CLAUSENBURG

BURG

CHAPTER XVII.

- GOLDEN RIVER-DESCRIPTION OF CLAUSENTHE ARISTOCRACY THEIR LOSSES GENERAL URBAN-ENGLISH OFFICER-POLITICAL RELATIONS.

The ethnographical division of Transylvania is not so difficult of comprehension, when we recollect that the southern part of it is Saxon, that is to say, the country round Herrmanstadt and Cronstadt, with Fagaras in the middle, which is almost purely Daco-Roman. On the east of Transylvania, all the country between Maros-vasarhely and the Wallachian frontier is Szekler. In the north-east is a Saxon island, Bistritz, quite separated from the Saxons in the south. All the rest of Transylvania is Daco-Roman in substratum, with a Magyar proprietary, and a sprinkling of Magyars in the towns and villages.

After quitting Maros-vasarhely, I descended the Maros, and, leaving the Szekler territory, entered that of the mixed description last-mentioned. The hilly country to the right is called the Mezoszek; has a scanty population, and is rich and fertile, and therefore very different from the Szekler-land, which is overstocked with population, and has no ground to spare; so that the Szekler ekes out his subsistence by wood-cutting, not only in his own forests, but also on the Upper Maros, in the north-eastern part of Transylvania, and is altogether much more laborious and industrious than the sauntering Magyar peasant of the plains of Hungary. In Mezoszek food is so abundant, and the population so lazy, that Count Kassured me positively that he had a fine field of wheat in this district, which rotted in blackness on the ground, because, it being allodial, the peasantry would not cut it down, although he repeatedly offered them a share of the product. Such are the contrasts which a single day's journey offer to the traveller. In one district, every patch of cultivable territory utilised by over-population; and in the next county, separated by a Chinese wall of national antipathy,

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a deliberate neglect of resources lying at the hand: and I noticed many cottages in this district without even the kitchen garden, which, with the smallest trouble in the world, would have produced a wholesome and agreeable variety of vegetables.

I then ascended the Aranyos to Thorda, which river is called "Golden,” from its sands abounding in this precious metal. All that group of mountains to the westward of Transylvania, that separates it from the plains of Hungary and the basins of the Koros, abounds in the precious metals, more particularly gold. But although the Aranyos has a large Daco-Roman population, the laborious process of gold-washing is in the hands of the gipsies, who, if industrious, more particularly after the heavy rains of spring and autumn, make a good revenue, the grains being sold at a fixed sum to the Director-General of the Royal Mines at Zalatna, a place which, during the disastrous anarchy of the autumn of 1848, excited the cupidity of the Daco-Roman hordes, and was accompanied by a horrible massacre of those employed in the direction of the gold production.

I now arrived at Clausenburg, the ex-capital of Transylvania, and had a most kind reception from the Bethlen, Teleki, Wesseleny, Kemeny, Miko, Nemes, Bornemissa, and other families, and who have all suffered more or less severely; first, by the so-called abolition of feudalism, and, subsequently, by the devastation of their property during the Daco-Roman anarchy: and who not only showed the utmost willingness to give me every information, but did all that could be done to render my short residence agreeable. The town itself is exceedingly well built; and, without reckoning Pesth, Presburg, Kashau, and Temesvar (which have a large majority of German population), Clausenburg is better constructed than any Magyar place that I know, either in Hungary or Transylvania. It was also one of the original seven boroughs of Transylvania; but the Saxon element has almost entirely disappeared, and the principal Transylvanian nobility, having resided

here, built large and substantial houses, many of them distinguished by considerable elegance, both internal and external. The great square is large, and just looks like that of a German principality, and, therefore, has no resemblance either to the middle-age solidity of the Saxon towns, or to the Turkish-looking collection of houses one sees in the Szekler-land, or on the Theiss.

