At Sesenheim

WE never should have gone to Sesenheim at all, if it had not been for Rhodora. It was a Saturday afternoon in June, and we — that is, Rhodora and her husband, John, and the Scribe, who was an old friend of them both — were standing on the north side of the minster square at Strassburg, in front of an old bricabrac shop. There was a blaze of sunlight on the square, and it seemed as if waves of heat, reflected from the huge red sandstone minster, were fairly beating in our faces. The shop looked dark and cool. Its windows were hung with rare old weapons, curious drinkingcups in pewter and clay, odd bits of eighteenth-century china, and carved wooden crucifixes, together with peasants’ rings and charms and many a queer ornament in ivory or silver. It was not a shop that a woman like Rhodora could easily pass by, and that which drew her fancy specially was a pair of silver candelabra, tiny graceful things, a trifle battered.

“ How much do you think they would want for them ? ” she asked.

“ I am sure I don’t know,” John answered, without enthusiasm.

“ They are so lovely,” she said, reflectively. “ And I can just see them over our fireplace, John. Wait a minute.” Then she disappeared within the shop, leaving John and the Scribe upon the scorching pavement. There was the sound of an eager dialogue, but the questions soon grew slower and more subdued, and presently Rhodora reappeared, empty-handed save for the Baedeker which now emerged from its temporary hiding-place underneath her traveling-wrap.

“Three hundred francs! ” she exclaimed, with an impressive whisper. “ Did you ever hear of anything equal to that?” The gentlemen were silent. “ Now do you think that he could have suspected I was an American ? ” she demanded. “ I ’m sure I did n’t make any mistake in the German.”

Her companions laughed. “ It is queer that so many shopkeepers do take you for an American,” remarked John, ironically.

” Do you honestly think your bonnet looks like a German bonnet ? ” the Scribe ventured to ask.

Rhodora was mollified. “ I hope not,” she sighed, as if the idea brought some comfort with it. She stepped off from the narrow pavement, apparently to go toward the minster, and then stopped, as if surveying the city for final judgment.

“ I believe I ’m a little disappointed with Strassburg,” she declared; “ except of course for the cathedral. Three hundred francs for those candelabra! ” She turned regretfully toward the shop windows again, and her eye fell upon the name of the owner, in faded gilt letters, above them. “ Brion,” she repeated. " Brion ? It must be a French name. Why, Brion, — who was Brion ? Tell me, one of you two gentlemen.”But John and the Scribe looked at each other helplessly. “ Brion — why, of course ! ” exclaimed Rhodora. “ Friederike Brion, Goethe’s Friederike ! John, Sesenheim must be near by, and I’ve always wanted to go there. It’s so hot, and dirty here ; let’s go to spend the Sunday at Sesenheim ! ”

That is how we three happened to make our pilgrimage to the quiet Alsatian village, whose sole claim to notice is that it was once the scene of a love episode more idyllic and more tenderly told than perhaps any other that ever won its gentle way into the world’s literature.

It was all Rhodora’s enthusiasm. We got but slight encouragement from Jean, our skeptical head-waiter at the Maison Rouge, to whom we applied for information. “ Sesenheim ? ” he repeated, with a head-waiter’s shrug. “ Il y a du bon vin rouge là bas, mais ”— Clearly he knew nothing about Friederike Brion. There were no more trains that day. But Rhodora was not thus to be put down, after all her desires to visit Sesenheim, which dated back, she gravely informed us, to her schoolgirl days, when she had first read Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, and had promptly fallen in love with Friederike. She dispatched the Scribe in search of a cheap edition of Dichtung und Wahrheit; she explained to her husband that for this once she would not object to a Sunday train ; and she had her own way in everything. To tell the truth, John, who during his summer vacation was inspecting the chemical laboratories of German universities, and the Scribe, who was keeping him lazy company, were both of them tempted by the idea of escaping for a day from the round of travel, and of going to seek an Arcadia.

