A tour through Holland

by Sir John Carr

The only part of the city which presented any appearance of animation was the market-place, which abounded with fine vegetables, and exquisite fruit. The market-women, and the female peasants, wear a large handkerchief depending from the top of the head, which has a picturesque effect. Fruit is so abundant that for the value of 3d. I purchased a pound and a half of the most luscious grapes. In this square, part of the scaffolding used for illuminating the hotel de ville, on the grand duke making his first entry into the city, remained. About a mile from the town is a country palace of the prince, separated from a garden, in front of it, by the great road to Cologne. The palace is large, and very elegantly furnished; the gardens are spacious, well kept, and open to well-dressed persons. The view of the city from these walks is very beautiful. The ramparts, which are levelling as fast as the pickaxe and spade can lay them low, in many places present a very agreeable walk.

All religions are tolerated, but that most followed is Roman Catholic, for the celebration of which there are three large churches; before one of them, raised and railed off, is a group as large as life, in wood, painted white, representing our Saviour crucified between the two thieves, and Mary Magdalen, kneeling; several persons were praying very devoutly before those images. The dead are wisely buried out of the city. In one of the streets at the extremity of the town, is a prodigious pile of buildings for barracks. The soldiers of the grand duke, principally Germans, and a few French, had a very military appearance. The manufactures are at a pause; the population is reduced to about eight thousand persons, the greater portion of whom are in very abject circumstances. How different must this place be to its former period of prosperity, before the last war, when a gay old Prussian officer who resided there, told me, that it was enlivened with clubs, casinos, and balls, when every family of common respectability could regale its friends with the choicest Johannis-Berg Hockein-Rheideshein wine. The princes of Germany differ very much from those of our own country, in the plain and unostentatious manner in which they move about. One morning, when I was crossing the court of my inn to go to breakfast, I saw a little boy fencing with a stick with one of the ostlers: as I was pleased with his appearance, I asked him if he was the son of the maitre d’hotel, to which he replied, “No sir, I am the hereditary prince Von Salm.” The prince and princess, his father and aunt, were at the same hotel, having come to Dusseldorf to pay their respects to Prince Murat. The grand ducal court was, as I was informed, kept up with considerable splendor, in the circle of which the grand dutchess, one of the sisters of Napoleon, had not yet made her appearance. It was generally believed, notwithstanding the use my worthy host made of her approaching entry, that no great attachment existed between the grand ducal pair; and that the gaiety of the imperial court of Paris possessed more prevailing attractions to the grand Dutchess than her own. Murat, grand Duke of Berg, is an instance of the astonishing results of great ability and good fortune. His origin was so very obscure, that very little of it is known. The following anecdote will, however, throw some light upon the extreme humility of his early condition in life. After his elevation to the rank of a prince of the French empire, he halted, in the close of the last war, at a small town in Germany, where he stayed for two or three days; and on finding the bread prepared for his table of an inferior kind, he despatched one of his suite to order the best baker in the town to attend him, to receive from him his directions respecting this precious article of life. A baker who had been long established in the place was selected for this purpose; and upon the aide-de-camp ordering him to wait upon the prince immediately, he observed, to the no little surprise of the officer—“It is useless my going, the prince will never employ me.” Upon being pressed to state his reasons, he declined assigning any; but as the order of the messenger was peremptory, he followed him, and was immediately admitted to Murat, with whom he stayed about ten minutes, and then retired. As he quitted the house in which the prince lodged, he observed to the aide-de-camp, “I told you the prince would not employ me—he has dismissed me with this,” displaying a purse of ducats. Upon being again pressed to explain the reason of this singular conduct, he replied, “The Prince Murat, when a boy, was apprenticed to a biscuit baker in the south of France, at the time I was a journeyman to him, and I have often threshed him for being idle; the moment he saw me just now, he instantly remembered me, and without entering into the subject of our ancient acquaintance, or of that which led me to his presence, he hastily took his purse of ducats from the drawer of the table where he sat, gave it to me, and ordered me to retire.”

The heroic courage which Murat displayed in the campaign of 1797, when in conjunction with Duphoz, at the head of their respective divisions, they plunged into the deep and impetuous stream of Tagliamento, gained the opposite banks, and drove the Austrians, headed by their able and amiable general, the Archduke Charles, as far as the confines of Carnithia and Carniola; and the numerous battles in which he distinguished himself in Egypt, and afterwards at Montebello and Marengo, where at the head of his cavalry, he successfully supported the brilliant and eventful movement of Dessaix, will rank him in the page of history amongst the most illustrious of those consummate generals, which the fermentation of the French revolution has elevated from the depths of obscurity. In Egypt he was high in the confidence of Napoleon, whom he accompanied with Lasnes, Andreossi, Bessieres, and several members of the Egyptian Institute, when Bonaparte effected his memorable passage from his army to Frejus, in August 1799. Upon the death of General Le Clerc, who was united to a sister of Napoleon, Murat paid his addresses to, and espoused his widow,[^[3]] with the entire approbation of his great comrade in arms, by whom he was, upon his elevation to the imperial throne, created a prince of the empire, and at length raised to the rank of a sovereign. He is reserved and unostentatious, and is seldom visible to his people. Some of the Westphalians, who are attached to the ancient order of things, have a joke amongst themselves at the expense of their new prince, whose christian name being Joachim, they pronounce it with an accompanying laugh, Jachim, which means “drive him away;” and there is very little difference in the pronunciation.

[3]. This is a mistake of the author. Prince Murat married Napoleon’s youngest sister, who had not been previously married. Le Clerc’s widow is married to Prince Borghese.

