CHAPTER 11: The Present is a Present

The girl was huffing and puffing by the time she climbed up the slope, down the splendid curved staircase and up again another to reach the other side of the garden.  She saw Prince leaning against the bowling-shaped balustrade.  She run fast to give him a big, big bear hug from behind, even the girl was not as big in size as the Green Beast.  She could not wait to tell him her latest findings about symmetry.

“Learning from yesterday was hard work. Seizing the present was a choice at will.”

Bass the Constant Companion

“You aren’t a factory-made, mass-produced teddy bear readily available from a shop shelf.  That explains why you have a pair of beautiful triangle eyes that nothing compares!” gasped the girl.

Prince felt faintly embarrassed and uttered, “But I don’t look like a prince by all standards either.”

“By whose standards?” asked the innocent and wide-eyed girl.

The rhetoric question left Prince speechless.

“I told you so,” echoed Bass, “you are beautiful.”

The girl seemed about to speak again, but Prince forestalled her by flying away with a sharp jump.  She managed to leap by her superb reflexes and mounted on his back just in time for take-off.  Bass was a bit slow to react and could marginally cling to Prince’s hairy legs.

Prince regained his balance with a sigh.

When he refocused, his new discovery was blowing his mind out of consciousness.  Perhaps Prince did not pay enough attention to small details before or the winter sun that hid behind the clouds was to blame.  Neither the skyline appeared with startling beauty in front of his triangle eyes nor the Reichstag dome was in perfect symmetry.  It was once a total mistaken ideal of perfection.  It was time to unlearn the principles of the mesmerising media.

Shortly, they landed on a roof ridge overlooking the magnificent stone structure Alte Mainbrücke.

The city context of Würzburg was historically, culturally, and socially prescribed.  The organic and powerful urban landscape revealed how the city functioned and was administered, how its people lived, laboured, and worshipped, and how economic, social, and cultural facets were interwoven into their lives.  Pastel-coloured and cheerful, the city’s modernisation preserved the bottom-up community development traits, so spontaneous and vibrant that Prince could find no perfect symmetry and order in them.

“I wonder why I didn’t see things this way before.” doubted Prince.

“Look! They are important civic and religious edifices.  Together, they fostered the development of community in a cultural, entrepreneurial, and democratically organized society.”  The girl was right as no two buildings were the same.  Talking about church building styles in Würzburg, for instance, the Würzburger Dom was Romanesque; the Marienkapelle was Gothic; the Neubaukirche was Renaissance; the Stift Haug Kirche was Baroque; and the Kirche St. Andreas was brutalist, falling into the modernism category.  For the matter, artistic tastes and beauty standards did change drastically over time.

 “By the way, I met a crazy human, who said the treasure was housed in the Spiegelkabinett, the Mirror Cabinet of the Residenz Würzburg,” recalled Prince lightly.

“Then what are you waiting for?” urged the girl.

“He was just another…”

“Go, Prince,” encouraged the girl softly.

Prince carried his buddies back on land on the Alte Mainbrücke and took off again on his own. 

“Learning from yesterday was hard work.  Seizing the present was a choice at will,” said Bass softly.

The entrance to the Residenz Würzburg could easily be overlooked in the midst of the peasants’ town.  The site selection by Prince-Bishop Johann Philipp Franz von Schönborn offered fascinating insights into the episcopal principality of Würzburg, where the prince-bishops had full control over the royalty and the church.  The giant palace’s architect Balthasar Neumann was renowned for synthesizing with French château architecture and the imperial baroque style of Vienna into a coherent German baroque narrative and addressing many more demands of the Schönborn family.  He also incorporated masterfully the designs of contemporary architects such as Maximilian von Welsch, Lucas von Hildebrandt, Germain Boffrand, and Robert de Cotte.

The marble Treppenhaus staircase was rather shallow, and Prince could easily rise five steps with one leg making ten in two bounding strides.

As he looked up to the unsupported stone vault, he was blown away at the ceiling frescos, painted by the Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, depicting an allegorical scene of the exotic four continents.  But he could not afford another minute as an art connoisseur.  He had to run quicker before his racing heart burst out and fled his chest.

Through the Weißer Saal, Prince entered the Kaisersaal, where the visitors were standing still on the checker marble floor ogling at all the riches and objects of beauty literally from every angle.  They lingered around and waited for the three-p.m. guided tour group to return from the Kaiserzimmer visit at the southern wing before they could enter.  They could hardly notice Prince sneaking in the back-of-house corridor

Prince observed that there would be a brief gap between each guided tour.  He bent forward and through the low servant door, he was then alone in the Spiegelkabinett.

Sumptuously furnished, the Spiegelkabinett was panelled entirely with glass that was engraved, painted, and gilded with designs on the rear face using the verre églomisé technique to produce a mirror finish.  The gold-edged picture frames formed abstract curves and wriggling, bubble-like shapes all around the room.

“Spieglein, Spieglein an der Wand, wer ist die Schönste im ganzen Land?” intoned Prince stoutly, trying to verify that the mirror was an authentic magic mirror.

“Thou, O Prince, art the fairest in the land,” answered the Mirror.  “My audio response system is available in six thousand and five hundred human languages and can detect the language or a combination of languages to best communicate with you, O Prince.”

That did not sound right.

Nonetheless, Prince spoke again, “I come to claim my treasure.”

“Don’t tell me what you are after.  Words could be deceiving.”

Uncannily spooky, Prince froze to the spot with his feet gripping the timber parquet floor tightly.  He had been waiting for some fairy-tale magic or supernatural experience to feel assured of his existence or worth long enough.

“Indeed,” the Mirror broke the awkward silence, “there is a present for everybody who managed to come here.  Here are six hundred presents in the mirrors on the wall.  Walk around to see them all for yourself, pick the one your heart most desires, and it will be yours forever.”

Prince stared at one of the mirrors in transformation.  The glass melted like liquid mercury.  The colour pigments of the knight on horseback dissolved and sank to the bottom causing a ripple to spread across the surface.  Then the underlying dark gloss paint showed. 

Soon, green figures, hundreds of them, came into his peripheral vision.  The mirrors, big and small, reflected the reversed image of Prince.

They evolved into his perfect portraits with facial bilateral symmetry, each in different poses, graceful, modest, heroic, flamboyant, and fierce.  The coronation portrait in sapphire robes was simply irresistible.  Some portraits were way too flawless that Prince could not even recognise his very own face.

Prince was struggling to understand all of the portraits, except one.  Only one mirror painting, not posey at all, depicted the as-of condition of his asymmetrical triangle eyes in his causal sitting posture.

“It is exactly what you imagined happening, isn’t it?” retorted the Mirror.

He felt compelled to tap his claws on one of the mirrors and so he did.  Then the magic began to work.

All of a sudden, the gilding seemed to be tarnishing and flaking.  The walls of the Spiegelkabinett turned to a carousel spinning faster and faster.  Prince felt topsy-turvy and could not hold onto the ground anymore.  The flashy Murano glass chandelier was momentarily rotating on its hanging wire before his eyes, until he could not help but close them.

“The present is safe with me,” dizzy and light-headed, Prince muttered to himself as he collapsed completely to the floor.

In the meantime, the beastie buddies were having fun outside the Residenz Würzburg.  Bass, as usual, snapped a selfie whenever he caught good lighting and the palace’s splendid details.  Nothing beautiful escaped his attention.

Prince’s body was soon discovered on the Spiegelkabinett floor by the four-p.m. group and the incident caused quite a commotion.

The girl was alarmed and immediately rushed to the upper floor as she heard people screaming “Green Beast!  Gre-ee-eee-en Beast!”.