We were lucky enough to find a guide to our Arcadia in the shape of a tiny book on Friederike Brion, written by Pastor Lucius of Sesenheim; and as the early morning train carried us out of Strassburg into the fresh greenness of the level Alsatian country, the Scribe was deputed to read the important passages from the pastor’s loving little chronicle. So with Friederike Brion in one hand and Dichtung und Wahrheit in the other, he read aloud, and gradually the story took shape: how the Strassburg student, twenty-one, brilliant, lovable, rode to Sesenheim in the autumn of 1770, and met the slender, light-haired daughter of the village pastor ; how the gentleness and the gayety of this maiden of eighteen won the student’s heart, so that when he went back to Strassburg he could not rest, but must write her letters, bright, tender, and infinitely winning, and must send her verses with all the lyric passion of the “ young Goethe ” in them, and must ride out to Sesenheim again and again, tarrying longer at each visit, until it seemed to himself and to all as if he “ belonged there ; " then how he grew restive, perhaps because his genius stung him and he knew himself to be only twenty-one, with the wide world before him ; how he leaned down from the saddle and parted with her. ill at ease himself, and not daring, probably, to tell her the truth ; how he wrote a final letter to her, only to find that her gentle answer “ tore his heart,” while his conscience troubled him a long time, forcing him in Götz and Clavigo to do poetic penance ; how in journeying southward with the Duke of Weimar, eight, years later, he made a solitary detour and visited the parsonage, to find all its inmates unchanged toward him, and Friederike calm and affectionate as of old, so that the next morning, at sunrise, he rode away from Sesenheim “in peace,” as he wrote the Frau von Stein ; and how after that the lovers never saw each other again, Goethe rising steadily upon his splendid and solitary path, and Friederike Brion, spinster, growing old, and dying in 1813 at her brother’s house in the tiny village of Meissenheim, having lived a life of such unselfish ministration and such sweetness that an old woman who has survived into our own day tells us that when as a child she heard about angels, she “ always thought of Aunty Brion in a white dress,” and that “the sick, and children, and old people ” loved her.

Between the scraps of reading we kept looking out of the wide-opened windows of the slowly moving train, upon the fields of hops and the wide reaches of grain and grass, intersected here and there by lines of heavy foliage, and darkened by clumps of scattered woodland. To the left were the Vosges, in a retreating blue distance, while as we rolled northward, all along on the right, beyond the Rhine, were the wooded summits of the Black Forest, misty yet and shadow-barred in the morning sunlight. It was Trinity Sunday, and the peasants in holiday costume thronged the station platforms, intent upon excursions to neighboring villages. Aside from the recurrent peasant laughter, the morning was perfectly still. After an hour, we passed Drusenheim. It was the place where Goethe changed horses, and the very next village was Sesenheim.

We got out. “ It’s much like the rest, after all, " said John, as he stretched his lank body and eyed the typical modern German station, with its new, neat ugliness.

But Rhodora, holding her skirts together as she passed quickly through a stolid group of peasant women, had already started around the corner of the building. “Come,” she said, “I know I shall find my way.” We followed her along a foot-path through a clover field. To the left, over a fruit orchard, were the reddish-gray roof tiles of the village and the eight-sided tower of Pastor Brion’s church. In a moment more we emerged upon the road, white in the glaring June sunlight, and winding its way into Sesenheim. As we passed the first houses, a girl was busily at work draping a white cloth about a temporary roadside shrine of the Virgin, in honor of the feast day. Oh, the Gasthaus zum Anker was easily to be found, she said ; and presently we reached it, standing just where the Anker of Goethe’s time stood, close by the church.

The main room of the inn proved to be deserted, except for the inn-keeper’s daughter, and two or three peasants quietly taking their bread and cheese and wine in a corner. The place was scrupulously clean, with yellow-painted tables and benches, after the Alsatian fashion. Rhodora soon discovered on the wall a print of the old parsonage and of the Brion family, as the latter had existed in the idealizing mind of some tolerable artist. The present parsonage was modern, the Fraulein smilingly told us, but the barn was just as it was when Goethe and Friederike painted the old chaise together, and had such ill luck with the varnishing; and the jasmine bower, where they sat in the moonlight, was there, too. Pastor Lucius had moved away, but his successor would be glad to show everything to us.

We had an Alsatian country dinner, with such delicious water that even “ le bon vin rouge ” was almost a superfluity, in a small room whose window looked out on a garden, beyond which was the old gray church. A faint smell of June roses came in from the garden. Perhaps it was only Rhodora ’s fancy, but it veritably seemed as if we became aware of something subtler than any rose-scent in the atmosphere of this place. There was a hint here of an immortal fragrance. During the meal we talked much of Goethe, — of his capacity for loving, his impressionableness to external influences, and that reflection of his actual experiences in his poetry which makes what he has written such a revelation of the modern mind. Did his life turn once for all, here in this quiet Sesenheim, and adopt certain lines of choice ? Was the Sesenheim experience a spiritual crisis for him. or was it only an incident in his development, like his love affairs with Annette and Gretchen and Lili and many another ? We fell to discussing, naturally enough, his reasons for breaking faith with Friederike, and came no nearer a solution than other people have done, who have never taken dinner under the shadow of the Sesenheim church. Rhodora was inclined to be lenient with the young genius. Would it have been wise or right for him, she asked, to make this gentle country girl happy, when his future was unsettled, when the consciousness of power was strong within him, and he knew she could never keep pace with him ? Rhodora is a brilliant talker, especially with the odds against her, and she was quicker than either of the men, and knew more about Goethe. But John burst out finally, his brown eyes flashing, and his hand playing nervously with the last of his cherries :—•