Amer. Editor.

As Dusseldorf had infinitely less charms for me than it had for the grand Dutchess, I was as well pleased to quit it, as she was disinclined to enter it; so mounting my cabriolet, for which I was obliged to make the best bargain I could with the post-master, I set off for Cologne, the road to which is far more pleasant than any other part of the dutchy which I saw, though the whole is very flat. About six miles from Dusseldorf, I passed a beautiful country palace of the grand Duke, called Benrad, composed of a range of semicircular buildings detached from each other, standing upon the summit of a gentle slope, at the bottom of which is a large circular piece of water. The grand Duke makes this place his principal residence, and very seldom goes to that in the neighbourhood of the city more than twice in the week, to give audience and transact affairs of state, which, as the government is entirely despotic, are managed with ease and despatch. The appearance of the body-guard at the entrance announced that the prince was at this place when I passed it: the grounds and gardens, seen from the road, appear to be tastefully arranged. Although the road is sandy, yet it is infinitely preferable, I was informed, to crossing the ferry at Dusseldorf, and proceeding by that route to Cologne. After passing Muhlheim, a very neat town, the suburbs of which are adorned with some handsome country-houses, I entered, about a mile further, the village of Deutz, and beheld the venerable city of Cologne, separated by the Rhine, immediately before me. At one end of the village is a large convent of Carmelites, and on the day of my arrival a religious fête was celebrating, at which nearly all the population of the place and neighbourhood assisted, and the streets were enlivened with little booths, in which crosses and ornaments of gold lace and beads were tastefully exposed to the eye.

The bell of the flying bridge summoned me on board, and in about five minutes I found myself in the French empire, attended by French custom-house officers in green costume, who conducted me to the Douane. This ferry cannot fail to impress the mind and excite the curiosity of a stranger: it is formed of a broad platform resting upon two large barges, like our coal lighters; from this platform a vast wooden frame in the shape of a gallows is erected, which is fastened to the former by strong chains of iron, whilst from the centre cross piece, a chain of the same metal of great length, is fixed to the top of an upright pole standing in each of a long line of boats, the remotest of which is at anchor; by this machinery a powerful pressure is obtained; to each of the barges a rudder is affixed, which, upon being placed in an oblique direction, produces a lateral motion upon the stream, which acts as a force from above; so that by changing the rudder to the right or left, the bridge is forced on one side or the other of the river, with equal certainty and celerity. Fifteen hundred persons can with perfect ease be transported at the same time upon these bridges, and carriages and horses are driven upon them without any stoppage, from the banks, to which they are lashed, until put in motion. The Germans call this machine the Fliegende Schiffs-Brücke, or the volant bridge of boats; the Dutch geer burg, or the bridge in shackles, in allusion to its chains; and the French le pont volant, or the flying bridge.

The search made by the custom-house officers amongst my fellow-passengers, most of whom had only just crossed and recrossed the river, was very rigorous; the females were marched up to a small house, where, as I discovered by accidentally opening the door, and offending as the elders did when they took a lawless peep at Susanna, to the no small delight of those who were lounging without, and of embarrassment to those within, they underwent a private examination by two matrons, appointed for the purpose.

At this place I expected some difficulty; but upon my declaring myself an American, and showing my pass, and just opening my trunk, the officers, with great politeness, called a porter to carry my luggage into the city, and pulling off their hats, recommended me to La Cour Imperiale, one of the best hotels, where I arrived just in time to sit down to a splendid table d’hôte, at which several beautiful and well-dressed ladies, German noblemen, and French officers, were present.

This city was formerly celebrated for the number of its devotees and prostitutes, which the French police has very much reduced. The first object I visited, was the cathedral, which, from the water appears like a stupendous fragment, that had withstood the shock of war, or some convulsion of nature, by which the rest of the pile had been prostrated; but upon inquiry, I found that it owed its mutilated appearance to no such event, but to the obstacles which have occurred for ages in completing it, according to its original design. In the year 1248, Conrad, the elector and bishop of Hocksteden, in the pride and exultation of holy enthusiasm, resolved to erect a temple to God, which should have no equal in size and magnificence; it was intended that the two western towers should have been five hundred feet in elevation, and the nave or body of the church in proportion, and every external stone which the eye could perceive, decorated with the most exquisite ornament of pure gothic architecture. The successors of the prince bishop, who resembled in the splendor of his spirit the emperor who so elegantly wished to leave the town stone, which he had found brick, continued the building for two centuries and a half; but owing to their resources being insufficient, they were obliged to leave it in a very imperfect state, but capable of being used for religious purposes. There is no building of the kind to compare with it, but the Duomo at Milan. One of the western towers, which I ascended, is about two hundred and fifty feet high, from which there is a fine view of the city, the Rhine, and the surrounding country; the other tower is not above forty feet high. The roof of the greater part of the body of the church is temporary and low; but so spacious is the area which it covers, that one hundred massy pillars, arranged in four rows, present a light and airy appearance upon it. My guide, who was a good humoured intelligent man, with many significant shrugs of regret, informed me, that the moveable decorations of the church and altar were once worthy of a stranger’s attention; but that the generals of the French armies, during the revolution, had pillaged this holy sanctuary of its richest ornaments; however, the grand altar in the choir was not sufficiently portable for their rapacious hands, and remains to show the magnificent scale upon which every part of the cathedral was originally designed. This altar is formed of one solid block, of the finest sable marble, sixteen feet long and eight broad, placed upon the summit of a flight of steps.