Chapter VII: Part 7

The instinct which impels friends and servants to fly from sinking fortunes is a well-established fact in human natural history; but Fouquet's hold upon his followers was extraordinary: it resisted the shock of ruin. They risked court-favor, purse, and person, to help him. Gourville, before he thought of his own safety, carried a hundred thousand livres to Madame Fouquet, to be used in defending the Surintendant, or in bribing a judge or a jailer. The rest of his property he divided, intrusting one half to a devout friend, the other to a sinful beauty, Ninon de l'Enclos, and fled the country. The "professor" absorbed all that was left in his hands; Ninon returned her trust intact. This little incident was made much use of at a later day by the _Philosophes_, and Voltaire worked it up into "Le Dépositaire." From the Bastille, Pellisson addressed to the King three papers in defence of his chief: "masterpieces of prose, worthy of Cicero," Voltaire says,--"_ce que l'éloquence a produit de plus beau_." And Sainte-Beuve thinks that Louis must have yielded to them, if he had heard them spoken, instead of reading them in his closet. The faithful La Fontaine fearlessly sang the sorrows of his patron, and accustomed "_chacun à plaindre ses malheurs_." He begged to the King for mercy, in an ode full of feeling, if not of poetry. "Has not Oronte been sufficiently punished by the withdrawal of thy favor? Attack Rome, Vienna, but be merciful to us. _La Clémence est fille des Dieux_." A copy of this ode found its way to the prisoner. He protested against these lines:--

"Mais, si tu crois qu'il est coupable,
Il ne veut point être innocent."

Two years of prison had not broken him down to this point of self-abasement. Could any Sultan, or even the "Oriental Despot" of a radical penny-a-liner, be implored in more abject terms? Madame de Sévigné, Madame de Scudéry, Le Fèvre, talked, wrote, and spared no expense for their dear friend. Brébeuf, the poet, who had neither influence nor money, took to his bed and died of grief. Hesnault, author of the "Avorton," a sonnet much admired in those days, and translated with approval into English verse, as,

"Frail spawn of nought and of existence mixed,"

eased his feelings by insulting Colbert in another sonnet, beginning thus:--

"Ministre avare et lâche, esclave malheureux."

The poet escaped unpunished. His affront gave Colbert the chance for a _mot_,--an opportunity which Frenchmen seldom throw away. When the injurious verses were reported to the Minister, he asked,--"Is there anything in them offensive to the King?" "No." "Then there can be nothing in them offensive to me." Loret, of the Gazette, was not so lucky. A gentle appeal in his journal for less severity was punished by striking the editor from the pension-list,--a fine of fifteen hundred livres a year. Fouquet heard of it, and found means to send, by the hands of Madame Scudéry, a year's allowance to the faithful newsman.

The Government was not ready to proceed to trial until 1664. For three years the sharpest lawyers in France had been working on the Act of Accusation. It was very large even for its age. The accompanying _Pièces_ were unusually voluminous. The accused had not been idle. His _Défenses_ may be seen in fourteen closely printed Elzevir 18mos.

The unabated rigor of Fouquet's prison had convinced his friends that it was useless to hope for clemency, and that it might be difficult to save his life. The King was as malignant as at first; Colbert and Le Tellier as venomous, as if it had been a question of Fouquet's head or their own. They talked about justice, affected moderation, and deceived nobody. Marshal Turenne, speaking of their respective feelings in the matter, said a thing which was considered good by the _bel-esprits_:--"I think that Colbert is the more anxious to have him hanged, and Le Tellier the more afraid he will not be."

But meantime the Parisians had changed their minds about the Surintendant. Now, they were all for him. His friends had done much to bring this about; time, and the usual reaction of feeling, had done more. His haughtiness and his pomp were gone and forgotten; there remained only an unfortunate gentleman, crushed, imprisoned, threatened with death, attacked by his enemies with a bitterness which showed they were seeking to destroy the man rather than to punish the criminal,--yet bearing up against his unexampled afflictions with unshaken courage. The great Public has strong levelling propensities, both upward and downward. If it delights to see the prosperous humbled, it is always ready to pity the unfortunate; and even in 1664 the popular feeling in Paris was powerful enough to check the ministers of an absolute king, and to save Fouquet's life. His persecutors were so eager to run down their prey that they overran it "In their anxiety to hang him," some one said, "they have made their rope so thick that they cannot tighten it about his neck."

In November, 1664, Fouquet was brought before a commission of twenty-two judges, selected from the different Parliaments of the kingdom. After protesting against the jurisdiction of the court, he took his seat upon the _sellette_, although a chair had been prepared for him beside it. The interrogatories commenced. There were two principal charges against him. First, diversion of the public funds to his own use,--embezzlement or defalcation we should call it. Proof: his great expenditure, too large for any private fortune. Answer: that his expenses were within the income he derived from his salaries, pensions, and the property of himself and wife. He was questioned closely upon his administration of the finances. He was invariably self-possessed and ready with an answer, and he eluded satisfactorily every attempt of the judges to entrap him, although, as one of his best friends confessed, "some places were very slippery." The second charge, treason against the State, was based upon a paper addressed to his wife, and found in his desk. Fifteen years before, after a quarrel with Mazarin, he had drawn up a plan of the measures to be taken by his family and adherents in case of an attack upon his life or liberty. It was a mere rough draught, incomplete, which had remained unburned because forgotten. The fortifications of Belleîle and the number of his retainers were brought up as evidence of his intention to carry out the "_projet_," as it was called, if it became necessary. Fouquet's explanations, and the date of the paper, were satisfactory to the majority of the Commission. At last even the Chancellor admitted that the proof was insufficient to sustain this part of the accusation. Fouquet's answer to Séguier, during the examination on the "_projet_," was much admired, and repeated out-of-doors. Séguier asserted more than once, "This is clearly treason." "No," retorted Fouquet, "it is not treason; but I will tell you what is treason. To hold high office, to be in the confidence of the King; then suddenly to desert to the enemies of that King, to carry over relatives, with the regiments and the fortresses under their command, and to betray the secrets of State: that is treason." And that was exactly what Chancellor Séguier had done in the Fronde.

In French criminal jurisprudence, the theory seems to be that the accused is guilty until he has proved his innocence, and those conversant with French trials need not be told that the judges assist the public prosecutor. In this case, they sought by cross-examinations to confuse Fouquet, and to entrap him into dangerous admissions. Séguier sternly repressed any leanings in his favor; he even reproved some of the judges for returning the salutation of the prisoner, as he entered the court-room.

The trial lasted five weeks. All Paris looked on absorbed, as at a drama of the most exciting interest. Fouquet never appeared so admirable as then, at bay, firmly facing king, ministers, judges, eager for his blood, excited by the ardor of pursuit, and embittered by the roar of applause with which his masterly defence was received out-of-doors. Even those who knew the Surintendant best were astonished at his courage and his presence of mind. He seemed greater in his adversity than in his magnificence. Some of the judges began to waver. Renard, J., said,--"I must confess that this man is incomparable. He never spoke so well when he was _Procureur_; he never showed so much self-possession." Another, one Nesmond, died during the trial, and regretted openly on his death-bed that he had lent himself to this persecution. The King ordered that this dying speech and confession should not be repeated, but it circulated only the more widely.

"No public man," Voltaire says, "ever had so many personal friends"; and no friends were ever more faithful and energetic. They repeated his happy answers in all quarters, praised his behavior, pitied his sufferings, and reviled and ridiculed his enemies. They managed to meet him, as he walked to and from the Arsenal, where the Commission sat, and cheered him with kind looks. Madame de Sévigné tells us how she and other ladies of the same faith took post at a window to see "_notre pauvre ami_" go by. "M. d'Artagnau walked by his side, followed by a guard of fifty _mousquetaires_. He seemed sad. D'Artagnau touched him to let him know that we were there. He saluted us with that quiet smile we all knew so well." She says that her heart beat and her knees trembled. The lively lady was still grateful for that compliment.

The animosity which the King did not conceal made an acquittal almost hopeless, but great efforts were made to save the life of the Surintendant. Money was used skilfully and abundantly. Several judges yielded to the force of this argument; others were known to incline to mercy. Fouquet himself thought the result doubtful. He begged his friends to let him know the verdict by signal, that he might have half an hour to prepare himself to receive his sentence with firmness.

The Commission deliberated for one week,--an anxious period for Fouquet's friends, who trembled lest they had not secured judges enough to resist the pressure from above. At last the court was reopened. D'Ormesson, a man of excellent family and social position, who had favored the accused throughout the trial, delivered his opinion at length. He concluded for banishment. The next judge voted for decapitation, but with a recommendation to mercy. Next, one Pussort, a malignant tool of the Chancellor, inveighed against Fouquet for four hours, so violently that he injured his case. His voice was for the gallows,--but, in consideration of the criminal's rank, he would consent to commute the cord for the axe. After him, four voted for death; then, five for banishment. Six to six. Anxiety had now reached a distressing point. The Chancellor stormed and threatened; but in vain. On the twenty-fifth of December the result was known. Nine for death, thirteen for banishment. Saved! "I am so glad," Sévigné wrote to Simon Arnauld, "that I am beside myself." She exulted too soon. The King was not to be balked of his vengeance. He refused to abide by the verdict of the Commission he himself had packed, and arbitrarily changed the decree of banishment to imprisonment for life in the Castle of Pignerol,--to solitary confinement,--wife, family, friends, not to be permitted to see the prisoner, or to write to him; even his valet was taken away.

Thus the magnificent Surintendant disappeared from the world forever,--buried alive, but indomitable and cheerful. His last message to his wife was, "I am well. Keep up your courage; I have enough for myself, and to spare."

"We still hope for some relaxation," Sévigné writes again; but none ever came from the narrow-hearted, vindictive King. He exiled Roquesante, the judge who had shown the most kindness to Fouquet, and turned an _Avocat-Général_ out of office for saying that Pussort was a disgrace to the Parliament he belonged to. Madame Fouquet, the mother, famous for her book of prescriptions, "Recueil de Recettes Choisies," who had cured, or was supposed to have cured, the Queen by a plaster of her composition, threw herself at the King's feet, with her son's wife and children. Their prayer was coldly refused, and they soon received an order to reside in remote parts of France. Time seemed to have no mollifying effect upon the animosity of the King. Six years later, a young man who attempted to carry a letter from Fouquet to his wife was sent to the galleys; and in 1676, fifteen years after the arrest, Madame de Montespan had not influence enough to obtain permission for Madame Fouquet and her children to visit the prisoner.

This cruel and illegal punishment lasted for twenty years, until an attack of apoplexy placed the Surintendant beyond the reach of his torturer. So lost had he been in his living tomb, that it is a debated point whether he died in Piguerol or not. He has even been one of the candidates for the mysterious dignity of the Iron Mask. In his dungeon he could learn nothing of what was passing in the world. Lauzun, whose every-day life seemed more unreal and romantic than the dreams of ordinary men, was confined in Pignerol. Active and daring as Jack Sheppard, he dug through the wall of his cell, and discovered that his next neighbor was Fouquet. When he told his fellow-prisoner of his adventures and of his honors, how he had lost the place of Grand Master of the Artillery through Louvois, and had only missed being the acknowledged husband of the grand-daughter of Henry IV. because Madame de Montespan persuaded the King to withdraw his consent, Fouquet, who recollected him as a poor _cadet de famille_, thought him crazy, and begged the jailer to have him watched and properly cared for.

