Rizal in Europe: Portrait of the Traveller as Filipino (First of two parts)

Erwin S. Fernandez

                                                                                                                             Hoja seca que cuela indecisa 

                                                                                                                            Y arrebata violente turbión,

                                                                                                                            Asi vive en la tierra el viajero,

                                                                                                                            Sin norte, sin alma, sin patria ni amor.¹

Jose Rizal, Canto del Viajero

In commemoration of the Philippine national hero’s 2009 birth and death anniversary, this article describes in detail Jose Rizal’s voyage to Europe in 1882 and his tour of Paris and other European cities prior to his return to the Philippines in 1887. By telling how Rizal encountered and confronted Europe, it arrives at an honest portrait of the Filipino as a traveller, which is no different from the experiences of Filipinos today in the Diaspora.

Without Europe, Rizal could never be the Rizal anybody knew him to be in the same way that without 1872, as he himself had admitted to his fellow propagandists; he could have been a Jesuit (Guerrero, 1998). It was in Europe where he would seek the cure for the malady afflicting his beloved Filipinas. In Europe he would sit and listen to liberal Republican professors; work with French and German doctors; and meet its great sages. All these, however, would be too academic to deal with for someone like Rizal who only wanted to enjoy every minute of his visit and stay in Europe in the 1880s as any traveller would want to today.

Oceanic voyage and reptilian dreams: Manila to Madrid

But Rizal would cross oceans to see in flesh and blood the Europe he had read in Cesare Cantu’s world history about great battles fought, of palaces and courts where royal intrigues and murders happened. The long voyage would take him to Singapore where he was almost cheated by the carriage driver, to Point Galle where on their way there he dreamed of snakes, and Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), to Cape Guardafui in what is now Somalia, Gulf of Aden and its city and Suez and its famous canal. On June 7, 1882, they entered the Mediterranean Sea and four days later, they reached Naples and Sicily in Italy. They were allowed for an hour and a half to stay ashore but he was “carried by love and curiosity” so he went down riding in a boat, bringing with him a watch and some orders for the telegraph office (Rizal, 1977, p. 71). He saw “paved streets, squares, buildings, shops, statues” and strolled down the town of Naples (Ibid). Quickly learning his lesson, he returned aboard “without being fooled by the guide and the driver” (Ibid.). Two days after, the Djemnah dropped anchor in Marseille.

The more-than-a-month trip endeared him to his new friends and acquaintances so that he was saddened by their departure. Bidding his goodbye to them, he went to the customhouse where he was treated politely. It was early in the morning when riding a coach on the way to Hotel Noailles he saw magnificent houses along well-paved Rue Canebière, and the Bourse Palace. At the hotel he occupied a room complete with first-class amenities on the second floor overlooking the street. After getting a haircut, he took a walk around becoming enchanted with the large and beautiful houses and captivated by newspaper and flower vendors. Back in the hotel, he caught up with his Spanish friends suggesting to them that they go to chateau d’eau or “the water castle,” the other name for Parc Longchamp. There he saw the Palais Longchamp with the stunning fountain, “the water…falls in a grand cascade” (Ibid., p. 75). It was a memorial to the arrival of water in Marseille via the canal. They visited the botanical and the zoological gardens where he was amused with the monkeys. Then they visited the museum, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in the East Wing and the Museum of Natural History in the West Wing of which it was his first time to see one. It gave him an indescribable feeling; he wanted to spend the whole day there. After his companions left him, he stayed devouring all he could see and then he went home stopping in a shop to buy a pair of candles and a bar of soap. From the hotel, he went to a restaurant to eat, then strolled for a while and went back to the hotel. Having known that his friends were not in the hotel, he went out of the hotel but he was forced to go back because of the blistering cold.

The following morning he woke up late and went to see his companions. They took a stroll going as far as rue de la Republiqué to see the Panorama, then to Belfast Place where they spent a good time. New to their surroundings, they lost their way but found it nonetheless. They spent lunch together and with a companion he went shopping until four o’clock in the afternoon. They returned to the hotel only to see the departure of his Dutch friends. To take away his sadness, he chatted with his friends and planned to take supper at Café Maison Dorée but instead ended in the hotel. Then they went for a walk and stayed in a café listening to concert, songs and drama until midnight. The following day, waking up late again, he went with his friends to take a last stroll going into last-minute shopping so that only twenty-eight pesos remained of the seventy-six pesos he brought from Manila. With a first-class ticket costing twelve pesos, he only had sixteen pesos left. Treated rudely by the carabineers in Barcelona upon his arrival on June 16, he came not as a tourist but as a medical student with a vague if not unknown mission in his head (Ibid., 77-79).

Missing Laguna in the heart of beautiful Paris

After almost exactly a year of studies in Madrid, Rizal went back to France but now in Paris. More than the suggestion of his elder brother who advised him to study there, he was really enchanted by France (Quirino, 1997). Aboard an express train, he would notice the bare landscape of Old Castile from the verdant topography of Hendaye, the first French town. Passing through many cities awakened his memories of their glorious past. He arrived on June 17 and stayed at Hotel de Paris at 37 rue de Maubeuge. “The environs of Paris are very beautiful and very picturesque” he would write to his parents, and that “here everything is dear” (Rizal, 1977, p. 234).  On his first morning he went for a stroll and he could only imagine how big Paris in a description to his parents as the whole area comprising Calamba, Cabuyao and Santa Rosa. He did nothing but walk perhaps to save money for the carriage fare to see the Champs Elysées, Vendome Column, Place de la Concorde, Obelisk of Luxor and the Madeleine Church. About the Champs Elysées, he wrote that it was “a grand avenue from the Place de la Concorde to the Arch of the Carrousel, wide and long, filled with trees, with theatres on both sides in which plays and concerts are held at night…” (Ibid., p.235). In the evening, he went with his Filipino friends to the Theatre of the Opera “the most sumptuous public edifice I’ve seen until the present” (Ibid., p.236). The following day he went to the Laennec Hospital marvelling at the advances the French were doing, then the Bon Marché, one of the five big department stores and the Church of Notre Dame of Paris where it reminded him of Victor Hugo.

The whole summer he spent much in sightseeing and observing and attending French medical institutions. Regarding the latter, he went to see the Lariboisiere Hospital. After attending an operation, he visited the Jardin d’Acclimatation located outside the city where he saw a variety of plants and birds. He also went to see at the end of the grand avenue the Summer Circus in which equestrian and gymnastic performances were performed. The National Panorama, just like what he saw in Marseille and Madrid, depicted historical scenes, this time the Franco-Prussian war. He also visited the Palace of Industry displaying Japanese painting, the Hotel Dieu, a big hospital that can accommodate 300 patients, the Museum of Orfila where he saw human and comparative anatomies, an interest to medical students like him, the Jardin des Plantes, the Luxembourg Garden and Palace, of the latter he was able to see the museum of painting and sculpture, the Hotel des Invalides built to provide shelter to poor soldiers and the Museum of Artillery (Ibid., pp. 239-245).

Apart from the Musée Gavin, a private museum, he did not miss the Louvre Museum spending three days there from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon without taking a rest. He was not the usual tourist who would cursorily look at the pieces and leave. He was there to learn and was even mesmerized by the splendour he saw that he imagined that out of the walls would come out a historic face embodying the tales and stories of which the Louvre had a role through the centuries. At the ground floor, he was delighted with so much antiquity, the sphinxes in the Egyptian Museum, pieces of stone with huge bas reliefs in the Assyrian Museum, a column from a Greek temple in the Asiatic section and sculptures of Michelangelo in the Renaissance section. On the second floor, he saw paintings by great European masters: da Vinci, Ruysdael, Van Dyck, and Murillo among others (Ibid., pp. 247-250).

He did not leave France without visiting the Pantheon where tombs of great French men were kept going down the ground to see Voltaire’s and Rosseau’s with the help of a guide holding a lantern. From Paris, he went with his Filipino friends to the Palace of Versailles by train, a one-hour ride. The former residence of the Bourbons and the Bonapartes built under Louis XIV, it was now a historical museum.  It was a hurried tour but he was able to visit the rooms of Napoleon I, his study, the rooms of Louis XIV, XV, XVI and their wives, the queens. Outside, he marvelled at the garden and the park (Ibid., pp. 251-256).

He would leave Paris more impressed than before of French courtesy, cleanliness and orderliness and more knowledgeable of the French language but he knew that Paris was not Europe. He would learn this in February 1886 in Germany.

Northern Mirror (Dagupan City) December 30, 2009-January 5, 2010: 5-6.