the sabres crossed at the end of outstretched arms; only the wrists moved; to flinch spelt disgrace; and the blades clashed by numbers until the razor-sharp tips sliced gashes deep enough, tended with rubbed-in salt, to last a lifetime. I had noticed these academic stigmata on the spectacled faces of doctors and lawyers; brow, cheek or chin, and sometimes all three, were ripped up by this haphazard surgery in puckered or gleaming lines strangely at odds with the wrinkles that middle age had inscribed there. I think Fritz, who was humane, thoughtful and civilized and a few years older than me, looked down on this antique custom, and he answered my question with friendly pity. He knew all too well the dark glamour of the Mensur among foreigners.
The rather sad charm of a university in the vacation pervaded the beautiful town. We explored the academic buildings and the libraries and the museum and wandered round the churches. Formerly a stronghold of the Reform, the town now harbours the rival faiths in peaceful juxtaposition and if it is a Sunday, Gregorian plainsong escapes through the doors of one church and the Lutheran strains of Einâ feste Burg from the next.
That afternoon, with Fritz and a friend, I climbed through the woods to look at the ruins of the palace that overhangs the town: an enormous complex of dark red stone which turns pink, russet or purple with the vagaries of the light and the hour. The basic mass is mediaeval, but the Renaissance bursts out again and again in gateways and courtyards and galleries and expands in the delicate sixteenth-century carving. Troops of statues posture in their scalloped recesses. Siege and explosion had partly wrecked it whenthe French ravaged the region. When? In the Thirty Years War; one might have guessed... But who had built it? Didnât I know? Die Kurfürsten von der Pfalz! The Electors Palatine... We were in the old capital of the Palatinate...
Distant bells, ringing from faraway English class-rooms, were trying to convey a forgotten message; but it was no good. âGuess what this gate is called!â Fritz said, slapping a red column. âThe Elizabeth, or English Gate! Named after the English princess.â Of course! I was there at last! The Winter Queen! Elizabeth, the high-spirited daughter of James I, Electress Palatine and, for a year, Queen of Bohemia! She arrived here as a bride of seventeen and for the five years of her reign, Heidelberg, my companions said, had never seen anything like the masques and the revels and the balls. But soon, when the Palatinate and Bohemia were both lost and her brotherâs head was cut off and the Commonwealth had reduced her to exile and poverty, she was celebrated as the Queen of Hearts by a galaxy of champions. Her great-niece, Queen Anne, ended the reigning line of the Stuarts and Elizabethâs grandson, George I, ascended the throne where her descendant still sits. My companions knew much more about it than I did. [2]
In spite of its beauty, it was a chill, grey prospect at this moment. Lagged in sacking for the winter, desolate rose trees pierced the snow-muffled terraces. These were bare of all footprints but our own and the tiny arrows of a robin. Below the last balustrade, the roofs of the town clustered and beyond it flowed the Neckar and then the Rhine, and the Haardt Mountains, and the Palatine Forest rippled away beyond. A sun like an enormous crimson balloon was about to sink into the pallid landscape. It recalled, as it does still, the first time I saw this wintry portent. In a sailor-suitwith H.M.S. Indomitable on my cap-ribbon, I was being hurried home to tea across Regentâs Park while the keepers were calling closing time. We lived so close to the zoo that one could hear the lions roaring at night.
This Palatine sun was the dying wick of 1933; the last vestige of that ownerless rump of the seasons that stretches from the winter solstice to the New Year. ââTis the
The rather sad charm of a university in the vacation pervaded the beautiful town. We explored the academic buildings and the libraries and the museum and wandered round the churches. Formerly a stronghold of the Reform, the town now harbours the rival faiths in peaceful juxtaposition and if it is a Sunday, Gregorian plainsong escapes through the doors of one church and the Lutheran strains of Einâ feste Burg from the next.
That afternoon, with Fritz and a friend, I climbed through the woods to look at the ruins of the palace that overhangs the town: an enormous complex of dark red stone which turns pink, russet or purple with the vagaries of the light and the hour. The basic mass is mediaeval, but the Renaissance bursts out again and again in gateways and courtyards and galleries and expands in the delicate sixteenth-century carving. Troops of statues posture in their scalloped recesses. Siege and explosion had partly wrecked it whenthe French ravaged the region. When? In the Thirty Years War; one might have guessed... But who had built it? Didnât I know? Die Kurfürsten von der Pfalz! The Electors Palatine... We were in the old capital of the Palatinate...
Distant bells, ringing from faraway English class-rooms, were trying to convey a forgotten message; but it was no good. âGuess what this gate is called!â Fritz said, slapping a red column. âThe Elizabeth, or English Gate! Named after the English princess.â Of course! I was there at last! The Winter Queen! Elizabeth, the high-spirited daughter of James I, Electress Palatine and, for a year, Queen of Bohemia! She arrived here as a bride of seventeen and for the five years of her reign, Heidelberg, my companions said, had never seen anything like the masques and the revels and the balls. But soon, when the Palatinate and Bohemia were both lost and her brotherâs head was cut off and the Commonwealth had reduced her to exile and poverty, she was celebrated as the Queen of Hearts by a galaxy of champions. Her great-niece, Queen Anne, ended the reigning line of the Stuarts and Elizabethâs grandson, George I, ascended the throne where her descendant still sits. My companions knew much more about it than I did. [2]
In spite of its beauty, it was a chill, grey prospect at this moment. Lagged in sacking for the winter, desolate rose trees pierced the snow-muffled terraces. These were bare of all footprints but our own and the tiny arrows of a robin. Below the last balustrade, the roofs of the town clustered and beyond it flowed the Neckar and then the Rhine, and the Haardt Mountains, and the Palatine Forest rippled away beyond. A sun like an enormous crimson balloon was about to sink into the pallid landscape. It recalled, as it does still, the first time I saw this wintry portent. In a sailor-suitwith H.M.S. Indomitable on my cap-ribbon, I was being hurried home to tea across Regentâs Park while the keepers were calling closing time. We lived so close to the zoo that one could hear the lions roaring at night.
This Palatine sun was the dying wick of 1933; the last vestige of that ownerless rump of the seasons that stretches from the winter solstice to the New Year. ââTis the
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