THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION.

IN THREE CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER THE SECOND.

A GERMAN hotel I take to appear in three
distinctive phases. There is, first, the watering-
place hotel—let us say, the Gross-Herzog
Albrect, at Saxe-Roulettenburg.

It is the building in the little capital of the
Duchy; for the Grand Duke never could
raise money enough to finish his freestone
palace on the Eselskopf-Platz, and lives
chiefly at a shabby little hunting-lodge, in a
forest, with turrets like pepper-boxes, and
walls like those of a raised pie. Albrect-
Maximilian the nineteenth—whose privy
purse it would be emphatically filching trash
to steal—derives a large portion of his revenue
from the Gross-Herzog; not, perhaps, from
the actual hotel department of the establishment,
but from certain succursal institutions
under the same roof, to wit, the Kursaal;
comprising dancing, conversation, and reading
saloons; together with two gaily-
decorated apartments, which you would take
to be the most innocent chambers in the
world, but which, nevertheless, lead straight
down to—well, to the infernal regions; for
there are played the infernal games of the
trente-et-quarante and roulette. Brauwer
and nephew are the landlords of the hotel,
and the lessees of the adjacent inferno; and
a very handsome royalty they pay to the
nineteenth Albrect. I know we have some
peers of the realm in England who are coal-
merchants, and some deans and chapters not
above receiving rents for the dens where
thieves dwell; but I don't think any member
of our royal family has condescended to go
snacks in the profits of a gambling-house yet.

The Gross-Herzog needs be a splendid
edifice, for it is the resort of the flower of
Europe, both aristocratic and financial. About
the month of August in every year, the most
astonishing symptoms of ill-health begin to
manifest themselves in families whose
members have more money than they know what
to do with, and doctors, with extraordinary
unanimity, concur in recommending, as the
certain and only cure, the famous baths of
Saxe-Roulettenburg. The affection is quite
cosmopolitan, being felt simultaneously by
blasé Russian nobles in the far north, who
forthwith importune the Czar for an exeat
to travel, and by nankeen-clad Planters,
enervated by a long course of tobacco chewing
and gin-cocktails in the recesses of the
Old Dominion and South Carolina. No
home Chalybeates can approach the medicinal
virtues of Saxe-Roulettenburg; so, hither
they come, to the great pleasure and profit of
Herren Brauwer and nephew, the increase
of the grand ducal revenues; and, through
him of course, though indirectly, the greater
glory of the Germanic Confederation.

I cannot help alluding to the annual
August malady as curious. But the most
curious thing of the whole is, that at the
selfsame time all the chief rascals in Europe
begin to feel ill too. I don't mean the dirty,
ragged, penniless rascals; but the well-dressed
scoundrels, with travelling carriages and
cheque-books. They—who have no right to
have any lungs at all, and have certainly no
hearts—suddenly grow nervous about their
respiratory organs, and they, too, are off
to Roulettenburg. Then there is such a
getting up-stairs with portmanteaus and
carpet-bags in the Gross-Herzog; such a playing
of quadrille bands in the Kursaal; such
a rattling of rakes and turning of wheels in
the gambling-rooms; such laughing, flirting,
dancing, dicing, duelling; such a delightful
salmagundi of pleasure, and elopement, and
love, madness, Rhine-wine, swindling, squandering,
lying, cigar-smoking, boar-hunting,
landscape-sketching, and suicide, that you
might fancy Vanity Fair, as the Pilgrim saw
it, come again. Only, Christian does not come
that way, and Hopeful has long since given
up the place as a bad job.

Looking at it in a purely hotel point of
view, the Gross-Herzog leaves little to be
desired. There are music-rooms, billiard-rooms,
morning parlours, evening saloons. There
are two amply-spread tables d'hôte a-day;
the first at one o'clock in the afternoon, for
the natives, who are early feeders; the second
at half-past five, for the foreigners. The fare
is abundant and substantial: a little too sour
in some instances, perhaps; a little too greasy
in others; a little too powerfully smelling
altogether. But there are a great many
courses: and, as long as you steer clear of the
fish, and studiously avoid the pastry (which
is cold shot in the guise of dough), and
give the sauer-kraut a wide berth, you may
fare sumptuously. For the Rhine wines are
excellent, the fruits delicious, the meats
tender and well-flavoured. You can get
even beef. The bedrooms are light and
airy; the waiters (though obstinately
opposed to washing) are civil and obliging; and
the head-waiter, or Herr Oberkellner, is a
majestic-looking man, with a ring on his
thumb and a watch in his fob; of whom there
is a tradition among the servants that he is a
born baron, and who is so grave, so erudite
in appearance, so metaphysically mysterious,
that you would not be at all surprised if he
were to turn out some day to be Professor
Busschwigg of the University of Heligoland,
and bring you a thesis on the non-existence
of matter instead of your bill.

One feels inclined to go with Mr. Albert
Smith to the full tether of his advocacy of
German hotels, at least, while the bathing
season at the Gross-Herzog lasts. I know no
French hotel that can at all compare with it
for cheerful elegance. This is the life I lead