A tour through Holland : $b along the right and left banks of the Rhine, to the south of Germany, in the summer and autumn of 1806Carr, John, Sir
History
A tour through Holland : $b along the right and left banks of the Rhine, to the south of Germany, in the summer and autumn of 1806
Carr, John, Sir
Netherlands -- Description and travel; Rhine River Valley -- Description and travel
All religions are tolerated, but that most followed is Roman Catholic,
for the celebration of which there are three large churches; before one
of them, raised and railed off, is a group as large as life, in wood,
painted white, representing our Saviour crucified between the two
thieves, and Mary Magdalen, kneeling; several persons were praying very
devoutly before those images. The dead are wisely buried out of the
city. In one of the streets at the extremity of the town, is a
prodigious pile of buildings for barracks. The soldiers of the grand
duke, principally Germans, and a few French, had a very military
appearance. The manufactures are at a pause; the population is reduced
to about eight thousand persons, the greater portion of whom are in very
abject circumstances. How different must this place be to its former
period of prosperity, before the last war, when a gay old Prussian
officer who resided there, told me, that it was enlivened with clubs,
casinos, and balls, when every family of common respectability could
regale its friends with the choicest Johannis-Berg Hockein-Rheideshein
wine. The princes of Germany differ very much from those of our own
country, in the plain and unostentatious manner in which they move
about. One morning, when I was crossing the court of my inn to go to
breakfast, I saw a little boy fencing with a stick with one of the
ostlers: as I was pleased with his appearance, I asked him if he was the
son of the maitre d’hotel, to which he replied, “No sir, I am the
hereditary prince Von Salm.” The prince and princess, his father and
aunt, were at the same hotel, having come to Dusseldorf to pay their
respects to Prince Murat. The grand ducal court was, as I was informed,
kept up with considerable splendor, in the circle of which the grand
dutchess, one of the sisters of Napoleon, had not yet made her
appearance. It was generally believed, notwithstanding the use my worthy
host made of her approaching entry, that no great attachment existed
between the grand ducal pair; and that the gaiety of the imperial court
of Paris possessed more prevailing attractions to the grand Dutchess
than her own. Murat, grand Duke of Berg, is an instance of the
astonishing results of great ability and good fortune. His origin was so
very obscure, that very little of it is known. The following anecdote
will, however, throw some light upon the extreme humility of his early
condition in life. After his elevation to the rank of a prince of the
French empire, he halted, in the close of the last war, at a small town
in Germany, where he stayed for two or three days; and on finding the
bread prepared for his table of an inferior kind, he despatched one of
his suite to order the best baker in the town to attend him, to receive
from him his directions respecting this precious article of life. A
baker who had been long established in the place was selected for this
purpose; and upon the aide-de-camp ordering him to wait upon the prince
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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