Volume 5 — Translated from the French. The Crucifix of Baden. A Legend of the Middle Ages.

Will you follow me to Baden? Not to that elegant and wild and whirling Baden of painted faces and flashy toilettes, where gentlemen of the turf display their horsemanship on the plain of Iffezheim; where the majesty of old Germany elbows, in the Trinkhalle, the princes of Bohemia; but to the fresh, dark, silent, almost unknown nooks of that Baden which God has made and which man has yet left untouched; where the artist wanders for his picture, the poet for his inspiration, the dreamer for his vision, the Christian to murmur his prayer; for it is to a burial-ground that I am about to lead you. But fear not on that account; this burial-place of Baden has comparatively but little of the mournful in its appearance; it is truly, as its name declares, the Fried Hof—the Court of Peace. Under that green turf, under those flower-clad hillocks, there lie bodies that suffer no more, but sleep in quiet; their souls may suffer, indeed, and be in pain, but their souls are no longer there; and can repose alone be frightful? Look around, and, as far as the eye can reach, what beauty shines in the landscape, what a charm invests the distant meeting of earth and sky! Look up to the gray blue heaven, pale and transparent, as is ever that sky which stretches over the valley of the Rhine; to those pure white clouds floating like distant sails on a stormless sea; to those distant hills, with outlines softening as they recede; to the green woods that fringe their sides; to those walls which time has breached; those crumbling towers; those ruined castles which seem to overhang the plain of the dead—man's work, and the hands that created it, becoming dust together. These sights may, indeed, be melancholy, but they are peace-giving too; for there in the midst hangs Christ bowing his weary head and stretching out his bruised arms in yonder great crucifix of stone.

In a churchyard, nothing is more frequent, nor, so to speak, more natural, than to see a crucifix. It is there like the flag on the bastion, the mast on the vessel. Without it the place would be accursed and desolate, for hope would be wanting there. All know and acknowledge this, but, nevertheless, few passers-by bestow a glance on the holy image. Some faithful ones may, when they see it, make the sign of the cross; others bend slightly before it; well-bred people uncover; free-thinkers, with proud look and step, with unbending knee and body erect, pass it by, they who would bow so low before the coronet of a prince or even the key of a chamberlain.

And certainly indifferent, timid, and free-thinking ones come to the Fried Hof of Baden; but there, few stop not and marvel, if by chance their eyes fall upon its crucifix. There is upon that rigid face—those features of stone—a look of life, of flesh and blood, which enchains you, moves the depths of your heart, speaks to you. To understand that gaze, it is not necessary to be a Christian; alas! it is enough to be a man. Those lips, half parted in a sigh, tremble in the stone; those half-closed eyes seem really to weep; agony sits upon every feature; bitterness of soul has worn every one of those furrows, the arch of the brows has been contracted, the pure lines of the profile broken, the calm of the forehead destroyed by a sorrow, overwhelming, silent, inconsolable; and you would have before you the image of human misery the most complete, the deepest, the most horrible, if a ray from the Majesty on high did not come to elevate and illumine that petrifaction of grief.

When you have long studied those features and contemplated their agony, you involuntarily ask yourself: Where did the sculptor find so suffering a face, so living an agony? whence came his model? for you feel that those features once were the flesh of one to whom ordinary grief were as nothing. That look of life, that pain so real, came certainly from a human heart that once beat beneath them, and in them painted its wounds, its tortures, and its agony. They were seen, and not merely created in the artist's brain.

Yes; you are right. Those features are those of a suffering, repentant, and miserable man. If you approach the base of the crucifix, you will see graven in the once soft stone, in long Gothic letters, and in the Suabian dialect of the fifteenth century, these short and simple words, which are the explanation and the ending of its story:

Nothing more; no signature to the work, nor name added to the prayer. But young souls, simple hearts, poetic spirits, which still may be found at Baden, in spite of "sport" and "the turf," will relate to you the birth of the work and the fate of the artist; for, alas! the story of the crucifix is also the story of the sculptor.