195 A Fashionable Bath in the Olden Time. PERHAPS there are few places respecting which we possess so many minute and curious traits of social history as the little Swiss watering-place of Baden, in the Canton Aargau. The very name of it is unknown to the greater part of the cosmopolitan flying squadron of tourists who scour Europe annually east, west, north, and south; from Trouville to Carlsbad, from Monaco to Pyrmont. A quiet, carpet-slippered kind of townlet is Baden in Aargau now-a-days; yet it has seen brave doings, and received fine folks in its time. And, luckily, there are extant various contemporary chronicles which shew forth for us the quaint humours and queer doings of the place in very lively colours. That the ubiquitous Roman was here, knew all about the warm medicinal springs, left marble bath pavements and leaden pipes to attest his presence, and fortified the so-called Castellum Thermarum on the height where some rude Helvetian fortress had already stood in the dim ages, all this the gentle reader will probably be willing to accept on my bare word. Tacitus, in speaking of the difficulty of defending the Castellum Thermarum against Cæcina, uses the phrase "dilapsis vetustate manibus;" so that even in classic days the castle-commonly called throughout the middle ages der Stein von Baden, or Stone of Baden,could boast of a respectable antiquity, and had its " 'good old times" behind it. After the fall of the Roman power came the turn of Alemanni, and Franks, and Burgundians, and a long et cætera of barbarous, semi-barbarous, and-to borrow a phrase from the music-bookdemi-semi-barbarous tribes, all fighting, and struggling, and plundering, and burning, tramping, in a fierce and breathless fashion, along their allotted course through the ages, and all to be but dimly descried by the keenest-eyed historian through a great cloud of dust and smoke, and the twilight of so distant a past. When Charlemagne's mighty empire was broken up after his death, Baden came to be a part of Germany under the Römisches Reich; and it was known in the tenth century as "The Bath of the Three Kings, in Upper Swabia, by Switzerland." Then, through various vicissitudes, it fell to the house of Habsburg, whose original Stamm-Schloss, the cradle of the race, stands in ruins on a hill but a few miles away, above Schinznach, to this day. The Stein von Baden brought nothing but ill fortune to the Habsburgers. By a singular fatality three members of that house sallied forth from the old castle to meet death or defeat, on three different occasions. Duke Albert, of Austria, who succeeded King Adolph as Roman Reichskönig, passed the last night of his life here. On the next morning, that of the 1st of May, 1308, he was murdered by his nephew Johann, and being left dying by the roadside, is said to have had his wounds staunched by a poor peasant woman, in whose charitable arms he breathed his last. The legend has often been illustrated by pen and pencil. Again, Duke Leopold, of Austria, held a council of war in the castle of Baden, wherein it was resolved to attack the rebellious Swiss,-in revolt against the house of Austria,-on two sides, and the proud duke caused cords and ropes to be provided to bind and hang the insolent peasants, whom he made very sure of overcoming. He set forth, with a brilliant train of nobles and an army of nine thousand men, full of arrogant confidence, to chastise these common folks. But the common folks held their ground in a rather unexpected fashion; and in the memorable battle of Morgarten (1315), achieved so complete and glorious a victory over their high-horn assailants, that Duke Leopold, who barely escaped with his life from the field, was compelled a year afterwards to make peace with them. Yet once again: another Duke Leopold, nephew of the preceding one, and great-grandson of King Albert, held, in the year 1386, another great council of war, in the grim old fortress; the result of which was that he, with the flower of his knighthood, was overthrown and slain at the battle of Sempach, wherein Arnold von Windelried made himself a name immortal in Swiss story. So singular a series of disasters might surely have justified a superstitious 'belief on the part of the Habsburgers, that the Stein von Baden was a spot fatal to their race. All through the stormy fifteenth century there were feuds and fights in, and about, Baden in Aargau; and yet, strange as it may seem, the brief intervals of peace were filled up with a life of jollity, revelry, and merry-making, of which an eye-witness has left us a lively picture, in a letter written from the baths in the year 1417. As a Swiss writer at the beginning of the present century naïvely observes, "It is hard to believe that in such unquiet times the most unbridled enjoyment reigned on the very spot where but a short time previous war had been raging; yet Poggio, who was in Baden two years after the conquest" (he alludes to the conquest of Baden by Berne on behalf of the Swiss Confederation in 1415), "has shown us sufficiently what drinking, singing, and lovemaking went on here in