for the oven, with plates of cabbage and cakes made
of fried grasshoppers.

There are shells everywhere, cartridges strew the grounds, gun-cotton
is dangerously dispersed, and black powder is scattered in long trains.
But side by side with this debauch of war materials, droll details
attest the human side of Chinese life; on all the window-sills are pots
of flowers, on all the walls are household gods placed there by the
soldiers. The familiar sparrow abounds here, and is never interfered
with, it seems, by the inhabitants of the place, and from the roofs
the cats, circumspect but anxious to enter into relations with us,
are observing the sort of _ménage_ that will be possible with such
unexpected hosts as ourselves.

Very near us, a hundred metres from our fort, passes the Great Wall
of China. It is surmounted at this point by a watch tower, where the
Japanese are now established, and there they have planted their white
flag on a bamboo stick in the red sunlight.

Always smiling, especially at the French, the little Japanese soldiers
invite us to come up to see from above the surrounding country.

The Great Wall, seven or eight hundred metres thick at this point,
descends gently amid green grass on the Chinese side, but drops
vertically on the side toward Manchuria, where it is flanked by
enormous square bastions.

We mount, and at our feet we see the wall plunging on one hand into the
Yellow Sea, while on the other it rises to the summits of the mountain
and goes winding on through the fields as far as the eye can see,
giving the impression of a colossal thing which never comes to any end.

Toward the east we have a view, in this clear light, of the deserted
plains of Manchuria.

Toward the west--in China--the wooded country has a deceptive look
of peace and confidence. All the European flags hoisted on the forts
have a festive air amid all the green. It is true that on a plain near
the shore there are evidences of an immense movement of Cossacks, but
they are far away and the noise does not reach us, though there are at
least five thousand men among the tents and among the flags which are
stuck into the ground. Where the other powers send to Ning-Hia only a
few companies, the Russians on the contrary proceed in great masses,
because of their designs on neighboring Manchuria. Shan-Haï-Kouan, the
Tartar village which has closed its gates through fear of pillage,
appears in the distance, gray and mute as though asleep behind its
high crenellated walls. On the sea off toward the horizon, rests the
squadron of the Allies,--a fleet of steel monsters with black smoke,
friends for the moment, silently assembled in the motionless blue.

The weather is calm, exquisite, buoyant. The prodigious rampart of
China blossoms at this season like a garden. Between its sombre bricks,
loosened by time, asters, and quantities of pinks like those at the
seashore in France are pushing their way through.

This legendary wall, which has for centuries stopped all invasion from
the north, will probably nevermore see the yellow flag and the green
dragon of the Celestial emperors. Its time has gone by, passed, is
forever at an end.




III

ON THE WAY TO PEKIN


I

  THURSDAY, Oct. 11, 1900.

At noon, on a beautiful calm day that is almost warm and very luminous
on the water, I leave the admiral's ship, the _Redoutable_, to go on a
mission to Pekin.

We are in the gulf of Petchili on the road to Taku, but at such
a distance from the shore that it is not visible, so there is no
indication of China anywhere.

The trip begins with a short ride on a steam launch, which takes us out
to the _Bengali_, the little despatch-boat which will bring me to land
by to-night.

The water is softly blue in the autumn sunshine, which is always
bright in this part of the world. To-day, by chance, the wind and the
waves seem to sleep. As far as one can see, great warships succeed
one another, motionless and menacing. As far as the horizon there are
the turrets, the masts, the smoke of the astonishing international
squadron with all its train of satellites, torpedo boats, transports,
and a legion of packet-boats.

The _Bengali_, upon which I am about to embark for a day, is one of
the little French ships carrying troops and war supplies, which for a
month past has been painfully and wearisomely going and coming between
the transports or freighters arriving from France, and the port of Taku
beyond the Pei-Ho bar.

To-day it is full of Zouaves,--brave Zouaves who arrived yesterday from
Tunis, careless and happy, bound for this ominous Chinese land. They
are crowded on the bridge, packed together, their faces gay and their
eyes wide open for a glimpse of China, which has filled their thoughts
for weeks and which is now near at hand, just over the horizon.

According to ceremonial custom, the _Bengali_, when it appears,
must pass the stern of the _Redoutable_ to salute the admiral. The
music waits behind the armor, ready to play one of those marches so
intoxicating to the sailor. And when we come up close to the big ship,
almost under its shadow, all the Zouaves--those destined to return as
well as those who must perish--wave their red caps to the sound of the
bugle, with hurrahs for the ship, which here represents France to
their eyes, and for the admiral, who from the bridge raises his cap in
their honor.

At the end of half an hour China appears.

Never has an uglier and more forbidding shore surprised and congealed
poor newly arrived soldiers. A low shore, a gray barren land without
tree or grass. Everywhere there are forts of colossal size of the same
gray as the earth, masses of geometrical outline pierced by embrasures
for guns. Never has the approach to a country presented a more
extensive or aggressive military array; on both sides of the horrible
stream with its muddy waters loom similar forts, giving the impression
of a place both terrible and impregnable, giving the impression also
that this harbor, in spite of its wretched surroundings, is of the
first order of importance, is the key to a great country, and gives
access to a city large, rich, and powerful--as Pekin must have been.
From a nearer view the walls of the first two forts, stained, full of
holes, and ravaged by cannon-balls, bear witness to furious and recent
battles.

We know how, on the day Taku was taken, they exhausted their strength
on one another. By a miracle, a French shell from the _Lion_ fell
right into one of them, causing the explosion of its enormous powder
magazine so that the yellow gunners lost their heads. The Japanese then
seized this fort and opened an unexpected fire on the one opposite,
and immediately the overthrow of the Chinese began. Had it not been
for this chance, for this shell, and for this panic, all the European
gunners anchored in the Pei-Ho would inevitably have been lost; the
landing of the Allies would have been impossible or problematical, and
the whole face of the war changed.

[Illustration: TRANSPORTS ON THE PEI-HO]

We now move up the river through the muddy infected water where
impurities of all sorts are floating, as well as the bodies of men
and animals. On both of the sombre shores we see by the light of
the declining sun a procession of ruins, a uniform black and gray
desolation of earth, ashes, and calcined slopes, tumbled walls, and
ruins.

On this pestilential river a feverish animation reigns, so that it is
difficult for us to make our way through the obstructions. Junks by
the hundreds, each flying the colors and having at the stern the name
of the nation by whom it is employed--France, Italy, United States,
etc.--in big letters above the devilry of the Chinese inscription,
besides a numberless flotilla of towing vessels, lighters, colliers,
and packets.

On the terrible, steep, muddy banks, amongst filth and dead animals,
there is an ant-like activity. Soldiers of all the armies of Europe
mingle with coolies driven with sticks, unpacking military stores,
tents, guns, wagons, mules, horses. Such a confusion as never was of
uniforms, rubbish, cannons, débris, and provisions of all kinds. An icy
wind which rises toward evening makes us shiver after the hot sun of
the day and brings with it the gloom of winter.

Before the ruins of a quarter where the flag of France is floating, the
_Bengali_ approaches the lugubrious shore, and our Zouaves disembark
rather discountenanced by the sombre reception given them by China.
While waiting for some sort of a shelter to be provided, they light
fires on the shore which the wind fans into flame, and there they heat
their evening meal in darkness and silence and in the midst of clouds
of infected dust.

On the deserted plain from which the dust, the cold, and the squalls
come, the black devastated town, overrun with soldiers, extends,
breathing pestilence and death.

A small street through its centre, hastily rebuilt in a few days' time
with mud, broken timbers, and iron, is lined with dubious-looking
taverns. Men from I don't know where, mongrels of every race, sell
absinthe, salt-fish, and deadly liquors to the soldiers. There is some
drunkenness, and occasionally knives are drawn.

Outside of this improvised quarter Taku no longer exists. Nothing but
ruined walls, burned roofs, piles of ashes, and nameless receptacles
of filth, wherein are huddled together old clothing, dogs, and human
heads covered with hair.

I slept on board the _Bengali_, this hospitality having been extended
to me by the commander. Occasional shots break the nocturnal silence,
and toward morning I hear--although half asleep--horrible cries uttered
by the Chinese on shore.


  FRIDAY, October 12.

I rose at daybreak to go and take the train, which still runs as far as
Tien-Tsin and even a little beyond. Farther on, the road having been
destroyed by Boxers, I shall continue I do not yet know how, either
in a Chinese cart, in a junk, or on horseback, and from all accounts
cannot count on seeing the great walls of Pekin for six or seven days.
I have an order which will secure me rations from the posts along the
road, otherwise I should run the risk of dying from hunger in this
ravaged land. I have as little baggage as possible, nothing but a light
canteen, and but one travelling companion, a faithful servant brought
from France.

At the station, where I arrive at sunrise, I find again all yesterday's
Zouaves, their knapsacks on their backs. No tickets are necessary for
this railway, everything military is carried by right of conquest.
Along with Cossack and Japanese soldiers a thousand Zouaves pile into
carriages with broken panes through which the wind whistles. I find a
place with their officers, and very soon we are calling up memories of
Africa, where they have been, and longing for Tunis and Algeria the
White.

We are two hours and a half on the road across the mournful plain. At
first it was only gray earth as at Taku; then there were reeds and
herbage touched with frost. On all sides are immense splashes of red,
like blood stains, due to the autumn flowering of a kind of marsh
plant. On the horizon of this desert myriads of migratory birds may
be seen, rising like clouds, eddying and then falling. The north wind
blows and it is very cold.

Soon the plain is peopled with tombs,--tombs without number, all of the
same shape,--each one a kind of cone of earth piled up and surmounted
by a ball of faience,--some small, like little huts, others as large
as camping tents. They are grouped according to families and they are
legion. The entire country is a burial-place with a gory look resulting
from the splashes of red to which I have referred.

At the stopping-places where the ruined stations are occupied by
Cossacks, there are calcined cars--damaged by fire--and locomotives
riddled with balls. At other places we do not stop because there
is nothing left; the few villages which mark this vicinity are all
destroyed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Tien-Tsin! It is ten o'clock in the morning. Pierced by the cold, we
step down amid the clouds of dust which the north wind perpetually
scatters over this dried-up country. We are taken in hand by Chinese
scouts, who, without even knowing where we want to go, trot off, at
full speed, with us in their little carriages. The European streets
along which they are running (here called "concessions"), seen through
a cloud of blinding dust, have the look of a big city, but the almost
luxurious houses are riddled with shells, literally ripped open and
without roofs or windows. The shores of the rivers, here as at Taku,
are like a fevered babel; thousands of junks lie there, unloading
troops, horses, guns. In the streets where Chinese workmen are carrying
enormous loads of war supplies, one meets soldiers of all the nations
of Europe, officers in every sort of uniform, on horseback, in chairs,
or on foot. And there is of course a perpetual interchange of military
salutes.

Where are we to lay our heads? Really, we have no idea, in spite of our
desire for a shelter from the icy wind and dust. However, our Chinese
runners keep on like rolling balls.

We knock at the doors of two or three hotels which have risen up among
the ruins out of a confusion of broken furniture. Everything is full,
full to overflowing; gold will not buy a loft with a mattress.

Willy-nilly we must beg our board and lodging from unknown officers,
who give us the most friendly hospitality in houses where the holes
made by shot and shell have been hastily stopped up so that the wind
may no longer enter.


  SATURDAY, October 13.

I have chosen to travel by junk as far as the course of the Pei-Ho will
permit, the junk serving as a lodging in this country where I am forced
to dally.

This makes necessary many little preparations.

The first thing is to make a requisition for this junk and to
appropriate this species of sarcophagus where I am to live under a
roof of matting. The next is to buy in the more or less ruined shops
of Tien-Tsin the things necessary for a few days of nomadic life,
from bedding to arms; and lastly, to hire from the Lazarist Fathers a
Chinese person to make tea,--young Toum, aged fourteen, with the face
of a cat and a queue reaching to the ground.

I dined with General Frey, who, with his small French detachment, was,
as every one knows, the first to enter the heart of Pekin, the Imperial
City. He was good enough to relate to me in detail this magnificent
journey, the taking of the Marble Bridge and his final entrance into
the Imperial City,--that mysterious place which I shall soon see, and
into which before him no European had ever penetrated.

As to my own small personal expedition, which in comparison with his
appears so easy and unimportant, the general kindly concerned himself
with what we were to drink _en route_, my servant and I, in this time
of infection, when the water is a constant danger on account of human
remains, thrown there by the Chinese, left lying in all the wells; and
he made me a present of untold value,--a case of eau d'Evian.


II

THE TWO GODDESSES OF THE BOXERS


  SUNDAY, October 14.

An old Chinese woman, wrinkled as a winter apple, timidly opens the
door at which we have loudly knocked. It stands in the deep shadow of
a narrow passageway exhaling unhealthy fetid smells, between walls
blackened by filth, where one feels as shut in as in the heart of a
prison.

The old woman, an enigmatical figure, looks us all over with a
blank impenetrable gaze; then recognizing among us the chief of the
international police, she silently steps aside and permits us to enter.
We follow her into a dark little court. Poor late autumn flowers are
growing in the old walls, and we breathe faint sickly odors.

We are a group of officers, three French, two English, and one Russian,
who are there clearly by right of conquest.

Our conductor is a strange creature, balancing on the tips of her
incredibly small feet. Her gray hair fastened with long pins is so
tightly drawn back that it seems to raise her eyes unduly. Her dark
dress is indefinite in color, but her parchment-like face bears to a
high degree that something appertaining to a worn-out race, which we
are wont to call distinction. She appears to be only a servant, yet
her aspect, her carriage, are disconcerting; some mystery broods over
her, she seems like a refined matron who has resorted to a shameful
clandestine occupation. This whole place, moreover, is difficult to
describe to those who do not know it.

Beyond the court is a sordid vestibule, then a door painted black,
with a Chinese inscription consisting of two big red letters. Without
knocking, the old woman draws the bolt and opens it.

We may be mistaken, but we have come in all good faith to pay a visit
to _two goddesses_,--prisoners kept shut up in this palace. For here
we are in the common, the lower dependencies, the secret places of the
palace of the viceroy of Petchili, and to reach this spot we have had
to pass over the immense desolation of a town with cyclopean walls
which is at present only a mass of débris and dead bodies.

The animation of these ruins, accidentally peopled by joyous soldiers,
is singular, unique, on this Sunday, which is a holiday in camp and
barracks. In the long streets filled with wreckage of all kinds,
Zouaves and African chasseurs, arm-in-arm with Germans in pointed
helmets, pass gaily between the walls of roofless houses. There are
little Japanese soldiers, shining and automatic, Russians with flat
caps, plumed Bersaglieri, Austrians, Americans with big felt hats, and
Indian cavalrymen with enormous turbans. All the flags of Europe are
floating over the ruins of Tien-Tsin, which has been partitioned by
the allied armies. In certain quarters the Chinese who have gradually
returned, after their flight, have established bazars in the open air
in the lovely sunshine of this autumn Sunday,--bazars where in the
midst of incendiary ashes they sell to the soldiers articles picked
up in the ruins, porcelains, jars, silk dresses, furs. There are so
many of these soldiers, so many uniforms of every kind on our route, so
many sentinels presenting arms, that we grow weary returning the many
salutes received as we pass through this unheard-of babel.

At the farther side of the destroyed city, near the high ramparts in
front of the palace of the viceroy, where we are going to see the
goddesses, some Chinese, undergoing torture in a kind of pillory,
are lined up along the wall, with inscriptions above them describing
their offences. Two pickets guard the doors with bayonetted guns, one
an American, the other a Japanese, standing alongside of the horrible
grinning old stone monsters who watch, crouching, on either side of the
entrance.

There is nothing sumptuous, nothing great in this dusty, decrepit
palace which we have traversed unheeding, but it speaks of real China,
of old China, grimacing and hostile. There is a profusion of monsters
in marble, in broken faience, and in worm-eaten wood, falling to pieces
from sheer old age or threatening from the edges of roofs to do so;
frightful forms half buried in sand and ashes, with horns, claws,
forked tongues, and big squinting eyes.