“You make one mistake, my dear: no German in Goethe’s time, and hardly one in our own, would dream that his wife could ' keep pace with him ; ’ and he would not want to have her do so, even if he believed she could. You forget where you are. Now do you suppose,” he added almost fiercely, “ that any man of genius has the right to break the heart of a girl like Friederike, in order to further his own ‘ development ’ ? ”

“ But I think, John,” Rhodora answered slowly, “ it is not a question of what is right or wrong : it is a question of the inevitable, of something that would lie outside the man’s will.”

It seemed to the Scribe that the last word had been said, on each side. Perhaps the Fräulein suspected it, too, for she came up timidly, and suggested that as there was to be a funeral service in the church, we might make the best of the opportunity to see the interior. So we paid for the dinner, while Rhodora drew on her tan-colored gloves, straightening her bonnet stealthily before a cracked glass in the main room of the inn, and we strolled over to the church, entering in the wake of half a dozen slowly pacing women. The edifice, consisting of a single narrow nave and rounding choir, was built in the fifteenth century, and since the time of Louis XIV. has been used by Roman Catholics and Protestants alike, as is often the custom in Alsace-Lorraine. In the aisle was a tombstone, with the inscription half effaced, hearing the date of 1557, over which the young Goethe’s feet once stepped so lightly; and there was the pastor’s pew, in which, by the side of Friederike, he found her father’s sermon “ none too long.” In the apse was a tinseled altar, with crucifix and candles and the image of the Virgin, while on the right wall of the nave was the pulpit, decorated, as were all the windows, with long green branches in honor of Trinity Sunday. The seats were filled with peasant women, in dark, immobile rows ; each dressed like all the others, in a black alpaca gown, a short sack of the same material edged with velvet ribbon, a brocaded silk neckcloth, and a queer little quilted black silk cap, with wide stiff bows of ribbon that stood out from the head like the wings of a huge dusky butterfly. They were all of that age, from thirty to sixty-five, when peasants look just alike, — their hair bleached yellow and their faces browned by labor in the fields; shrewd faces, many of them, with strong features, but absolutely untouched by any lines of thought; with animal patience and endurance in them, and in the eyes something of the expression that a dog or horse has when he looks at you and does not understand you.

They were all hushed and reverent now, in the presence of the offices of the church.

The Lutheran pastor ascended into the pulpit, and read the formal death notice of the person whose funeral sermon he was to preach. It was an old woman, born in the very year that Friederike Brion died. There had once been an irregularity in her life, it appeared. ‘4 My beloved ones, this woman was sinful,” the round-faced blonde young pastor began, “ but we are all sinful.” He paused, and there was a profound stillness. An old peasant woman on the seat in front of us turned to a companion, and whispered, the tears starting from her bleared eyes, “Das ist wahr.” He went on again, preaching from the text, “ Dust thou art,” amid a silence almost painful. A few children sat in front of the pulpit. On the very back seat were three men, not old, but with strangely wrinkled faces, and all of them were sobbing. Through the open window near the pulpit, the June breeze blew in, making the linden branches rustle gently, and throw flickering shadows on the whitewashed wall. The Scribe found himself looking at Rhodora. She sat leaning forward slightly, intent upon the unfamiliar language; her gloved hands clasped and resting in her lap, her jaunty brown jacket loosened; a touch of color in her face, her gray eyes wide and never moving from the pastor, her thin lips parted. Beyond this delicate, sensitive, highly organized American woman, curiously out of place here, were the rows of Alsatian peasants, whose lives were narrowed down to Sesenheim and the fields around it. “ Dust thou art.” the preacher kept reiterating ; ay, but of what different clay, and how differently breathed upon ! Yet here, in this out-of-the-way corner of the world, in the presence of these reverent souls and these solemn words, life seemed all of a sudden very simple and to be tested by simple standards, whether the life be Goethe’s or a peasant woman’s.

