But some one may say here, How are these people to live? I agree at once with the sentiment—no one is more ready to assent to that excellent adage—‘Il faut que tout le monde vive, even grand-dukes.’ But there are a hundred ways of eking out subsistence in cheap countries, without trenching on morality. The military service of Austria, Prussia, and Russia is open to them, should their own small territories not suffice for moderate wants and wishes. In any case I am not going to trouble my head with providing for German princes, while I have a large stock of nephews and nieces little better off. All I care for at present is to point out the facts of a case, and not to speculate how they might be altered.
Now, to proceed. In proportion as vice is more prevalent, the decorum of the world would appear to increase, and internal rottenness and external decency bear a due relation to each other. People could not thus violate the outward semblance of morality, by flocking in hundreds and tens of hundreds to those gambling states, those rouge et noir dependencies, those duchies of the dice-box. A man’s asking a passport for Baden would be a tacit averment, ‘I am going to gamble.’ Ordering post-horses for Ems would be like calling for ‘fresh cards’; and you would as soon confess to having passed a few years in Van Diemen’s Land as acknowledge a summer on the Rhine.
What, then, was to be done? It was certainly a difficulty, and might have puzzled less ingenious heads than grand-ducal advisers. They, however, soon hit upon the expedient. They are shrewd observers, and clever men of the world. They perceived that while other eras have been marked by the characteristic designation of brass, gold, or iron, this, with more propriety, might be called the age of bile. Never was there a period when men felt so much interested in their stomachs; at no epoch were mankind so deeply concerned for their livers; this passion—for it is such—not being limited to the old or feeble, to the broken and shattered constitution, but extending to all age and sex, including the veteran of a dozen campaigns and the belle of a London season, the hard-lined and seasoned features of a polar traveller, and the pale, soft cheek of beauty, the lean proportions of shrunken age, and the plump development of youthful loveliness. In the words of the song—
‘No age, no profession, no station is free.’
It is the universal mania of our century, and we may expect that one day, our vigorous pursuit of knowledge on the subject will allow us to be honourably classed with the equally intelligent seekers for the philosopher’s stone. With this great feature of the time, then, nothing was easier than to comply. The little realm of Hesse-Homburg might not have attractions of scenery or society; its climate might, like most of those north of the Alps, be nothing to boast of; its social advantages being a zero, what could it possess as a reason—a good, plausible reason, for drawing travellers to its frontier? Of course, a Spa!—something very nauseous and very foul smelling, as nearly as possible like a warm infusion of rotten eggs, thickened with red clay. Germany happily abounds in these; Nature has been kind to her, at least underground, and you have only to dig two feet in any limestone district to meet with the most sovereign thing on earth for stomachic derangements.
The Spa discovered, a doctor was found to analyse it, and another to write a book upon it. Nothing more were necessary. The work, translated into three or four languages, set forth all the congenial advantages of pumps and promenades, sub-carbonates, tables d’hôte, waltzing, and mineral waters. The pursuit of health no longer presented a grim goddess masquerading in rusty black and a bald forehead, but a lovely nymph, in a Parisian toilette, conversing like a Frenchwoman, and dancing like an Austrian.
Who would not be ill, I wonder? Who would not discover that Hampshire was too high and Essex too low, Devon too close and Cumberland too bracing? Who would not give up his village M.D., and all his array of bottles, with their long white cravats, for a ramble to the Rhine, where luxurious living, belles, and balls abounded, and where soit dit en passant, the rouge et noir table afforded the easy resource of supplying all such pleasures, so that you might grow robust and rich at once, and while imbibing iron into your blood, lay up a stock of gold with your banker? Hence the connection between Spas and gambling; hence the fashionable flocking to those healthful spots by thousands who never felt illness; hence the unblushing avowal of having been a month at Baden by those who would flinch at acknowledging an hour in a ‘hell’; and hence, more important than all, at least to one individual concerned, the source of that real alchemy by which a grand-duke, like Macheath, can
‘Turn all his lead to gold.’
Well may he exclaim, with the gallant captain—
‘Fill every glass!’
Were the liquor champagne or tokay, it could not be a hundredth part as profitable; and the whole thing presents a picture of ‘hocussing’ on the grandest scale ever adopted.
The fifteen glasses of abomination demand a walk of half an hour, or a sojourn in the Cursaal. The Cursaal is a hell! there is no need to mince it. The taste for play is easily imbibed—what bad taste is not?—and thus, while you are drawing the pump, the grand-duke is diving into your pocket. Here, then—I shall not add a word—is the true state of the Spas of Germany. As I believe it is customary to distinguish all writers on these ‘fountains of health’ by some mark of princely favour proportionate to their services of praise, I beg to add, if the Gross Herzog von Hesse-Homburg deems the present a suitable instance for notice, that Arthur O’Leary will receive such evidence of grand-ducal approbation with a most grateful spirit, and acknowledge the same in some future volume of his ‘Loiterings,’ only requesting to mention that when Theodore Hook—poor fellow!—was dining once with a London alderman remarkable for the display and the tedium of his dinners, he felt himself at the end of an hour and a half’s vigorous performance only in the middle of the entertainment; upon which he laid down his knife, and in a whisper uttered: ‘Eating more is out of the question; so I ‘ll take the rest out in money.’