The Mayence to which I was going was not the Mayen that I wanted, but I did not know that. You have heard of people weeping over the wrong tombstones. This was a case in point. Fortunately I was going in the direction of the real Mayen, though I did not know that either. I ran through a country which reminded me very much of the region in which Terre Haute is located and I said to myself quite wisely: “Now I can see why my father and so many other Germans from this region settled in southern Indiana. It is like their old home. The wide, flat fields are the same.”
When we reached Mayence and I had deposited my kit-bag, for the time being I strolled out into the principal streets wondering whether I should get the least impression of the city or town as it was when my father was here as a boy. It is curious and amusing how we can delude ourselves at times. Mayence I really knew, if I had stopped to consider, could not be the Mayen, where my father was born. The former was the city of that Bishop-Elector Albert of Brandenburg who in need of a large sum of money to pay Rome for the privilege of assuming the archbishopric, when he already held two other sees, made an arrangement with Pope Leo X—the Medici pope who was then trying to raise money to rebuild or enlarge St. Peter’s—to superintend the sale of indulgences in Germany (taking half the proceeds in reward for his services) and thus by arousing the ire of Luther helped to bring about the Reformation in Germany. This was the city also of that amiable Dominican Prior, John Tetzel, who, once appealing for ready purchasers for his sacerdotal wares declared:
“Do you not hear your dead parents crying out ‘Have mercy on us? We are in sore pain and you can set us free for a mere pittance. We have borne you, we have trained and educated you, we have left you all our property, and you are so hard-hearted and cruel that you leave us to roast in the flames when you could so easily release us.’”
I shall always remember Mayence by that ingenious advertisement. My father had described to me a small, walled town with frowning castles set down in a valley among hills. He had said over and over that it was located at the junction of the Rhine and the Moselle. I recalled afterward that he told me that the city of Coblenz was very near by, but in my brisk effort to find this place quickly I had forgotten that. Here I was in a region which contained not a glimpse of any hills from within the city, the Moselle was all of a hundred miles away, and no walls of any medieval stronghold were visible anywhere and yet I was reasonably satisfied that this was the place.
“Dear me,” I thought, “how Mayence has grown. My father wouldn’t know it.” (Baedeker gave its population at one hundred and ten thousand). “How Germany has grown in the sixty-five years since he was here. It used to be a town of three or four thousand. Now it is a large city.” I read about it assiduously in Baedeker and looked at the rather thriving streets of the business heart, trying to visualize it as it should have been in 1843. Until midnight I was wandering about in the dark and bright streets of Mayence, satisfying myself with the thought that I was really seeing the city in which my father was born.
For a city of so much historic import Mayence was very dull. It was built after the theories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with, however, many modern improvements. The Cathedral was a botch, ornamented with elaborate statues of stuffy bishops and electors. The houses were done in many places in that heavy scroll fashion common to medieval Germany. The streets were narrow and winding. I saw an awful imitation of our modern Coney Island in the shape of a moving circus which was camped on one of the public camping places. A dull heavy place, all told.
Coming into the breakfast-room of my hotel the next morning, I encountered a man who looked to me like a German traveling salesman. He had brought his grip down to the desk and was consuming his morning coffee and rolls with great gusto, the while he read his paper. I said to him, “Do you know of any place in this part of Germany that is called Mayen?—not Mayence.” I wanted to make sure of my location.
“Mayen? Mayen?” he replied. “Why, yes. I think there is such a place near Coblenz. It isn’t very large.”
“Coblenz! That’s it,” I replied, recalling now what my father had told me of Coblenz. “To be sure. How far is that?”
“Oh, that is all of three hours from here. It is at the juncture of the Moselle.”