In the grim walled court a few late roses are still in blossom under
trees a century old.

Now, after various turns along badly lighted passages, we reach the
goddesses' door,--the one marked with two big red letters. The old
Chinese woman, ever mute and mysterious, with head held high but with
lifeless eyes persistently downcast, pushes open the black doors, with
a gesture of submission which means: "Here they are, look at them!"

In a room which is almost dark and where the evening sun never enters,
two poor girls, two sisters who look alike, are seated with bowed
heads amid lamentable disorder, in positions indicative of supreme
consternation,--one on a chair, the other on the edge of an ebony bed
which they must share at night. They are dressed in humble black, but
here and there on the floor are scattered shining silks and tunics
embroidered in big flowers and gold chimæras,--the garments they put
on when going to meet the armies, in the midst of whistling bullets on
days of battle,--their attire as warriors and goddesses.

For they are a kind of Jeanne d'Arc,--if it is not blasphemy to
pronounce a name of almost ideal purity in this connection,--they are
the goddesses of the incomprehensible Boxers, so atrocious and at the
same time so admirable: hysterical creatures, exciting both the hatred
and terror of the foreigner, who one day fled without fighting in a
panic of fear, and the next with the shrieks of the possessed threw
themselves straight into the face of death, under a shower of bullets
from troops ten times as numerous as themselves.

The goddesses, taken prisoners, are the property, the curious bibelot,
if one may use the word, of the seven Allies. They are not badly
treated. They are merely shut up for fear they will commit suicide,
which has become a fixed idea with them. What will be their fate?
Already their captors are tired of seeing them and don't know what to
do with them.

On a day of defeat the junk in which they sought refuge was surrounded,
and they, with their mother, who followed them everywhere, threw
themselves into the water. The soldiers fished them out fainting. The
goddesses after much care came to their senses. But the mamma never
again opened her oblique old Chinese eyes. The girls were made to
believe that she had been taken to a hospital and would soon come back.
At first the prisoners were brave, animated, haughty, and always well
dressed. But this very morning they have been told that their mother is
no more, and it is that which has stunned them, like a physical blow.

Having no money to buy mourning dress, which in China is always white,
they asked to be allowed white leather shoes--which at this moment
cover their doll-like feet, and which are as essential here as the
crape veil is with us.

They are both slender and of a waxen pallor, scarcely pretty, but
with a certain grace, a certain charm as they stand there, one in
front of the other, without tears, with drooping eyes and with arms
falling straight at their sides. They do not raise their eyes even to
ascertain who enters or what is wanted of them. They do not stir as we
come in, nothing matters to them now. They await death, indifferent to
everything.

They inspire in us an unlooked-for respect by the dignity of their
despair, respect and infinite compassion. We have nothing to say to one
another, and are as embarrassed at being there as though we had been
guilty of some indiscretion.

It occurred to us to put some money on the disordered bed; but one of
the sisters, while appearing not to see us, threw the pieces of silver
onto the floor and with a gesture invited the servant to dispose of
them as she wished. So that this was on our part a further mistake.

There is such an abyss of misunderstanding between European officers
and Boxer goddesses that it is impossible to show our sympathy for
them in any way. So we, who came to be amused by a curious sight,
depart in silence with a tightening of the heartstrings at the thought
of the two poor creatures imprisoned in a gloomy room in the fading
evening light.

       *       *       *       *       *

My junk, with five Chinese aboard, will go up the river under the
French flag, which is already a protection. The war department has
decided it to be more prudent--although my servant and I are armed--to
send two soldiers with us, two men with horses carrying guns and
munitions.

Beyond Tien-Tsin, where I have spent another day, one may go an hour
further by train in the direction of Pekin, as far as the town of
Yang-Soon. My junk, with two soldiers, Toum, and the baggage, will
await me there at a bend in the river, and has gone on ahead to-day
with a military escort.

I dine this evening with the consul-general, the one who escaped being
shot almost by miracle, although his flag was for a long time, during
the siege, a mark for the Chinese gunners.


III

  MONDAY, October 15.

I left Tien-Tsin by railway at eight o'clock in the morning. An hour
on the road, across the same old plain, the same desolation, the same
cutting wind, the same dust. Then the ruins of Yang-Soon, where the
train stops because there is no road left; from this point on, the
Boxers have destroyed everything, the bridges are cut, the stations
burned, and the rails scattered over the country.

My junk is there awaiting me by the river's side. For the present, for
three days at least, I must arrange for a life on the water, in the
little sarcophagus which is the cabin of this queer boat, under the
roof of matting which gives a view of the sky through a thousand holes,
and which to-night will permit the white frost to disturb our slumbers.
But this room in which I am to live, eat and sleep in complete
promiscuity with my French companions is so small, so very small that
I dismiss one of the soldiers. We could never manage there with four.

The Chinese of my train, ragged and sordid, receive me with profound
bows. One takes the rudder, the others jump onto the bank, where they
harness themselves to the end of a long line attached to the mast
of the junk--and we are off, being towed against the current of the
Pei-Ho, a heavy poisonous stream in which, here and there amongst the
reeds on the banks, parts of human bodies appear.

The soldier I have kept is named Renaud, and he tells me he comes from
Calvados. He and my servant Osman, both happy to be going to Pekin,
vie with one another in gaiety and good-will and in comical ingenious
inventions to make our lodging more convenient. The trip, in spite of
unpleasant surroundings, begins to the sound of their merry childlike
laughter. We depart in the full morning light, under the rays of a
deceptive sunshine which pretends it is summer although an icy wind is
blowing.

The seven allied nations have established military posts from point to
point along the Pei-Ho, to insure communication by way of the river
between Pekin and the gulf of Petchili, where their ships come in.
Toward eleven o'clock I stop the junk near a large Chinese fort from
which floats the French flag.

It is one of our posts occupied by Zouaves; we get out to get our
rations, enough bread, wine, preserves, sugar, and tea for two days. We
shall receive no more now until Tong-Tchow (City of Celestial Purity),
which we shall reach day after to-morrow in the evening, if nothing
untoward prevents. Then the towing of our junk begins again; slowly and
monotonously we move between gloomy devastated banks.

The country around us remains unchanged. On both sides as far as the
eye can reach are fields of "sorghos"--which is a kind of giant millet
much taller than our maize. The war prevented its being harvested in
season, and so it stands reddened by the frost. The monotonous little
tow-path, a narrow strip on the grayish soil, is on a level with the
cold fetid water, at the foot of the eternal dried sorghos, which forms
an endless curtain all along the river. Sometimes a phantom village
appears on the horizon; as one approaches it, it proves to be only
ruins and the bodies of the dead.

I have a mandarin's arm-chair in my junk on which to enthrone myself
when the sun shines and the wind is not too cutting. More frequently
I prefer to walk along the shore doing my miles in company with our
towers, who plod along bending over like beasts of burden, with
the rope passed over the shoulders. Osman and Renaud peer out of a
port-hole after me as we walk along the track of gray earth shut in
by the uninterrupted border of sorghos and by the river, the wind
blowing sharply all the while. We are often obliged to step aside
suddenly because of a dead man--with one leg stretched out across the
path--looking slyly up at us.

The events of the day are the meeting of junks going down the river and
passing ours. They go in long lines fastened together, flying the flag
of some one of the allied nations, and carrying the sick, the wounded,
and the spoils of war.

In the twilight we pass the remains of a village in which the Russians,
on their way to Manchuria, are encamped for the night. They are taking
carved furniture out of an abandoned house, breaking it up and making a
fire of it. As we go on we see the flames mounting in great jets, and
reaching out to the sorghos near by; for a long time its incendiary
light is visible behind us, in the mournful empty grayness of the
distance. This first nightfall on our junk is full of gloom in the
strange solitude into which hour by hour we penetrate still further.
The shadows are deep about us and there are many dead along the ground.
In the confused and infinite darkness, all about us seems hostile or
gloomy, and the cold increases with the silence and obscurity.

The impression of melancholy disappears at supper when our Chinese
lantern is lighted, illuminating the sarcophagus, which we have closed
as tightly as possible to shut out the wind. I have invited my two
companions to my table--my comical little table, which they themselves
have made from a broken oar and an old plank. The bread seems exquisite
to us after our long walk on the bank; to warm us we have the hot tea
which young Toum has prepared for us over a fire of sorghos, and when
hunger is assuaged and Turkish cigarettes give forth their soothing
clouds of smoke, we have almost a feeling of home and comfort in our
poor shelter enveloped in outside darkness.

Then comes bedtime--although the junk moves on, our towers continuing
their march by feeling their way along the sorghos of the dark path, so
full of surprises. Toum, although he is an elegant young Chinaman, goes
to roost with the others of his race in the straw in the hold. The rest
of us, still dressed of course, with our boots on and firearms at hand,
stretch out on the narrow camp-bed of our cabin, looking at the stars,
which, as soon as the lantern is out, appear between the meshes of our
matting-roof, shining brightly in the frosty sky.

Distant shots reach us from far off, indicating nocturnal dramas with
which we have no concern, and just before midnight two guards, one
Japanese and the other German, try to stop our junk; we are obliged
to get up to discuss the matter, and by means of a hastily lighted
lantern, show the French flag and the stripes that I wear on my sleeve.

At midnight the Chinese make fast our boat, at a spot they say is safe,
so that they too may rest. We all fall into a profound slumber in the
icy night.


IV

  TUESDAY, October 16.

We are up at daylight and off again. In the cold, magnificent dawn,
upon a clear pink sky, the sun rises and shines without heat on the
green plain, and on the deserted place where we have slept.

All at once I leap to the ground with an instinctive longing for
activity, anxious to move, to walk. Horrors! At a turn in the path as
I am running fast without looking where I am going, I almost step on
something in the form of a cross,--a naked corpse lying face downward
with extended arms, half buried in the mud and of a corresponding
color; the dogs or the crows, or some Chinese who wanted the queue,
have taken the scalp, leaving the cranium white and minus hair or skin.

It grows colder each day as we get farther away from the sea, and the
plain begins gradually to slope upward.

Junks pass as they did yesterday, going down the river in files with
military stores, and are under the care of soldiers of all the nations
of Europe. Then come long intervals of solitude, during which no living
thing appears in this region of millet and reeds. The wind that blows
more and more bitterly is healthful; it dilates the chest, and for the
moment redoubles life. So we march along between the sorghos and the
river, on the everlasting frosty path that leads to Pekin, without
fatigue, without any desire to hurry, but always ahead of the solemn
Chinamen, who, tugging at their ropes, continue to draw our floating
house, keeping up their pace with the regularity of machines.

There are a few trees now on the banks, willows with very green leaves
of a variety unknown to us; they seem untouched by the autumn, and
their beautiful color is in striking contrast to the rusty tones of the
grass and the dying sorghos. There are gardens too,--abandoned gardens
that belonged to hamlets that have been burned; our Chinamen sometimes
send one of their number on a marauding expedition, and he brings back
armfuls of vegetables for our meals.

Osman and Renaud, as we pass by ruined houses, sometimes pick up
articles which they think necessary for the embellishment of our
dwelling,--small mirrors, carved seats, lanterns, even bunches of
artificial flowers made of rice paper, which may have adorned the
headdresses of massacred or fleeing Chinese ladies, and which they
naïvely use to decorate the walls of the room. The interior of our
sarcophagus soon takes on an air of distinction quite droll and
barbaric.

It is astonishing how soon we accustom ourselves to the perfectly
simple life on the junk, an existence of healthy fatigue, devouring
appetites, and heavy sleep.

Toward the evening of this day the mountains of Mongolia, those which
tower above Pekin, begin to appear on the distant horizon, on the very
border of this infinitely level land.

There is something especially lugubrious about the twilight to-day. The
sinuous Pei-Ho, narrowing hour by hour at each turn, seems to be but a
tiny stream between its silent shores, and we feel altogether too much
shut in by the confused growth which conceals such sombre things. The
day goes out in one of those cold dead colorings that are a specialty
of Northern winters. All that there is in the way of light comes from
the water, which reflects more vividly than the sky; the river, like
a mirror, reflects the sunset yellows; one might even say that it
exaggerates the sad light, as it runs between the inverted images of
the reeds, the monotonous sorghos and the already black silhouettes
of the few trees. The solitude is deeper than that of yesterday.
The cold and the silence settle down upon one like a winding sheet.
There is a penetrating melancholy in feeling the slow oncoming of the
night in this nameless spot, a certain anguish in looking at the last
reflections of the neighboring reeds,--reflections which continue, even
though ahead of us darkness claims the hostile and unknown distance.

Happily, the hour for supper is here, the longed-for hour, for we are
very hungry. In our little retreat I shall find again the red light of
our lantern, the excellent soldier's bread, the smoking tea served by
Toum, and the cheerfulness of my two good servants.

Toward nine o'clock, just as we pass a group of junks full of people,
all Chinese,--marauders' junks evidently,--we hear cries behind
us,--cries of distress and death, cries that are horrible in the
stillness. Toum, who lends his fine ear and understands all that these
people are saying, explains that they are engaged in killing an old man
because he has stolen some rice. We were not numerous enough or sure
enough of our party, to interfere. I fired two shots into the air in
their direction, and all became still as if by magic; we had, no doubt,
saved the head of the old rice thief at least until the morning.

Then it is quiet until daylight. After midnight, tied up no matter
where among the reeds, we all sleep a sleep that is undisturbed. It
is calm and cold under the stars. There are a few shots fired in the
distance. We are conscious of them, but they do not wake us.


  WEDNESDAY, October 17.

We rise at daybreak and run along the bank in the white frost; the dawn
is pink, and soon the sun rises bright and clear.

Wishing to take a short cut through the everlasting sorghos fields and
to rejoin the junk which is obliged to follow a long turn in the river
further on, we cross the ruins of a hamlet where frightfully contorted
bodies are lying, on whose blackened members the ice has formed little
crystals that shine like a coating of salt.

After our noon dinner, as we emerge from the semi-obscurity of our
sarcophagus, the Chinamen point to the horizon. Tong-Tchow, the "City
of Celestial Purity," is beginning to show itself; great black walls
surmounted with miradors, and an astonishingly tall, slender tower, of
a very Chinese outline with twenty superimposed roofs.

It is all distant still, and the plains about us are full of horrors.
From a stranded junk emerges a long dead arm, of a bluish tone. And
the bodies of cattle borne by the current pass by us in a perfect
procession, all swollen and exhaling a bovine pest. A cemetery must
have been violated hereabouts, for on the mud of the shore there are
empty coffins with human bones alongside them.


V

AT TONG-TCHOW

Tong-Tchow, which occupies two or three kilometres along the bank, is
one of those immense Chinese cities--more densely populated than many
of the capitals of Europe--whose very name is almost unheard of with
us. To-day, needless to say, it is but the ghost of a city, and as one
approaches it it does not take long to perceive that it is now empty
and in ruin.

We approach slowly. At the foot of the high black crenellated walls,
junks are crowded all along the river. On the bank the same excitement
as at Taku and at Tien-Tsin is complicated by some hundreds of
Mongolian camels crouching in the dust.

There are soldiers, invaders, cannons, materials of war. Cossacks who
are trying captured horses go and come at full gallop among the various
groups, with great savage cries.

The various national colors of the European Allies are hoisted in
profusion; they float from high up on the black walls pierced by
cannon balls, from the camps, from the junks, from the ruins. And the
continual wind--the implacable icy wind carrying the infected dust that
smells of the dead--plays upon these flags, which give an ironical air
of festivity to all the devastation.

I look for the French flags so as to stop my junk in our neighborhood
and to go at once to our quarters. I can try our country's rations
there this evening; furthermore, not being able to continue our trip on
the river, I must procure for to-morrow morning a cart and some saddle
horses.

