BOOKS.
'TWIXT OLD TIMES AND NEW.* IN the course of his life and wanderings, the Baron de Malortie has met with a great many surprising adventures, and heard a great many curious stories. These, he tells us, he has collected from his diaries, and hence we have this sightly book, the print and paper and rough edges of which are certainly to be admired. It contains "a medley of typical stories," by which we suppose the writer to mean that they are specimens of what be could tell us if he chose. The title of the book is well chosen ; for many of these strange things happened in the middle of the present century, which seems to modern eyes a kind of border-land, not far removed from the dark ages, when
• 'Twixt Old Times and New. By Baron de Malortie, Author of "Diplomatic Sketches," &c. London : Ward and Downey. 1890, compared with the great knowledge and high civilisation of' the present day. Seriously, one cannot deny the immense progress made in the last forty years, not only in England. bat everywhere, and it is easier to realise this when we look at- the date of the first, and perhaps the most remarkable, of M. de Malortie's sketches.
In 1854, being in Germany, the friend with whom be was staying took him to pay a visit to a certain old Freiherr von Schreckenburg—name excellently chosen—whose dwelling, character, customs, and surroundings would have matched better with a date of two hundred years before. The old stronghold of the Schreckenburg, partly burnt by the Prussians in 1806. still consisted of a large keep and tvi o four-storied wings ; while the courtyard, and most of the space inside the ruined outer walls, was turned into a very untidy farm-yard. Inside the castle, life was arranged with old-world severity, and that flat utilitarianism which in German minds is so oddly mixed with poetry. The whole household, servants and all, dined together at a long table covered with pewter pots and tin dishes, on a pig roasted whole and a mixture of potatoes, prunes, and raisins. The only mark of refinement appeared with the coffee :—
" The coffee was served on a very large silver salver, quite three feet by two ; and on it, next to a very ordinary silver pot and sugar-basin, stood a tiny cream-jug, a gem of workmanship and taste, and one of the finest specimens of old Russian plate which I have ever seen even in the Czar's dominions. It was the gift of Peter the Great, who daily had used it during the three weeks he was staying at the Schreckenburg. 'We had it all complete—tray, teapot, sugar-basin, kettle, and the rest,' re- marked the Baroness ; 'also two cups, and some spoons and forks and knives. But it gave so much bother to clean. Besides, we had our wedding set—that one over there ; and so I had the old things melted down, and this big tray made out of it. It is the same silver, you know ; and we always call it "the Great Peter." It gives no trouble, and is more useful. The jug was lost at the time, and we only found it again after the tray came home. But we never use the thing, and I do not hold with elaborate fingle- fangle affairs.' I looked at the Count, and the Count at me, and even the old pastor seemed to acknowledge the vandalism of our hosts. 'It is the same silver, you know.' Unable to say a word about tray or cream-pot, I begged leave to see the rooms of the great Czar."
The rooms were dismantled and bare, except that-
" Once beautiful Gobelin tapestries covered the walls. They were of course faded, and in many places torn down; but, to my horror, I saw that they were pierced by bullets in hundreds of places. 'Prussian bullets,' I said to myself. But I was wrong. A word of enquiry brought the explanation that the boys did their pistol-practice here when it was too cold to shoot from their customary stand on the outer wall. They had had rare fun, they told me, in aiming at the eyes and noses of the figures ; but having now done with those features, they were practising at the fingers. 'Boys,' said I, 'you must be mad ! These tapestries have been of great beauty, and are still worth lots of money.' ' Nonsense !' answered Ulrich ; 'there are eight or nine rooms in the other wing hung with that stuff, and father thinks so little of it that whenever our oxen want covers in winter-time he has a strip down. If you go down to the cow-house you can see dozens of them dressed up in those old hangings—they are not worth a woollen blanket:—Peter the Great's plate melted down for 'convenience,' pistol-practice at Gobelins stuff, and tapestry rugs for cows !—what next was I to hear and to see? My friends had taken a walk through the stables, and I followed them, curious to see if I really should find old Gobelins in a cow- house. The boys .had not exaggerated. There stood a bullock with a Cupid and the head of a Venus on his back ; there a cow with the bust of Nero ; there another with some shepherdesses on the borders of an ornamental lake ; in fact, nearly all the animals had shared in the plunder Our host, noticing the effect of this exhibition of old tapestry, said : You think me a brute, I dare say ; but blankets cost money—this stuff doesn't; and these old hangings may as well rot on the backs of my cattle as in a
deserted state-room.' I ventured to say that he might have sold or exchanged them ; whereupon the Baron turned upon me a rather proud look—' Sold them ! No. I should blush for so mean an act. We are too poor to keep the place as it was—well, then, let it fall to pieces with us. But I dare say the old Burg will hold out for another generation or two.'"
