The more you regard these two Palaces in juxtaposition and the more you study their marvellous details, the more sadness gains upon you. Strange destiny for masterpieces of marble and stone! An ignorant visitor mutilates them, an absurd cannon-ball annihilates them, and they were not mere artists but kings who made them. Nobody knows to-day the names of those divine men who built and sculptured the walls of Heidelberg. There is renown there for ten great artists who hover nameless above this illustrious ruin. An unknown Boccador planned this Palace of Frederick IV.; an ignored Primaticcio composed the façade of Otho-Heinrich; a Cæsar Cæsarino, lost in the shadows, designed the pure arches to the equilateral triangle of Louis V.’s mansion. Here are arabesques of Raphael, and here are figurines of Benvenuto. Darkness shrouds everything. Soon these marble poems will perish,—their poets have already died.
For what did these wonderful men work? Alas! for the sighing wind, for the thrusting grass, for the ivy which has come to compare its foliage with theirs, for the transient swallow, for the falling rain, and for the enshrouding night.
One singular thing here is that the three or four bombardments to which these two façades have been subjected have not treated them in the same way. Only the cornice and the architraves of Otho-Heinrich’s Palace have been damaged. The immortal Olympians who dwell there have not suffered. Neither Hercules, nor Minerva, nor Hebe has been touched. The cannon-balls and shells crossed each other here without harming these invulnerable statues. On the other hand, the sixteen crowned knights, who have heads of lions on the grenouillières of their armour and who have such valiant countenances, on the Palace of Frederick IV. have been treated by the bombs as if they had been living warriors. Nearly every one of them has been wounded. The face of the Emperor Otho has been covered with scars; Otho, King of Hungary, has had his left leg fractured; Otho-Heinrich, the Palatine, has lost his hand; a ball has disfigured Frederick the Pious; an explosion has cut Frederick II. in half and broken Jean Casimir’s loins. In the assaults which were levelled at the highest row, Charlemagne has lost his globe and in the lower one Frederick IV. has lost his sceptre.
However, nothing could be more superb than this legion of princes all mutilated and all standing. The anger of Leopold II. and of Louis XIV., the thunder—the anger of the sky, and the anger of the French Revolution—the anger of the people, have vainly assailed them; they all stand there defending their façade with their fists on their hips, with their legs outstretched, with firmly planted heel and defiant head. The Lion of Bavaria is proudly scowling under their feet. On the second row beneath a green bough, which has pierced through architrave and which is gracefully playing with the stone feathers of his casque, Frederick the Victorious is half drawing his sword. The sculptor has put into his face an indescribable expression of Ajax challenging Jupiter and Nimrod shooting his arrow at Jehovah. These two Palaces of Otho-Heinrich and Frederick IV. must have offered a superb sight when seen in the light of that bombardment on the fatal night of May 21, 1693....
To-day the Tower of Frederick the Victorious is called the Blown-up Tower.
Half of this colossal cylinder of masonry lies in the moat. Other cracked blocks detached from the top of the tower would have fallen long ago if the monster-trees had not seized them in their powerful claws and held them suspended above the abyss.
A few steps from this terrible ruin chance has made a ruin of ravishing beauty; this is the interior of Otho-Heinrich’s Palace, of which until now I have only described the façade. There it stands open to everybody under the sunshine and the rain, the snow and the wind, without a ceiling, without a canopy, and without a roof, whose dismantled walls are pierced as if by hazard with twelve Renaissance doors,—twelve jewels of orfèvrerie, twelve chefs d’œuvre, twelve idyls in stone—entwined as if they issued from the same roots, a wonderful and charming forest of wild flowers, worthy of the Palatines, consule dignæ. I can only tell you that this mixture of art and reality is indescribable; it is at once a contest and a harmony. Nature, who has a rival in Beethoven, finds also a rival in Jean Goujon. The arabesques form tendrils and the tendrils form arabesques. One does not know which to admire most, the living or the sculptured leaf.
This ruin appears to be filled with a divine order.
It seems to me that this Palace, built by the fairies of the Renaissance, is now in its natural state. All these marvellous fantasies of free and savage art would be out of harmony in these halls when treaties of peace or war were signed here, when grave princes dreamed here, and when queens were married and German emperors created here. Could these Vertumnuses, Pomonas, or Ganymedes have understood anything about the ideas that came into the heads of Frederick IV. or Frederick V., by the grace of God Count Palatine of the Rhine, Vicar of the Holy Roman Empire, Elector and Duke of Upper and Lower Bavaria? A grand seigneur slept in this chamber beside a king’s daughter, under a ducal baldaquin; now there is neither seigneur, king’s daughter, baldaquin, nor even ceiling to this chamber; it is now the home of the bind-weed, and the wild mint is its perfume. It is well. It is better thus. This adorable sculpture was made to be kissed by the flowers and looked upon by the stars....
The night had fallen, the clouds were spread over the sky, and the moon had mounted nearly to the zenith, while I was still sitting on the same stone, gazing into the darkness which had gathered around me and into the shadows which I had within me. Suddenly the town-clock far below me sounded the hour; it was midnight: I rose and descended. The road leading to Heidelberg passes the ruins. At the moment when I arrived before them, the moon, veiled by the diffused clouds and surrounded by an immense halo, threw a weird light upon this magnificent mass of mouldering ruins....