What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

On looking back on the circumstances from my present lofty and calm observatory, I am disposed to wonder that nothing worse betided us than the one adventure of which I am about to speak. But, as I remember, the people generally were, if somewhat ruder and rougher than an English population of similar status, upon the whole very kindly and good-natured.

But at one place—a village called Pleintling—we did get into trouble, which very nearly ended tragically. The terms upon which we were to be housed for the night, and the price to be paid for our accommodation of all sorts had been settled overnight, and the consciousness that we were giving unusual trouble induced us to pay without grumbling such a price for our beds and supper and breakfast as the host had assuredly never received for his food and lodging in all his previous experience. But it was doubtless this very absence of bargaining which led our landlord to imagine that he had made a mistake in not demanding far more, and that any amount might be had for asking it from so mysterious a party who parted, too, so easily with their money. So as we were stepping on board the next morning he came down to the water’s edge, and with loud vociferation demanded a sum more than the double of that which we had already paid him. The ladies, and indeed all the party save myself, who was the paymaster, had already gone on board, and I was about to follow, unheeding his demands and his threats, when he seized me by the throat, and dragging me backwards, declared in stentorian tones that he had not been paid. I sturdily refused to disburse another kreutzer. The other men, who had gone on board, jumped back to my assistance. But suddenly, as if they had risen from the earth, several other fellows surrounded us and dragged down my friends. The old landlord, beside himself with rage, lifted an axe which he had in his hand, and was about to deal me a blow which would probably have relieved the reading world of this and many another page! But my mother, shrieking with alarm, had meantime besought the captain of the boat to settle the matter by paying whatever was demanded. He also jumped on shore just in time, and released us from our foes, and himself from further delay, by doing so.

At the next place at which we could go on shore we made a complaint to the police officials; and it is not without satisfaction even after the lapse of half a century that I am able to say that a communication from the police in an Austrian town some days subsequently, and after we had crossed the Bavarian frontier, informed us that the old scoundrel at Pleintling had not only been made to disgorge the sum he had robbed us of, but had been trounced as he deserved. I suspect that he had imagined from the strangeness of our party, and our mode of travelling, that there were reasons why we should not be inclined to seek any interview with the officers of the police.

With that sole exception our voyage from Ratisbon to Vienna was a prosperous, and on the whole, pleasant one, varied only by not unfrequently recurring difficulties occasioned by shoals and sandbanks, when all hands, save the non-working party in the bow, would take to the water in a truly amphibious fashion to drag the boat off.

But I must not be led by these moving accidents by flood and field to forget a visit paid to the sculptor Dannecker in his studio at Stuttgardt. There is in my mother’s book an etching by M. Hervieu of the man and place. I remember well the affectionate reverence with which he uncovered for us his colossal bust of Schiller, as described by my mother, and the reasons which he assigned (mistaken as they appeared to me, but it is presumptuous in me to say so) for making it colossal. Schiller had been his life-long friend, and these reasons, whether artistically good or not, were at all events morally admirable and pathetically touching as given by the old man, while looking up at his work with tears in his octogenarian eyes. I do not think the reproduction of the bust in M. Hervieu’s etching is a very happy one, but I can testify to the full-length portrait of the aged sculptor being a thoroughly life-like one. It is the old man himself. He died a year or two after the date of our visit.

Uhland too we visited, and Gustav Schwab. Of the former I may say literally vidi tantum, for I could speak then no German, and very few words now, and Uhland could speak no other language. And our interview is worth recording mainly for the case of the noticeable fact that such a man, holding the position he did and does in the literature of his country, should at that day have been unable to converse in French.

Gustav Schwab, though talking French fluently, and, as I remember, a little English also, impressed me as quintessentially German in manner, in appearance, and ways of thinking. He was one of the kindliest of men, contented with you only on condition of being permitted to be of service to you, and at the end of half an hour making you somehow or other feel as if he must have been an old friend, if not in your present, at least in some former state of existence.

My journey among these southern Germans left me with the impression that they are generally a kindly and good-natured people. A little incident occurred at Tübingen which I thought notably illustrated this. The university library there is a very fine one; and while the rest of our party were busied with some other sight-seeing, I went thither and applied to the librarian for some information respecting the departments in which it was strong, its rules, &c. He immediately set about complying with my wishes in the most obliging manner, going through the magnificent suite of rooms with me himself, and pausing before the shelves wherever he had any special treasure to show. All of a sudden, without any warning, just as we were passing through the marble jambs of a doorway from one room to another, my head began to swim; I lost consciousness, and fell, cutting my head against the marble sufficiently to cause much bloodshed. When I recovered my senses I found the librarian standing in consternation over me, and his pretty young wife on her knees with a basin of water bathing my head. She had been summoned from her dwelling to attend me, and there was no end to their kindness. I never experienced such a queer attack before or since. I suppose it must have been occasioned by too much erudition on an empty stomach!

Our route to Vienna was a very devious one, including southern Bavaria, Salzburg, and great part of the Tyrol. But I must not indulge in any journalising reminiscences of it. Were I to do so in the case of all the interesting journeys I have made since that day how many volumes would suffice for the purpose! When calling the other day, only two or three months ago, on Cardinal Massaia at the Propaganda in Rome in order to have some conversation with him respecting his thirty-five years’ missionary work in Africa, on returning from which he received the purple from Leo XIII., he obligingly showed me the MS. which he had prepared from his recollection of the contents of the original notes, unfortunately destroyed during his imprisonment by hostile tribes in Africa, and which is now being printed at the Propaganda Press in ten volumes quarto. His Eminence was desirous that it should be translated into English, and published in London with the interesting illustrations he brought home with him, and which adorn the Roman edition. But as the wish of his Eminence was that it should be published unabridged (!) I was obliged to tell him that I feared he would not find a London publisher. We parted very good friends, and on taking my leave of him he said, pressing my hand kindly, that we should shortly meet again in heaven—which, considering that he knew he was talking to a heretic, I felt to be a manifestation of liberal feeling worthy of note in a cardinal of the Church of Rome.

Will the kind reader, bearing in mind the recognised and almost privileged garrulity of old age, pardon the chronology-defying introduction of this anecdote here, which was suggested to me solely by the vision of what my reminiscences would extend to if I were to treat of all my wanderings up and down this globe in extenso?