This Freiherr, a man of sixty, not forty years ago," prided him- self on never having travelled by rail, and having never seen a town; he had never touched a newspaper, never written a letter." The Gobelins tapestry is all worn out by this time, probably, and it is very possible that the precious old glass and china,
which the Freiherrin, though she could not sell it. would gladly have exchanged for "one good serviceable set," has found its way from the hands of a younger Schreckenburg into those of some collector.
In his sketch called "A True Heroine," Baron de Malortie gives us some amusing and interesting recollections of Carla- bad, as it was soon after 1850. The invalids in those days were disciplined like an army, and drank Sprudel and Sehlossbrunnen by the hardest and fastest rules, under the command of old Colonel Pfrenger. There is a good story of a poor Polish Jew, who, being "caught one day at his twentieth glass of Sprudel, the usual allowance being six," explained that he had been ordered to take six glasses a day for a month, but could only afford a week's lodging. Therefore, his plan was to drink twenty-four glasses a day, and be cured just the same. And he found this doubly economical, as the Sprudel was so satisfying that it made dinner quite unnecessary. The - heroine " who gives her name to this sketch was a noble Russian Princess, who followed her fianej to Siberia, married him there, and lived with him for twelve years underground in the lead-mines. The adventures of another Princess, as extraordinary as this one was heroic, are so amusing that we would gladly quote them.
It is hardly necessary to say that the scenes of these stories are not at all confined to Germany and its neighbours, but range over a good part of the known world, the Baron's life and interests being truly cosmopolitan. From Paris, for instance, comes a curious account of the young days of M. Thiers, besides a short and very uncomplimentary sketch of Prince Jerome Bonaparte at the time of the Coup d'Etat. There is something really attractive in the picture of Thiers' and Mignet's young days in the Quartier Latin, when a diet of bread and radishes was varied now and then by a champagne supper, and a horse at five francs was hired for a Sunday ride in the Bois de Boulogne. The clothes in which M. Thiers appeared on these occasions had a way of spending the rest of the week chez ma tante, as the French say ; and once, when it was impossible to redeem them for Sunday, a benevolent and sympathising old German bookseller lent him a new tail- -coat, a pair of shoes, and twenty francs. It was in this old man's shop that Thiers spent hours studying for his book, Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire, which ran a very near chance of never seeing the light at all, for no publisher would even look at it, till the same excellent old friend introduced the author to the firm of Cotta. While their historical studies were thus being carried on under difficulties which put more fortunate writers to shame, Thiers and Mignet added to their small means by painting fans, making copies from 'those in museums and shop-windows. But, perhaps, as M. de Malortie says, the most curious part of the whole story is " that the future liberator of France from German occupation should owe his start from obscurity to German generosity and German help."
The scene of a large part of the book is laid in Mexico, where the writer served in 1864 on the staff of Count Than. For the memory of this gallant General he has the most devoted admira- tion; and his sketches of Mexican warfare—as, indeed, all the war-sketches throughout the book—are wonderfully spirited. The romance of fighting in such a country, so strongly felt by himself and other young officers, is perhaps especially brought out in the paper called "Juan Francisco," where we have a most picturesque account of the Cuatecomache Indians and the campaign against them, which ended well, so far as Count Thun was concerned, in a hunting expedition, and in friendly and chivalrous relations with their brave chief. But the story of Maximilian and Mexico must always remain one of the most tragic in history. The incidents which, from his own knowledge, Baron de Malortie is able to add to those generally known, only serve to deepen this tragedy, by bringing out more strongly the nobleness of its victims. We may safely say that people who care for curious characters, military adventures, and the by-ways of history and politics, will find few dull pages in this book.
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