Stopping near a place which seems to belong to us, I ask some Zouaves
the road to our quarters; they promptly, eagerly, and politely offer to
accompany me. Together we go on toward a great door in the thick black
wall.

At this entrance to the city they have, by means of ropes and boards,
established a cattle-yard for the purpose of supplying food for the
soldiers. Besides a few live animals there are three or four on the
ground, dead from the bovine pest, and some Chinese prisoners have this
moment come to drag them to the river, the general rendezvous for dead
bodies.

We enter a street where our soldiers are employed at various kinds of
work in the midst of heaps of rubbish. Through the broken doors and
windows of the houses the wretched interiors are visible; everything
is in fragments, broken, destroyed as though for pleasure. From the
thick dust raised by the north wind and by our own footsteps rises an
intolerable odor of the dead.

For two months the rage for destruction, the frenzy for murder, has
beset this unfortunate "City of Celestial Purity," invaded by the
troops of eight or ten different countries. She felt the first shock of
all these hereditary hatreds. First the Boxers came her way. Then the
Japanese,--heroic little soldiers of whom I do not wish to speak ill,
but who destroy and kill as barbarian armies were wont to do. Still
less do I wish to speak ill of our friends, the Russians; but they have
sent here their Cossack neighbors from Tartary, and half-Mongolian
Siberians, all admirable under fire, but looking at war in the Asiatic
fashion. Then there are the cruel cavalrymen of India sent by Great
Britain. America has let loose her soldiers. And when, in the first
desire for vengeance for Chinese cruelties, the Italians, the Germans,
the Austrians, and the French arrived, nothing was left intact.

Our commander and his officers have improvised lodgings and offices in
some of the larger Chinese houses, hastily repairing the roofs and
walls. In strong contrast to the rudeness of these places are the
sumptuous wood carvings and the tall Chinese vases found intact among
the ruins.

They promise me carriages and horses for to-morrow morning to be ready
at sunrise on the bank near my junk. When all is settled there is about
an hour of daylight left, so I wander about the ruins of the city with
my armed followers, Osman, Renaud, and Chinese Toum.

As one gets farther away from the quarters where our soldiers are, the
horrors increase with the solitude and the silence.

We come first to the street of the China merchants, great warehouses
where the products of the Canton manufactories were stored. It must
have been a fine street judging from the carved and gilded but ruined
façades which remain. To-day the yawning shops, almost demolished,
seem to vomit onto the highway their heaps of broken fragments. One
walks on precious enamel decorated with brilliant flowers, for it
literally covers the ground so that one crushes it in passing. There
is no knowing whose work this was; it was already done when our troops
arrived. But it must have taken whole days of furious attack with boots
and clubs to reduce it all to such small bits; jars, plates, cups,
are ground to atoms, pulverized, together with human bones and hair.
At the back of these warehouses the coarser wares occupied a sort of
interior court. These courts with their old walls are particularly
lugubrious this evening, in the dying light. In one of them we found
a mangy dog trying to drag something from underneath a pile of broken
plates--it was the body of a child whose skull had been broken. The dog
began to eat the flesh that was left on the legs of the poor dead thing.

There was no one to be seen in the long devastated streets where the
framework of the houses, as well as the tiles and the bricks, had
tumbled down. Crows croaked in the silence. Horrible dogs who feed
on the dead fled before us, hanging their tails. We had glimpses of
Chinese prowlers, wretched-looking creatures, trying to find something
to steal, or of some of the dispossessed timidly creeping along the
walls attempting to find out what has become of their homes.

The sun is already low, and the wind is rising as it does every night.
We shiver with the sudden cold. Empty houses fill the shadows.

These houses are all of considerable extent, with recesses, a
succession of courts, rock work, basins, and melancholy gardens.
Crossing the threshold, guarded by the ever-present granite monsters
worn by the rubbing of hands, one finds oneself in an endless series of
apartments. The intimate details of Chinese life are touchingly and
graciously revealed by the arrangement of potted plants, flowerbeds,
and little balconies where bindweed and other vines are trained.

Here, surrounded with playthings, is a poor doll, which doubtless
belonged to some child whose head has been broken; there a cage hangs
with the bird still in it, dried up in one corner with its feet in the
air.

Everything is sacked, removed, or destroyed; furniture is broken, the
contents of drawers thrown about the floors, papers, blood-stained
clothing, Chinese women's shoes spattered with blood, and here and
there limbs, hands, heads, and clumps of hair.

In certain of the gardens neglected plants continue to blossom gaily,
running over into the walks amongst the human remains. Around an
arbor which conceals the body of a woman, twines pink convolvulus in
blossoming garlands. The blossom is still open at this late hour of the
day and in spite of the cold nights, which quite upsets our European
ideas of convolvulus.

In one of the houses back in a recess in a dark loft, something moves!
Two women cower pitifully! Finding themselves discovered, they are
seized with terror and fall at our feet, trembling, weeping, clasping
their hands, and begging for mercy. One is young, the other older,
and they look alike. Mother and daughter! "Pardon, sir, pardon; we are
afraid," translates little Toum naïvely, understanding their broken
words. Evidently they expect the worst of us--and then death. For how
long have they lived in this hole, these two poor things, thinking with
each step that resounds on the pavement of the deserted court that
their end has come? We leave them a few pieces of silver, which perhaps
humiliates without helping them, but it is all that we can do, and then
we go.

Another house, a house of the rich this one is, with a profusion of
potted plants in enamelled porcelain jars in the sad little garden.
In an apartment that is already dark (for decidedly night is coming
on, the uncertainty of twilight is beginning), but where the havoc is
less extensive, for there are great chests and beautiful arm-chairs
still intact, Osman suddenly recoils with terror before something which
emerges from a bucket placed upon a board. Two torn thighs, the whole
lower part of a woman thrust into this bucket with the feet in the air!
Undoubtedly the mistress of this elegant home. Her body? Who knows
what has been done with the body? But here is the head, under this
arm-chair, near the skeleton of a cat. The mouth is open, showing the
teeth, and the hair is long.

In addition to the broad, almost straight streets whose desolation is
visible from one end to the other, there are little tortuous streets
leading up to gray walls. They are the most desolate to enter at this
twilight hour, with only the cry of the crow as an accompaniment.
Little stone gnomes guard their mysterious doors, and their pavements
are strewn with human heads with long queues. One approaches certain
turns in the streets with a heavy heart. It is over, and nothing in
the world would tempt us to enter again at this hour one of those
frightfully still houses where one meets with so many gruesome
encounters.

We had gone far into the city before night came on, and the silence
had become intolerable. We return to the region where the troops are
quartered, cut by the north wind and chilled by the cold and gloom; our
return is rapid; broken china and other débris impossible to define
crackle under our feet.

The banks are lined with soldiers warming themselves and cooking their
suppers over bright fires, where they are burning chairs, tables, and
bits of carved wood or timbers. Coming out of the Dantesque streets, it
all bespeaks joy and comfort to us.

Near our junk there is a canteen, improvised by a Maltese, where
intoxicants are sold to soldiers. I send my men to get whatever
liquors they want for our supper, for we need something to warm and
cheer us if possible. We celebrate with smoking soup, tea, chartreuse,
and I don't know what besides, in our little matting-covered dwelling,
tied up this time on the pestilential mud and enveloped as usual by
cold and darkness.

At dessert, when the hour for smoking arrives in our sarcophagus,
Renaud, to whom I have given the floor, tells us that his squadron is
encamped on the borders of a Chinese cemetery in Tien-Tsin, and that
the soldiers of another European nation (I prefer not to say which) in
the same vicinity spend their time ransacking the graves and taking
from them the money which it is the custom to bury with the dead.

"To me, colonel" (I am colonel to him, as he is ignorant of the naval
appellation of _commandant_, which, with us, goes with five gold
stripes), "to me it does not seem right. Even though they are Chinese,
we ought to leave their dead in peace. What disgusts me is that they
cut their rations up on the planks of the coffins. And I say to them,
'Put it on the outside if you will, but not on the inside, which has
touched the corpse.' But these savages, colonel, laugh at me."


VI


  THURSDAY, October 18.

It is a surprise to awaken to a dark and sombre sky. We counted upon
having, as on the preceding mornings, the almost never clouded autumn
and winter sun, which in China shines and warms even when everything is
frozen hard, and which has, up to this time, helped us to support the
gruesome sights of our journey.

When we open the door of the junk just before dawn, our horses and cart
are there, having just arrived. On the forbidding shore some Mongolians
with their camels are crouched about a fire which has burned all night
in the dust; and behind their motionless groups the high walls of the
city, of an inky blackness, rise to meet the low-hanging clouds.

We leave our small nomadic equipment in the junk, in the care of two
marines of the Tong-Tchow division, who will look after it until our
return, and also our most precious possession, the last of the bottles
of pure water given us by the general.

The last stage of our journey is made in the company of the French
consul-general at Tien-Tsin and of the chancellor of the legation, who
are both bound for Pekin, under the escort of a marshal and three or
four artillerymen.

Our long, monotonous route leads us across fields of sorghos reddened
by the early frosts, and through deserted villages where no one is
stirring. It is a cold, gray morning, and the autumn country, upon
which a fine rain is falling, is in mourning.

At certain moments I almost fancy myself on the roads of the Basque
country in November, amid the uncut maize. Then all at once some
unknown symbol arises to recall China,--either a tomb of mysterious
shape or a stele mounted upon enormous granite tortoises.

From time to time we meet military convoys of one nation or another, or
lines of ambulances. In one place some Russians have taken shelter from
a shower in the ruins of a village; in another a number of Americans,
who have discovered some hidden clothing in an abandoned house, go on
their way rejoicing, with fur mantles on their backs.

Then there are tombs, always tombs, from one end to the other; China is
strewn with them; some are almost hidden by the roadside, others are
magnificently isolated in enclosures which are like mortuary thickets
of dark green cedars.

Ten o'clock. We should be approaching Pekin, although as yet nothing
indicates its nearness. We have not seen a single Chinese since our
departure; the whole country is deserted and silent under a veil of
almost imperceptible rain.

We are going to pass not far from the tomb of an empress, it seems, and
the French chancellor, who knows the neighborhood, proposes that he and
I make a détour to look at it. So, leaving the others to continue their
route, we take a side path through the tall, damp grass.

A canal and a pool soon appear, of a pale color, under the indefinite
sky. There is no one to be seen anywhere; the sad quiet of a
depopulated country prevails. The tomb on the opposite bank scarcely
peeps out from its cedar wood, which is walled about on all sides. We
see little but the first marble gates leading to it and the avenue of
white stele which is finally lost under the mysterious trees. It is
all rather distant, and is reproduced in the mirror of the pool in
long inverted reflections. Near us the tall leaden stems of some lotus
killed by the frost bend over the water, where the rain drops have
traced faint rings. The whitish spheres seen here and there are heads
of the dead.

When we rejoin our company they promise that we shall enter Pekin in
half an hour. After the complications and delays of our journey we
almost believe we shall never arrive. Besides, it is incredible that so
large a city could be so near in this deserted country, such a little
way ahead of us.

[Illustration:
_Copyright, 1901, by J. C. Hemment_
THE GREAT WALL SURROUNDING THE OUTER CITY OF PEKIN]

"Pekin does not proclaim itself," explains my new companion. "Pekin
takes hold of you; when you perceive it you are there."

The road passes through groups of cedars and willows with falling
leaves, and in the concentration of our effort to see the City
Celestial we trot on in the fine rain, which does not wet us at all, so
drying are the northern winds, carrying the dust always and everywhere;
we trot on without speaking.

"Pekin!" suddenly exclaims one of our companions, pointing out an
obscure mass just rising above the trees,--a crenellated dungeon of
superhuman proportions.

Pekin! In a few seconds, during which I am feeling the spell of this
name, a big gloomy wall, of unheard-of height, is disclosed, and goes
on endlessly in the gray, empty solitude, which resembles an accursed
steppe. It is like a complete change of scene, performed without the
noise of machinery or the sounds of an orchestra, in a silence more
impressive than any music. We are at the very foot of the bastions and
ramparts, dominated by them, although a turn in the road had up to this
moment concealed them. At the same time the rain is turning to snow,
whose white flakes mingle with the suspended dirt and dust. The wall
of Pekin overwhelms us, a giant thing of Babylonian aspect, intensely
black under the dead light of a snowy autumn morning. It rises toward
the sky like a cathedral, but it goes on; it is prolonged, always the
same, for miles. Not a person on the outskirts of the city, not a green
thing all along these walls! The ground is uneven, dusty, ashen in
color, and strewn with rags, bones, and even an occasional skull! From
the top of each black battlement a crow salutes us as we pass, cawing
mournfully.

The clouds are so thick and low that we do not see clearly; we are
oppressed by long-looked-for Pekin, which has just made its abrupt
and disconcerting appearance above our heads; we advance to the
intermittent cries of the crows, rather silent ourselves, overpowered
at being there, longing to see some movement, some life, some one or
some thing come out from these walls.

From a gate ahead of us, from a hole in the colossal enclosure, slowly
emerges an enormous brown, woolly animal like a gigantic sheep; then
two, then three, then ten. A Mongolian caravan begins to pass us,
always in the same silence, broken only by the croakings of the ravens.
These enormous Mongolian camels, with their furry coats, muffs on their
legs, and manes like lions, file in an endless procession past our
frightened horses. They wear neither bells nor rattles, like the thin
beasts of the Arabian deserts; their feet sink deep into the sand,
which muffles their footsteps so the silence is not broken by their
march.

Perceived through a veil of fine snow and black dust, the caravan has
passed us, and moves on without a sound, like a phantom thing. We find
ourselves alone again, under this Titanic wall, from which the crows
keep watch. And now it is our turn to enter the gloomy city through the
gates by which the Mongolians have just passed out.


VII

AT THE FRENCH LEGATION


Here we are at the gates, the double triple gates, deep as tunnels,
and formed of the most powerful masonry,--gates surmounted by
deadly dungeons, each one five stories high, with strange curved
roofs,--extravagant dungeons, colossal black things above a black
enclosing wall.

Our horses' hoofs sink deeper and deeper, disappear, in fact, in
the coal-black dust, which is blinding and all-pervading, in the
atmosphere as well as on the ground, in spite of the light rain and
the snowflakes which make our faces tingle.

Noiselessly, as though we were stepping upon wadding or felt, we pass
under the enormous vaults and enter the land of ruin and ashes.

A few slatternly beggars shivering in corners in their blue rags, a few
corpse-eating dogs, like those whose acquaintance we have already made
_en route_,--and that is all. Silence and solitude within as well as
without these walls. Nothing but rubbish and ruin, ruin.

The land of rubbish and ashes, and little gray bricks,--little bricks
all alike, scattered in countless myriads upon the sites of houses that
have been destroyed, or upon the pavement of what once were streets.

Little gray bricks,--this is the sole material of which Pekin was
built; a city of small, low houses decorated with a lacework of gilded
wood; a city of which only a mass of curious débris is left, after fire
and shell have crumbled away its flimsy materials.

We have come into the city at one of the corners where there was the
fiercest fighting,--the Tartar quarter, which contained the European
legations.

Long straight streets may still be traced in this infinite labyrinth
of ruins; ahead of us all is gray or black; to the sombre gray of the
fallen brick is added the monotonous tone which follows a fire,--the
gloom of ashes and the gloom of coal.

Sometimes in crossing the road they form obstacles,--these tiresome
little bricks; these are the remains of barricades where fighting must
have taken place.

After a few hundred metres we enter the street of the legations, upon
which for so many months the anxious attention of the whole world was
fixed.

Everything is in ruins, of course; yet European flags float on every
piece of wall, and we suddenly find, as we come out of the smaller
streets, the same animation as at Tien-Tsin,--a continual coming and
going of officers and soldiers, and an astonishing array of uniforms.

