Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (26 page)
34
At the age of twenty-six Kepler had written this half-serious, third-person description of himself: 'That man has in every way a dog-like nature. His appearance is that of a little house dog. His body is agile, wiry, and well-proportioned. Even his appetites were the same: he liked gnawing bones and dry crusts of bread, and was so greedy that whatever his eyes chanced on he grabbed; yet, like a dog, he drinks little and is content with the simplest food. His habits also were like those of a house dog . . . He was constantly on the move, digging among the sciences, politics, and private affairs, even the most trivial kind; always following someone else, imitating his thoughts and actions. He is impatient with conversation but greets visitors just like a dog; yet when the smallest thing is snatched away from him he flares up and growls. He tenaciously persecutes wrongdoers - that is, he barks at them. He is malicious and bites people with his sarcasms. He hates many people exceedingly and they avoid him, but his masters are fond of him. He has a dog-like horror of baths, tinctures and lotions.'
35
It is probably a good thing that they were not going to London, and that Gyldenstierne was not with them.
36
The Capuchins' pique is understandable, if only for the fact that Rudolf had taken a shine to their miraculous statue of the Madonna and Child and borrowed it to put in his private chapel at the palace. However, the statue promptly made its own way back to the monastery - one pictures the indignant Mother, golden babe in arms, striding indignantly home across the
at dead of night. Three times the statue was moved, and three times it returned. Impressed, the Emperor left the Lady and her Little One to the monks, and even presented the Virgin Mother with a gold crown and robe, which is perhaps what Mary had been angling for all along
37
There is some confusion among the biographies as to whether at this time Tycho moved into another house, perhaps on Tychonova, or back into the late Baron Kurtz's Italian-style palace on the west side of the Hradcany, where Tycho had lived when hefirst came to Prague. I am particularly struck by the mention of the
on the plaque outside The Golden Griffin house on Novy Svet (see footnote 23 on page 143). This enormous pile was built in 1668 on the site where once stood the Kurtz house; if the plaque is right, and Tycho did die there, it must be that this is where he lived for those last months in Prague, and not on Tychonova.
38
The Belvedere still stands, lovely and delicate among the massy edifices crowding the
he
Blue Guide
describes it as 'one of the purest examples in central Europe of the Italian Renaissance style'. Chateaubriand admired it, on a visit to Prague in 1833, although he did worry about how cold the place would be in Prague's unitalianate winters.
39
What a baleful portent that name must have sounded to the Dane!
40
Medical opinion at the time was that Tycho had died as the result of a kidney stone, but when his body was exhumed in 1901 no stones were found. It is probable that the true cause of death was uraemia.
41
F. Marion Crawford's Gothic novel,
The Witch of Prague,
opens with an impressive portrayal of a funeral service in the Tyn Church. My copy of the book is a paperback in the 'Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult' series. Yes, Prague puts one into strange company sometimes.
42
Now the Czech Academy of Sciences.
43
Rudolf, of course, did not make good his promise of the 20,000 florins for Tycho's data and instruments, and the Brahe family were reluctant to hand them over to the new Imperial Mathematician. Tycho's assistant, Tengnagel, who had succeeded in having the job of compiling of the
Tabulae Rudolphi-nae
transferred to him, at twice Kepler's promised salary, demanded the return of Tycho's manuscripts and star charts. Kepler complied, but secretly held back the Mars observations. Give a dog a bone . . .
44
This fine phrase is from Ferguson's
The Nobleman and His Housedog.
45
Praguers have a distressing fondness for throwing people from high places. In 1393 the fourth King Wenceslas, obviously not half so good as his dynastic ancestor and namesake, had the VicarGeneral of the Archdiocese of Prague, Jan Nepomucky - later canonised as St John of Nepomuk - thrown from the Charles Bridge and drowned in the Vltava. Later, in 1419, after the death of Wenceslas, followers of the religious radical Jan Hus flung the Mayor of Prague and his councillors to their deaths from the windows of the New Town Hall, with no piles of dung to break their fall. Leaping forward - if that is not too tasteless a formulation, given the topic - to the twentieth century, on the morning of March 10th, 1948, the Czech Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, a liberal who had tried to limit communist power in the new coalition government, was found dead in the courtyard beneath the open window of the Foreign Ministry; it was assumed he had committed suicide in face of the prospect of the Stalinisation of his country, but suspicions persist that he did not jump but was pushed. It is understandable therefore, that in the fateful month of August 1968, there were many who feared that the Russians would do in Prague as the Praguers do and thrust the reformist First Secretary, Alexander Dubcek, from some conveniently high elevation.
46
Frances Yates,
The Rosicrucian Enlightenment.
