Chapter III: The Abandoned Room

There is a faint odor of tea in the dark room, an odor of I know not what beside,--of dried flowers and old silks.

There is no way of getting more light in this curious room, which opens into a big gloomy salon, for its windows receive only half-light because of the rice paper in all the panes; they open onto a yard that is no doubt surrounded by triple walls. The alcove-bed, large and low, which seems to be set into an inner wall thick as a rampart, has silk curtains and a cover of dark blue,--the color of the sky at night. There are no seats, indeed there would scarcely be room for any; neither are there any books, nor could one very well see to read. On the dark wooden chests which serve as tables, stand melancholy bibelots in glass cases; small vases of bronze or of jade containing very stiff artificial bouquets, with petals made of mother-of-pearl and ivory. A thick layer of dust over everything shows that the room is not occupied.

At first sight there is nothing to mark the place or the time,--unless, possibly, the fineness of the ebony carving of the upper part of the bed reveals the patience of the Chinese. Everything is sombre and gloomy, with straight, austere lines.

Where are we, then, in what obscure, closed, clandestine dwelling?

Has some one lived here in our time or was it in the distant past?

How many hours--or how many centuries--has he been gone, and who could he have been, the occupant of the abandoned room?

Some sad dreamer evidently, to have chosen this shadowy retreat; some one very refined, to have left behind him this distinguished fragrance, and very weary, to have been pleased with this dull simplicity and this eternal twilight.

One feels stifled by the smallness of the windows, whose panes are veiled with silky paper, and which never can be opened to admit light or air because they are sealed into the wall. And besides, you recall the weary way you must take to get here, and the obstacles you encounter, and that disturbs you.

First, there is the big black Babylonian wall, the superhuman ramparts of a city more than ten leagues around, which to-day is a mass of ruins, half empty, and strewn with corpses; then a second wall, painted blood-red, which forms a second city enclosed in the first. Then a third wall, more magnificent still, and also the color of blood; this is the wall that surrounds the great mysteries of the place, and before the days of the war and the fall of the city no European had ever gone beyond it; to-day we were detained for more than an hour, in spite of passes, signed and countersigned; through the keyhole of a great gate guarded by soldiers and barricaded from within, we were compelled to threaten and argue at length with the guards inside, who sought to hide and to escape. These gates once opened, another wall appeared, separated from the former one by a road going all the way around the enclosure; here tattered garments were scattered about, and dogs were playing with the bones of the dead. This wall was of the same red, but still more splendid, and was crowned along its entire length by a horned ornamentation and by monsters made of a golden yellow faience. When we had finally passed this third wall, queer old beardless persons came to meet us with distrustful greetings, and guided us through a maze of little courts and small gardens, walled and walled again, in which old trees were growing amongst rockwork and jars. All of it was separate, concealed, distressing; all of it protected and peopled by monsters and chimæras in bronze or marble, by a thousand faces, whose grimaces signified ferocity and hatred, by a thousand unknown symbols. And every time each gate in the red walls with the yellow faience tops closed behind us, as in horrible dreams the doors of a series of passageways close upon one, nevermore to permit one to go out.

Now, after our long journey which seems like a nightmare, we feel, as we look at the anxious group who have conducted us, walking noiselessly on their paper soles, that we have committed some supreme and unheard-of profanation in their eyes, in penetrating to this modest room; they stand there in the doorway, peering obliquely at our every gesture; the crafty eunuchs in silken robes, and the thin mandarins, wearing along with the red button of their headdresses, the melancholy raven's quill. They were compelled to yield, they did not wish to; they tried by every ruse to lead us to some other part of the immense labyrinth of this palace of Heliogabalus; to interest us in the luxurious salons farther on, in the great courts, and in the marble balconies, which we shall see later; in a whole Versailles some distance farther on, now overgrown by weeds, and where no sound is heard but the song of the crows.

They were determined we should not come here, and it was by observing the dilation of the pupils of their frightened eyes that we guessed which way to go.

Who lived here, then, sequestered behind so many walls,--walls more terrible by far than those of our western prisons? Who could he have been, the man who slept in this bed under these silken covers of nocturnal blue, and in his times of revery, at nightfall or at dawn, on glacial winter days, was obliged to contemplate these pensive little bouquets under glass, ranged so symmetrically along the black chests?

It was he, the invisible Emperor, Son of Heaven, childish and feeble; he whose empire is vaster than all Europe, and who reigns like a vague phantom over four or five hundred millions of subjects.

It is the same person in whose veins the vigor of half-deified ancestors is exhausted, who has too long remained inactive, concealed in this palace more sacred than a temple; the same who neglects and envelops in twilight the diminishing place where he is pleased to live. The immense setting in which former emperors lived frightens him and he abandons it all; grass and brushwood grow on the majestic marble railings and in the grand courtyards; crows and pigeons by the hundreds make their nests in the gilded vaults of the throne room, covering with dirt and dung the rich and curious rugs left there to be ruined. This inviolable palace, a league in circumference, which no foreigner has ever seen, of which one can learn nothing, guess nothing, has in store for Europeans who enter it for the first time the surprise of mournful dilapidation and the silence of a tomb.

The pale Emperor never occupied the throne rooms. No, what suited him was the quarter where the small gardens were, and the enclosed yards, the quaint quarter where the eunuchs tried to prevent our going. The alcove-bed in its deep recess, with its curtains like the blue of night, indicates fear.

The small private apartments behind this gloomy chamber extend like subterranean passages into still deeper shadows; ebony is the prevailing wood; everything is intentionally sombre, even the mournful mummified bouquets under their glass cases. There is a soft-toned piano which the young Emperor was learning to play, in spite of his long, brittle nails; a harmonium, and a big music-box that gives Chinese airs with a tone that seems to come from beneath the waters of a lake.

Beyond this comes what was doubtless his most cherished retreat,--it is narrow and low like the cabin of a ship, and exhales the fine odor of tea and dried rose-leaves.

There, in front of a small airhole covered with rice paper, through which filters a little sombre light, lies a mattress, covered with imperial golden-yellow silk, which seems to retain the imprint of a body habitually extended upon it. A few books, a few private papers, are scattered about. Fastened to the wall are two or three unimportant pictures, not even framed, representing colorless roses, and written in Chinese characters underneath are the last orders of the physician for this chronic invalid.

What was the real character of this dreamer, who shall ever say? What distorted views of life had been bequeathed to him of the things of this world and of the world beyond? What do all these gruesome symbols signify to him? The emperors, the demigods, from whom he descends, made old Asia tremble; tributary sovereigns came from great distances to prostrate themselves, filling this place with banners and processions more magnificent than our imaginations can picture; within these same walls, so silent to-day, how and under what passing phantasmagoric aspects did he retain the stamp of the wonderful past?

And what confusion must have entered his unfathomable little brain when the unprecedented act was accomplished, and events occurred which he never in his wildest fears could have anticipated! His palace, with its triple walls, violated to its most secret recesses; he, the Son of Heaven, torn from the dwelling where twenty generations of his ancestors had lived inaccessible; obliged to flee, and in his flight to permit himself to be seen, to act in the light of day like other men, perhaps even to implore and to wait!

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Just as we are leaving the abandoned room our orderlies, who purposely remained behind, laughingly throw themselves on the bed with the nocturnal blue curtains, and I hear one of them remark gaily in an aside and with a Gascon accent: "Now, old fellow, we can say that we have lain on the bed of the Emperor of China."