Prague, 28 and 29 May 1833.
On Monday the 28th of May, as the history lesson at which I was to have been present at eleven o'clock did not take place, I found myself free to go through, or, rather, to revisit the town which I had already seen and seen again in coming and going. I do not know why I had imagined that Prague was nestled in a gap of mountains that threw their black shadow over a huddled kettleful of houses. Prague is a bright city, in which twenty-five or thirty graceful towers and steeples rise up to the sky; its architecture reminds one of a town of the Renascence. The long sway of the Emperors over the Cisalpine countries filled Germany with artists from those countries; the Austrian villages are villages of Lombardy, Tuscany or the Venetian main-land: one would think one's self under the roof of an Italian peasant, if, in the farm-houses, with their great bare rooms, a stove did not take the place of the sun.
The view enjoyed from the windows of the Castle is agreeable: on one side, you see the orchards of a cool valley, with green slopes, enclosed by the denticulated walls of the town, which run down to the Moldau, almost as the walls of Rome run from the Vatican down to the Tiber; on the other side, you perceive the city, cut in two by the river, which is beautified by an island set up stream and embraces another island down stream, after leaving the northern suburb. The Moldau flows into the Elbe. A boat might have taken me on board at the bridge of Prague and landed me at the Pont-Royal in Paris. I am not the work of the ages and kings; I have neither the weight nor the duration of the obelisk[601] which the Nile is now sending to the Seine; the girdle of the Vestal of the Tiber would be strong enough to tow my galley.
The Moldau Bridge, which was first built in wood, in 795, by Mnata, has been rebuilt, at different times, in stone. While I was taking the measure of this bridge, Charles X. was walking on the pavement; he carried an umbrella; his son accompanied him like a paid cicerone. I had said, in the Conservateur, that "men would go to the window to see the Monarchy pass:" I saw it pass on the bridge of Prague.
In the constructions of which Hradschin is composed one sees historic halls, museums hung with the restored portraits and the furbished arms of the Dukes and Kings of Bohemia. Not far from the shapeless masses, there stands detached against the sky a pretty building decked with one of the graceful porticoes of the Cinquecento: this architecture has the drawback of being out of harmony with the climate. If at least one could, during the Bohemian winter, put those Italian palaces in the hot-house, with the palm-trees? I was always preoccupied with the thought of the cold which they must feel at night.
History of Prague.
Prague, often besieged, taken and re-taken, is known to us, in a military respect, by the battle called after it and by the retreat in which Vauvenargues[602] took part. The bulwarks of the town are demolished. The moat of the Castle, on the side of the high plane, forms a deep and narrow groove, now planted with poplars. At the time of the Thirty Years' War, this moat was filled with water. The Protestants, having penetrated into the Castle, on the 23rd of May 1618, threw two Catholic lords, together with the Secretary of State, out of window: the three divers saved their lives. The Secretary, like a well-bred man, begged a thousand pardons of one of the lords for his rudeness in falling on his head. In this present month of May 1833, we are no longer so polite: I am not sure what I should say in a similar case, although I have been a secretary of State myself.
Tycho Brahe died in Prague[603]: would you, for all his knowledge, have a false nose in wax or silver as he did? Tycho consoled himself in Bohemia, like Charles X., by contemplating the heavens; the astronomer admired the work, the King adores the Workman. The star which appeared in 1572 (and died out in 1574) and which passed successively from dazzling white to the red yellow of Mars and the leaden white of Saturn presented to Tycho's observations the spectacle of the conflagration of a world. What is the revolution whose breath blew the brother of Louis XVI. to the tomb of the Danish Newton beside the destruction of a globe, accomplished in less than two years?
General Moreau came to Prague to concert with the Emperor of Russia a restoration which he, Moreau, did not live to see.
If Prague were by the sea-side, nothing would be more charming; and Shakespeare, striking Bohemia with his wand turns it into a shipping country: