GENEVA
PAINTED BY
J. HARDWICKE LEWIS &
MAY HARDWICKE LEWIS
DESCRIBED BY
FRANCIS GRIBBLE
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1908
Contents
| CHAPTER I | |
| PAGE | |
| Old Geneva | [1] |
| CHAPTER II | |
| The War of Independence | [9] |
| CHAPTER III | |
| The Reformation | [13] |
| CHAPTER IV | |
| The Expulsion of the Nuns | [17] |
| CHAPTER V | |
| The Rule of Calvin | [23] |
| CHAPTER VI | |
| The Triumph of the Theocracy | [29] |
| CHAPTER VII | |
| The University | [33] |
| CHAPTER VIII | |
| Professor Andrew Melvill | [39] |
| CHAPTER IX | |
| Théodore de Bèze | [43] |
| CHAPTER X | |
| War with Savoy | [51] |
| CHAPTER XI | |
| The Escalade | [53] |
| CHAPTER XII | |
| An Interval of Quiet | [61] |
| CHAPTER XIII | |
| Revolutions | [65] |
| CHAPTER XIV | |
| Literature and Science | [71] |
| CHAPTER XV | |
| Saussure | [77] |
| CHAPTER XVI | |
| Men of Letters | [89] |
| CHAPTER XVII | |
| Songs and Squibs | [93] |
| CHAPTER XVIII | |
| Religious Revival | [95] |
| CHAPTER XIX | |
| Romanticism | [99] |
| CHAPTER XX | |
| Later Men of Letters | [105] |
| CHAPTER XXI | |
| Voltaire | [107] |
| CHAPTER XXII | |
| Voltaire and the Theatre | [111] |
| CHAPTER XXIII | |
| Visitors to Ferney | [119] |
| CHAPTER XXIV | |
| Coppet | [123] |
List of Illustrations
| 1. | Sunset on Mont Blanc from above Geneva. J. H. L. | [Frontispiece] |
| FACING PAGE | ||
| 2. | L’Église de la Madeleine, Geneva. M. H. L. | [6] |
| 3. | The Last Snow on the Wooded slopes. M. H. L. | [10] |
| 4. | Geneva from the Arve. M. H. L. | [20] |
| 5. | The Bay of Meillerie. J. H. L. | [26] |
| 6. | Evian les Bains, Hte. Savoie. M. H. L. | [34] |
| 7. | The Glaciers des Bossons, Chamonix. J. H. L. | [38] |
| 8. | Yvoire, Hte. Savoie. M. H. L. | [44] |
| 9. | La Roche, Hte. Savoie. J. H. L. | [50] |
| 10. | The Castle of Etrembières, Hte. Savoie. J. H. L. | [56] |
| 11. | Nyon Castle, looking across the Lake to Mont Blanc. J. H. L. | [62] |
| 12. | Montenvers and Aiguilles Verte and Dru. J. H. L. | [68] |
| 13. | The Jura Range from Thonon, Hte. Savoie. J. H. L. | [74] |
| 14. | The Aiguille and Dôme du Goûter, Mont Blanc. M. H. L. | [80] |
| 15. | The Statue of Jean Jacques Rousseau on the Island in the Rhone, Geneva, from Hôtel des Bergues. J. H. L. | [90] |
| 16. | The Head of Lake Annecy, Hte. Savoie. J. H. L. | [96] |
| 17. | Nernier, Hte. Savoie. M. H. L. | [100] |
| 18. | The Chateau de Prangins. M. H. L. | [110] |
| 19. | A Vaudoise: Summer. M. H. L. | [120] |
| 20. | The Tricoteuse: Winter. M. H. L. | [128] |
CHAPTER I
OLD GENEVA
Towns which expand too fast and become too prosperous tend to lose their individuality. Geneva has enjoyed that fortune, and has paid that price for it.
Straddling the Rhone, where it issues from the bluest lake in the world, looking out upon green meadows and wooded hills, backed by the dark ridge of the Salève, with the ‘great white mountain’ visible in the distance, it has the advantage of an incomparable site; and it is, from a town surveyor’s point of view, well built. It has wide thoroughfares, quays, and bridges; gorgeous public monuments and well-kept public gardens; handsome theatres and museums; long rows of palatial hotels; flourishing suburbs; two railway-stations, and a casino. But all this is merely the façade—all of it quite modern; hardly any of it more than half a century old. The real historical Geneva—the little of it that remains—is hidden away in the background, where not every tourist troubles to look for it.
It is disappearing fast. Italian stonemasons are constantly engaged in driving lines through it. They have rebuilt, for instance, the old Corraterie, which is now the Regent Street of Geneva, famous for its confectioners’ and booksellers’ shops; they have destroyed, and are still destroying, other ancient slums, setting up white buildings of uniform ugliness in place of the picturesque but insanitary dwellings of the past. It is, no doubt, a very necessary reform, though one may think that it is being executed in too utilitarian a spirit. The old Geneva was malodorous, and its death-rate was high. They had more than one Great Plague there, and their Great Fires have always left some of the worst of their slums untouched. These could not be allowed to stand in an age which studies the science and practises the art of hygiene. Yet the traveller who wants to know what the old Geneva was really like must spend a morning or two rambling among them before they are pulled down.
The old Geneva, like Jerusalem, was set upon a hill, and it is towards the top of the hill that the few buildings of historical interest are to be found. There is the cathedral—a striking object from a distance, though the interior is hideously bare. There is the Town Hall, in which, for the convenience of notables carried in litters, the upper stories were reached by an inclined plane instead of a staircase. There is Calvin’s old Academy, bearing more than a slight resemblance to certain of the smaller colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. There, too, are to be seen a few mural tablets, indicating the residences of past celebrities. In such a house Rousseau was born; in such another house—or in an older house, now demolished, on the same site—Calvin died. And towards these central points the steep and narrow, mean streets—in many cases streets of stairs—converge.
As one plunges into these streets one seems to pass back from the twentieth century to the fifteenth, and need not exercise one’s imagination very severely in order to picture the town as it appeared in the old days before the Reformation. The present writer may claim permission to borrow his own description from the pages of ‘Lake Geneva and its Literary Landmarks’:
‘Narrow streets predominated, though there were also a certain number of open spaces—notably at the markets, and in front of the Cathedral, where there was a traffic in those relics and rosaries which Geneva was presently to repudiate with virtuous indignation. One can form an idea of the appearance of the narrow streets by imagining the oldest houses that one has seen in Switzerland all closely packed together—houses at the most three stories high, with gabled roofs, ground-floors a step or two below the level of the roadway, and huge arched doors studded with great iron nails, and looking strong enough to resist a battering-ram. Above the doors, in the case of the better houses, were the painted escutcheons of the residents, and crests were also often blazoned on the window-panes. The shops, too, and more especially the inns, flaunted gaudy sign-boards with ingenious devices. The Good Vinegar, the Hot Knife, the Crowned Ox, were the names of some of these; their tariff is said to have been fivepence a day for man and beast.
‘The streets, being narrow, were also very generally crowded, and were particularly crowded in the evenings. From the stuffy houses—and even in these days of sanitation a really old Swiss house is sometimes stuffy enough to make the stranger gasp for breath—the citizens of high as well as low degree sallied to take their pleasure in the street. The street was their drawing-room. They stood and gossiped there; they sat about on benches underneath their windows. Or some musician would strike up a lively tune, and ladies of the highest position in society—the daughters and wives of Councillors and Syndics—attired in velvets and silks and satins, would dance round-dances in the open air. For all their political anxieties, these early Genevans were, on the whole, a merry people.
‘But—let there be no mistake about it—they made merry in the midst of filth and evil smells. On this point we have unimpeachable information in the shape of a rescript issued by the Chapter of the Cathedral after conference with the Vidomne and the Syndics. The Chapter complains that too many citizens dispose of their slops by carelessly throwing them out of window, and establish refuse-heaps outside their front-doors—a noisome practice which still prevails in many of the Swiss villages, though no longer in any of the Swiss towns. It is also complained that nearly every man has a pig-sty, and lets his pigs run loose in the streets for exercise, and that there is an undue prevalence of such unsavoury industries as the melting of tallow and the burning of the horns of cattle. One can imagine the net result of this great combination of nuisances. In a city of magnificent distances it might have passed. Bayswater, at the present day, lives in ignorance of the smells of Bermondsey. But in Geneva, when Geneva was almost as small as Sandwich, one can understand that the consequences were appalling to the nostrils of the polite. The fact that the city was so overrun with lepers and beggars that two lazar-houses and seven hôpitaux—or casual wards, as one might say—had to be provided for their reception, adds something, though not perhaps very much, to this unpleasant side of the picture.
L’ÉGLISE DE LA MADELEINE, GENEVA
‘Our ecclesiastical rescript further proves that while the Genevans were a merry and a dirty, they were also an immoral, people. It records that they are unduly addicted to the game of dice, and that the outcome of this pastime is “fraud, deception, theft, rapine, lies, fights, brawls, and insults, to say nothing of damnable blasphemy”; and it ordains that any man who “swears without necessity” shall “take off his hat and kneel down in the place of his offence, and clasp his hands, and kiss the earth”—or pay a fine of three halfpence if he fail to do so. Then it proceeds to propound an elaborate scheme for the State regulation of immorality, forbidding certain indulgences “to clergymen as well as laymen”; and requiring the Social Evil to wear something in the nature of a Scarlet Letter to distinguish her from other women.’
CHAPTER II
THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
In the first half of the sixteenth century occurred the two events which shaped the future of Geneva: Reformation theology was accepted; political independence was achieved.
Geneva, it should be explained, was a fief of the duchy of Savoy; or so, at all events, the Dukes of Savoy maintained, though the citizens were of the contrary opinion. Their view was that they owed allegiance only to their Bishops, who were the Viceroys of the Holy Roman Emperor; and even that allegiance was limited by the terms of a Charter granted in the Holy Roman Emperor’s name by Bishop Adhémar de Fabri. All went fairly well until the Bishops began to play into the hands of the Dukes; but then there was friction, which rapidly became acute. A revolutionary party—the Eidgenossen, or Confederates—was formed. There was a Declaration of Independence and a civil war.
So long as the Genevans stood alone, the Duke was too strong for them. He marched into the town in the style of a conqueror, and wreaked his vengeance on as many of his enemies as he could catch. He cut off the head of Philibert Berthelier, to whom there stands a memorial on the island in the Rhone; he caused Jean Pecolat to be hung up in an absurd posture in his banqueting-hall, in order that he might mock at his discomfort while he dined; he executed, with or without preliminary torture, several less conspicuous patriots. Happily, however, some of the patriots—notably Besançon Hugues—got safely away, and succeeded in concluding treaties of alliance between Geneva and the cantons of Berne and Fribourg. The men of Fribourg marched to Geneva, and the Duke retired. The citizens passed a resolution that he should never be allowed to enter the town again, seeing that he ‘never came there without playing the citizens some dirty trick or other’; and, the more effectually to prevent him from coming, they pulled down their suburbs and repaired their ramparts, one member of every household being required to lend a hand for the purpose.
THE LAST SNOW ON THE WOODED SLOPES
Presently, owing to religious dissensions, Fribourg withdrew from the alliance. Berne, however, adhered to it, and, in due course, responded to the appeal for help by setting an army of seven thousand men in motion. The route of the seven thousand lay through the canton of Vaud, then a portion of the Duke’s dominions, governed from the Castle of Chillon. Meeting with no resistance save at Yverdon, they annexed the territory, placing governors (or baillis) of their own in its various strongholds. The Governor of Chillon fled, leaving his garrison to surrender; and in its deepest dungeon was found the famous prisoner of Chillon, François de Bonivard. From that time forward Geneva was a free republic, owing allegiance to no higher power.
