No one need be ashamed to avow his or her love of it; it is acknowledged to be indispensable. Bishop or priest, sage or philosopher, can use it without being thought undignified. Imagine a pope, or cardinal, or bishop, or priest, or senator, or judge scented with “Mille Fleurs,” or “Jockey Club,” or “Bouquet de Nilsson”! The bare thought is revolting! To be sure, for some years, “Bouquet d'Afrique” has been the fashion among the “potent, grave, and reverend seigniors” at Washington who make our laws and amuse themselves by adding “Fifteenth Amendments” to the highly respectable and ever-to-be-respected Constitution of the United States.
But that will pass away with Time, the healer and destroyer; the reconstructionist will make all right; the “Fifteenth” will be amended with the “Sixteenth”; and, with the sway of lovely woman, Cologne, without which no well-bred, well-dressed woman's toilette is complete, will resume its reign over heads and hearts; and “Bouquet d'Afrique” will perhaps return to the hot and happy home where the indefatigable Stanley recently discovered the wandering, long-sought Livingstone—who did not care to be found, as he certainly appeared perfectly content among dusky dark-browed brothers and sisters, hunting lions and tigers, and imagining each little rivulet and lake the source of the Nile, or Congo, or Niger, or any other meandering [pg 616] river taking its rise in the great water-shed by the Mountains of the Moon.
If mothers are to be judged by the character of their sons, the mother of Nero, in whose honor Cologne was named, could not have been the mildest and gentlest of her sex. Says Lacordaire, “The education of the child is commenced in the womb of the mother, continued on her breast, completed at her knees.” Sweet must have been the reveries, refreshing the instructions, edifying the conduct of Julia Agrippina, who brought into the world the finished despot that drenched the soil of Rome with the blood of the Christian martyrs, who persecuted unto death the heroes of the faith that now people heaven.
Cologne owes its origin to a Roman camp established by Marcus Agrippa. The Emperor Claudius, at the request of his wife, Julia Agrippina, daughter of Germanicus and mother of Nero, sent a colony of Roman veterans, a.d. 50, named the town after her Colonia Agrippina, and it then became the capital of the Province of Germania Secunda. Vitellius was here proclaimed Emperor of Rome, a.d. 69; Trajan here received from Nerva the summons to share his throne; the usurper Sylvanus was also proclaimed emperor here in 353; a few years later Cologne was taken by the Franks; Childeric made it his residence in 464; and Clovis was here proclaimed king in 508.
During the reign of Pepin, it was the capital of the kingdoms of Neustria and Austrasia. Bruno, Duke of Lorraine, was the first of its archbishops who exercised the temporal power, with which he was invested by his brother, Otho the Great. From that time the town increased rapidly in wealth and splendor, and shortly after became one of the principal emporiums of the Hanseatic League; the commerce of the East was here concentrated, and direct communication with Italy constantly kept up. In 1259, the town acquired the privilege by which all vessels were compelled to unload here and reship their cargoes in Cologne bottoms.
At this period it had a population of 150,000, and could furnish 30,000 fighting men in time of war. In the XIIIth century, there was a mutiny among the weavers; 17,000 looms were destroyed; the rebellious workmen were banished from the city; and that, together with the expulsion of the Jews in 1349, did great injury to the town, the number of whose inhabitants was reduced in 1790 to 42,000, of whom nearly one-third were paupers. Then came the devastating wars which succeeded the maelstrom of the French Revolution, when in the general upheaval empires and kingdoms disappeared, new political combinations were made which changed the map of Europe, and the Rhine became the frontier of the French Empire.
Cologne was nominally French, but the hearts of the people were German—as German as the most ardent worshipper of the “New God,” as Von Bolanden calls the new Empire, the child of Bismarck and Von Moltke. After Waterloo, the Holy Alliance made another partition of the kingdoms and peoples, and Cologne shook off the French yoke, and returned to her national ways and customs. One great cause of its decay had been the closing of the navigation of the Rhine, which restriction was removed in 1837, and, since then, trade has greatly revived, and the town been much improved.
Many of the old streets have been widened and paved, and a considerable [pg 617] portion of waste ground covered with new buildings. The opening of the railways to Paris, Antwerp, Ostend, Hamburg, and Berlin has greatly added to its commercial prosperity, and Cologne bids fair to resume its former position among the chief cities of Europe. Cologne was formerly called the “Holy Cologne,” and the “Rome of the North”—titles which she owed to the number of relics and churches she possessed.
At one time, the city contained 200 buildings devoted to religious uses. These gradually diminished, until in 1790 their number was reduced to 137. During the French Revolution, they were shamefully plundered, the convents suppressed, and their property confiscated; so that at present there are not more than twenty churches and seven or eight chapels; but many other ecclesiastical buildings still remain, used as warehouses and chapels.
Maria im Capitol, so named from its having been built on the site of the Roman capitol, stands on an eminence reached by a flight of steps. The Frankish kings had a palace close by, to which Plectruda, the wife of Pepin, retired in 696, having separated from her husband on account of his attachment to Alpais, the mother of Charles Martel. In 700, she pulled down the capitol, and erected a church on its site, to which she attached a chapter of canonesses. Until 1794, the senate and consuls repaired hither annually on S. John's day to assist at Mass, when the outgoing Burgomasters solemnly transferred the insignia of office to the newly elected, who were each presented with a bouquet of flowers by the abbess.