Frankfort was a disappointment to me at first. It was a city of over four hundred thousand population, clean, vigorous, effective; but I saw it in a rain, to begin with, and I did not like it. It was too squat in appearance—too unvarying in its lines; it seemed to have no focal point such as one finds in all medieval cities. What has come over the spirit of city governments, directing architects, and individual enterprise? Is there no one who wants really to do the very exceptional thing? No German city I saw had a central heart worthy of the name—no Piazza del Campidoglio such as Rome has; no Piazza della Signoria such as Florence has; no Piazza San Marco such as Venice has; not even a cathedral center, lovely thing that it is, such as Milan has. Paris with its Gardens of the Tuileries, its Champs-de-Mars, its Esplanades des Invalides, and its Arc de Triomphe and Place de l’Opéra, does so much better in this matter than any German city has dreamed of doing. Even London has its splendid focal point about the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s and the Embankment, which are worth something. But German cities! Yet they are worthy cities, every one of them, and far more vital than those of Italy.
I should like to relate first, however, the story of the vanishing birthplace. Ever since I was three or four years old and dandled on my father’s knee in our Indiana homestead, I had heard more or less of Mayen, Coblenz, and the region on the Rhine from which my father came. As we all know, the Germans are a sentimental, fatherland-loving race and my father, honest German Catholic that he was, was no exception. He used to tell me what a lovely place Mayen was, how the hills rose about it, how grape-growing was its principal industry, how there were castles there and grafs and rich burghers, and how there was a wall about the city which in his day constituted it an armed fortress, and how often as a little child he had been taken out through some one of its great gates seated on the saddle of some kindly minded cavalryman and galloped about the drill-ground. He seems to have become, by the early death of his mother and second marriage of his father, a rather unwelcome stepchild and, early, to escape being draughted for the Prussian army which had seized this town—which only a few years before had belonged to France, though German enough in character—he had secretly decamped to the border with three others and so made his way to Paris. Later he came to America, made his way by degrees to Indiana, established a woolen-mill on the banks of the Wabash at Terre Haute and there, after marrying in Ohio, raised his large family. His first love was his home town, however, and Prussia, which he admired; and to his dying day he never ceased talking about it. On more than one occasion he told me he would like to go back, just to see how things were, but the Prussian regulations concerning deserters or those who avoided service were so drastic and the likelihood of his being recognized so great that he was afraid of being seized and at least thrown into prison if not shot, so he never ventured it. I fancy this danger of arrest and his feeling that he could not return cast an additional glamour over the place and the region which he could never revisit. Anyhow I was anxious to see Mayen and to discover if the family name still persisted there.
When I consulted with the Cook’s agent at Rome he had promptly announced, “There isn’t any such place as Mayen. You’re thinking of Mayence, near Frankfort, on the Rhine.”
“No,” I said, “I’m not. I’m thinking of Mayen—M-a-y-e-n. Now you look and see.”
“There isn’t any such place, I tell you,” he replied courteously. “It’s Mayence, not very far from Frankfort.”
“Let me see,” I argued, looking at his map. “It’s near the junction of the Rhine and the Moselle.”
“Mayence is the place. See, here it is. Here’s the Moselle and here’s Mayence.”
I looked, and sure enough they seemed reasonably close together. “All right,” I said, “give me a ticket to Berlin via Mayence.”
“I’ll book you to Frankfort. That’s only thirty minutes away. There’s nothing of interest at Mayence—not even a good hotel.”
Arrived at Frankfort, I decided not to send my trunks to the hotel as yet but to take one light bag, leaving the remainder “im Gepäck” and see what I could at Mayence. I might want to stay all night, wandering about my father’s old haunts, and I might want to go down the Rhine a little way—I was not sure.