CHAPTER III
THE REFORMATION
The Reformation occurred simultaneously with the political revolution; and the informal historian, who is under no compulsion to take a side, is inevitably impressed less by the piety of the Reformers than by their uproarious behaviour. Their leader—the ringleader in their disturbances—was Farel, a hot-headed Frenchman from Gap, in Dauphiné. He hounded the people on to wreck the churches; he invaded the pulpits of other preachers without invitation, and confuted them therefrom; he once broke up an ecclesiastical procession, and, snatching an image out of the priest’s hand, threw it over the bridge into the river. Moreover, as was natural, he included among his devoted followers many evangelists whose zeal was, like his own, conspicuously in excess of their discretion. Of one of them, Pastor Malingre of Yverdon, it is recorded by a contemporary chronicler that ‘his methods were not very evangelical—he used to crown the Roman Catholic priests with cow-dung.’
Reform was already in the air when Farel came to Geneva to preach. The new doctrine had been bruited abroad by pedlars from Nuremberg, who ate meat on Fridays, and expressed the opinion that ‘the members of the religious Orders ought to be set to work in the fields, that the saints were dead and done for, and that it was nonsense to pray to them, seeing that they could render no assistance.’ So we read in Bonivard’s ‘Chronicle’; but, even so, Geneva was not quite prepared to receive Farel with open arms. He was haled before an ecclesiastical court, and accused of preaching the Gospel in an inappropriate costume—‘got up like a gendarme or a brigand.’ One burly monk gave him a ‘coup de pied, quelque part,’ and the monks collectively proposed to throw him into the Rhone; and, though the laity protected him from clerical violence, the Syndic ordered him to quit the town within six hours, as an alternative to being burnt alive. He went, and three years passed before he returned and triumphed in a theological disputation held in the great hall of the Couvent de la Rive.
The result of that disputation was, as has been written, that ‘religious liberty was taken away from the Roman Catholics and given to the Protestants.’ The celebration of the Mass, so recently a solemn duty, now became a high crime and misdemeanour; and the victorious Reformers proceeded, like the French anti-clericals of our own day, to the expulsion of monks and nuns. The first to go were the Sisters of the Convent of Sainte-Claire, founded in 1476 by Yolande, wife of Duke Amadeus IX. of Savoy and sister of Louis XI. of France. We have a full account of their ejection from the pen of one of them, Sister Jeanne de Jussie, afterwards Lady Superior of a convent at Annecy.
CHAPTER IV
THE EXPULSIONS OF THE NUNS
The Sisters had long been exposed to annoyance by Reformers of the baser sort. One such Reformer, having occasion to call at the convent on some municipal business, had insisted on washing his hands in the holy water, and had boasted, when he got outside, that he had been privileged to kiss the nuns all round—‘a foul lie,’ says Sister Jeanne, ‘for he did not even attempt to kiss any one of us.’ Another Reformer had preached against them, declaring that they ought to be ‘turned out and compelled to marry in accordance with the commandment of God’; and the congregation had been so impressed by the discourse that the younger men among the worshippers had climbed up on to the convent wall, and sat there singing amorous songs for the edification of the inmates.
No official action was taken, however, until after the conclusion of the disputation above referred to, though then it followed quickly. Fifteen Reformers, including Farel and Viret, called at the convent, declined the invitation to say what they had to say through the grating, but threatened to force the door if they were not admitted. The door was opened to them, therefore, and all the Sisters being summoned before them in the chapter-house, Farel ‘spoke in terms of vituperation of the holy cloister, of religion, of chastity, and of virginity, in a way that went to the hearts of the poor Sisters.’ The others kept silence, but Mère Vicaire protested, interrupted, and screamed. Our narrative proceeds:
‘She stationed herself between the Sisters and the young men, saying:
‘“Since your preacher is such a holy man, why don’t you treat him with respect and obedience? You’re a pack of young rascals, but you won’t make any progress here.”
