Of my fellow-travellers I can tell you nothing. I had no means of cultivating their acquaintance; they spoke French (and doubtless they had a right to do so) after a manner of their own, but were as unintelligible to me as Kant’s metaphysics or Mr Montague’s directions for dancing the new galopades.
As an illustration of the peculiarity of pronunciation, they tell of a Fleming commencing, I believe, one of Beaumarchais’ plays with the line—
“Hélas! je ne sais pas quel cours je dois prendre”;
Upon which a witty Frenchman replied—
“Monsieur, prenez la poste et retournez en Flandre.”
Never was Parisian at Potsdam more thoroughly ennuyé than I was during this voyage of two days. It was near night when I was roused from slumber by the boat’s arrival in Cologne. I had been dreaming of all sorts of things and people,—visions of mulled wine and Mozart, beefsteaks and Beethoven, flitted through my mind in all the mazes of mad confusion; and with the valorous resolution of realising at least one part of my musings in the shape of a hot supper and a flask of Nierensteiner, I went up on deck, when my friend came to meet me with the disastrous intelligence that there was not an unoccupied room or bed in the town. The good supper, the Nierensteiner, and the soft bed on which I had rolled by anticipation, faded like the baseless fabric of a vision.
However, we set out upon a voyage of discovery, accompanied by a little army of baggage porters and lackeys, one word of whose language we did not understand, but who did not on that account cease to hurl at our devoted heads every barbarous guttural of their macadamising tongue.
In this manner we made the tour of the entire town, and I was concluding a most affecting appeal to the sympathies of the vinegar-faced landlady of the Hôtel d’Hollande, which I already perceived would prove unsuccessful, when a German merchant with whom we had travelled from Rotterdam made his appearance, and by his kind interference we were admitted. Having realised our intentions with respect to supper, fatigued and worn out by our indefatigable exertions, we wrapped our travelling cloaks around us and slept soundly till morning.
As we had arrived one day before the Festival, we had full time to see the town. It was a mass of dark, narrow, ill-paved streets, with high gloomy-looking houses, each story projecting beyond the one beneath, and thus scarcely admitting the light of the blue heavens.
The Cathedral, however, is one of the most beautiful specimens of the florid Gothic remaining in Europe, and would, had it been completed, have eclipsed the more celebrated Cathedral of Strasbourg: the great entrance presents the richest instance of the laboured tracery of this school of architecture I have ever witnessed. The structure was originally designed to be built in the shape of a cross, but two limbs were all that were finished. The exterior is divided into a number of small chapelries, each of which boasts its patron saint, whose bones are exhibited in a glass-case to the admiration of the devotee.