those days." The Poggio above mentioned is no other than the Florentine Giovanni Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, the celebrated savant and restorer of letters in the fifteenth century. He was born in Tuscany in 1380, and died Chancellor of the Florentine Republic in 1459, at the ripe age of seventy-nine. He had been Secretary to three Popes; and it was in the suite of his Holiness Pope John the Twenty-third, that he visited Constance during the Council of 1414, and thence found his way to Baden. The letter in question is addressed to his brother savant Niccolo Nicoli; and exists in Poggio Bracciolini's printed works. The learned gentleman, albeit a frequenter of Popes, and therefore, one might suppose, subject to edifying influences, had, alas! but too clearly failed to profit by such advantages if they came in his way; for the character of much of his writing is distinctly immoral, and warns us not to place too implicit faith in his rather highly coloured descriptions of certain phases of Baden life. It would, indeed, be a curious, and not uninstructive, study of national character, were we able so to analyse the narrative of Poggio Bracciolini as to detect where, and to what extent, it deviates from the simple truth, by reason of the narrator's Italian tone of mind and habits of thought. Nevertheless, the old Florentine's letter is full of quaint and interesting traits of manners, whose genuineness cannot be doubted. And probably those cases wherein he distorts the truth are all due rather to mistaken inferences from the facts observed, than to wilful mis-statements of the facts themselves; and the inferences are such as were in all likelihood considered very natural and self-evident by his Florentine acquaintances. in the year of grace one thousand four hundred and seventeen! He begins his epistle to Nicoli thus: "I write thee this letter from the baths here, whither I have been driven by gout in the hands; and I deem that the place merits a description, not only for its situation and pleasantness, but for the customs of the guests who sojourn here, and their manner of taking the baths." After a discursive comparison of these baths with those of Puteoli, "to which nearly all Rome was wont to resort for pleasure," and a declaration that, except on the score of natural beauty, Baden is greatly to be preferred to Puteoli, and indeed may be said to rival Cypria (!) in its manifold and seductive attractions, Bracciolini proceeds to give some account of his journey from Constance. He came down the Rhine in a boat as far as Schaffhausen, and thence "by reason of the great fall which the river makes at that place," went about a mile and a half on foot to Kaiserstuhl. The learned traveller here remarks that, on approaching the Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, he was reminded of what is told respecting the cataracts of the Nile: namely, that the great roar and din of the waters causes the inhabitants on the banks to become deaf. It is worthy of note that no earlier mention of the Falls of the Rhine is known than this of the Florentine writer. "At last," says he, "we reached Baden, a sufficiently prosperous town situated in a valley surrounded and shut in by mountains, and on the banks of a green and swift running river, which falls into the Rhine about a mile and a half below the town." This statement is not literally accurate, inasmuch as the river Limmat on which Baden is situated, falls into the Aar, the Aar into the Reuss, and the Reuss into the Rhine. He proceeds: "At about a quarter of an hour's journey from the town, and close down beside the river, there is a great open space surrounded by splendid inns, able to receive a large number of guests, and here are the baths. Each inn has its own bath, which is used only by those who are lodged in the house. The total number of private and public baths amounts to about thirty. For the lowest class of the people, there exist two spacious baths open on all sides, wherein men, women, youths and maidens, in a word the whole of the populace which congregates here, bathe all together. . . . I have often diverted myself with this spectacle, and have at the same time wondered in my own mind at the simplicity of these good people, who neither trouble themselves to turn their eyes upon it, nor speak nor think the least evil on the subject. As to the private baths within the hostelries, they are very handsomely decorated, and are common to both sexes. There is, to be sure, a dividing panel between the men and the women; but it is pierced by several windows with flaps to let down, and the two parties can drink and talk together and not only see, but touch each other. Moreover, there are upper galleries where men assemble to chat and watch the bathers. It is free also to every one to pay a visit to his neighbours' baths. . . . Very often they feast in the bath itself on various dishes contributed by all the members of the company, and placed on a floating table. Ladies and gentlemen eat together. In the house where I bathed I was one day invited to such a banquet. I