A big flag marks the entrance to what was our legation, two monsters
in white marble crouch at the threshold; this is the etiquette for all
Chinese palaces. Two of our soldiers guard the door which I enter, my
thoughts recurring to the heroes who defended it.

       *       *       *       *       *

We finally dismount, amid piles of rubbish, in an inner square near
a chapel, and at the entrance to a garden where the trees are losing
their leaves as an effect of the icy winds. The walls about us are so
pierced with balls that they look like sieves. The pile of rubbish at
our right is the legation proper, destroyed by the explosion of a
Chinese mine. At our left is the chancellor's house, where the brave
defenders of the place took refuge during the siege, because it was in
a less exposed situation. They have offered to take me in there; it was
not destroyed, but everything is topsy-turvy, as though it were the
day after a battle; and in the room where I am to sleep the plasterers
are at work repairing the walls, which will not be finished until this
evening.

As a new arrival, I am taken on a pilgrimage to the garden where those
of our sailors who fell on the field of honor were hastily buried amid
a shower of balls. There is no grass here, no blossoming plants, only
a gray soil trampled by the combatants,--crumbling from dryness and
cold,--trees without leaves and with branches broken by shot, and over
all a gloomy, lowering sky, with snowflakes that are cutting.

We remove our hats as we enter this garden, for we know not upon whose
remains we may be treading. The graves will soon be marked, I doubt
not, but have not yet been, so one is not sure as one walks of not
having under foot some one of the dead who merits a crown.

In this house of the chancellor, spared as by a miracle, the besieged
lived helter-skelter, slept on a floor space the size of which was day
by day decreased by the damage done by shot and shell, and were in
imminent danger of death.

In the beginning--their number, alas, rapidly diminished--there were
sixty French sailors and twenty Austrians, meeting death, side by side,
with equally magnificent courage. To them were added a few French
volunteers, who took their turns on the barricades or on the roofs, and
two foreigners, M. and Madame Rosthorn of the Austrian legation. Our
officers in command of the defence were Lieutenant Darcy and midshipman
Herber; the latter was struck full in the face by a ball, and sleeps
to-day in the garden.

The horrible part of this siege was that no pity was to be expected
from the besiegers, if, starved, and at the end of their strength,
it became necessary for the besieged to surrender, it was death, and
death with atrocious Chinese refinements to prolong the paroxysms of
suffering.

Neither was there the hope of escape by some supreme sortie; they were
in the midst of a swarming city, they were enclosed in a labyrinth of
buildings that sheltered a crowd of enemies, and were still further
imprisoned by the feeling that, surrounding them, walling in the whole,
was the colossal black rampart of Pekin.

It was during the torrid period of the Chinese summer; it was often
necessary to fight while dying of thirst, blinded by dust, under a sun
as destructive as the balls, and with the constant sickening fear of
infection from dead bodies.

Yet a charming young woman was there with them,--an Austrian, to whom
should be given one of our most beautiful French crosses. Alone amongst
men in distress, she kept an even cheerfulness of the best kind, she
cared for the wounded, prepared food for the sick sailors with her own
hands, and then went off to aid in carrying bricks and sand for the
barricades or to take her turn as watch on the roof.

       *       *       *       *       *

Day by day the circle closed in upon the besieged as their ranks grew
thinner and the garden filled with the dead; gradually they lost
ground, although disputing with the enemy, who were legion, every piece
of wall, every pile of bricks.

And when one sees their little barricades hastily erected during
the night out of nothing at all, and knows that five or six sailors
succeeded in defending them (for five or six toward the end were all
that could be spared), it really seems as though there were something
supernatural about it all. As I walked through the garden with one of
its defenders, and he said to me, "At the foot of that little wall we
held out for so many days," and "In front of this little barricade we
resisted for a week," it seemed a marvellous tale of heroism.

And their last intrenchment! It was alongside the house,--a ditch dug
tentatively in a single night, banked up with a few poor sacks of
earth and sand; it was all they had to keep out the executioners, who,
scarcely six metres away, were threatening them with death from the top
of a wall.

Beyond is the "cemetery," that is, the corner of the garden in which
they buried their dead, until the still more terrible days when they
had to put them here and there, concealing the place for fear the
graves would be violated, in accordance with the terrible custom of
this place. It was a poor little cemetery whose soil had been pressed
and trampled upon in close combat, whose trees were shattered and
broken by shell. The interments took place under Chinese fire, and an
old white-headed priest--since a martyr, whose head was dragged in the
gutter--said prayers at the grave, in spite of the balls that whistled
about him, cutting and breaking the branches.

Toward the end their cemetery was the "contested region," after they
had little by little lost much ground, and they trembled for their
dead; the enemy had advanced to its very border; they watched and they
killed at close quarters over the sleeping warriors so hastily put to
rest. If the Chinese had reached this cemetery, and had scaled the last
frail trenches of sand and gravel in sacks made of old curtains, then
for all who were left there would have been horrible torture to the
sound of music and laughter, horrible dismemberment,--nails torn out,
feet torn off, disembowelling, and finally the head carried through the
streets at the end of a pole.

They were attacked from all sides and in every possible manner, often
at the most unexpected hours of the night. It usually began with cries
and the sudden noise of trumpets and tam-tams; around them thousands
of howling men would appear,--one must have heard the howlings of the
Chinese to imagine what their voices are; their very timbre chills your
soul. Gongs outside the walls added to the tumult.

Occasionally, from a suddenly opened hole in a neighboring house, a
pole twenty or thirty feet long, ablaze at the end with oakum and
petroleum, emerged slowly and silently, like a thing out of a dream.
This was applied to the roofs in the hope of setting them on fire.

They were also attacked from below, they heard dull sounds in the
earth, and understood that they were being undermined, that their
executioners might spring up from the ground at any moment; so that
it became necessary, at any cost, to attempt to establish countermines
to prevent this subterranean peril. One day, toward noon, two terrible
detonations, which brought on a regular tornado of plaster and dust,
shook the French legation, half burying under rubbish the lieutenant
in command of the defences and several of his marines. But this was
not all; all but two succeeded in getting clear of the stones and
ashes that covered them to the shoulders, but two brave sailors never
appeared again. And so the struggle continued, desperately, and under
conditions more and more frightful.

       *       *       *       *       *

And still the gentle stranger remained, when she might so easily have
taken shelter elsewhere,--at the English legation, for instance, where
most of the ministers with their families had found refuge; the balls
did not penetrate to them; they were at the centre of the quarter
defended by a few handfuls of brave soldiers, and could there feel
a certain security so long as the barricades held out. But no, she
remained and continued in her admirable rôle at that blazing point, the
French legation,--a point which was the key, the cornerstone of the
European quadrangle, whose capture would bring about general disaster.

One time they saw with their field glasses the posting of an imperial
edict commanding that the fire against foreigners cease. (What they
did _not_ see was that the men who put up the notices were attacked by
the crowd with knives.) Yet a certain lull, a sort of armistice did
follow; the attacks became less violent.

They saw that incendiaries were everywhere abroad; they heard
fusillades, cannonades, and prolonged cries among the Chinese; entire
districts were in flames; they were killing one another; their fury was
fermenting as in a pandemonium, and they were suffocated, stifled with
the smell of corpses.

Spies came occasionally with information to sell--always false
and contradictory--in regard to the relief expedition, which amid
ever-increasing anxiety was hourly expected. "It is here, it is there,
it is advancing," or "It has been defeated and is retreating," were the
announcements, yet it persisted in not appearing.

What, then, was Europe doing? Had they been abandoned? They continued,
almost without hope, to defend themselves in their restricted quarters.
Each day they felt that Chinese torture and death were closing in upon
them.

They began to lack for the essentials of life. It was necessary to
economize in everything, particularly in ammunition; they were growing
savage,--when they captured any Boxers, instead of shooting them they
broke their skulls with a revolver.

One day their ears, sharpened for all outside noises, distinguished a
continued deep, heavy cannonade beyond the great black ramparts whose
battlements were visible in the distance, and which enclosed them in a
Dantesque circle; Pekin was being bombarded! It could only be by the
armies of Europe come to their assistance.

Yet one last fear troubled their joy. Would not a supreme attack
against them be attempted, an effort be made to destroy them before the
allied troops could enter?

As a matter of fact they were furiously attacked, and this last day,
the day of their deliverance, cost the life of one of our officers,
Captain Labrousse, who went to join the Austrian commander in the
glorious little cemetery of the legation. But they kept up their
resistance, until all at once not a Chinese head was visible on the
barricades of the enemy; all was empty and silent in the devastation
about them; the Boxers were flying and the Allies were entering the
city!

       *       *       *       *       *

This first night of my arrival in Pekin was as melancholy as the nights
on the road, but in a more commonplace way, with more of _ennui_. The
workmen had just finished the walls of my room; the fresh plaster gave
forth a chilling dampness that penetrated to my very bones, and as the
room was empty, my servant spread my narrow mattress from the junk upon
the floor, and began to make a table out of some old boxes.

My hosts were good enough to have a stove hastily set up for me and
lighted, which called up a picture of European discomfort in some
wretched place in the country. How could one fancy oneself in China, in
Pekin itself, so near to mysterious enclosures, to palaces so full of
wonders?

As to the French minister, whom I am anxious to see, to convey to
him the admiral's communications, I learn that he, having no roof to
cover his head, has gone to seek shelter at the Spanish legation; and
furthermore, that he has typhoid fever, which is epidemic on account
of the poisonous condition of the water, so that for the present no
one can see him. So my stay in this damp place threatens to be more
prolonged than I anticipated. Through the window-panes covered with
moisture I gloomily look out onto a court filled with broken furniture,
where the twilight is falling and the snow.

Who could have foreseen that to-morrow, by an unexpected turn of
fortune, I should be sleeping on a great gilded, imperial bed in a
strange fairyland in the heart of the Forbidden City?


VIII

  FRIDAY, October 19.

I awake benumbed with the damp cold of my poor lodging; water drips
down the walls and the stove smokes.

I go off to perform a commission entrusted to me by the admiral for
the commander-in-chief of our land troops, General Voyron, who lives
in a small house near by. In the division of the mysterious Yellow
City, made by the heads of the allied troops, one of the palaces of the
Empress fell to our general. He installed himself there for the winter,
not far from the palace which was to be occupied by one of our allies,
Field-Marshal von Waldersee, and there he has graciously offered me
hospitality. He himself leaves for Tien-Tsin to-day, so for the week
or two which his trip will occupy I shall be there alone with his
aide-de-camp, one of my old comrades, who has charge of adapting this
residence from fairyland to the needs of military service.

What a change it will be from my plastered walls and charcoal stove!

My flight to the Yellow City will not take place till to-morrow
morning, for my friend, the aide-de-camp, expresses his kindly wish to
arrive before me at our palace, where some confusion reigns, and to
prepare the place for me.

So, having no further duties to-day, I accept the offer of one of the
members of the French legation to go with him to see the Temple of
Heaven. It has stopped snowing, the cold north wind has chased away the
clouds, and the sun is shining resplendently in the pale blue sky.

According to the map of Pekin, this Temple of Heaven is five or six
kilometres from here, and is the largest of all the temples. It
seems that it is situated in the midst of a park of venerable trees
surrounded by double walls. Up to the time of the war the spot was
unapproachable; the emperors came once a year and shut themselves up
there for a solemn sacrifice, preceded by purifications and preparatory
rites.

To reach it we have to go outside of all the ashes and ruins, outside
of the Tartar City where we are staying, through the gigantic gates of
the terrible walls, and penetrate to the Chinese City itself.

These two walled cities, which together make up Pekin, are two immense
quadrilaterals placed side by side; one, the Tartar City, contains in a
fortress-like enclosure the Yellow City, where I go to-morrow to take
up my abode.

[Illustration: CHEN-MUN GATE TO PEKIN]

As we come through the separating wall and see the Chinese City framed
by the colossal gateway, we are surprised to find a great artery,
stately and full of life as in the old days, running straight through
Pekin, which up to this time had seemed like a necropolis to us; the
gold decorations, the color, the thousand forms of monsters were all
unexpected, as well as the sudden aggression of noises, of music,
and voices. This life, this agitation, this Chinese splendor, are
inconceivable, inexplicable to us; such an abyss of dissimilarity lies
between this world and ours!

The great artery stretches on before us broad and straight,--a road
three or four kilometres long, leading finally to another monumental
gate which appears in the distance, surmounted by a dungeon with an
absurd roof. This is an opening through a wall beyond which is the
outside solitude. The low houses which line the street on both sides
seem to be made of gold lace, from top to bottom the open woodwork of
their façades glitters; they are finely carved at the top, all shining
with gold, with gargoyles similar to our own, and rows of gilded
dragons. Black stele covered with gold letters rise much higher than
the houses, from which jut out black and gold lacquered platforms for
the support of strange emblems with horns and claws and monsters' faces.

Through the clouds of dust, the gilding, the dragons, and the chimæras
glisten in the dusty sunlight as far as one can see. Above it all
triumphal arches of astonishing lightness mount heavenward across the
avenue; they are airy things of carved wood, with supports like the
masts of a ship, which repeat against the pale blue ether more strange
hostile forms, horns, claws, and fantastic beasts.

On the broad highway where one treads as upon ashes, there is a dull
rumbling of caravans and horses. The stupendous Mongolian camels, brown
and woolly, attached to one another in long endless files, pass slowly
and solemnly along, unceasingly like the waters of a river, raising as
they walk the powdery bed which stifles the sounds of this entire city.
They are going, who knows where, into the depths of the Thibetan or
Mongolian deserts, carrying in the same indefatigable and unconscious
way thousands of bales of merchandise; taking the place of canals and
rivers which convey barges and junks over immense distances. So heavy
is the dust raised by their feet that they can scarcely lift them; the
legs of these innumerable camels in procession, as well as the lower
parts of the houses, and the garments of the passers-by, are all vague
and confused in outline, as though seen through the thick smoke of a
forge, or through a shower of dark wool; but the backs of the great
beasts with their shaggy coats, emerging from the soft clouds near
the earth, are almost sharply defined, and the gold of the façades,
tarnished below, shines brightly at the height of the extravagant
cornices.

It seems like a phantasmagoric city with no real foundations, resting
upon a cloud, a heavy cloud, whereon gigantic sheep, with necks
enlarged by a thick brown fleece, move inoffensively.

Above the dust the sun shines clear and white, making resplendent the
cold, penetrating light in which things stand out incisively. Objects
that are high up above the ground stand out with absolute clearness.
The smallest of small monsters on the top of the triumphal arches may
be clearly seen, as well as the most delicate carving on the summits
of the stele; one can even count the teeth, the forked tongues, the
squinting eyes of the hundreds of gold chimæras which jut from the
roofs.

Pekin, the city of carvings and gildings, the city of claws and horns,
is still capable of creating illusions; on dry, sunny, windy days it
recovers something of its splendor under the dust of the steppes, under
the veil which then masks the shabbiness of its streets and the squalor
of its crowds.

Yet all is old and worn in spite of the gilding which still remains
bright. In this quarter there was continual fighting during the siege
of the legations, the Boxers destroying the homes of those whom they
suspected of sympathy for the barbarians.

The long avenue which we have been following for half an hour ends now
at an arched bridge of white marble, still a superb object; here the
houses come to an end, and on the opposite bank the gloomy steppes
begin.

This was the Bridge of the Beggars,--dangerous inhabitants, who,
before the capture of Pekin, ranged themselves on both sides of its
long railing and extorted money from the passers-by; they formed a
bold corporation with a king at its head, who often went armed. Their
place is unoccupied to-day; the vagrants departed after the battles and
massacres began.

Beyond this bridge a gray plain, empty and desolate, extends for two
kilometres, as far as the Great Wall, far beyond where Pekin ends. The
road, with its tide of caravans, goes straight on through this solitude
to the outside gate. Why should this desert be enclosed by the city's
walls? There is not a trace of previous constructions; it must always
have been as it is. No one is in sight on it; a few stray dogs, a few
rags, a few bones, and that is all.