The Surintendant had twice wounded the vanity of his King. He had presumed to have a more beautiful _château_ than his master, and had unluckily fancied the same woman. Louis revenged himself by burying his rival alive for twenty years. That Fouquet had plotted rebellion nobody believed. He was too wise a politician not to know that the French were weary of civil war and could not be tempted to exchange one master for half a dozen military tyrants. That he had taken the public money for his own use was not denied, even by his friends; and banishment would have been a just punishment, although, perhaps, a harsh one. For it is hardly fair to judge Fouquet by our modern standard of financial honesty, low as that may be. We, at least, try to cover up jobs, contracts, and defalcations by professions or appearances. The difficulty of raising money for the expenses of Government in a state impoverished by years of internal commotions had accustomed public men to strange and irregular expedients, and unscrupulous financiers catch fine fish in troubled waters. Mazarin openly put thousands of livres into his pocket; the Surintendant imitated him on a smaller scale. But, if he paid himself liberally for his services, he also showed energy and skill in his attempts to restore order and economy in the administration of the revenue. After his disgrace money was not much more plenty. France, it is true, tranquil and secure within her borders, again showed signs of wealth, and was able to pay heavier taxes; but the King wasted them on his wars, his _châteaux_, and his mistresses, as recklessly as the Surintendant. He had no misgivings as to his right to spend the people's money. From his principle, "_L'État, c'est moi_," followed the corollary, "The income of the State is mine." From 1664 to 1690 one hundred and sixteen millions of livres were laid out in unnecessary _hôtels, châteaux_, and gardens. His ministers imitated him at a humble distance. Louvois boasted that he had reached his fourteenth million at Meudon. "I like," said Louis, "to have those who manage my affairs skilfully do a good business for themselves."

Before many years had passed, it was evident that Colbert, with all his energy and his systems, did not make both the financial ends meet any better than the Surintendant. A merchant of Paris, with whom he consulted, told him,--"You found the cart upset on one side, and you have upset it on the other." Colbert had tried to lighten it by striking eight millions of _rentes_ from the funded debt; but it was too deeply imbedded in the mire; the shoulder of Hercules at the wheel could not have extricated it. After Colbert was removed, times grew harder. Long before the King's death the financial distress was greater than in the wars and days of the Fronde. Every possible contrivance by which money could be raised was resorted to. Lotteries were drawn, tontines established, letters of nobility offered for sale at two thousand crowns each. Those who preferred official rank could buy the title of Councillor of State or of Commissioner of Police. New and profitable offices were created and disposed of to the highest bidder,--inspectorships of wood, of hay, of wine, of butter. Arbitrary power, no matter whether we call it sovereign prince or sovereign people, falls instinctively into the same ways in all times and countries. The Demos of a neighboring State, absolute and greedy as any monarch, have furnished us with plenty of examples of this last imposition upon industry. Zealous servants are rewarded and election-expenses paid by similar inspectorships and commissionerships, not only useless, but injurious, to every one except those who hold them.

When these resources became exhausted, a capitation-tax was laid, followed by an assessment of one tenth, and the adulteration of the currency. The King cut off the pension-list, sold his plate, and dismissed his servants. Misery and starvation laid waste the realm. At last, the pompous, "stagy" old monarch died, full of infirmities and of humiliations; and the road from the Boulevard to St. Denis was lined with booths as for a _fête_, and the people feasted, sang, and danced for joy that the tyrant was in his coffin. Time, the _galantuomo_, amply avenged Fouquet.

* * * * *

AMONG THE MORMONS.

The approach to Salt Lake City from the east is surprisingly harmonious with the genius of Mormonism. Nature, usually so unpliant to the spirit of people who live with her, showing a bleak and rugged face, which poetically should indicate the abode of savages and ogres, to Hans Christian Andersen and his hospitable countrymen, but lavishing the eternal summer of her tropic sea upon barbarians who eat baked enemy under her palms, or throw their babies to her crocodiles,--this stiff, unaccommodating Nature relents into a little expressiveness in the neighborhood of the Mormons, and you feel that the grim, tremendous _cañons_ through which your overland stage rolls down to the City of the Saints are strangely fit avenues to an anomalous civilization.

