Some years ago the crowded house which greeted this Magyar melodrama would have been impossible. Half the audience, though Hungarian, would not have understood their own language. They would have wanted it translated into German.
To understand the immense strides which Magyarism has made one must look back a little. To-day hardly a German word is to be heard in the thoroughfares, and no German words disfigure the public announcements, the sign-posts, the playbills, or the street corners. There are many thousands of Hungarians who do not even understand German. Think of this, and then remember that in 1840 a movement for the reintroduction of the Magyar language at the University of Pest met with but scant encouragement outside the town. The police then spoke German, the army spoke German, the lectures of the University were delivered in Latin. Up to the year 1790 there was not even a professor at the University who spoke Magyar. To-day in the towns everything is Magyar and nothing is German.
To-day (it was ‘to-day’ when this was written), in the hotel at which I am staying, the patriots have a dinner. Their dining-room adjoins the writing-room in which I am penning (or rather pencilling) these lines. Great speeches are being made, and every now and then the room rings again with the Magyar cries of ‘Elyen! Elyen!’ (Bravo! bravo!) and ‘Hayunk, hayunk!’ (Hear, hear). There is in the room, writing, a young man with a coal-black beard, fierce gleaming eyes, and the milk-white teeth for which the Magyars are renowned. He listens to the speeches that come through the closed door, and presently, as one of the speakers makes a great point amid a roar of applause in the next room, he springs to his feet and shouts ‘Elyen! Elyen!’ too. Then, catching my astonished gaze, he smiles, begs me to excuse him, and explains that he is the son of a Hungarian exile, that he was born in Egypt, whither his father fled to escape imprisonment for his political opinions in the days of tyranny, and that he is thinking of those years of exile now, and the father who died in a far-off country for love of his native land.
I left Budapest on Monday morning by the Orient express for Munich, and Herr Julius, who saw me to the railway-station, wept on my breast and whiled away the time with anecdotes of his past career. Herr Julius had once saved a nice little fortune—many thousands of florins—and he wanted to invest it. He knew many of the financial barons of Vienna. He asked their advice, and, acting on it, he bought the ‘obligations’ of a local company. These obligations cost him five hundred florins each, and they were soon to be worth a thousand, and Herr Julius would make a fine thing of his investment. But the best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft a-gley, and the great ‘krach’ came suddenly, and with it widespread ruin. Companies were scattered before the winds like chaff. Great financial houses came tumbling down as though they had been built of cards, and Vienna rang with the cries and curses of the ruined and undone. The ‘obligations’ which Herr Julius had bought rattled down in value till at last they became almost worthless. In despair the poor fellow was glad to take five florins each for the ‘obligations’ for which he had paid five hundred, and he was lucky to get that, for a day or two afterwards the bubble burst utterly, and the ‘papers’ he had held were not worth a kreuzer each!
‘Ah, sir,’ says Herr Julius, his eyes filling with tears, ‘after that my little fortune was gone, not for months did I sleep. I beat my breast, I tore my hair, I could eat nothings; my life was to me one great burthen. At last I say to myself, Julius, old man, this does not do; your little fortune it has gone, but you must cheer yourself and begin again the battle of life. So one day I say to myself, I will forget, I will drown care, I will go out and enjoy myself, and laugh with the rest. The first day that I shake the sorrow from my mind I go to the Prater in the afternoon. I enter the third coffee-house; I sit in the garden and listen to the band. I drink my beer and feel hungry. The man come with salami; I say I will eat, and I buy for twopence halfpenny some salami.
‘Well, sir,’ continued Herr Julius, ‘the man he weigh me out my salami, and he spread out a piece of paper, and he put upon it my six slices. I drink a good draught of beer. I pick up my salami, and I say, “Julius, after all life is good, still can you have your beer and salami.” At that moment my eye it catches the piece of paper. I look at it. It has print on it. It has a number. Ach, leiber Gott! it is my “obligation” for which I have paid once five hundred florins. On that has the sausage man served me with twopennyworth of salami! That night again I sleep not.’
I express my sympathy with Herr Julius, and the Orient express steams into the station. In his excitement at bidding me farewell Herr Julius drops his overcoat, which he carries over his arm. Instantly the platform is spread as for a feast. Herr Julius has carefully collected the débris of dinners for which I have paid without availing myself of all the privileges to which I am entitled. Oranges roll about in every direction; sweet biscuits are crushed under the heels of hurrying porters; pink prawns and white radishes make the dull platform gay with colour; the wing of a fowl and the leg of a goose fall together on to the line. Here is a piece of cheese, there half a dozen lumps of sugar. Herr Julius gives a wild shriek, falls upon his hands and knees, and proceeds to gather up the fragments that remain. And while he is still collecting these remnants of our many feasts the engine whistles, and the Orient express bears me away. I thrust my head out of the window, and the last glimpse I get of Herr Julius shows me that remarkable man busily engaged in picking gravel and cinders from a small piece of Gruyère cheese. I paid for it, and he is determined that it shall not be wasted.
I only spent one day in Munich, and then I fled to the Bavarian Alps. The customs of the city were too much for me. From early morn till late at night the Munichers drink beer and eat radishes the size of turnips. I had great difficulty, not being Sandow, in lifting up the mug of beer which was brought to me at a beer-garden. Putting it down I found a sheer impossibility. But I sat at a table with a fine young Bavarian, who put away ten huge mugs of the national beverage in rapid succession. I was taken to one garden—the Lion Brewery Garden—where the average sale is 10,000 litres a day, and there are fifty such establishments in full swing in Munich.
CHAPTER XXIV.
A MAD KING’S PALACE.
Not being able to drink beer and eat turnip radishes, and the theatres all being closed, I went off to the mountains and made for Herrenchiemsee, the lovely lake on which the wide world’s wonder, King Ludwig’s gorgeous palace, is situated. Weird and woful is the tale of Bavaria’s mad monarch, Ludwig II. He was cursed with that form of insanity which is called ‘la folie des grandeurs.’ He rode about in carriages of eye-dazzling magnificence, the panels of which were hand-painted by great artists at a cost of a thousand pounds per panel, and his carriages were always drawn by eight cream-white horses. He dressed himself up as Lohengrin and sailed about the lonely lakes at midnight on the back of a mechanical swan. The palace that he built at Herrenchiemsee is a blaze of golden glory. His bed alone cost £20,000, and he ruined himself before the palace was half finished. The magnificence of the state apartments and the famous Hall of Mirrors beggars description. Only a madman afflicted with the ‘folie des grandeurs’ would have commenced such a dwelling-place. Everything in it is real gold, real silver, and real marble, and all of the most exquisite workmanship. A peacock (if ever a peacock brought ill-luck this one did) which stands in the vestibule cost £7,500. The interior decoration of one room alone cost £21,000. For a writing-table in the royal study the King paid £2,000, and throughout the entire palace the cost of everything is in proportion. No wonder the King found himself penniless at last, and his subjects unwilling to supply him with further funds for his mad extravagance. It was the building of this palace which led to the terrible tragedy on the Starnberg Lake which filled all the world with horror.