Like most things that are interesting in these old countries, it is, however, a remembrance of the days when force was the only law, when the sword and the spear were the only arbiters, and he who had command of the most of them was the ruler.
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE CASTLE.
It has had many masters. In 1685 Louis XIV., of France, set up a claim to the country and invaded it. Of course he had no earthly right to it, any more than the then occupant, but that didn’t matter. They didn’t split hairs in those days.
When a king wanted an adjoining country he simply figured up how many cut-throats he had and how many cut-throats the king had that he proposed to go for, and if he had more cut-throats than the other king, why he went for him.
And so Count Melac, Louis’s chief cut-throat, assailed Heidelberg, and the city and castle capitulated to him. He occupied it during the Winter of 1688, but as the German armies were approaching in too great force to suit his notions, in March, 1689, he evacuated the place, having first blown up the fortifications and burned the town, and made what havoc he could. Four years later the French finished the destruction, then the Germans rebuilt it in part, but, as if fate had a spite against it, it was struck by lightning shortly after and was abandoned as a fortress and palace, and so it stands to-day.
Ruin as it is, it is the most wonderful combination of nature and art I have ever seen or ever expect to. The old kings who built it had good eyes for effect as well as defense. The mountain is three hundred and thirty feet above the river, and it is a precipice inaccessible except by winding paths, which, when fortified, an hundred men might hold against ten thousand. This before the days of rifled guns. Our present artillery would knock the place as it was into a cocked hat in an hour. But in those smooth-bore days it was a place of strength, and could only be taken by a systematic siege.
We are much obliged to the French for one piece of vandalism. When they evacuated it the last time they tried to blow up the principal round tower. They placed a frightful amount of powder in it, and it exploded, but so well had the work been built that it merely broke off about a third of it, which toppled over into the moat and still lies there as it fell. The walls at the point where the break is, are twenty feet thick, and are as solid as a rock. There was no shoddy in this work. There needed to be no shoddy, for the work cost the Rhine robbers who built it nothing. They confiscated the quarries for the stone, and then drafted a sufficient force of men from all parts of their dominions to do the work, feeding them upon black bread and sour wine, which they seized also, making the building of almost any kind of a castle a very cheap affair.
It is a curious place—this reminiscence of the past. There are miles of halls, of passages, secret and open; there are drawbridges and turrets, and posts for warders; there is the enormous terrace, overlooking the beautiful Neckar and the vine-clad hills on the opposite bank; there is the wonderful court in the interior, the walls facing inward, rich in statuary and wondrous carving, grandly even though a ruin.
Imagine this vast structure when it was itself, filled with knights and ladies, on the night of some festival! Think of it, with lights gleaming from every window, the terrace filled with happy dancers, and the immense court full of pleasure-seekers!
There have been high jinks in the old Schloss. It must have been a wonderful place for everyone except the wretched peasantry—whose unrequited labor built it, whose unrequited labor supported it, and whose bodies defended it.