We speak of crossing the Rocky Mountains from Denver to Salt Lake; but, in reality, they reach all the way between those places. They are not a chain, as most Eastern people imagine them, but a giant ocean caught by petrifaction at the moment of maddest tempest. For six hundred miles the overland stage winds over, between, and around the tremendous billows, lying as much as may be in the trough, and reaching the crest at Bridger's Pass, (a sinuous gallery, walled by absolutely bare yellow mountains between two and three thousand feet in height at the road-side,) but never getting entirely out of the Rocky-Mountain system till it reaches the Desert beyond Salt Lake. Even there it runs constantly among mountains; in fact, it never loses sight of lofty ranges from the moment it makes Pike's Peak till its wheels (metaphorically) are washed by the Pacific Ocean; but the mountains of the Desert may legitimately set up for themselves, belonging, as I believe, to a system independent of the Rocky Mountains on the one side and the Sierra Nevada on the other. At a little _plateau_ among snowy ridges a few miles east of Bridger's Pass, the driver leans over and tells his insiders, in a matter-of-fact manner, through the window, that they have reached the summit-level. Then, if you have a particle of true cosmopolitanism in you, it is sure to come out. There is something indescribably sublime, a conception of universality, in that sense of standing on the water-shed of a hemisphere. You have reached the secret spot where the world clasps her girdle; your feet are on its granite buckle; perhaps there sparkles in your eyes that fairest gem of her cincture, a crystal fountain, from which her belt of rivers flows in two opposite ways. Yesterday you crossed the North Platte, almost at its source (for it rises out of the snow among the Wind-River Mountains, and out of your stage-windows you can see, from Laramie Plains, the Lander's Peak which Bierstadt has made immortal); that stream runs into the sea from whose historic shores you came; you might drop a waif upon its ripples with the hope of its reaching New Orleans, New York, Boston, or even Liverpool. To-morrow you will be ferried over Green River, as near its source,--a stream whose cradle is in the same snow-peaks as the Platte,--whose mysterious middle-life, under the new name of the Colorado, flows at the bottom of those tremendous fissures, three thousand feet deep, which have become the wonder of the geologist,--whose grave, when it has dribbled itself away into the dotage of shallows and quicksands, is the desert-margined Gulf of California and the Pacific Sea. Between Green River and the Mormon city no human interest divides your perpetually strained attention with Nature. Fort Bridger, a little over a day's stage-ride east of the city, is a large and quite a populous trading-post and garrison of the United States; but although we found there a number of agreeable officers, whose acquaintance with their wonderful surroundings was thorough and scientific, and though at that period the fort was a rendezvous for our only faithful friend among the Utah Indians, Washki, the Snake chief, and that handful of his tribe who still remained loyal to their really noble leader and our Government, Fort Bridger left the shadowiest of impressions on my mind, compared with the natural glories of the surrounding scenery.

Mormondom being my theme, and my space so limited, I must resist the temptation to give detailed accounts of the many marvellous masterpieces of mimetic art into which we find the rocks of this region everywhere carved by the hand of Nature. Before we came to the North Platte, we were astonished by a ship, equalling the Great Eastern in size, even surpassing it in beauty of outline, its masts of columnar sandstone snapped by a storm, its prodigious hulk laboring in a gloomy sea of hornblendic granite, its deck-houses, shapen with perfect accuracy of imitation, still remaining in their place, and a weird-looking demon at the wheel steering it on to some invisible destruction. This naval statue (if its bulk forbid not the name) was carved out of a coarse millstone-grit by the chisel of the wind, with but slight assistance from the infrequent rain-storms of this region. In Colorado I first began to perceive how vast an omission geologists had been guilty of in their failure to give the wind a place in the dynamics of their science. Depending for a year at a time, as that Territory sometimes does, upon dews and meltings from the snow-peaks for its water, it is nevertheless fuller than any other district in the world of marvellous architectural simulations, vast cemeteries crowded with monuments, obelisks, castles, fortresses, and natural colossi from two to five hundred feet high, done in argillaceous sandstone or a singular species of conglomerate, all of which owe their existence almost entirely to the agency of wind. The arid plains from which the conglomerate crops out rarefy the superincumbent air-stratum to such a degree that the intensely chilled layers resting on the closely adjoining snow-peaks pour down to reëstablish equilibrium, with the wrathful force of an invisible cataract, eight, ten, even seventeen thousand feet in height. These floods of cold wind find their appropriate channels in the characteristic _cañons_ which everywhere furrow the whole Rocky-Mountain system to its very base. Most of these are exceedingly tortuous, and the descending winds, during their passage through them, acquire a spiral motion as irresistible as the fiercest hurricane of the Antilles, which, moreover, they preserve for miles after they have issued from the mouth of the _cañon_. Every little cold gust that I observed in the Colorado country had this corkscrew character. The moment the spiral reaches a loose sand-bed, it sweeps into its vortex all the particles of grit which it can hold. The result is an auger, of diameter varying from an inch to a thousand feet, capable of altering its direction so as to bore curved holes, revolving with incalculable rapidity, and armed with a cutting edge of silex. Is it possible to conceive an instrument more powerful, more versatile? Indeed, practically, there is no description of surface, no kind of cut, which it is not capable of making. I have repeatedly seen it in operation. One day, while riding from Denver to Pike's Peak, I saw it (in this instance, one of the smaller diameters) burrow its way six or seven feet into a sand-bluff, making as smooth a hole as I could cut in cheese with a borer, of the equal diameter of six inches throughout, all in less time than I have taken to describe it. Repeatedly, on the same trip, I saw it gouge out a circular groove around portions of a similar bluff, and leave them standing as isolated columns, with heavy base and capital, presently to be solidified into just such rock pillars as throng the cemeteries or aid in composing the strange architectural piles mentioned above. Surveyor-General Pierce of Colorado, (a man whose fine scientific genius and culture have already done yeoman's service in the study of that most interesting Territory,) on a certain occasion, saw one of these wind-and-silex augers meet at right angles a window-pane in a settler's cabin, which came out from the process, after a few seconds, a perfect opaque shade, having been converted into ground-glass as neatly and evenly as could have been effected by the manufacturer's wheel. It is not a very rare thing in Colorado to be able to trace the spiral and measure the diameter of the auger by rocks of fifty pounds' weight and tree-trunks half as thick as an average man's waist, torn up from their sites, and sent revolving overhead for miles before the windy turbine loses its impetus. The efficiency of an instrument like this I need not dwell upon. After some protracted examination and study of many of the most interesting architectural and sculpturesque structures of the Rocky-Mountain system, I am convinced that they are mainly explicable on the hypothesis of the wind-and-silex instrument operating upon material in the earthy condition, which petrified after receiving its form. Indeed, this same instrument is at present nowise restricted by that condition in Colorado, and is not only, year by year, altering the conformation of all sand and clay bluff's on the Plains, but is tearing down, rebuilding, and fashioning on its facile lathe many rock-strata of the solidity of the more friable grits, wherever exposed to its action. Water at the East does hardly more than wind at the West.