For a long distance into this steppe there are sombre red walls at both
right and left which seem to enclose great cedar woods. The enclosure
at the right is that of the Temple of Agriculture; at the left is the
Temple of Heaven, for which we are bound. We plunge into this gloomy
region, leaving the dust and the crowds behind.

The enclosure around the Temple of Heaven has a circumference of more
than six kilometres; it is one of the most extensive in the whole
city, where everything is on an old-time scale of grandeur which
overpowers us to-day. The gate which was formerly impassable will
not close now, and we enter the wood of venerable trees--cedars,
arbor-vitæ, and willows--through which long avenues have been cut. This
spot, accustomed to silence and respect, is now profaned by barbarian
cavalry. Several thousand Indians sent out to China by England are
encamped there; their horses have trampled the grass; the turf and the
moss are filled with rubbish and manure. From a marble terrace where
incense to the gods was formerly burned, clouds of infected smoke were
rising, the English having chosen this place for the burning of cattle
that die of the plague, and for the manufacture of bone-black.

There are, as in all sacred woods, two enclosures. The secondary
temples, scattered amongst the cedars, precede the great central temple.

Never having been here before, we are guided by our judgment toward
something which must be it, higher than anything else, above the tops
of the trees,--a distant rotunda with a roof of blue enamel, surmounted
by a gold sphere which glistens in the sunshine.

The rotunda, when we finally reach it, proves to be the sanctuary
itself. Its approaches are silent; there are no more horses or
barbarian riders. It stands on a high esplanade of white marble reached
by a series of steps and by an "imperial path," reserved for the Son
of Heaven, who is not permitted to mount stairs. An "imperial path"
is an inclined plane, usually an enormous monolith of marble placed
at an easy angle, upon which the five-clawed dragon is sculptured in
bas-relief; the scales of the great heraldic animal, its coils and its
nails, serve to sustain the Emperor's steps and to prevent his feet,
dressed in silk, from slipping on the strange path reserved for Him
alone, and which no Chinese would dare to tread.

We mount irreverently by this "imperial path," scratching the fine
white scales of the dragon with our coarse shoes.

From the top of the lonely terrace, melancholy and everlastingly white
with the unchanging whiteness of marble, one sees above the trees of
the wood, great Pekin in its dust, which the sun is beginning to gild
as it gilds the tiny evening clouds.

[Illustration:
_Copyright, 1901, by J. C. Hemment_
THE TEMPLE OF HEAVEN]

The gate of the temple is open, and guarded by an Indian trooper
with oblong sphynx-like eyes, as out of his element as we in this
ultra-Chinese and sacred environment. He salutes us and permits us to
enter.

The circular temple is bright with red and gold and has a roof of
blue enamel; it is a new temple built to replace a very old one which
was burned ten years ago. The altar is bare, it is bare everywhere;
plunderers have passed over it, leaving nothing but the marble
pavements, the beautiful lacquered ceilings, and the walls; the tall
columns of red lacquer, arranged in the form of a circle, all taper
uniformly and are decorated with garlands of gold flowers.

On the esplanade around it, weeds have pushed their way here and there
between the carved stones of the pavement, attesting the extreme
age of the marble in spite of its immaculate whiteness. It is a
commanding place, erected at great expense for the contemplation of the
sovereigns, and we linger, like the Sons of Heaven themselves, to gaze
upon it.

In our immediate vicinity the tops of the arbor-vitæ and the
cedars,--the great wood which envelops us in calm and silence,--come
first. Then, toward the north is the endless but obscure city, which
seems almost unreal; one divines rather than sees it, so hidden is it
in the smoke or fog which forms a gauzy veil. It might be a mirage were
it not for the monumental roofs of exaggerated proportions, whose tops
of shining enamel emerge from the fog here and there, clear and real;
these are palaces and pagodas. Beyond all this, very far away, is the
crest of the mountains of Mongolia, which to-night have no base and
seem to be cut out of blue and red paper high up in the air. Toward the
west is the gray steppe through which we have come; the slow procession
of caravans crossing it marks upon it as far as the eye can see an
uninterrupted brown path; we realize that this endless procession goes
on for hundreds of miles, and that on all the great roads of China,
to its most distant frontiers, similar processions are moving with
identical slowness.

It is the old unchanging method of communication between these men so
different from ourselves,--men with perseverance and infinite patience,
for whom the march of time, which unsteadies us, does not exist; it
forms for them the arterial circulation of this boundless empire, where
four or five hundred million brains--the reverse of our own and forever
incomprehensible to us--live and speculate.




IV

IN THE IMPERIAL CITY


I

  SATURDAY, October 20.

It snows. The sky is lowering and overcast, with no hope of clearing,
as though there were no longer any sun. A furious north wind is
blowing, and the black dust whirls and eddies, commingling with the
snowflakes.

This morning, my first interview with our minister took place at the
Spanish legation. His temperature has fallen, but he is still very
weak, and must remain in bed for some days, so I am obliged to postpone
until to-morrow or the day after the communications I have to make to
him.

I take my last meal with the members of the French legation in the
chancellor's house, where, in default of sumptuous quarters, they have
offered me the most kindly hospitality. At half-past one the two little
Chinese chariots arrive, lent me for the emigration of myself, my
people, and my light luggage to the Yellow City.

The Chinese chariots are very small, very massive, very heavy, and
entirely without springs; mine has something of the elegance of a
hearse; the outside is covered with a slaty-gray silk, with a wide
border of black velvet.

We are to journey toward the northwest, in the opposite direction
from the Chinese City where we were yesterday, and from the Temple
of Heaven. We have five or six kilometres to go almost at a walk, on
account of the pitiable condition of the streets and bridges, where
most of the paving stones are missing.

These Chinese chariots cannot be closed; they are like a simple sentry
box mounted on wheels,--so to-day we are lashed by the wind, cut by the
snow, blinded by the dust.

First come the ruins of the legation district, full of soldiers. Then
more lonely, almost deserted and entirely Chinese ruins--one gray,
dusty devastation, seen vaguely through clouds of black and clouds
of white. At the gates and on the bridges are European or Japanese
sentinels, for the whole city is under military rule. From time to time
we meet soldiers and ambulances carrying the flag of the Red-Cross
Society.

At last the first enclosure of the Yellow or Imperial City is announced
by the interpreter of the French legation, who has kindly offered to
be my guide, and to share my chariot with its funeral trappings. I try
to look, but the wind burns my eyes.

We are passing with frightful jolts through great blood-colored
ramparts, not by way of a gate, but through a breach made with a mine
by Indian cavalrymen.

Pekin, on the farther side of this wall, is somewhat less injured.
In some of the streets the houses have kept their outside covering
of gilded woodwork and their rows of chimæras along the edges of the
roofs; all this is crumbling and decayed, it is true, licked by the
flames or riddled by grape-shot. An evil-looking rabble, dressed in
sheepskins or blue cotton rags, still swarms in some of the houses.

Another rampart of the same blood red and a great gate ornamented with
faience through which we must pass,--this time it is the real gate of
the Imperial City, the gate of the region which no one was ever allowed
to enter; it is to me as though it had been announced as the gate to
mystery or to an enchanted land.

We enter, and my surprise is great; for it is not a city, but
a wood,--a sombre wood, infested with crows which croak in the
gray branches. The trees are the same as those at the Temple of
Heaven,--cedars, arbor-vitæ, and willows,--old trees all of them, of
twisted shapes, unknown in our country. Sleet and snow cling to their
branches, and the inevitable dust in the narrow, windy paths engulfs us.

There are also wooded hills where kiosks of faience rise among the
cedars; in spite of their height, it is plain that they are artificial.
Obscured by the snow and dust, we can see here and there in the distant
wood austere old palaces, with enamelled roofs, guarded by horrible
marble monsters which crouch at the thresholds.

The whole place is of an incontestable beauty, while at the same time
it is dismal, unfriendly, and disturbing under this sombre sky.

Now we approach some enormous object which we shall soon be alongside
of. Is it a fortress, a prison, or something more lugubrious still?
Double ramparts without end, always blood red, with gloomy dungeons
and a moat thirty metres wide, full of water-lilies and dying roses.
This is the Violet City, enclosed in the heart of the impenetrable
Imperial City, and more impenetrable still. It is the residence of the
Invisible, of the Son of Heaven--God! but the place is gloomy, hostile,
savage, beneath this sombre sky!

We continue to advance under the old trees into what seems the park of
death.

[Illustration: MARBLE BRIDGE OVER MOAT BEFORE SOUTHERN GATE OF THE
FORBIDDEN CITY]

These dumb, closed palaces, seen first on one side, then on the other,
are the Temple of the God of the Clouds, the Temple of Imperial
Longevity, or the Temple of the Benediction of Sacred Mountains. Their
names, inconceivable to us, the names of an Asiatic dream, make them
still more unreal.

My companion assures me that this Yellow City is not always so terrible
as it is to-day; for this weather is exceptional in a Chinese autumn,
which is usually magnificently luminous. He promises me afternoons of
warm sunshine in this wood, unique in all the world, where I shall make
my home for several days.

"Now look," he said, "look! This is the Lake of the Lotus, and that is
the Marble Bridge."

The Lake of the Lotus and the Marble Bridge! These two names have long
been known to me as the names of things _which could not be seen_, but
of things whose reputations had crossed insurmountable walls. They call
up images of light and intense color, and are a surprise to me here in
this mournful desert, in this icy wind.

The Lake of the Lotus! I had pictured it as sung by the Chinese poets,
of an exquisite limpidity with great calices open to an abundance of
water, a sort of aquatic plain covered with pink flowers, pink from one
end to the other. And this is it!--This slime and this gloomy swamp,
covered with dead leaves turned brown by the frost! It is infinitely
larger than I supposed, this lake made by the hand of man; it goes on
and on toward nostalgic shores, where ancient pagodas appear among the
old trees, under the gray sky.

The Marble Bridge! Yes, this long, white arch supported by a series of
white pillars, this exceedingly graceful curve, the balustrades with
monsters' heads,--this all corresponds to the idea I had of it; it is
very sumptuous and very Chinese. I had not, however, foreseen the two
dead bodies decaying in their robes, which lay among the reeds at the
entrance to the bridge.

The large dead leaves on the lake are really lotus-leaves; I recognize
them now that I see them near at hand, and remember to have seen
similar ones--but oh, so green and fresh--on the ponds of Nagasaki
or of Yeddo. And there once must have been here the effect of an
uninterrupted covering of pink blossoms; their fading stems rise now by
thousands above the slime.

They will undoubtedly die, these fields of lotus, which for centuries
have charmed the eyes of the emperors, for the lake is almost empty; it
is the Allies who have turned its water into the canal that connects
Pekin with the river, in order to re-establish this route which the
Chinese had dried up for fear of its serving the purpose of the
invaders.

The Marble Bridge, white and solitary, leads us across to the other
bank of the lake, very narrow at this point, and there I shall find
the Palace of the North, which is to be my residence. At first I do
not see that there are enclosures within enclosures, all with great
gates, dilapidated and in ruins. A dull light falls from the wintry sky
through opaque clouds that are filled with snow.

In the centre of a gray wall there is a breach where an African
chasseur is on guard; on one side lies a dead dog, on the other a pile
of rags and filth breathing a corpse-like odor. This, it appears, is
the entrance to my palace.

We are black with dust, powdered with snow, and our teeth are
chattering with cold, when we finally get down from our chariot in
a court encumbered with débris, where my comrade, Captain C., the
aide-de-camp, comes to meet me. With an approach like this, one well
might wonder if the promised palace were not chimerical.

Just back of this court there is, however, the first appearance of
magnificence. Here and there is a long gallery of glass, light,
elegant, and apparently intact, amid so much destruction. Through
the panes one has glimpses of gold, porcelains, and imperial silks
with designs of dragons and clouds. This is one corner of the palace,
completely hidden until you are right upon it.

Oh, our evening meal on the night of our arrival in this strange
dwelling! It is almost totally dark. At an ebony table my companion
and I are seated, wrapped in our military cloaks with collars turned
up, our teeth chattering with cold, and are served by our orderlies
with trembling limbs. A feeble little Chinese candle of red wax, stuck
in a bottle,--a candle picked up in the débris from some ancestral
altar,--sheds a dim light, blown as it is by the wind. Our plates, in
fact all the dishes, are of porcelain of inestimable value,--imperial
yellow, marked with the cipher of a fastidious emperor, who was a
contemporary of Louis XV. But our wine and our muddy water--boiled and
reboiled for fear of poison in the wells--are in horrible old bottles
with bits of potato, cut into shape by the soldiers, for corks.

The gallery where this scene takes place is very long; the distance
is lost in obscurity where the splendors of an Asiatic tale are dimly
perceived. Its sides are of glass up to the height of a man, and this
frail wall is all that separates us from the sinister darkness which
surrounds us; one has a feeling that the wandering forms outside, the
phantoms attracted by our small light, may from a distance see us at
table, and this is disturbing. Above the glass there is a series of
light frames containing rice-paper, which reach to the ceiling, from
which marvellous ebony sculptures depend, delicate as lacework; this
rice-paper is torn, and allows the mortally cold night wind to strike
us. Our frozen feet rest on imperial yellow carpets of the finest wool,
with the five-horned dragons sprawling upon them. Close to us gigantic
incense-burners of cloisonné of the old inimitable blue, with gold
elephants as pedestals, are softly burning; there are magnificent and
fanciful screens; phoenixes of enamel spread their long wings; thrones,
monsters, things without age and without price abound. And there we
are, inelegant, dusty, worn, soiled, with the air of coarse barbarians,
installed like intruders in fairyland.

What must this gallery have been scarcely three months ago, when
instead of silence and death there was life, music, and flowers;
when a crowd of courtiers and servants in silken robes peopled these
approaches so empty and ruined to-day; when the Empress, followed by
the ladies of the palace, passed by dressed like goddesses!

Having finished our supper, which consisted of the regular army ration,
having finished drinking our tea out of museum-like porcelain, now for
the hour of smoking and conversation. No, we try in vain to think it
amusing to be here, in this unforeseen and half fantastic way. It is
too cold; the wind chills us to the marrow. We do not enjoy anything.
We prefer to go off and to try to sleep.

My comrade, Captain C., who has taken possession of the place, leads me
with a lantern and a few followers to the apartment set aside for me.
It is on the _rez-de-chausée_, of course; there are no real stories in
Chinese houses. As in the gallery, from which we come, there is nothing
between me and the night outside but a few panes of glass, very light
shades of white silk, and windows of rice-paper torn from one end to
the other. As to the door, which is made of one great pane of glass, I
fasten it with a cord, since there is no lock.

There are some admirable yellow rugs on the floor, thick as cushions.
I have a big imperial bed of carved ebony, and my mattress and pillows
are covered with precious silk embroidered in gold, but there are no
sheets, although I have a soldier's gray woollen blanket.

       *       *       *       *       *

To-morrow my companion tells me I may go and select from her Majesty's
reserve supply whatever I wish in the way of further decorations for
this room, as it can do no one any harm to move things about.

Assuring me that the gates of the outer enclosure, as well as the
breach by which I entered, are guarded by sentinels, he retires with
his orderlies to the other end of the palace.

Dressed, and with my boots on, I stretch myself out on the beautiful
silk cushions, adding to my gray blanket an old sheepskin and two or
three imperial robes embroidered with gold chimæras. My two servants
arrange themselves in like manner on the floor. Before blowing out the
red candle from some ancestral altar, I am constrained to admit in my
secret soul that the accusation that we are "Occidental barbarians" has
been completely confirmed since supper.

The wind has tormented and torn all that was left of the rice-paper
in my panes; above me there is a perpetual sound like the movement
of the wings of nocturnal birds or the flight of bats. I distinguish
occasionally, although half asleep, a short fusillade or an isolated
cry in the distance.