contributed my share to it, but did not go myself, albeit warmly pressed to do so; and this not out of shyness,"-an almost superfluous assurance, oh erudite and epicurean Poggio Bracciolini !" which is looked on here as rustic ignorance, but because I did not understand their language. For it appeared to me but a dull business that an Italian, ignorant of the German tongue, should pass a whole day in the bath merely eating and drinking, and remaining dumb and speechless in the midst of a company of fair women. Two of my friends, however, did go. They ate and drank and frolicked, conversed by means of an interpreter, fanned the ladies, and, in a word, enjoyed themselves mightily. They wore linen garments, such as the men put on here when they are invited into the ladies' baths. I looked on from the gallery and saw everything: the manners and customs of these good people, their good eating, and their agreeable, unconstrained behaviour. Wonderful it is to see with what innocent-mindedness they live, and with what easy confidence the men behold strangers in familiar conversation with their wives! Nothing gives them uneasiness; they put the best construction on all things, or rather they take no notice at all. There is nothing so grave but the customs of these worthy folks make it appear light as a feather. . . . "Some of these baths, as I have said already, are used in common by men and women if they belong to the same family, or are united by ties of friendship. Many a one will visit three or four such baths daily, and pass the greater part of his time in them with singing, drinking, andafter the bath-dancing. Even in the water some set themselves to playing instruments. Nothing can be more enchanting to see and to hear than when blooming young maidens in the full freshness of their beauty sing to the accompaniment of these instruments, with fair, open countenances, goddess-like in form and motion, their light draperies floating on the water, and each one appearing like a new Venus. They have, too, a charling custom, when they see gentlemen watching them from the chiefly gas, of playfully begging an alms of them. Then the men throw in their hands, or with their outspread linen garments, whilst each catch struggles to the prettier among the girls, small coins which they throw down to them wreaths woven of all manner of flowers, with which they adorn their heads." 66 All these proceedings had so great a charm for Poggio Bracciolini, and, to use his own phrase, so enlivened his spirits," that notwithstanding he himself bathed twice daily, he employed almost all the rest of his time in paying visits from bath to bath and in showering down wreaths and small coins on the frolicksome nymphs, like the rest of the world. "For," says he, "amidst this continual noise, of talking and singing, there is no time for reading, nor even for thinking. And to attempt being the only wise man here would have been the height of folly; especially for one who is no self-tormenting ascetic, and who deems nothing human alien to himself." A little further on, he has a passage which is worth transcribing as the account by an eye-witness of a diversion in vogue at a fashionable watering-place four centuries and a half ago. "Besides these amusements," (the bathing, singing, fiddling, talking, flower-throwing, eating and drinking, aforesaid), "there is yet another of no little charm. Behind the hostelries, and close to the borders of the river, there lies a great meadow shaded by many trees. Here, after dinner, all the guests assemble and enjoy themselves with song and dance and divers games. Most of them play at ball; not, however, after our fashion, but thus: there is a ball with little bells inside it, and this is thrown by a lady or gentleman to the person he or she likes best. All run after the ball, for whoever catches it has won, and throws it in his turn to the object of his preference. Everybody stands with outstretched hands ready to seize it, and he who holds it, makes as though he would throw it first to one person and then to another. I must pass over a thousand other pleasant diversions, for the sake of brevity, and have only given thee a little sample of one or two, in order that thou mightest have some conception what a great company of Epicureans we are here. . . . Innumerable, moreover, is the crowd of noble and plebeian folks who come hither from a distance of a hundred miles, not so much for the cure, as for pleasure. Many make a pretext of bodily ailments who are only sick in mind. You see many handsome women arrive here without their husbands, without relatives, and only escorted by a couple of maids and a man servant; or else by some old frump of an aunt, who is more easily to be deceived than bribed." (This observation is characteristic, and marks a state of things precisely contrary to that which Poggio had been accustomed to on the other side of the Alps). "Each one adorns herself as far as may be with gold, silver, and precious stones; so that one might suppose they had come, not to take the baths, but to some splendid nuptials. Even nuns |