Before we enter the City of the Saints, let me briefly describe the greatest, not merely of the architectural curiosities, but, in my opinion, the greatest natural curiosity of any kind which I have ever seen or heard of. Mind, too, that I remember Niagara, the Cedar-Creek Bridge, and the Mammoth Cave, when I speak thus of the _Church Buttes_.

They are situated a short distance from Fort Bridger; the overland road passes by their side. They consist of a sandstone bluff, reddish-brown in color, rising with the abruptness of a pile of masonry from the perfectly level plain, carved along its perpendicular face into a series of partially connected religious edifices, the most remarkable of which is a cathedral as colossal as St. Peter's, and completely relieved from the bluff on all sides save the rear, where a portico joins it with the main precipice. The perfect symmetry of this marvellous structure would ravish Michel Angelo. So far from requiring an effort of imagination to recognize the propriety of its name, this church almost staggers belief in the unassisted naturalness of its architecture. It belongs to a style entirely its own. Its main and lower portion is not divided into nave and transept, but seems like a system of huge semi-cylinders erected on their bases, and united with reëntrant angles, their convex surfaces toward us, so that the ground-plan might be called a species of quatre-foil. In each of the convex faces is an admirably proportioned door-way, a Gothic arch with deep-carved and elaborately fretted mouldings, so wonderfully perfect in its imitation that you almost feel like knocking for admittance, secure of an entrance, did you only know the "Open sesame." Between and behind the doors, alternating with flying-buttresses, are a series of deep-niched windows, set with grotesque statues, varying from the pigmy to the colossal size, representing demons rather than saints, though some of the figures are costumed in the style of religious art, with flowing sacerdotal garments.

The structure terminates above in a double dome, whose figure may be imagined by supposing a small acorn set on the truncated top of a large one, (the horizontal diameter of both being considerably longer in proportion to the perpendicular than is common with that fruit,) and each of these domes is surrounded by a row of prism-shaped pillars, half column, half buttress in their effect, somewhat similar to the exquisite columnar _entourage_ of the central cylinder of the leaning tower of Pisa. The result of this arrangement is an aërial, yet massive beauty, without parallel in the architecture of the world. I have not conveyed to any mind an idea of the grandeur of this pile, nor could I, even with the assistance of a diagram. I can only say that the Cathedral Buttes are a lesson for the architects of all Christendom,--a purely novel and original creation, of such marvellous beauty that Bierstadt and I simultaneously exclaimed,--"Oh that the master-builders of the world could come here even for a single day! The result would be an entirely new style of architecture,--an American school, as distinct from all the rest as the Ionic from the Gothic or Byzantine." If they could come, the art of building would have a regeneration. "Amazing" is the only word for this glorious work of Nature. I could have bowed down with awe and prayed at one of its vast, inimitable doorways, but that the mystery of its creation, and the grotesqueness of even its most glorious statues, made one half dread lest it were some temple built by demon-hands for the worship of the Lord of Hell, and sealed in the stone-dream of petrifaction, with its priests struck dumb within it, by the hand of God, to wait the judgment of Eblis and the earthquakes of the Last Day.

After leaving Church Buttes and passing Fort Bridger, our attention slept upon what it had seen until we entered the region of the _cañons_. These are defiles, channelled across the whole breadth of the Wahsatch Mountains almost to the level of their base, walled by precipices of red sandstone or sugar-loaf granite, compared with which the Palisades of the Hudson become insignificant as a garden-fence. The least poetical man who traverses these giant fissures cannot help feeling their fitness as the avenues to a paradoxical region, an anomalous civilization, and a people whose psychological problem is the most unsolvable of the nineteenth century. During the Mormon War, Brigham Young made some rude attempts at a fortification of the great Echo Cañon, half a day's journey from his city, and this work still remains intact. He need not have done it; a hundred men, ambushed among the ledges at the top of the cañon-walls, and well provided with loose rocks and Minié-rifles, could convert the defile into a new Thermopylae, without exposure to themselves. In an older and more superstitious age, the unassisted horrors of Nature herself would have repelled an invading host from the passage of this grizzly _cañon_, as the profane might have been driven from the galleries of Isis or Eleusis.

About forty miles from Salt Lake City we began to find Nature's barrenness succumbing to the truly marvellous industry of the Mormon people. To understand the exquisite beauty of simple green grass, you must travel through eight hundred miles of sage-brush and _grama_,--the former, the homely gray-leaved plant of our Eastern goose-stuffing, grown into a dwarf tree six feet high, with a twisted trunk sometimes as thick as a man's body; the latter, a stunted species of herbage, growing in ash-tinted spirals, only two inches from the ground, and giving the Plains an appearance of being matted with curled hair or gray corkscrews. Its other name is "buffalo-grass"; and in spite of its dinginess, with the assistance of the sage, converting all the Plains west of Fort Kearney into a model Quaker landscape, it is one of the most nutritious varieties of cattle-fodder, and for hundreds of miles the emigrant-drover's only dependence.

By incredible labor, bringing down rivulets from the snow-peaks of the Wahsatch range and distributing them over the levels by every ingenious device known to artificial irrigation, the Mormon farmers have converted the bottoms of the _cañons_ through which we approached Salt Lake into fertile fields and pasture-lands, whose emerald sweep soothed our eyes wearied with so many leagues of ashen monotony, as an old home-strain mollifies the ear irritated by the protracted rhythmic clash or the dull, steady buzz of iron machinery. Contrasting the Mormon settlements with their surrounding desolation, we could not wonder that their success has fortified this people in their delusion. The superficial student of rewards and punishments might well believe that none but God's chosen people could cause this horrible desert, after such triumphant fashion, to blossom like the rose.

The close observer soon notices a painful deficiency in these green and smiling Mormon settlements. Everything has been done for the farm,--nothing for the home. That blessed old Anglo-Saxon idea seems everywhere quite extinct. The fields are billowing over with dense, golden grain, the cattle are wallowing in emerald lakes of juicy grass, the barns are substantial, the family-windmill buzzes merrily on its well-oiled pivot, drawing water or grinding feed, the fruit-trees are thrifty,--but the house is desolate. Even where its owner is particularly well off, and its architecture somewhat more ambitious than the average, (though, as yet, this superiority is measured by little more than the difference between logs and clapboards,) there is still no air about it of being the abode of happy people, fond of each other, and longing after it in absence. It looks like a mere inclosure to eat and sleep in. Nobody seems to have taken any pride in it, to feel any ambition for it. Woman's tender little final touches, which make a dear refuge out of a mud-cabin, and without which palatial brownstone is only a home in the moulding-clay,--those dexterous ornamentations which make so little mean so much,--the brier-rose-slip by the doorstep, growing into the fragrant welcome of many Junes,--the trellised Madeira-vines,--the sunny spot of chrysanthemums, charming summer on to the very brink of frost,--all these things are utterly and everywhere lacking to the Mormon inclosure. Sometimes we passed a fence which guarded three houses instead of one. Abundant progeny played at their doors, or rolled in their yard, watched by several unkempt, bedraggled mothers owning a common husband,--and we could easily understand how neither of these should feel much interest in the looks of a demesne held by them in such unhappy partnership. The humblest New-England cottage has its climbing flowers at the door-post, or its garden-bed in front; but how quickly would these wither, if the neat, brisk house-mistress owned her husband in common with Mrs. Deacon Pratt next door!

The first Mormon household I ever visited belonged to a son of the famous Heber Kimball, Brigham Young's most devoted follower, and next to him in the Presidency. It was the last stage-station but one before we entered Salt Lake, situated at the bottom of a green valley in Parley's Cañon (named after the celebrated Elder, Parley Pratt); and as it looked like the residence of a well-to-do farmer, I went in, and asked for a bowl of bread and milk,--the greatest possible luxury after a life of bacon and salt-spring water, such as we had been leading in the mountains. A fine-looking, motherly woman, with a face full of character, gray-haired, and about sixty years old, rose promptly to grant my request, and while the horses were changing I had ample time to make the acquaintance of two pretty young girls, hardly over twenty, holding two infants, of ages not more than three months apart. Green as I was to saintly manners, I supposed that one of these two young mothers had run in from a neighbor's to compare babies with the mistress of the house, after our Eastern fashion, universal with the owners of juvenile phenomena. When the old lady came back with the bread and milk, and both of the young girls addressed her as "mother," I was emboldened to tell her that her daughters had a pretty pair of children.

"They _are_ pretty," said the old lady, demurely; "but they are the children of my son"; then, as if resolved to duck a Gentile head and heels into Mormon realities at once, she added,--"Those young ladies are the wives of my son, who is now gone on a mission to Liverpool,--young Mr. Kimball, the son of Heber Kimball; and I am Heber Kimball's wife."

A cosmopolitan, especially one knowing beforehand that Utah was not distinguished for monogamy, might well be ashamed to be so taken off his feet as I was by my first view of Mormonism in its practical workings. I stared,--I believe I blushed a little,--I tried to stutter a reply; and the one dreadful thought which persistently kept uppermost, so that I felt they must read it in my face, was, "How _can_ these young women sit looking at each other's babies without flying into each other's faces with their fingernails, and tearing out each other's hair?" Heber Kimball afterwards solved the question for me, by saying that it was a triumph of grace.

Such another triumph was Mrs. Heber Kimball herself. She was a woman of remarkable presence, in youth must have been very handsome, would have been the oracle of tea-fights, the ruling spirit of donation-visits, in any Eastern village where she might have lived, and, had her home been New York, would have fallen by her own gravity into the Chief Directress's chair of half a dozen Woman's Aid Societies and Associations for Moral Reform. Yet here was this strong-minded woman, as her husband afterward acknowledged to me, his best counsellor and right-hand helper through a married life reaching into middle-age, witnessing her property in that husband's affections subdivided and parcelled out until she owned but a one-thirtieth share, not only without a pang, but with the acquiescence of her conscience and the approbation of her intellect. Though few first wives in Utah had learned to look concubinage in the face so late in life as this emphatic and vigorous-natured woman, I certainly met none whose partisanship of polygamy was so unquestioning and eloquent. She was one of the strangest psychological problems I ever met. Indeed, I am half inclined to think that she embraced Mormonism earlier than her husband, and, by taking the initiative, secured for herself the only true wifely place in the harem,--the marital after-thoughts of Brother Heber being her servants rather than her sisters. She was most unmistakably his favorite.

One day in the Opera-House at Salt Lake, when the carpenters were laying the floor for the Fourth-of-July-Eve Ball, Heber and I got talking of the _pot-pourri_ of nationalities assembled in Utah. Heber waxed unctuously benevolent, and expressed his affection for each succeeding race as fast as mentioned.

"I love the Danes dearly! I've got a Danish wife." Then turning to a rough-looking carpenter, hammering near him,--"You know Christiny,--eh, Brother Spudge?"

"Oh, yes! know her very well!"

A moment after,--"The Irish are a dear people. My Irish wife is among the best I've got."

Again,--"I love the Germans! Got a Dutch wife, too! Know Katrine, Brother Spudge? Remember she couldn't scarcely talk a word o' English when she come,--eh, Brother Spudge?"

Brother Spudge remembered,--and Brother Heber continued to trot out the members of his marital stud for discussion of their points with his more humble fellow-polygamist of the hammer; but when I happened to touch upon the earliest Mrs. Heber, whom I naturally thought he would by this time regard as a forgotten fossil in the Lower Silurian strata of his connubial life, and referred to the interview I had enjoyed with her on the afternoon before entering the city, his whole manner changed to a proper husbandly dignity, and, without seeking corroboration from the carpenter, be replied, gravely,--

"Yes! that is my first wife, and the best woman God ever made!"

The ball to which I have referred was such an opportunity for studying Mormon sociology as three months' ordinary stay in Salt Lake might not have given me. Though Mormondom is disloyal to the core, it still patronizes the Fourth of July, at least in its phase of festivity, omitting the patriotism, but keeping the fireworks of our Eastern celebration, substituting "Utah" for "Union" in the Buncombe speeches, and having a ball instead of the Declaration of Independence. All the saints within half a day's ride of the city come flocking into it to spend the Fourth. A well-to-do Mormon at the head of his wives and children, all of whom are probably eating candy as they march through the metropolitan streets in solid column, looks to the uninitiated like the principal of a female seminary, weak in its deportment, taking out his charge for an airing.

Last Fourth of July, it may be remembered, fell on a Saturday. In their ambition to reproduce ancient Judaism (and this ambition is the key to their whole puzzle) the Mormons are Sabbatarians of a strictness which would delight Lord Shaftesbury. Accordingly, in order that their festivities might not encroach on the early hours of the Sabbath, they had the ball on Fourth-of-July eve, instead of the night of the Fourth. I could not realize the risk of such an encroachment when I read the following sentence printed on my billet of invitation:--

"_Dancing to commence at_ 4 P.M."

Bierstadt, myself, and three gentlemen of our party were the only Gentiles whom I found invited by President Young to meet in the neighborhood of three thousand saints. Under these circumstances I felt like the three-thousandth homoeopathic dilution of monogamy. Morality in this world is so mainly a matter of convention that I dreaded to appear in decent polygamic society, lest respectable women, owning their orthodox tenth of a husband, should shrink from the pollution of my presence, whispering, with a shudder, "Ugh! Well, I never! How that one-wifed reprobate can dare to show his face!" But they were very polite, and received me with as skilfully veiled disapprobation as is shown by fashionable Eastern belies to brilliant seducers immoral in _our_ sense. Had I been a woman, I suppose there would have been no mercy for me.

I sought out our entertainer, Brigham Young, to thank him for the flattering exception made in our Gentile favor. He was standing in the dress-circle of the theatre, looking down on the dancers with an air of mingled hearty kindness and feudal ownership. I could excuse the latter, for Utah belongs to him of right. He may justly say of it, "Is not this great Babylon which I have built?" His sole executive tact and personal fascination are the key-stone of the entire arch of Mormon society. While he remains, eighty thousand (and increasing) of the most heterogeneous souls that could be swept together from the by-ways of Christendom will continue builded up into a coherent nationality. The instant he crumbles, Mormondom and Mormonism will fall to pieces at once, irreparably. His individual magnetism, his executive tact, his native benevolence, are all immense; I regard him as Louis Napoleon, _plus_ a heart; but these advantages would avail him little with the dead-in-earnest fanatics who rule Utah under him, and the entirely persuaded fanatics whom they rule, were not his qualities all coordinated in this one,--_absolute sincerity of belief and motive_. Brigham Young is the farthest remove on earth from a hypocrite; he is that grand, yet awful sight in human nature, a man who has brought the loftiest Christian self-devotion to the altar of the Devil,--who is ready to suffer crucifixion for Barabbas, supposing him Christ. Be sure, that, were he a hypocrite, the Union would have nothing to fear from Utah. When he dies, at least four hostile factions, which find their only common ground in deification of his person, will snatch his mantle at opposite corners. Then will come such a rending as the world has not seen since the Macedonian generals fought over the coffin of Alexander,--and then Mormonism will go out of Geography into the History of Popular Delusions. There is not a single chief, apostle, or bishop, except Brigham, who possesses any catholicity of influence. I found this tacitly acknowledged in every quarter. The people seem like citizens of a beleaguered town, who know they have but a definite amount of bread, yet have made up their minds to act while it lasts as if there were no such thing as starvation. The greatest comfort you can afford a Mormon is to tell him how young Brigham looks; for the quick, unconscious sequence is, "Then Brigham may last out my time." Those who think at all have no conjecture of any Mormon future beyond him, and I know that many Mormons (Heber Kimball included) would gladly die to-day rather than survive him and encounter that judgment-day and final perdition of their faith which must dawn on his new-made grave.

Well, we may give them this comfort without any insincerity. Let us return to where he stands gazing down on the _parquet_. Like any Eastern party-goer, he is habited in the "customary suit of solemn black," and looks very distinguished in this dress, though his daily homespun detracts nothing from the feeling, when in his presence, that you are beholding a most remarkable man. He is nearly seventy years old, but appears very little over forty. His height is about five feet ten inches; his figure very well made and slightly inclining to portliness. His hair is a rich curly chestnut, formerly worn long, in supposed imitation of the apostolic coiffure, but now cut in our practical Eastern fashion, as accords with the man of business, whose _métier_ he has added to apostleship with the growing temporal prosperity of Zion. Indeed, he is the greatest business-man on the continent,--the cashier of a firm of eighty thousand silent partners, and the only auditor of that cashier, besides. If I to-day signified my conversion to Mormonism, to-morrow I should be baptized by Brigham's hands. The next day I should be invited to appear at the Church-Office (Brigham's) and exhibit to the Church (Brigham) a faithful inventory of my entire estate. I am a cabinet-maker, let us say, and have brought to Salt Lake the entire earnings of my New-York shop,--twenty thousand dollars. The Church (Brigham sole and simple) examines and approves my inventory. It (Brigham alone) has the absolute decision of the question whether any more cabinet-makers are needed in Utah. If the Church (Brigham) says, "No," it (Brigham again) has the right to tell me where labor is wanted, and set me going in my new occupation. If the Church (Brigham) says, "Yes," it further goes on to inform me, without appeal, exactly what proportion of the twenty thousand dollars on my inventory can be properly turned into the channels of the new cabinet-shop. I am making no extraordinary or disproportionate supposition when I say that the Church (Brigham) permits me to retain just one-half of my property. The remaining ten thousand dollars goes into the Church-Fund, (Brigham's Herring-safe,) and from that portion of my life's savings I never hear again, in the form either of capital, interest, bequeathable estate, or dower to my widow. Except for the purposes of the Church, (Brigham's unquestionable will,) my ten thousand dollars is as though it had not been. I am a sincere believer, however, and go home light-hearted, with a certified check written by the Recording Angel on my conscience for that amount, passed to my credit in the bank where thieves break not through nor steal,--it being no more accessible to them than to the depositor, which is a comfort to the latter. The first year I net from my chairs and tables two thousand dollars. The Church (Brigham) sends me another invitation to visit it, make a solemn averment of the sum, and pay over to that ecclesiastical edifice, the Herring-safe, two hundred dollars. Or suppose I have not sold any of my wares as yet, but have only imported, to be sold by-and-by, five hundred Boston rockers. On learning this fact, the Church (Brigham) graciously accepts fifty for its own purposes.--Being founded upon a rock, it does not care, in its collective capacity, to sit upon rockers, but has an immense series of warehouses, omnivorous and eupeptic, which swallow all manner of tithes, from grain and horseshoes to the less stable commodities of fresh fish and melons, assimilating them by admirable processes into coin of the realm. These warehouses are in the Church (Brigham's own private) inclosure.--If success in my cabinet-making has moved me to give a feast, and I thereat drink more healths than are consistent with my own, the Church surely knows that fact the very next day; and as Utah recognizes no impunitive "getting drunk in the bosom of one's family," I am again sent for, on this occasion to pay a fine, probably exceeding the expenses of my feast. A second offence is punished with imprisonment as well as fine; for no imprisonment avoids fine,--this comes in every case. The hand of the Church holds the souls of the saints by inevitable purse-strings. But I cannot waste time by enumerating the multitudinous lapses and offences which all bring revenue to the Herring-safe.

Over all these matters Brigham Young has supreme control. His power is the most despotic known to mankind. Here, by the way, is the constitutionally vulnerable point of Mormonism. If fear of establishing a bad precedent hinder the United States at any time from breaking up that nest of all disloyalty, because of its licentious marriage-institutions, Utah is still open to grave punishment, and the Administration inflicting it would have duty as well as vested right upon its side, on the ground that it stands pledged to secure to each of the nation's constituent sections a republican form of government,--something which Utah has never enjoyed any more than Timbuctoo. I once asked Brigham if Dr. Bernhisel would be likely to get to Congress again. "No," he replied, with perfect certainty; "_we_ shall send ---- as our Delegate." (I think he mentioned Colonel Kinney, but do not remember absolutely.) Whoever it was, when the time came, Brigham would send in his name to the "Deseret News,"--whose office, like everything else valuable and powerful, is in his inclosure. It would be printed as a matter of course; a counter-nomination is utterly unheard of; and on election-day ---- would be Delegate as surely as the sun rose. The mountain-stream that irrigates the city, flowing to all the gardens through open ditches on each side of the street, passes through Brigham's inclosure: if the saints needed drought to humble them, he could set back the waters to their source. The road to the only _cañon_ where firewood is attainable runs through the same close, and is barred by a gate of which he holds the sole key. A family-man, wishing to cut fuel, must ask his leave, which is generally granted on condition that every third or fourth load is deposited in the inclosure, for Church-purposes. Thus everything vital, save the air he breathes, reaches the Mormon only through Brigham's sieve. What more absolute despotism is conceivable? Here lies the _pou-sto_ for the lever of Governmental interference. The mere fact of such power resting in one man's irresponsible hands is a crime against the Constitution. At the same time, this power, wonderful as it may seem, is practically wielded for the common good. I never heard Brigham's worst enemies accuse him of peculation, though such immense interests are controlled by his one pair of hands. His life is all one great theoretical mistake, yet he makes fewer practical mistakes than any other man, so situated, whom the world ever saw. Those he does make are not on the side of self. He merges his whole personality in the Church, with a self-abnegation which would establish in business a whole century of martyrs having a worthy cause.