II

  SUNDAY, October 21.

Cold, darkness, death, all that oppressed us last night, has
disappeared with the morning light. The sun shines warm as a summer
sun. The somewhat disordered Chinese magnificence which surrounds us is
bright with the light of the East.

It is amusing to go on a voyage of discovery over this almost hidden
palace, which lurks in a low spot, behind walls, under trees, looking
quite insignificant as you approach it, but is, together with its
dependencies, almost as large as a city.

It is made up of long galleries enclosed on all sides in glass; the
light framework, the verandahs, the small columns, are painted on the
outside a greenish bronze decorated with pink water-lilies.

One has the feeling that it was built according to the fancies of a
woman; it even seems as though the splendid old Empress had left in
it, along with her bibelots, a touch of her superannuated yet still
charming grace.

The galleries cross one another at right angles, forming courts at the
junctures, like little cloisters. They are filled with objects of art,
which can be equally well seen from without, for the entire palace is
transparent from one end to the other. There is nothing to protect all
this glass even at night; the place was enclosed by so many walls and
seemed so inviolable that no other precaution was deemed necessary.

Within, the architectural elegance consists of arches of rare wood,
crossing at frequent intervals; they are made of enormous beams so
carved, so leafy, so open, that they seem like lace, or, rather, like
bowers of dark leaves that form a perspective comparable to the lanes
in old parks.

       *       *       *       *       *

The wing which we occupy must have been the wing of honor. The farther
away from it one goes in the direction of the woods where the palace
ends, the more simple does the decoration become. At one end are the
lodgings of the mandarins, the stewards, the gardeners, the domestics,
all hurriedly abandoned and full of unfamiliar objects, household
utensils or those used in worship, ceremonial hats and court liveries.

Then comes an enclosed garden which is entered by an elaborately
carved marble gate. Here one finds small fountains, pretentious and
curious rockwork, and rows of vases containing plants which have died
from lack of water or from cold. Further on there is an orchard where
figs, grapes, eggplant, pumpkins, and gourds were cultivated,--gourds
especially, for in China they are emblems of happiness, and it was the
custom of the Empress to offer one with her own white hands to each of
the dignitaries who came to pay his court to her in exchange for the
magnificent presents he brought her. There are also small pavilions
for the cultivation of silkworms and little kiosks for storing edible
grains; each kind was kept in a porcelain jar decorated with imperial
dragons, worthy of a place in a museum.

The parks of this artificial little landscape end in the brush, where
they lose themselves under the leafless trees of the wood where to-day
the crows and the magpies are enjoying the beautiful autumn sun. It
seems that when the Empress gave up the regency--and we know by what
an audacious manoeuvre she so quickly managed to take it up again--it
was her caprice to construct a bit of the country here in the heart of
Pekin, in the very centre of this immense human ant-hill.

The most surprising thing in all this enclosure is a Gothic church
with two granite bell-towers, a parsonage, and a school,--all built
in other days by the missionaries and all of enormous size. But in
order to create this palace it was necessary to enlarge the limits of
the Imperial City and to include in them this Christian territory; so
the Empress gave the Lazarist Fathers more land and a more beautiful
church, erected at her own expense, where the missionaries and several
thousand converts endured all last summer the horrors of a four-months'
siege.

Like the systematic woman that she was, her Majesty utilized the church
and its dependencies for storing her reserves of all sorts, packed in
innumerable boxes. One could not imagine without having seen them what
an accumulation there could be of the strange, the marvellous, and the
preposterous in the reserve stock of bibelots belonging to an Empress
of China.

The Japanese were the first to forage there, then came the Cossacks,
and, lastly, the Germans, who left the place to us. At present the
church is in indescribable disorder,--boxes opened, their precious
contents scattered outside in rubbish heaps; there are streams of
broken china, cascades of enamel, ivory, and porcelain.

In the long glass galleries a similar state of things exists. My
comrade, who is charged with straightening out the chaos and making an
inventory, reminds me of that person who was shut up by an evil spirit
in a chamber filled with the feathers of all the birds of the woods and
compelled to sort them by species; those of the finch, the linnet, the
bullfinch together. However, he has already set about his difficult
task, and with Chinese workmen, under the direction of a few marines
and some African chasseurs, has already begun to clear things away.

       *       *       *       *       *

Five metres from here, on the opposite shores of the Lake of the Lotus,
as I was retracing my steps last night, I found a second palace which
once belonged to the Empress, which is now ours also. In this palace,
which no one is occupying at the moment, I am authorized to set up my
work-room for a few days, so that I may have quiet and isolation.

It is called the Rotunda Palace. Exactly opposite the Marble Bridge,
it resembles a circular fortress, on which have been placed small
miradors,--little, fairy-like castles,--and the single low entrance is
guarded day and night by soldiers, whose orders are to admit no one.

When you have crossed the threshold of this citadel, and the guards
have closed the door after you, you penetrate into the most exquisite
solitude. An inclined plane leads you to a vast esplanade about twelve
metres above the ground, where the miradors--the little kiosks--seen
from below stand; there is a garden with old, old trees, a labyrinth of
rocks, and a large pagoda shining with gold and enamel.

From here there is a commanding view of the palace and its park. On
one side the Lake of the Lotus is spread out; on the other, one has
a bird's-eye view of the Violet City, showing the almost endless
succession of high imperial roofs,--a world of roofs, a world of enamel
shining in the sunshine, a world of horns, claws, and monsters on gable
and tiling.

I walk in the solitude of this high place, in the shade of the old
trees, trying to understand the arrangement of the house and to choose
a study to my fancy.

In the centre of the esplanade is the magnificent pagoda which was
struck by a shell and which is still in battle disarray. Its presiding
divinity--a white goddess, who was the Palladium of the Chinese empire,
an alabaster goddess with a gold dress embroidered with precious
stones--meditates with downcast eyes, sweet, calm, and smiling, in the
midst of the destruction of her sacred vases, of her incense-burners
and her flowers.

One large gloomy room has kept its furnishings intact,--an admirable
ebony throne, some screens, seats of all shapes, and cushions of heavy
yellow imperial silk, brocaded with a cloud effect.

Among all the silent kiosks the one which I fix upon as my choice is at
the very edge of the esplanade on the crest of the surrounding wall,
overlooking the Lake of the Lotus and the Marble Bridge, and commanding
a view of the whole factitious landscape,--created out of gold ingots
and human lives to please the weary eyes of emperors.

It is hardly larger than a ship's cabin, but its sides are made
of glass extending to the roof, so that I shall be kept warm
until nightfall by the autumn sun, which here in China is seldom
over-clouded. I have a table and two ebony chairs with yellow silk
coverings brought in from the adjoining room,--and thus installed, I
descend again to the Marble Bridge and return to the Palace of the
North, where Captain C., my companion in this Chinese dream, is waiting
breakfast for me.

       *       *       *       *       *

I arrive in time to see, before they are burned, the curious
discoveries of the morning,--the decorations, emblems, and accessories
of the Chinese Imperial Theatre. They were cumbersome, frail things,
intended to serve but for a night or two, and then forgotten for an
indefinite time in a room that was never opened, and which they are
now clearing out and cleaning for a hospital for our sick and wounded.
Mythological representations were evidently given at this theatre, the
scene taking place either in hell or with the gods in the clouds; and
such a collection as there was of monsters, chimæras, wild beasts, and
devils, in cardboard or paper, mounted on carcasses made of bamboo or
whalebone, all devised with a perfect genius for the horrible, with an
imagination surpassing the limits of a nightmare!

The rats, the dampness, and the ants have caused irremediable havoc
among them, so it has been decided to burn all these figures that have
served to amuse or to trouble the dreams of the drowsy, dissipated,
feeble young Emperor.

Our soldiers are hurrying amid joy and laughter to carry all these
things out of doors. Here in the morning sunlight of the courtyard are
apocalyptic beasts and life-sized elephants that weigh nothing at all,
and which one man can make walk or run. They kick them, they jump upon
them, they jump into them, they walk through them and reduce them to
nothing; then at last they light the gay torch, which in the twinkling
of an eye consumes them.

Other soldiers have been working all the morning pasting rice-paper
into the sashes of our palace so that the wind shall not enter. As
for artificial heat, it comes up from below, Chinese fashion, from
subterranean furnaces which are arranged under the rooms, and which
we shall light this evening as soon as the chill comes on. For the
moment the splendid sunshine suffices; so much glass in the galleries,
where the silks, enamels, and gold glisten, gives us the heat of a
greenhouse, and on this occasion we take our meal, which is always
served on the Emperor's china, in an illusion of summer.

       *       *       *       *       *

The sky of Pekin is subject to excessive and sudden variations of which
we with our regular climate can form no conception. Toward the middle
of the day, when I find myself out of doors again under the cedars of
the Yellow City, the sun has suddenly disappeared behind some leaden
clouds which seem heavy with snow; the Mongolian wind begins to blow,
bitter cold, as it was yesterday, and again a northern winter follows
with no transition stage a few hours of the radiant weather of the
_Midi_.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have an arrangement to meet the members of the French legation in the
woods, to explore with them the sepulchral Violet City, which is the
centre, the heart, the mystery of China, the veritable abode of the Son
of Heaven, the enormous Sardanapalian citadel, in comparison with which
all the small modern palaces in the Imperial City where we are living
seem but children's playthings.

Even since the flight it has not been easy to enter the Violet City
with its yellow enamelled roofs. Behind the double walls, mandarins and
eunuchs still dwell in this home of magnificence and oppression, and
it is said that a few women, hidden princesses, and treasures still
remain. The two gates are guarded by severe sentries,--the north gate
by the Japanese, the south by Americans.

It is by the first of these two entrances that we are authorized
to pass to-day, and the group of small Japanese soldiers that we
find there smile upon us in welcome; but the austere gate--dark red
with gilded locks and hinges, representing the heads of monsters--is
closed from within and resists their efforts. The use of centuries has
warped the enormous doors so that through the crack one can see boards
fastened on to the inside to prevent their opening, and persons running
about announcing in flute-like voices that they have received no orders.

We threaten to burn the doors, to climb over them, to shoot through the
opening; all sorts of things which we have no intention of doing, but
which frighten the eunuchs and put them to flight.

No one is left to answer us. What are we to do? We are freezing our
feet by this cold wall; the moat, full of dead reeds, exhales dampness,
and the wind continues to blow.

       *       *       *       *       *

The kindly Japanese, however, send some of their strongest men--who
depart on a keen run--to the other gate, some four kilometres around.
They light a fire for us out of cedar branches and painted woodwork,
where we take turns warming our hands while we wait; we amuse ourselves
by picking up here and there old feathered arrows thrown by prince or
emperor from the top of the walls. After an hour's patient waiting,
noise and voices are heard behind the silent gate; it is our envoy
inside cuffing the eunuchs.

Suddenly the boards creak and fall and the doors open wide before us.


III

THE ABANDONED ROOM

There is a faint odor of tea in the dark room, an odor of I know not
what beside,--of dried flowers and old silks.

There is no way of getting more light in this curious room, which
opens into a big gloomy salon, for its windows receive only half-light
because of the rice paper in all the panes; they open onto a yard
that is no doubt surrounded by triple walls. The alcove-bed, large
and low, which seems to be set into an inner wall thick as a rampart,
has silk curtains and a cover of dark blue,--the color of the sky at
night. There are no seats, indeed there would scarcely be room for
any; neither are there any books, nor could one very well see to read.
On the dark wooden chests which serve as tables, stand melancholy
bibelots in glass cases; small vases of bronze or of jade containing
very stiff artificial bouquets, with petals made of mother-of-pearl and
ivory. A thick layer of dust over everything shows that the room is not
occupied.

[Illustration:
_Copyright, 1901, by J. C. Hemment_
THE BIG TOWER OR WALL ENTRANCE OF TARTAR CITY]

At first sight there is nothing to mark the place or the time,--unless,
possibly, the fineness of the ebony carving of the upper part of the
bed reveals the patience of the Chinese. Everything is sombre and
gloomy, with straight, austere lines.

Where are we, then, in what obscure, closed, clandestine dwelling?

Has some one lived here in our time or was it in the distant past?

How many hours--or how many centuries--has he been gone, and who could
he have been, the occupant of the abandoned room?

Some sad dreamer evidently, to have chosen this shadowy retreat; some
one very refined, to have left behind him this distinguished fragrance,
and very weary, to have been pleased with this dull simplicity and this
eternal twilight.

One feels stifled by the smallness of the windows, whose panes are
veiled with silky paper, and which never can be opened to admit
light or air because they are sealed into the wall. And besides, you
recall the weary way you must take to get here, and the obstacles you
encounter, and that disturbs you.

First, there is the big black Babylonian wall, the superhuman ramparts
of a city more than ten leagues around, which to-day is a mass of
ruins, half empty, and strewn with corpses; then a second wall, painted
blood-red, which forms a second city enclosed in the first. Then a
third wall, more magnificent still, and also the color of blood; this
is the wall that surrounds the great mysteries of the place, and before
the days of the war and the fall of the city no European had ever gone
beyond it; to-day we were detained for more than an hour, in spite of
passes, signed and countersigned; through the keyhole of a great gate
guarded by soldiers and barricaded from within, we were compelled to
threaten and argue at length with the guards inside, who sought to
hide and to escape. These gates once opened, another wall appeared,
separated from the former one by a road going all the way around the
enclosure; here tattered garments were scattered about, and dogs were
playing with the bones of the dead. This wall was of the same red,
but still more splendid, and was crowned along its entire length by a
horned ornamentation and by monsters made of a golden yellow faience.
When we had finally passed this third wall, queer old beardless persons
came to meet us with distrustful greetings, and guided us through a
maze of little courts and small gardens, walled and walled again, in
which old trees were growing amongst rockwork and jars. All of it was
separate, concealed, distressing; all of it protected and peopled by
monsters and chimæras in bronze or marble, by a thousand faces, whose
grimaces signified ferocity and hatred, by a thousand unknown symbols.
And every time each gate in the red walls with the yellow faience
tops closed behind us, as in horrible dreams the doors of a series of
passageways close upon one, nevermore to permit one to go out.

Now, after our long journey which seems like a nightmare, we feel,
as we look at the anxious group who have conducted us, walking
noiselessly on their paper soles, that we have committed some supreme
and unheard-of profanation in their eyes, in penetrating to this
modest room; they stand there in the doorway, peering obliquely at
our every gesture; the crafty eunuchs in silken robes, and the thin
mandarins, wearing along with the red button of their headdresses, the
melancholy raven's quill. They were compelled to yield, they did not
wish to; they tried by every ruse to lead us to some other part of
the immense labyrinth of this palace of Heliogabalus; to interest us
in the luxurious salons farther on, in the great courts, and in the
marble balconies, which we shall see later; in a whole Versailles some
distance farther on, now overgrown by weeds, and where no sound is
heard but the song of the crows.

They were determined we should not come here, and it was by observing
the dilation of the pupils of their frightened eyes that we guessed
which way to go.

Who lived here, then, sequestered behind so many walls,--walls more
terrible by far than those of our western prisons? Who could he have
been, the man who slept in this bed under these silken covers of
nocturnal blue, and in his times of revery, at nightfall or at dawn, on
glacial winter days, was obliged to contemplate these pensive little
bouquets under glass, ranged so symmetrically along the black chests?

It was he, the invisible Emperor, Son of Heaven, childish and feeble;
he whose empire is vaster than all Europe, and who reigns like a vague
phantom over four or five hundred millions of subjects.

It is the same person in whose veins the vigor of half-deified
ancestors is exhausted, who has too long remained inactive, concealed
in this palace more sacred than a temple; the same who neglects and
envelops in twilight the diminishing place where he is pleased to live.
The immense setting in which former emperors lived frightens him and
he abandons it all; grass and brushwood grow on the majestic marble
railings and in the grand courtyards; crows and pigeons by the hundreds
make their nests in the gilded vaults of the throne room, covering with
dirt and dung the rich and curious rugs left there to be ruined. This
inviolable palace, a league in circumference, which no foreigner has
ever seen, of which one can learn nothing, guess nothing, has in store
for Europeans who enter it for the first time the surprise of mournful
dilapidation and the silence of a tomb.