We came out into the full glow of the afternoon. Along a stone wall that inclosed the churchyard were ranged a dozen boys, waiting for the sermon to come to an end. “ Just as if it were a New England country meeting-house ! ” laughed John. The short grass of the churchyard was covered with small white daisies ; some geese toddled away from us as we wandered around to look for the gravestones of the elder Brions, which we found leaning up against the outer wall of the church, with name and date almost illegible: and all this was more like a country churchyard in the Old England than in the New. The sexton came out soon, bringing the Protestant Bible, and a procession of whiterobed girls, ready to be confirmed that afternoon in the Romanist faith, was already waiting at the door. They were homely brown little things; we looked in vain for a graceful Friederike. But Rhodora took a sudden fancy to one of them, a stooping, shy girl with great unworldly eyes, and went up and spoke to her. What she said we did not know ; perhaps the Alsatian did not, but the dark sad eyes smiled for a moment, and she actually turned and nodded at Rhodora, as the awkward procession filed into the porch. Women are curious creatures.

We walked over to the parsonage and gazed at the historic barn, while John reached his long arm over the fence and plucked a blossom from the famous jasmine bush. Just as Rhodora was protesting that she did not care to enter the new-fangled house, even to see one of Friederike’s letters, the rosy-cheeked pastor appeared at the door, and asked if he could be of any service. We looked at Rhodora. She accepted the offer with prompt willfulness, and with a superlative expression of gratitude in her queer German that must have amused the dominie. We all began to feel a little like tourists now, and rather ashamed of ourselves, though the pastor made a charming host, and explained why the old parsonage was torn down, and when the jasmine bush was transplanted, and how he had had to study Dichtung und Wahrheit in order to answer visitors’ questions ; and finally he took us to his library, where some of Friederike’s letters are preserved. But a yellowed old letter counts for so little after it is framed and hung ! Something, delicate and intangible, escapes. After we had put our names in the visitors’ book, — we were almost the only ones from America, — we came away, with a consciousness that antiquarianism and curiosity, that prose, in short, had breathed its spirit for a moment upon our hitherto unspoiled Sesenheim idyl.

Fortunately, the best was yet to come. We walked down the winding white road again, past the straggling cottages, — white too, except where the great weather-beaten beams of the framework were left exposed, crossing the plastered walls at all odd angles, — and on out of the village a hundred yards or so, in search of the spot whither most German pilgrims to Sesenheim first direct their steps, the hillock where Friederike passed many an hour in that favorite arbor of which Goethe himself has had so much to say. We found the place easily enough. Some Goethe lovers have bought the hillock, which proved to be an ancient burial mound, and have erected a new arbor, bearing the inscription " Friederiken Ruh. 1770-1880.” It commands a characteristic Alsatian view : in front, to the west, the village peeping through its abundant trees; to right and left, the wide-sweeping fertile plains, fed by slow watercourses and interspersed with forest land ; while on the east stretches the long line of trees that mark the course of the Rhine, beyond which lie the northern heights of the Black Forest, as they group themselves brokenly about BadenBaden. The arbor itself was too slender to shield us much from the June sun, so we took refuge under a great ash in the adjacent meadow ; and lying upon the hay, mown the day before, we watched for hours the white clouds drift across the heaven and pile themselves into a huge glistening mass above the Black Forest. Our talk wandered, too, apparently as incousequently as the clouds, but it always drifted back to Goethe. Toward sundown we strolled up to the arbor again, and waited for the train which was to carry us back to Strassburg. It was a pompous sunset, with slow-fading splendors that suffused the light flecks of cloud far in the south and north, and tinged with a rim of fire the great cloud rampart above Baden. We strained our eyes toward Strassburg, fancying that we could see the minster spire, a speck against that saffron sky, but the light faded out before we were quite sure. The wide landscape darkened gradually; we heard the nightingales in the deep woods along the Rhine. Just before the whistle of our train sounded from Niederbronn, Rhodora rose and left us for a moment. We could see her bending in the dusk above one of the bushes near the arbor ; then she came back with some white primroses in her hand. She gave us each one, and stuck a third through the buttonhole of her jacket. There was just one left. John took it suddenly, and, reaching up, fastened it in the lattice of Friederike’s arbor. “Why, of course, John ! ” said Rhodora, softly. “ The poor girl! ” Then she took John’s arm, and we came away.

Bliss Perry.