Carlsbad numbers eight springs: the most celebrated is the Sprudel, discovered by the stag-hound. This spring issues from the ground between the church and the Tepl with a hollow sound and a white steam; it leaps up with irregular bounds to a height of six or seven feet. The hot-springs of Iceland are superior to the Sprudel, but none goes to seek health in the deserts of the Hecla, where life expires; where the summer's day, issuing from the day, knows neither sunset nor sunrise; where the winter's night, born again of the night, is without dawn or twilight.
The water of the Sprudel boils eggs and serves to wash plates and dishes; this fine phenomenon has entered the service of the Carlsbad housewives: an image of genius which degrades itself by lending its power to vile works[626].
Carlsbad is the meeting-place in ordinary of sovereigns: they ought surely to get cured there of the crown for themselves and for us.
A daily list is published of the visitors to the Sprudel: on the old rolls we find the names of the poets and the most enlightened men of letters of the North: Gurowsky[627], Dunker, Weisse[628], Herder[629], Goethe; I should have liked to meet with that of Schiller, my favourite. In the sheet of the day, among obscure arrivals, one observes the name of the "Comtesse de Marnes:" it is only printed in small capitals.
In 1830, at the very moment of the fall of the Royal Family at Saint-Cloud, the widow and daughters of Christophe were taking the waters at Carlsbad. Their Haytian Majesties have retired to Tuscany, near the Neapolitan Majesties. King Christophe's youngest daughter, very well-educated and exceedingly pretty, has died at Pisa: her ebon beauty rests free under the porticoes of the Campo Santo, far from the cane-fields and mangrove-trees beneath whose shade she was born a slave.
In 1826, an Englishwoman from Calcutta was seen at Carlsbad, passing from the banian fig-tree to the Bohemian olive-tree, from the sun of the Ganges to the sun of the Tepl; she died away like a ray from the Indian sky lost in the cold and the darkness. The sight of cemeteries, in places consecrated to health, is a melancholy one: there young women sleep, strangers to one another; on their tombs are carved the number of their days and the place of their birth: one seems to be going through a hot-house in which flowers are cultivated of every climate, whose names are written on a label at the foot of the flowers.
The native law has anticipated the requirements of exotic death: foreseeing the decease of the travellers far from their country, it permits the exhumations beforehand. I might, then, have slept half a score of years in the Cemetery of St. Andrew and nothing would have hindered the testamentary dispositions of these Memoirs. If Madame la Dauphine were to expire here, would the French laws permit the return of her ashes? That would be a controversial point between the Sorbonizers of doctrine and the casuists of proscription.
The Carlsbad waters are stated to be good for the liver and bad for the teeth. I know nothing about the liver, but there are many toothless people at Carlsbad; perhaps the years are responsible for this, rather than the waters: time is an arrant liar and a great tooth-drawer.
Does it not seem to you as though I were recommencing the Chef-d'œuvre d'un inconnu[630]? One word leads me to another; I go from Iceland to India:
Voilà les Apennins et voici le Caucase[631].