The pale Emperor never occupied the throne rooms. No, what suited him
was the quarter where the small gardens were, and the enclosed yards,
the quaint quarter where the eunuchs tried to prevent our going. The
alcove-bed in its deep recess, with its curtains like the blue of
night, indicates fear.

The small private apartments behind this gloomy chamber extend
like subterranean passages into still deeper shadows; ebony is the
prevailing wood; everything is intentionally sombre, even the mournful
mummified bouquets under their glass cases. There is a soft-toned piano
which the young Emperor was learning to play, in spite of his long,
brittle nails; a harmonium, and a big music-box that gives Chinese airs
with a tone that seems to come from beneath the waters of a lake.

Beyond this comes what was doubtless his most cherished retreat,--it is
narrow and low like the cabin of a ship, and exhales the fine odor of
tea and dried rose-leaves.

There, in front of a small airhole covered with rice paper, through
which filters a little sombre light, lies a mattress, covered with
imperial golden-yellow silk, which seems to retain the imprint of a
body habitually extended upon it. A few books, a few private papers,
are scattered about. Fastened to the wall are two or three unimportant
pictures, not even framed, representing colorless roses, and written in
Chinese characters underneath are the last orders of the physician for
this chronic invalid.

What was the real character of this dreamer, who shall ever say? What
distorted views of life had been bequeathed to him of the things of
this world and of the world beyond? What do all these gruesome symbols
signify to him? The emperors, the demigods, from whom he descends, made
old Asia tremble; tributary sovereigns came from great distances to
prostrate themselves, filling this place with banners and processions
more magnificent than our imaginations can picture; within these same
walls, so silent to-day, how and under what passing phantasmagoric
aspects did he retain the stamp of the wonderful past?

And what confusion must have entered his unfathomable little brain
when the unprecedented act was accomplished, and events occurred which
he never in his wildest fears could have anticipated! His palace,
with its triple walls, violated to its most secret recesses; he, the
Son of Heaven, torn from the dwelling where twenty generations of his
ancestors had lived inaccessible; obliged to flee, and in his flight to
permit himself to be seen, to act in the light of day like other men,
perhaps even to implore and to wait!

       *       *       *       *       *

Just as we are leaving the abandoned room our orderlies, who purposely
remained behind, laughingly throw themselves on the bed with the
nocturnal blue curtains, and I hear one of them remark gaily in an
aside and with a Gascon accent: "Now, old fellow, we can say that we
have lain on the bed of the Emperor of China."


IV

  MONDAY, October 22.

Chinese workmen,--amongst whom we are warned that there are spies and
Boxers,--who look after the fires in the two furnaces in our palace,
have kept us almost too warm all night. When we get up there is, as
there was yesterday, another illusion of summer on our light verandah
with the green columns painted with pink lotus flowers. An almost
burning sun is rising and shining upon the ghostly pilgrimage which
I am about to make on horseback, toward the west, outside the Tartar
City, and through the ashy, silent, ruined suburbs.

In this direction there were, scattered through the dusty country,
Christian cemeteries which even in 1860 had never been violated by
the yellow race. But this time they furiously attacked the dead, and
left chaos and abomination behind them. The oldest remains, those of
missionaries who had been sleeping there for three centuries, were
disinterred, crushed, piled up and set on fire in order to destroy,
according to Chinese beliefs, whatever might still be left of their
souls. One must be somewhat acquainted with the ideas of the country
in order to understand the enormity of this supreme insult to all our
Occidental races.

The cemetery of the Jesuit Fathers was singularly splendid. They were
formerly very powerful with the Celestial Emperors, and borrowed for
their own tombs the funereal emblems of the princes of China. The
ground is literally strewn now with big marble dragons and tortoises,
and with tall stele with chimæras coiled about them; all these carvings
have been thrown down and smashed; the heavy stones of the vaults have
been broken also, and the ground thoroughly overturned.

A more modest enclosure, not far away, has for a long time been the
burial-place for the European legations. It has undergone the same
treatment as the beautiful cemetery of the Jesuits. The Chinese have
ransacked the graves, destroyed the bodies, and even violated the
coffins of little children. Some few human bones are still lying on
the ground, while the crosses that marked the graves are placed upside
down. It is one of the most poignantly affecting sights that ever met
my eyes.

Some good Sisters who lived near by kept a school for Chinese children;
of their houses nothing is left but a pile of bricks and ashes, even
the trees have been uprooted and stuck back in the ground head foremost.

This is their story:--

They were alone one night when about a thousand Boxers came along,
shouting their death cries and playing gongs. The Sisters began to pray
in their chapel as they awaited death. However, the noise died away,
and when day broke no one was in sight, so they escaped to Pekin and
took shelter with the bishop, taking their frightened little pupils
with them. When the Boxers were asked later why they had not entered
and killed the Sisters, they replied: "Because we saw soldiers' heads
and guns all around the convent walls." So the Sisters owed their lives
to this hallucination of their executioners.

The wells in the deserted gardens fill the air to-day with odors of
the dead. There were three large cisterns which furnished a water so
pure that they sent all the way from the legations to get it. The
Boxers filled these wells up to the brim with the mutilated bodies of
little boys from the Brothers' school and from Christian families in
the neighborhood. Dogs came to eat from the horrible pile which came up
to the level of the ground; but they had their fill, and so the bodies
were left, and have been so preserved by the cold and dryness that the
marks of torture upon them may still be seen. One poor thigh has been
slashed in stripes after the manner in which bakers sometimes mark
their loaves of bread, another poor hand is without nails. And here is
a woman from whom one of the private parts of her body has been cut and
placed in her mouth, where it was left by the dogs between her gaping
jaws. The bodies are covered with what looks like salt, but which
proves to be white frost, which in shady places never melts here. Yet
there is enough clear, implacable sunshine to bring out the emaciation
and to exaggerate the horrors of the open mouths, their agonized
expressions, and the rigidity of the anguished positions of the dead.

There is not a cloud to-day, but a pale sky which reflects a great
deal of light. All winter, it seems, it is much the same; even in the
coldest weather rains and snows are very exceptional in Pekin.

After our brief soldiers' breakfast, served on rare china in the long
gallery, I leave the Palace of the North to install myself in the kiosk
on the opposite shore, which I selected yesterday, and to begin my
work. It is about two o'clock; a summer's sun shines on my solitary
path, on the whiteness of the Marble Bridge, on the mud of the Lake,
and on the bodies that sleep amongst the frosted lotus leaves.

The guards at the entrance to the Rotunda Palace open and close behind
me the red lacquered doors. I mount the inclined plane leading to the
esplanade, and here I am alone, much alone, in the silence of my lofty
garden and my strange palace.

In order to reach my work-room, I have to go along narrow passageways
between old trees and the most unnatural rockwork. The kiosk is flooded
with light, the beautiful sunshine falls on my table and on my black
seats with their cushions of golden yellow; the beautiful melancholy
October sunshine illumines and warms my chosen retreat, where the
Empress, it seems, loved to come and sit and watch from this high point
her lake all pink with flowers.

The last butterflies and the last wasps, their lives prolonged by this
hot-house warmth, beat their wings against the window-panes. The great
imperial lake is spread out before us, spanned by the Marble Bridge;
venerable trees form a girdle around shores out of which rise the
fanciful roofs of palaces and pagodas,--roofs that are one marvellous
mass of faience. As in the landscapes painted on Chinese fans, there
are groups of tiny rocks in the foreground, and small enamelled
monsters from a neighboring kiosk, while in the middle distance there
are knotted branches which have fallen from some old cedar.

I am alone, entirely and deliciously alone, high up in an inaccessible
spot whose approaches are guarded by sentinels. There is the occasional
cry of a crow or the gallop of a horse down below, at the foot of
the rampart whereon my frail habitation rests, or the passing of an
occasional messenger. Otherwise nothing; not a single sound near enough
to trouble the sunny quiet of my retreat. No surprise is possible, no
visitor.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have been working for an hour, when a light rustling behind me from
the direction of the entrance gives me the feeling of some discreet
and agreeable presence. I turn round, and there is a cat who has
stopped short with one foot in the air, hesitating and looking me
straight in the eye, as if to ask: "Who are you, and what are you doing
here?"

I call him quietly, he replies with a plaintive miaul; and I, always
tactful with cats, go on with my writing, knowing very well that in a
first interview one must not be too insistent.

He is a very pretty cat, yellow and white, with the distinguished and
elegant air of a grand seignior. A moment later and he is rubbing
against my leg; so then I put my hand slowly down on the small, velvety
head, which, after a sudden start, permits my caresses and abandons
itself to them. It is over; the acquaintance is made. He is evidently
a cat accustomed to petting, probably an intimate of the Empress.
To-morrow and every day I shall beg my orderly to bring him a cold
luncheon from my rations.

       *       *       *       *       *

The illusion of summer ends with the day. The sun sets big and red
behind the Lake of the Lotus, all at once taking on a sad, wintry look;
at the same time a chill comes over all things, and the empty palace
grows suddenly gloomy. For the first time that day I hear footsteps
approaching, resounding in the silence on the pavement of the
esplanade. My servants, Osman and Renaud, are coming for me according
to instructions; they are the only human beings for whom the gate of
the walls below has orders to open.

It is icy cold as we cross the Marble Bridge in the twilight to return
to our home, and the moisture is gathering in clouds over the lake, as
it does every night.

After supper we go on a man hunt in the dark, through the courts and
rooms of the place. On the preceding nights we had observed through the
transparent window-panes disturbing little lights which were promptly
extinguished if we made any noise. These lights moved up and down the
uninhabited galleries, some distance away, like fireflies. To-night's
effort brings about the capture of three unknown men who with cutlasses
and dark lanterns have climbed over the walls to pilfer in the imperial
reserves. There are two Chinese and one European, a soldier of one
of the allied nations. Not to make too much ado over it, we content
ourselves with putting them out after cudgelling them well and boxing
their ears.


V

  TUESDAY, October 23.

Last night there was a still harder frost, which covered the ground in
the courtyard with small white crystals. This we discover during our
regular morning exploration of the galleries and dependencies of the
palace.

The former lodgings of the begging missionaries and the schoolrooms are
overflowing with packing boxes containing reserve supplies of silk and
tea. There is also a heap of old bronzes, vases, and incense-burners
piled up to the height of a man.

But the church itself is the most extraordinary mine,--a regular Ali
Baba's cave, quite filled. In addition to antiquities brought from the
Violet City, the Empress had put there all the presents she received
two years ago for her Jubilee. (And the line of mandarins who on that
occasion brought presents to their sovereign was a league long and
lasted an entire day.)

In the nave and side aisles the boxes and cases are piled to half the
height of the columns. In spite of the confusion, in spite of the hasty
pillaging of those who have preceded us,--Chinese, Japanese, German,
and Russian soldiers,--a marvellous collection remains. The most
enormous of the chests,--those beneath,--protected by their weight and
by the mass of things on top of them, have not even been opened. The
first to go were the innumerable smaller articles on top, most of them
enclosed in glass cases or in yellow silk coverings, such as bunches
of artificial flowers in agate, jade, coral, or lapis lazuli, pagodas
and blue landscapes made of the feathers of the kingfisher marvellously
utilized. Works of Chinese patience which have cost years of toil are
now broken in bits by the stroke of a bayonet, while the glass which
protected them is crackling under one's feet on the floor.

Imperial robes of heavy silk brocaded with gold dragons lie on the
ground among cases of every description. We walk over them, we walk
over carved ivories, over pearls and embroideries galore. There are
bronzes a thousand years old, from the Empress's collection; there are
screens which seem to have been carved and embroidered by supernatural
beings, there are antique vases, cloisonné, crackle ware, lacquers.
Certain of the boxes underneath, bearing the names of emperors who
died a century ago, contain presents sent them from distant provinces,
which no one has ever taken the trouble to open. The sacristy of this
astonishing cathedral contains in a series of pasteboard boxes, all the
sumptuous costumes for the actors in the Empress's theatre, with many
fashionable headdresses of former times.

This church, so full of pagan riches, has kept its organ intact,
although it has been silent for thirty years. My comrade mounts with
me to the gallery to try the effect of some hymns of Bach and Händel
under these vaultings, while the African chasseurs, up to their knees
in ivories, silks, and court costumes, continue their task of clearing
things out below.

       *       *       *       *       *

About ten o'clock this morning I cross over to the opposite side of the
Violet City to visit the Palace of Ancestors, which is in charge of our
marines. This was the Holy of Holies, the Pantheon of dead emperors, a
temple which was never even approached.

It is in a particularly shady spot; in front of the entrance gate are
light but ornate triumphal arches of green, red, and gold lacquer,
resting on frail supports, and mingling with the sombre branches of
the trees. Enormous cedars and cypresses, twisted by age, shelter the
marble monsters which crouch at the threshold and have given them a
greenish hue.

Passing the first enclosure, we naturally find a second. The courts,
always shaded by old trees, succeed one another in solemn magnificence.
They are paved with large stones, between which grows a weed common in
cemeteries; each one of the cedars and cypresses which cast its shadow
here is surrounded by a marble circle and seems to spring from a bed of
carving. A thick layer of thousands of pine needles continually falling
from the branches, covers everything. Gigantic incense-burners of dull
bronze, centuries old, rest on pedestals bearing emblems of death.

Everything here has an unprecedented stamp of antiquity and mystery. It
is a unique place, haunted by the ghosts of the Chinese emperors.

On each side are secondary temples, whose walls of lacquer and gold
have taken on with time the shades of old Cordova leather. They contain
broken catafalques, emblems and objects pertaining to certain funeral
rites.

It is all incomprehensible and terrible; one feels profoundly incapable
of grasping the meaning of these forms and symbols.

At length, in the last court on a white marble terrace guarded by
bronze roes, the Ancestors' Palace lifts its tarnished gold façade,
surmounted by a roof of yellow lacquer.

       *       *       *       *       *

It consists of one immense room, grand and gloomy, all in faded gold
turning to coppery red. At the rear is a row of nine mysterious double
doors, which are sealed with wax. In the centre are the tables on which
the repasts for the ancestral shades were placed, and where, on the
day the Yellow City was taken, our hungry soldiers rejoiced to find an
unexpected meal set forth. At each extremity of this lofty room chimes
and stringed instruments await the hour, which may never come again,
when they shall make music for the Shades. There are long, horizontal
zithers, grave in tone, which are supported by golden monsters with
closed eyes; gigantic chimes, one of bells, the others of marble slabs
and jade, suspended by gold chains and surmounted by great fantastic
beasts spreading their golden wings toward the dusky gold ceiling.

There are also lacquered cupboards as big as houses, containing
collections of old paintings, rolled on ebony or ivory sticks, and
wrapped in imperial silks.

Some of these are marvellous, and are a revelation of Chinese art of
which we of the Occident have no conception,--an art at least equal to
our own, though profoundly unlike it. Portraits of emperors in silent
revery, or hunting in the forest, portray wild places which give one
a longing for primitive nature, for the unspoiled world of rocks and
trees. Portraits of dead empresses painted in water-colors on faded
silks recall the candid grace of the Italian Primitives,--portraits
so pale, so colorless, as to seem like fleeting reflections of
persons, yet showing a perfection of modelling attained with absolute
simplicity, and with a look of concentration in the eye that makes you
feel the likeness and enables you for one strange moment to live face
to face with these princesses of the past who have slept for centuries
in this splendid mausoleum. All these paintings were sacred, never seen
or even suspected to exist by Europeans.

Other rolls, which when spread out on the pavement are six or eight
metres long, represent processions, receptions at court, or lines
of ambassadors; cavaliers, armies, banners; men of all kinds by the
thousands, whose dress, embroideries, and arms, suggest that one should
look at them with a magnifying glass. The whole history of Chinese
costume and ceremonial is contained in these precious miniatures.
We even find here the reception, by I know not what emperor, of an
ambassador from Louis XIV.; small persons with very French faces are
represented as though for exhibition at Versailles, with wigs after the
fashion of Roi-Soleil.

       *       *       *       *       *

The nine magnificent sealed doors at the back of the temple, shut
off the altars of nine emperors. They were good enough to break the
red wax seals for me and to destroy the fastenings at one of the
forbidden entrances, so that I might penetrate into one of the sacred
sanctuaries,--that of the great Emperor Kouang-Lu, who was in his glory
at the beginning of the eighteenth century. A serjeant has orders to
accompany me in this profanation, holding in his hand a lighted candle,
which seems to burn reluctantly here in the light cold air of the tomb.
The temple itself was quite dark, but here it was black night itself,
and it seemed as though dirt and cinders had been thrown about; the
dust that accumulates so endlessly in Pekin seems a sign of death and
decay. Passing from daylight, however dim, to the light of one small
candle that is lost in the shadows, one sees confusedly at first, and
there is a momentary hesitation, especially if the place is startling
in itself. I see before me a staircase rising to a sort of tabernacle,
which seems to be full of artistic creations of some unknown kind.

At both right and left, closed by complicated locks, are some severe
chests which I am permitted to examine. In their compartments and in
their double secret bottoms the sovereign's imperial seals have been
concealed by the hundreds,--heavy seals of onyx, jade, or gold struck
off for every occasion of his life and in commemoration of all the
acts of his reign; priceless relics which no one dared touch after his
obsequies, and which have lain there for twice one hundred years.

I go up into the tabernacle and the serjeant holds his candle before
the marvels there,--jade sceptres and vases, some of a peculiar and
exquisite workmanship in both dark and light jade, in cloisonné on
gold, or in plain solid gold. Behind the altar in an obscure position
a grand figure which I had not perceived followed me with an oblique
look that reached me through two curtains of yellow imperial silk,
whose folds were black with dust. It is a pale portrait of the defunct
Emperor,--a life-sized portrait, so obscure, as seen by the light of
our single wretched candle, as to seem like the reflection of a ghost
in a tarnished mirror. What a nameless sacrilege would our opening the
chests where his treasures were hidden seem to this dead man, nay, even
our presence in this most impenetrable of all places in an impenetrable
city!

When everything is carefully closed again, when the red seals have
been put back in place and the pale image of the Emperor returned
to silence, to its customary shadows, I hasten to get away from the
tomblike chill, to breathe the air again, to seek on the terrace some
of the autumn sunshine which filters through the cedar branches.

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.

       *       *       *       *       *

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.

       *       *       *       *       *

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."

       *       *       *       *       *

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?

For a time after this we are alone in desolate, ruined quarters of
the town. According to the position of the pale, setting sun, it seems
to me that we are on the right track; but if my "mafou," who speaks
nothing but Chinese, has not understood me, I shall be in a predicament.

       *       *       *       *       *

The return journey in the cold seems interminable to me. At last,
however, the artificial mountain of the imperial park is silhouetted
in gray on the sky ahead of us, with the little faience kiosks and
the twisted trees grouping themselves like scenes painted on lacquer.
We reach one of the yellow enamelled gates of the blood-red wall
surrounding the Imperial City, where two sentinels of the allied armies
present arms. From here I know my way, I am at home; so I dismiss my
guide and proceed alone to the Yellow City, from which at this hour no
one is allowed to depart.

The Imperial, the Yellow, the Forbidden City, encircled by its own
terrible walls in the very heart of great Pekin, with its Babylonian
environment, is a park rather than a city, a wood of venerable
trees,--sombre cypresses and cedars,--several leagues in circumference.
Some ancient temples peep through the branches, and several modern
palaces built according to the fancies of the Empress regent. This
great forest, to which I return to-night as if it were my home, has at
no former period of history been known to foreigners; even ambassadors
have never passed its gates; until recently it has been absolutely
inaccessible and profoundly unknown to Europeans.

This Yellow City surrounds and protects with its tranquil shadows the
still more mysterious Violet City, the residence of the Son of Heaven,
which occupies a commanding square in the centre of it, protected by
moats and double ramparts.

What silence reigns here at this hour! What a lugubrious region it
is! Death hovers over these paths where formerly princesses passed in
their palanquins and empresses with their silk-robed followers. Now
that the usual inhabitants have fled and Occidental barbarians have
taken their places, one meets no one in the woods, unless it be an
occasional patrol or a few soldiers of one nation or another, and only
the sentinels' step is heard before palace or temple, or the cries of
the crows and the barking of dogs about the dead.

I have to cross a region filled with trees, nothing but trees,--trees
of a truly Chinese contour, whose aspect is in itself quite sufficient
to give one the sharp realization of exile; the road goes on under the
deep shadow of the branches that turn the twilight into night. Belated
magpies are hopping about on the withered grass, and the crows, too,
their croakings exaggerated by the cold and the silence. At the end of
a quarter of an hour a corner of the Violet City appears, just at a
turn of the road. She slowly reveals herself, silent, closed, like a
colossal tomb. Her long, straight walls are lost in the confusion and
obscurity of the distance. As I draw nearer to her the silence seems to
be intensified, as though it grew as she broods over it.

[Illustration:
_Copyright, 1901, by J. C. Hemment_
THE EXECUTIVE PALACE OF THE EMPEROR IN THE FORBIDDEN CITY]

One corner of the Lake of the Lotus begins to come out like a bit of
mirror placed among the reeds to receive the last reflections of the
sky. I must pass along its edges in front of the Island of Jade, which
is approached by a marble bridge; and I know in advance, because I
have seen it daily, the horrible grimace in store for me from the two
monsters who have guarded the bridge for centuries.

At length I emerge from the shadow and oppression of the trees into
open space with the clear sky overhead, leaving the lake behind me.
The first stars are appearing, indicating another of the nights that
pass here in an excess of solitude and silence, with only an occasional
gunshot to break the tragic calm of wood and palace.

The Lake of the Lotus, which during the season of flowers must be the
marvellous field of pink blossoms described by the poets of China, is
now, at the end of October, only a melancholy swamp covered with brown
leaves, from which at this hour a wintry mist rises that hangs like a
cloud over the dead reeds.

My dwelling is on the other side of the lake; and now I have reached
the Marble Bridge which spans it with a beautiful curve,--a curve that
stands out white in spite of the darkness.

At this point a corpse-like smell greets my nostrils. For a week I
have known whence it comes,--from a person in a blue gown lying with
outspread arms, face downward, on the slimy shore; and ten steps
farther on his comrade is lying in the grass.

As soon as I cross the beautiful lonely Marble Bridge through the pale
cloud that hangs over the water I shall be almost home. At my left is
a faience gateway guarded by two German sentinels,--two living beings
whom I shall not be sorry to see,--who will salute me in automatic
unison; this will be at the entrance to the garden where Field-Marshal
von Waldersee resides, in one of the Empress's palaces.

Two hundred metres farther on, after passing more gates and more ruins,
I shall come to a fresh opening in an old wall, which will be my
entrance, guarded by one of our own men,--an African chasseur. Another
of the Empress's palaces is there concealed by its surroundings,--a
frail palace, almost wholly enclosed in glass. Once there, I push
open a glass door decorated with pink lotus flowers, and find again my
nightly fairyland, where priceless porcelains, cloisonné, and lacquer
stand about in profusion on the yellow carpets under the wonderfully
carved arches of ebony.


IX

It is dark when I reach my dwelling-place. The fires are already
lighted in the subterranean furnaces, and a soft heat rises through the
thick yellow carpets. We feel much at home and quite comfortable now in
this palace, which at first seemed so dreary to us.

I dine, as usual, at a small ebony table, which is lost in the long
gallery so dark at either end, in company with my comrade, Captain C.,
who has discovered new and wonderful treasures during the day, which he
has spread out, that we may enjoy them for at least an evening.

First, there is a throne of a style unknown to us; some screens of
colossal size that rest in ebony sockets, on which shining birds are
battling with monkeys amid the flowers of a dream. Candelabra, which
have remained in their silk cases since the seventeenth century,
now hang from the arches above our heads,--a shower of pearls and
enamel,--and many other indescribable things added to-day to our wealth
of articles of antique art.

It is the last time we shall be able to enjoy our gallery in its
completeness, for to-morrow most of these objects are to be labelled
and sent off with the reserve stock. Retaining one salon for the
general, who is to winter here, the rest of this wing of the palace
is to be cut up by light partitions into lodgings and offices for the
staff. This work will be done under the direction of Captain C., who is
chief architect and supervisor, whilst I, a passing guest, will have
only a consulting voice.

       *       *       *       *       *

As this evening marks the last chapter of our imperial phantasmagoria,
we sit up later than usual. For this once we are childish enough to
array ourselves in sumptuous Asiatic garments, then we throw ourselves
down on the cushions and call opium--so favorable to weary and blasé
imaginations such as ours have unfortunately begun to be--to our aid.
Alas! to be alone in this palace would have seemed magical enough to us
a few years ago without the aid of any avatar.

The opium, needless to say, is of exquisite quality; its fumes, rising
in rapid little spirals, soon make the air sweet and heavy. It quickly
brings to us the ecstasy, the forgetfulness, the relief, the youthful
lightness so dear to the Chinese.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is absolute silence without; absolute silence and deserted
courts, where all is cold and black. The gallery grows warm, the heat
of the furnace is heavy, for these walls of glass and paper, so frail
as a protection against surprises from without, form rooms almost
hermetically sealed and propitious to the intoxication that comes from
perfumes.

Stretched out upon the silken cushions, we gaze at the receding
ceiling, at the row of arches so elaborately carved into lacework, from
which the lanterns with the dangling pearls are suspended. Chimæras
of gold stand out from the thick folds of the green or yellow silks.
High screens of cloisonné, lacquer, or ebony, the great luxury of
China, shut off the corners, forming luxurious nooks filled with jars,
bronzes, and monsters with eyes of jade,--eyes which squintingly follow
you.

Absolute silence, except that from a distance one of those shots is
heard which never fails to mark the torpor of the night, or a cry
of distress or alarm; skirmishes between Europeans in the posts
and thieving Chinamen; sentinels afraid of the dead or of the night
shooting at a shadow.

In the foreground, which is lighted by one lamp, the only luminous
things whose design and color are engraved upon our already fixed gaze
are four gigantic incense-burners--hieratic in form, and made of an
adorable blue cloisonné--resting on gold elephants. They stand out
against a background of black lacquer traversed by flying birds, whose
plumage is made of different kinds of mother-of-pearl. No doubt our
lamp is going out, for, with the exception of these nearer things,
we scarcely see the magnificence of the place until the outline of
some rare vase five hundred years old, the reflection of a piece of
inimitable silk, or the brilliancy of some bit of enamel recalls it to
our memory.

       *       *       *       *       *

The fumes of the opium keep us awake until very late, in a state of
mind that is both lucid and at the same time confused. We have never
until now understood Chinese art; it is revealed to us for the first
time to-night. In the beginning we were ignorant, as is all the world,
of its almost terrible grandeur until we saw the Imperial City and the
walled palace of the Son of Heaven; now at this nocturnal hour, amid
the fragrant fumes that rise in clouds in our over-heated gallery, our
impressions of the big sombre temples, of the yellow enamelled roofs
crowning the Titanic buildings that rise above terraces of marble, are
exalted above mere captivated admiration to respect and awe.

In the thousand details of its embroidery and carvings which surround
us in such profusion, we learn how skilful and how exact this art
is in rendering the grace of flowers, exaggerating their superb and
languishing poses and their deep or deliciously pale colorings; then
in order to make clear the cruelty of every kind of living thing, down
to dragons and butterflies, they place claws, horns, terrible smiles,
and leering eyes upon them! They are right; these embroideries on
our cushions _are_ roses, lotus flowers, chrysanthemums! As for the
insects, the scarabs, the flies, and the moths, they are just like
those horrid things painted in gold relief on our court fans.

When we arrive at that special form of physical prostration which
sets the mind free (disengages the astral body, they say at Benares),
everything in the palace, as well as in the outside world, seems easy
and amusing. We congratulate ourselves upon having come to live in
the Yellow City at so unique a period in the history of China, at a
moment when everything is free, and we are left almost alone to gratify
our whims and curiosity. Life seems to hold to-morrows filled with
new and interesting circumstances. In our conversation we find words,
formulas, images, to express the inexpressible, the things that have
never been said. The hopelessness, the misery that one carries about
like the weight on a convict's leg, is incontestably lessened; and as
to the small annoyances of the moment, the little pin-pricks, they
exist no longer. For example, when we see through the glass gallery the
pale light of a moving lantern in a distant part of our palace, we say
without the slightest feeling of disturbance: "More thieves! They must
see us. We'll hunt them down to-morrow!"

And it seems of no consequence, even comfortable to us, that our
cushions and our imperial silks are shut off from the cold and the
horrors by nothing but panes of glass.


X

  THURSDAY, October 25.

I have worked all day, with only my cat for company, in the solitude of
the Rotunda Palace that I deserted yesterday.

At the hour when the red sun is setting behind the Lake of the Lotus my
two servants come as usual to get me. But this time, after crossing the
Marble Bridge, we pass the turn which leads to my palace, for I have
to pay a visit to Monsignor Favier, the Bishop of Pekin, who lives in
our vicinity, outside yet quite near the Imperial City.

It is twilight by the time we reach the "Catholic Concession," where
the missionaries and their little band of yellow followers endured the
stress of a long siege. The cathedral, riddled with balls, has a vague
look against the dark sky; and it is so dusty that we see as through a
fog this newly built cathedral, the one the Empress paid for in place
of the one she took for a storehouse.

Monsignor Favier, the head of the French missions, has lived in
Pekin for forty years, has enjoyed for a long time the favor of the
sovereigns, and was the first to foresee and denounce the Boxer peril.
In spite of the temporary blow to his work, he is still a power in
China, where the title of Viceroy was at one time conferred upon him.

The white-walled room where he receives me, lately pierced by a
cannon-ball, contains some precious Chinese bibelots, whose presence
here astonishes every one at first. He collected them in other days,
and is selling them now in order to be able to assist several thousand
hungry people driven by the war into his church.

The bishop is a tall man, with fine, regular features, and eyes that
show shrewdness and energy. He must resemble in looks, as well as in
his determined will, those bishops of the Middle Ages who went on
Crusades to the Holy Land. It is only since the outbreak of hostilities
against the Christians that he has resumed the priests' cloth and
cut off his long Chinese queue. Permission to wear the queue and the
Mandarins' garb was one of the greatest and most subversive favors
accorded the Lazarists by the Celestial emperors.

He was good enough to keep me with him for an hour. A well-dressed
Chinese served us with tea while he told me of the recent tragedy;
of the defence of fourteen hundred metres of wall, organized out of
nothing by a young ensign and thirty sailors, of their holding out for
two or three months right in the heart of an enflamed city, against
thousands of enemies wild with fury. Although he tells it all in a
very low tone, his speech grows warmer, and vibrates with a sort of
soldierly ruggedness as some emotion chokes him, especially whenever he
mentions Ensign Henry.

Ensign Henry died, pierced by two balls, at the end of the last
great fight. Of his thirty sailors many were killed, and almost all
were wounded. This story of a summer should be written somewhere in
letters of gold, lest it should be too quickly forgotten; it should be
attested, lest some day it should no longer be believed.

The sailors under the command of this young officer were not picked
men; they were the first that came, selected hap-hazard on board ship.
A few noble priests shared their vigils, a few brave seminarists took
a turn under their orders, besides a horde of Chinese armed with
miserable old guns. But the sailor

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