“God laat hem worden groot
Bewaar hem voor de doot
Dat Kleine Manje.”
But other “merkwaardige Personen,” great men of other nations, too, receive their share of this popular homage: Frederic the Great, Schiller, Gustavus Adolphus, and even old Cicero. Sometimes the popularity of a hero passes quickly. The English Admiral Vernon had hardly received signboard honors when he had to yield his place to Frederic, the “Glorious Protestant Hero,” as he was called after the battle of Rossbach. As a rule, a few changes in the costume of the portrait were considered sufficient by the landlord, who rarely indulged in the luxury of an entirely new picture for the new hero. To the English statesman, Horace Walpole, these rapid changes on the signboard suggested the following melancholy remarks: “I pondered these things in my breast and said to myself, ‘Surely all glory is but as a sign!’”
The French people were more loyal to their Bonaparte signs, long after the beloved emperor had been dethroned. For a long time the “napoléonisme cabaretier” refused to capitulate, says Carteret. In the country even serious fights were sometimes caused by the signs of the Imperialists, who ten years after Waterloo showed still the famous words, “La garde meurt et ne se rend pas,” or represented the meeting of Napoleon and Frederic with the inscription, “Le soleil luit pour tous les héros.” A tavern-keeper near Cannes, where Napoleon landed on his return from Elba, to reconquer France, honored the memory of the great man who rested in his inn with the words:—
“Chez moi c’est reposé Napoléon,
Venez boire et célèbrer son nom!”
On the other hand, we find the men who delivered their country from the yoke of the Corsican equally honored in signs; the tavern in which these great men had rested were for a long time held sacred by the people. “In Innsbruck, in the ‘Golden Eagle,’” we read in Heine’s “Reisebilder,” “where Andreas Hofer had lodged, and where every corner is still filled with his portraits and mementoes, I asked the landlord, if he knew anything of the ‘Sandwirth.’ Then the old gentleman boiled over with eloquence....”
To our great astonishment, we find even the idea of an invasion on old English tavern signs. We know well this fear of invasion is nothing new with our cousins. “Down the northeast wind the sea-thieves were always coming. England should always beware of the northeast wind. It blows her no good,”—that is the lesson the English school-children already learn in such books as C. R. L. Fletcher’s “History of England” (Oxford, 1911), to which Rudyard Kipling has contributed most passionate songs of patriotism. As early as 1753 the English had the black suspicion that Frederic the Great might land fifteen thousand of his Spartan Prussian soldiers on their coast, as if he just then had nothing else to do. Carlyle has refuted these suspicions as ridiculous: “King Friedrich distinguished himself by the grand human virtue of keeping well at home—of always minding his own affairs.” In these days of the Entente Cordiale and its result the World-War, the south wind, blowing from France, is entirely forgotten, but nevertheless it is just there that the most serious preparations for an invasion of England have been made repeatedly. In the year 1756 the cry resounded: “If France land on us, we are undone”; and in 1759 Admiral Conflans actually attempted to execute the idea with eighteen thousand men, but the enterprise failed completely, “not on the shores of Britain, but of Brittany.” Under Napoleon the danger increased, but after Nelson’s victory of Trafalgar, Napoleon had to abandon his maritime plans. The regained feeling of security was manifested in many caricatures mocking Napoleon, among which we have to reckon the sign “Old Bonaparte.” Using the familiar motive of “The ass in the bandbox,” the sign-painter represents the French Emperor riding on a donkey and sailing in a bandbox over the Channel to fight “Perfidious Albion.”
In this connection we ask permission to tell the story of another donkey-sign. Joseph II, Emperor of the old German Empire, whom we might call the “traveling Kaiser” of the eighteenth century, loved to put up at simple inns; even when he was invited by Frederic the Great, at their first interview in Neisse, to lodge in the castle, he preferred the liberty of having his ease at “The Three Kings.” Once, in Maestricht, he stopped at a hotel called “The Gray Donkey,” and gave the landlord as proof of his complete satisfaction the privilege to call his house hereafter “Kaiser Joseph” and to paint on his sign the equestrian portrait of his noble guest. But the Dutch customers did not recognize their old tavern under such a glorious name, and the landlord was finally obliged to put under the imperial picture the odd words: “The Real Gray Donkey.” Duke Charles of Württemberg, who knew this fancy of the Emperor, once pleased him enormously by hanging a big sign, “Hotel de l’Empereur,” out over the portal of his castle in Stuttgart, himself receiving the imperial visitor in the humble costume of an obedient landlord.