The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 17, March, 1859

Excerpt

HOLBEIN AND THE DANCE OF DEATH.

At the northwest corner of Switzerland, just on the turn of the Rhine from its westward course between Germany and Switzerland, to run northward between Germany and France, stands the old town of Bâle. It is nominally Swiss; but its situation on the borders of three countries, and almost in them all, has given to the place itself and to its inhabitants a somewhat heterogeneous air. "It looks," says one traveller, "like a stranger lately arrived in a new colony, who, although he may have copied the dress and the manner of those with whom he has come to reside, wears still too much of his old costume to pass for a native, and too little to be received as a stranger." Perhaps we may get a better idea of the mixed nationality of the place by imagining a Swiss who speaks French with a German accent.

Bâle is an ancient city; though Rome was bending under the weight of more than a thousand years when the Emperor Valentinian built at this angle of the river a fortress which was called the Basilia. Houses soon began to cluster round it upon the ruins of an old Helvetian town, and thus Basel or Bâle obtained its existence and its name. Bâle suffered many calamities. War, pestilence, and earthquake alternately made it desolate. Whether we must enumerate among its misfortunes a Grand Ecclesiastical Council which assembled there in 1431, and sat for seventeen years, deposing one infallible Pope, and making another equally infallible, let theological disputants decide. But the assembling of this Council was of some service to us; for its Secretary, Aeneas Sylvius, (who, like the saucy little prima donna, was one of the noble and powerful Italian family, the Piccolomini, and afterward, as Pope Pius II., wore the triple crown which St. Peter did not wear,) in his Latin dedication of a history of the transactions of that body to the Cardinal St. Angeli, has left a description of Bâle as it was in 1436.

After telling us that the town is situated upon that "excellent river, the Rhine, which divides it into two parts, called Great Bâle and Little Bâle, and that these are connected by a bridge which the river rising from its bed sometimes carries off," he, naturally enough for an ecclesiastic and a future Pope, goes on to say, that in Great Bâle, which is far more beautiful and magnificent than Little Bâle, there are handsome and commodious churches; and he naively adds, that, "although these are not adorned with marble, and are built of common stone, they are much frequented by the people." The women of Bâle, following the devotional instincts of their sex, were the most assiduous attendants upon these churches; and they consoled themselves for the absence of marble, which the good Aeneas Sylvius seems to imply would partly have excused them for staying away, by an arrangement in itself as odd as in Roman Catholic places of worship—to their honor—it is, and ever was, unusual. Each of them performed her devotions in a kind of inclosed bench or solitary pew....