It is an inane town, filled with sham, and petty fraud, and snobbery, but the baths are good.  I spoke with many people, and they were all agreed in that.  I had the twinges of rheumatism unceasingly during three years, but the last one departed after a fortnight’s bathing there, and I have never had one since.  I fully believe I left my rheumatism in Baden-Baden.  Baden-Baden is welcome to it.  It was little, but it was all I had to give.  I would have preferred to leave something that was catching, but it was not in my power.

There are several hot springs there, and during two thousand years they have poured forth a never-diminishing abundance of the healing water.  This water is conducted in pipe to the numerous bath-houses, and is reduced to an endurable temperature by the addition of cold water.  The new Friederichsbad is a very large and beautiful building, and in it one may have any sort of bath that has ever been invented, and with all the additions of herbs and drugs that his ailment may need or that the physician of the establishment may consider a useful thing to put into the water.  You go there, enter the great door, get a bow graduated to your style and clothes from the gorgeous portier, and a bath ticket and an insult from the frowsy woman for a quarter; she strikes a bell and a serving-man conducts you down a long hall and shuts you into a commodious room which has a washstand, a mirror, a bootjack, and a sofa in it, and there you undress at your leisure.

The room is divided by a great curtain; you draw this curtain aside, and find a large white marble bathtub, with its rim sunk to the level of the floor, and with three white marble steps leading down to it.  This tub is full of water which is as clear as crystal, and is tempered to 28 degrees Re’aumur (about 95 degrees Fahrenheit).  Sunk into the floor, by the tub, is a covered copper box which contains some warm towels and a sheet.  You look fully as white as an angel when you are stretched out in that limpid bath.  You remain in it ten minutes, the first time, and afterward increase the duration from day to day, till you reach twenty-five or thirty minutes.  There you stop.  The appointments of the place are so luxurious, the benefit so marked, the price so moderate, and the insults so sure, that you very soon find yourself adoring the Friederichsbad and infesting it.

We had a plain, simple, unpretending, good hotel, in Baden-Baden—­the Ho^tel de France—­and alongside my room I had a giggling, cackling, chattering family who always went to bed just two hours after me and always got up two hours ahead of me.  But this is common in German hotels; the people generally go to bed long after eleven and get up long before eight.  The partitions convey sound like a drum-head, and everybody knows it; but no matter, a German family who are all kindness and consideration in the daytime make apparently no effort to moderate their noises for your benefit at night.  They will sing, laugh, and talk loudly, and bang furniture around in a most pitiless way.  If you knock on your wall appealingly, they will quiet down and discuss the matter softly among themselves for a moment—­then, like the mice, they fall to persecuting you again, and as vigorously as before.  They keep cruelly late and early hours, for such noisy folk.