Europe and elsewhere

by Mark Twain

Rheumatism routed at Aix-les-Bains!

Gout admonished, Nerves braced up!

All diseases welcomed, and satisfaction given or the money returned at the door!

We leave nature’s noble cliffs and crags undefiled and uninsulted by the advertiser’s paint brush. We use the back of a king, which is better and properer and more effective, too, for the cliffs stay still and few see it, but the king moves across the fields of the world and is visible from all points, like a constellation. We are out for kings this week, but one will be along soon--possibly His Satanic Majesty of Russia. There’s a colossus for you! A mysterious and terrible form that towers up into unsearchable space and casts a shadow across the universe like a planet in eclipse. There will be but one absorbing spectacle in this world when we stencil him and start him out.

This is an old valley, this of Aix, both in the history of man and in the geological records of its rocks. Its little lake of Bourget carries the human history back to the lake dwellers, furnishing seven groups of their habitations, and Dr. William Wakefield says in his interesting local guide that the mountains round about furnish “Geographically, a veritable epitome of the globe.” The stratified chapters of the earth’s history are clearly and permanently written on the sides of the roaring bulk of the Dent du Chat, but many of the layers of race, religion, and government which in turn have flourished and perished here between the lake dweller of several thousand years ago and the French republican of to-day, are ill defined and uninforming by comparison. There are several varieties of pagans. They went their way, one after the other, down into night and oblivion, leaving no account of themselves, no memorials. The Romans arrived 2,300 years ago, other parts of France are rich with remembrances of their eight centuries of occupation, but not many are here. Other pagans followed the Romans. By and by Christianity arrived, some 400 years after the time of Christ. The long procession of races, languages, religions, and dynasties demolished one another’s records--it is man’s way always.

As a result, nothing is left of the handiwork of the remoter inhabitants of the region except the constructions of the lake dwellers and some Roman odds and ends. There is part of a small Roman temple, there is part of a Roman bath, there is a graceful and battered Roman arch. It stands on a turfy level over the way from the present great bath house, is surrounded by magnolia trees, and is both a picturesque and suggestive object. It has stood there some 1,600 years. Its nearest neighbor, not twenty steps away, is a Catholic church. They are symbols of the two chief eras in the history of Aix. Yes, and of the European world. I judge that the venerable arch is held in reverent esteem by everybody, and that this esteem is its sufficient protection from insult, for it is the only public structure I have yet seen in France which lacks the sign, “It is forbidden to post bills here.” Its neighbor the church has that sign on more than one of its sides, and other signs, too, forbidding certain other sorts of desecration.

The arch’s nearest neighbor--just at its elbow, like the church--is the telegraph office. So there you have the three great eras bunched together--the era of War, the era of Theology, the era of Business. You pass under the arch, and the buried Cæsars seem to rise from the dust of the centuries and flit before you; you pass by that old battered church, and are in touch with the Middle Ages, and with another step you can put down ten francs and shake hands with Oshkosh under the Atlantic.

It is curious to think what changes the last of the three symbols stand for; changes in men’s ways and thoughts, changes in material civilization, changes in the Deity--or in men’s conception of the Deity[Deity], if that is an exacter way of putting it. The second of the symbols arrived in the earth at a time when the Deity’s possessions consisted of a small sky freckled with mustard-seed stars, and under it a patch of landed estate not so big as the holdings of the Tsar to-day, and all His time was taken up in trying to keep a handful of Jews in some sort of order--exactly the same number of them that the Tsar has lately been dealing with in a more abrupt and far less loving and long-suffering way. At a later time--a time within all old men’s memories--the Deity was otherwise engaged. He was dreaming His eternities away on His Great White Throne, steeped in the soft bliss of hymns of praise wafted aloft without ceasing from choirs of ransomed souls, Presbyterians and the rest. This was a Deity proper enough to the size and conditions of things, no doubt a provincial Deity with provincial tastes. The change since has been inconceivably vast. His empire has been unimaginably enlarged. To-day He is a Master of a universe made up of myriads upon myriads of gigantic suns, and among them, lost in that limitless sea of light, floats that atom. His earth, which once seemed so good and satisfactory and cost so many days of patient labor to build, is a mere cork adrift in the waters of a shoreless Atlantic. This is a business era, and no doubt he is governing His huge empire now, not by dreaming the time away in the buzz of hymning choirs, with occasional explosions of arbitrary power disproportioned to the size of the annoyance, but by applying laws of a sort proper and necessary to the sane and successful management of a complex and prodigious establishment, and by seeing to it that the exact and constant operation of these laws is not interfered with for the accommodation of any individual or political or religious faction or nation.

Mighty has been the advance of the nations and the liberalization of thought. A result of it is a changed Deity, a Deity of a dignity and sublimity proportioned to the majesty of His office and the magnitude of His empire, a Deity who has been freed from a hundred fretting chains and will in time be freed from the rest by the several ecclesiastical bodies who have these matters in charge. It was, without doubt, a mistake and a step backward when the Presbyterian Synods of America lately decided, by vote, to leave Him still embarrassed with the dogma of infant damnation. Situated as we are, we cannot at present know with how much of anxiety He watched the balloting, nor with how much of grieved disappointment He observed the result.

Well, all these eras above spoken of are modern, they are of last week, they are of yesterday, they are of this morning, so to speak. The springs, the healing waters that gush up from under this hillside village, indeed are ancient. They, indeed, are a genuine antiquity; they antedate all those fresh human matters by processions of centuries; they were born with the fossils of the Dent du Chat, and they have been always abundant. They furnished a million gallons a day to wash the lake dwellers with, the same to wash the Cæsars with, no less to wash Balzac with, and have not diminished on my account. A million gallons a day for how many days? Figures cannot set forth the number. The delivery, in the aggregate, has amounted to an Atlantic. And there is still an Atlantic down in there. By Doctor Wakefield’s calculation the Atlantic is three-quarters of a mile down in the earth. The calculation is based upon the temperature of the water, which is 114 degrees to 117 degrees Fahrenheit, the natural law being that below a certain depth heat augments at the rate of one degree for every sixty feet of descent.