At Vesoul, after a long banishment, appeared Charles X.[436], now setting sail for the new exile which will be for him the last.
I passed the frontier without accident with all my rubbish: let us see if, on the other side of the Alps, I may not enjoy the liberty of Switzerland and the sun of Italy, the needs of my opinions and my years.
At the entrance to Basle, I met an old Swiss, a custom-house officer; he made me undergo "a liddle quarandine of a quarder of an hour;" my luggage was taken down into a cellar; they set in movement something or other which made the same sound as a stocking-frame; there rose a vinegary fume; and, thus purified from the contagion of France, I was released by my good Swiss.
I have said, in the Itinéraire, speaking of the storks of Athens:
"From the height of their nests, which revolutions cannot reach, they have seen the race of mortals change beneath them: while impious generations have risen on the tombs of the religious generations, the young stork has always nourished its old father."
I find again at Basle the storks nest which I left there six years ago; but the hospital in whose roof the stork of Basle has built its nest is not the Parthenon, the sun of the Rhine is not the sun of the Cephissus, the Council is not the Areopagus, Erasmus[437] is not Pericles; nevertheless, the Rhine, the Black Forest, Roman and Germanic Basle are something. Louis XIV. extended France to the gates of that city and three hostile monarchs[438] passed through it, in 1813, to come to sleep in the bed of Louis the Great, defended by Napoleon in vain. Let us go to see Holbein's[439] Dance of Death; it will tell us a tale of human vanities.
The Dance of Death (always presuming that it was not even then a real painting) took place in Paris, in 1424, in the Cimetière des Innocents: it came to us from England. The performance of this spectacle was recorded in pictures: these were exhibited in the cemeteries of Dresden, Lübeck, Minden, of the Chaise-Dieu, Strasburg and Blois in France; and Holbein's pencil immortalized these joys of the tomb at Basle.
These dances of death of the great artist have in their turn been carried away by death, which does not spare its own follies: there remain at Basle, of Holbein's labour, only six pieces sawn from the stones of the cloisters and lodged in the library of the University. A coloured drawing has preserved the harmony of the work.
Those grotesque figures on a terrible back-ground partake of the genius of Shakespeare, a genius blended of comedy and tragedy. The persons bear a lively expression: rich and poor, old and young, men and women, popes, cardinals, priests, emperors, kings, queens, princes, dukes, nobles, magistrates, warriors, all struggle and argue with Death; not one accepts it with a good grace.
Death is infinitely various, but always clownish, like life, which is only a serious piece of buffoonery. This Death of the satirical painter goes one leg short, like the wooden-legged beggar whom it accosts; it plays the mandoline behind its back-bone, like the musician whom it drags away. It is not always bald: tufts of fair, brown, or grey hair flutter on the skeleton's neck and make it more frightful by making it nearly alive. In one of the cartoons, Death has almost hair, it is almost young, like a young man, and it carries off a young girl who is looking at herself in a glass. Death has in its wallet the tricks of a crafty schoolboy: with a pair of scissors, it cuts the string of a dog which leads a blind man, and the blind man is at two steps from an open pit; elsewhere, Death, in a short mantle, accosts one of its victims with the gestures of a Pasquin. Holbein may have taken the idea of this formidable gaiety in nature itself: enter a reliquary, all the death's-heads seem to grin, because they uncover their teeth; that is laughter. What are they grinning at? At death or at life?