The Lady Elizabeth was a keen theatregoer, and at Christmastide in 1612, the King's Men, Shakespeare's company, presented
The Tempest
for the couple's delight on their betrothal night. Yates notes that some scholars have suggested that the nuptial masque in the play had been added to the original version especially for the occasion. And on the wedding night, February 14th, 1613, a masque, with words by Thomas Campion and produced by Inigo Jones, was presented at the banqueting house at Whitehall before the newlyweds and the court. Yates quotes a charming chorus:
Advance your chorall motions now,
You musick-loving lights,
This night concludes the Nuptiall vow,
Make this the best of nights;
So bravely crowne it with your beames,
That it may live in fame,
So long as Rhenus or the Thames
Are knowne by either name.
Alas, the magical union of Rhine and Thames was not to endure.
47
Ibid., p 41.
48
Her daughter, another Elizabeth, was to be the dedicatee of Descartes'
Principia.
Summer, sometime in the middle of the 1990s. The city is hot and smoky, and seems to gasp, as if in distressed relief at having survived the terrible decades, so I fancifully think. It is my first visit since the Velvet Revolution - that journalist's formulation, which I have never heard a Praguer employ, has definitely begun to irritate - and I cannot help but search for signs of change everywhere. I am staying at U Pava ('At the Peacock'), a pleasant little hotel close by the Charles Bridge in Mala Strana. At night from the wide-open window of my room I have an uninterrupted view over the treetops of Vojan Park to the Castle on its hill, glaringly floodlit. I switch off the bedside lamp to get the full effect. The floodlighting is a post-1989 innovation, surely? The communists would have regarded such a show of unashamed consumption of the city's electricity supply as a typical piece of Westernised decadence, and probably they would have been right. Standing at the window in the moth-dusted darkness I am struck by how little like a castle the Castle is, with its long, blank, fortress wall studded with row upon row of tiny square windows and not a turret in sight and the spires of St Vitus's thrusting their witch's fingernails into the sky in what seems a gesture of frozen hysteria. Vaclav Havel is the President now. The fact is hard to credit, even yet. It is as if Kafka's K. had suddenly been welcomed into the Castle by a smiling Kramm and told that with immediate effect he will cease to be a lowly land surveyor and instead assume the leadership of the realm. I try to picture this playwright, admirer of Beckett and lonesco, sitting in his neat blue suit at a desk in Rudolf's palace, poring over documents of state. Havel himself is fully alive to the absurd dimension of his rise to power. In a speech in Jerusalem shortly after his inauguration he expressed, with an almost jaunty frankness, his feelings of incongruousness - of being, even, an imposter.
I am the kind of person who would not be in the least surprised if, in the very middle of my Pre sidency, I were to be summoned and led off to stand trial before some shadowy tribunal, or taken straight to some quarry to break rocks. Nor would I be surprised if I were to suddenly hear the reveille and wake up in my prison cell, and then, with great bemusement, proceed to tell my fellow-prisoners everything that had happened to me in the past six months. The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher I am the stronger my suspicion is that there has been some mistake.
If he were indeed to be apprehended, no doubt the nameless authorities would in their mordantly witty way send a pair of clapped-out actors to make the arrest, perhaps even dressing them up in frock coats and non-collapsible top hats.
At midnight suddenly the floodlights are switched off. It is a shock, especially as it happens without a sound; somehow, so vast a disillumi-nation should be accompanied by a peal of bells, or a thunder-crack, or at least the amplified sizzle of a gigantic flashbulb. Unnerved, I fumble my way into bed and feel like pulling the blankets over my head. When my eyes have accustomed themselves to the dark I see that one of the Castle windows, just one, is still lit. Someone must be working late. I suppose by association with my thoughts of Havel I recall a fragment from Beckett, 'the little lights of man . . .' Comforted, I close my eyes. There is a part of the self that is always a child.
I was in Prague to attend a literary festival, with a side trip to Bratislava where I would address a gathering of academics. My friend
the writer, had collected me from the airport in his brand-new green car which his daughter Jindra, with whom he lodges, insists is blue. In his late seventies,
who loves to drive, loves his car; the silliness of this attachment amuses him. In the driving seat, though, he is very serious, the wheel held firmly with both hands at the top and his head thrust so far forward his forehead almost touches the windscreen. On that sunny afternoon we drove through pleasant suburbs that could have been the outskirts to any European city. I ask about property prices. He shrugs. They are going up, like everything else. He and Jindra have to share a tiny apartment, even though Jindra has an important job in Havel's office. I tell him about my unsettling experience with the Castle floodlights, and the solitary window that remained lit. He laughs, and says that of course that will have been Jindra's office: she always works late. The coin cidence strikes me as a little bit of Prague's old magic, and I am charmed. Jindra's window is suddenly an Archimedean lever powerful enough to lift the night itself a momentous inch or two.