A stop is made at a dark pagoda, where the coffin is temporarily left. This pagoda is so surrounded with foliage that it seems at first as though one were simply entering a garden of cedars, willows, and white lilacs; but soon the eye distinguishes behind and above this verdure other rarer and more magnificent foliage, carved by the Chinese for their gods in the form of clusters of maple or of bamboo, which form under the ceiling a high arbor of gold.
And here this curious funeral comes to an end. The groups divide, sorting themselves according to nations, and soon disperse among the hot wooded walks in the direction of their various palaces.
The setting of the Yellow City seems vaster, more extensive than ever in the April light. One is bewildered by so much artificiality. How marvellous the genius of these people has been! To have created bodily, in the midst of an arid plain, a lifeless desert, a city twenty leagues in circumference, with aqueducts, woods, rivers, mountains, and lakes! To have created forest distances and watery horizons, to give their sovereigns illusions of freshness! And to have enclosed all this,—which in itself is so large that one cannot see its boundaries,—to have separated it from the rest of the world, to have sequestered it, if one may use the word, behind such formidable walls!
What their most audacious architects have not been able to create, nor their proudest emperors, is a real springtime in this parched land,—a spring like ours, with its warm rains and its tremendously rapid growth of grass, ferns, and flowers. Here there is no turf, no moss, no odorous hay; the springtime resurrection is indicated here by the thin foliage on the willows, by tufts of grass here and there, or by the blossoming of a sort of purple gillyflower that springs up out of the dusty soil. It rains only in June, and then there is a deluge flooding all things.
Poor Yellow City, where we walk this morning, meeting so many people, so many armed detachments, so many uniforms; poor Yellow City, closed to the world for so many centuries, an inviolable refuge for the rites and mysteries of the past; city of splendor, oppression, and silence! When I saw it in the autumn it had an air of desertion which suited it; but now I find it overrun by the soldiers of all Europe. In all the palaces and golden pagodas "barbarian" troopers drag their swords or groom their horses under the very noses of the great dreamy Buddhas.
I saw to-day, at a Chinese merchant's, a collection of the ingenious terra-cotta statuettes, which are a specialty of Tien-Tsin. Up to the present year, only inhabitants of the Celestial Empire have been represented,—people of all social conditions and in every circumstance of life; but these, inspired by the invasion, represent various Occidental warriors, whose types and costumes are reproduced with astonishing accuracy. The modellers have given to the soldiers of certain European countries, which I prefer not to designate, an expression of fierce rage, and have placed in their hands light swords or bludgeons, or whips raised as if to strike a blow.
Our own men wear the red cap of the country, and are exceedingly French as to faces, with moustaches made of yellow or brown silk; each one carries tenderly in his arms a little Chinese baby. They are posed in different ways, but all are inspired by the same idea; the little Chinese is sometimes holding the soldier by the neck and embracing him; sometimes the soldier is tossing the laughing child, or, again, he is carefully wrapping it in his winter cloak. Thus it is, in the eyes of these careful observers, that while others are rough and always ready to strike a blow, our soldier is the one who after the battle becomes the big brother of the enemy's little children; after several months of practically living together, the Chinese have chosen this, and this alone, to characterize the French.