The inn, a large modern edifice, was very good, and conducted with great regularity and cleanliness, by an Italian who, having grown rich, had built the establishment, so that the complaints that travellers make of deficient accommodation, everywhere out of Pesth, were not applicable here. A curious adventure occurred to me in this house. The Zimmerkellner, or chamber-man, who struck me as being polite and gentlemanly in his manner, came to me one morning, with a long face, saying that he was not a waiter by profession, but had adopted the dress and occupation as a disguise, having been an officer in Bem's army, and, having been recognised, he was about to be enrolled in the Austrian army as a private soldier, unless something could be done to keep him out; and as he had seen that I had struck up an acquaintance with the recruiting captain, in the coffee-room, he begged ine to speak to him to see if he could be got off; but, on pointing out to him the absurdity of a foreigner thrusting himself into a matter that did not concern him, on the strength of a coffee-house acquaintance, he said, “He saw that there was nothing. for it but to shoulder a musket;" which I told him I thought more like the occupation of a gentleman than the domestic service of an hotel.

The recruiting captain in question was one of the amusing originals that I met in the course of my tour; and, with a saturnine countenance, was by no means deficient in homely good sense. He told me that he was taken prisoner by the Magyars, and kept at a place called Zillah, where, on his arrival, an ultra-Magyar female fanatic said, "She would stake her salvation if she could see "the captain hung on a gallows, and Kossuth elevated to

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supreme power." And it so happened, that, after the war, Zillah was the very place to which the captain was sent as imperial commissioner to apprehend the principal rebels. So one of the first persons he sent for was the fanatical woman, and he said to her, "You said that you would stake your salvation on my elevation to the gallows. Somebody will certainly hang from the gallows-but not I." On this the woman grew deadly pale and frightened, and the captain resumed: "As for your salvation, which you proposed to stake, first catch it before you propose to dispose of it: the state punishes high treason-but not stupidity; so go about your business."

While at Zillah, in custody, he told me that he was much pressed to be an officer in the Hungarian army; and that one insolent person said, "What if we should hang you up to that tree?" To which he answered: "If I hang as an Austrian officer, the Austrians may give me an honourable burial; but if I join you, I may be hanged as a rascal."

Clausenburg subsists almost entirely by what is spent by the resident landed proprietary; and, therefore, there were many complaints of deficient incomes. The Transylvanian nobility is not so rich as that of Hungary and Bohemia; but a considerable number of families of several thousands sterling per annum resided at Clausenburg. It may, therefore, easily be conceived what a blow the revolutionary legislation and subsequent anarchy was to them; and little did the town mob suppose, when they were terrorising the legislature under the influence of the agitators, the extent to which they were quarrelling with their own bread and butter. In the few principal families who receive a well-recommended stranger, no traces are visible of the distress that has been produced; for several of them have estates in parts of Hungary that have escaped ravage: and I never saw, in any capital of Europe, a more artistic French cuisine than that of Baron B, a well-known bon-vivant; but this is the rare exception. The great majority of those classes who expended in Clausenburg,

the rents of Transylvania, declare themselves ruined; and every tradesman in the town has suffered by the change. Had they consented, with a free will, to the revolutionary intoxication, one could have contemplated their "blue devils" as a retribution, however painful; but most of the principal families, admitting that great reforms were needed, constantly speak of Sechenyi as the first of Hungarians, and the skilful state physician, who would have effected a cure of the ills of the state; and almost as unanimously consider Kossuth as an arrant quack doctor, whose eloquence was a drug that produced a pleasant momentary intoxication, but the certain dissolution of society in the sequel. For although the union of Transylvania with Hungary took place during the revolution, all the previous impulse to reform came from Sechenyi, and all the previous impulse to revolutionary separation from Kossuth.

The condition of the Magyar proprietary in Transylvania is truly deplorable, and since the fall of the old French noblesse at the first revolution, I much doubt if there is any proprietary in Europe that have suffered so severe a reverse. "I cannot," said count BP to me, whose income of 40007. sterling was reduced to 8007., "approve that a horde of Asiatics should have come into this country and violently dispossessed the aboriginal inhabitants; but it has been so for a thousand years." And it is impossible for any traveller who looks upon respect for property as indisputably the highest of all the tests of civilisation, to follow the whole concatenation of the Transylvanian revolution without a feeling of the most poignant description. The Daco-Roman treated as a helot by the Magyar-the Saxon denationalised by the ultraMagyar faction-the Daco-Roman put in sudden possession of the property of his Magyar landlord by a set of shouting landless ultra-Magyar terrorists-the Daco-Roman, like a beggar on horseback, riding to the devil with blood-stained hands, and lastly, the unfortunate Magyar proprietor, even of conservative opinions, paying the penalty of the repeal faction having sought to identify the Magyar name with