‘Whereat they were all indignant, and exclaimed:
‘“What the devil is the matter with the woman? Are you mad? Go back to your place.”
‘“I won’t,” she said, “until these young men leave the Sisters alone!”’
So Mère Vicaire was put out of the room; and the preacher resumed his discourse on the institution of matrimony. We read that ‘when he referred to the corruption of the flesh, the Sisters began to scream’; and that when he spoke of the advantages of married life, the Mère Vicaire, who was listening at the key-hole, began to batter at the panels, exclaiming: ‘Don’t you listen to him, my sisters; don’t you listen to him.’ So, after labouring at the conversion of the Sisters from ten o’clock in the morning until five o’clock in the afternoon, the Reformers retired discomfited. A crowd of three hundred persons was waiting for them outside the gate, prepared to offer marriage to any nun whom they might have persuaded to accompany them; but they came forth alone, the last to leave being thumped on the back by a nun who desired to hurry his departure.
It transpired, however, that one of the Sisters—‘the ill-advised Sister Blasine’—had been converted by the Reformers’ arguments. The other nuns tried to detain her, but the citizens broke into the convent and fetched her out in triumph, and also insisted that the convent should provide her with a dowry and pay her damages for the disciplinary whippings inflicted upon her during her membership of the Order. It was the culminating outrage. The nuns decided to leave Geneva, and the Lady Superior applied to the Syndic for an armed escort. The request was granted, and the ‘dolorous departure’ began. Three hundred soldiers were turned out to see the Sisters safely across the bridge over the Arve, where the territory of Geneva ended. It was the first time since their taking of the veil that they had been outside the convent walls, and some of them had spent all their lives in the cloister and grown old there, so that they were in no fit state to travel thus on foot. Let Sister Jeanne tell us what befell them:
GENEVA FROM THE ARVE
‘Truly it was a pitiful thing to see this holy company in such condition, so overcome by pain and toil that several of them broke down and fainted by the way—and that on a rainy day and in a muddy road, and with no means of getting out of their trouble, for they were all on foot, except four invalids who were in a cart. There were six poor aged Sisters, who had been for sixteen years members of the Order, and two who for sixty-six years had never been outside the convent gate. The fresh air was too much for them. They fainted away; and when they saw the beasts of the fields, they were terrified, thinking that the cows were bears, and that the sheep were ravening wolves. Those who met them could not find words to express their compassion for them; and, though the Mère Vicaire had given each Sister a stout pair of boots to keep her feet dry, the greater number of them would not walk in boots, but carried them tied to their girdles, and in this way it took them from five o’clock in the morning until nearly nightfall to reach Saint Julien, though the distance is less than a league.’
CHAPTER V
THE RULE OF CALVIN
Stories such as those related above make it clear that rowdyism was likely to be the note of the Reformation at Geneva so long as Farel remained at the head of ecclesiastical affairs. With all his fiery zeal for Gospel truth, he was no better than a theological demagogue; and what Geneva wanted at the moment was not a demagogue, but a disciplinarian. Calvin supplied that need. He was a Protestant wanderer over the face of the earth, and he came to Geneva on his way from Italy to Strassburg. Farel, who had come to know his own limitations, called upon him in his inn, and prevailed upon him to stay and help him to keep order in the town, and, in particular, to help him to suppress certain Libertines, or Friends of Liberty, who had been protesting that the Reformers had no right to ‘require the citizens to attend sermons against their will,’ and demanding ‘liberty to live as they chose without reference to what was said by the preachers.’ Calvin, after much hesitation, consented, and so a new era began.
It was not the work of a day. Calvin began energetically enough, admonishing Bonivard for undue familiarity with his servant-maid, standing a gambler in the pillory with a pack of cards hung round his neck, imprisoning a hairdresser for making a client look too beautiful, and endeavouring to throw ridicule upon conjugal infidelity by obliging an offender to ride round the town on a donkey. But the recalcitrants fought stubbornly for the right of living as they chose. The people who wanted to live dissolute lives allied themselves with the people who wanted unleavened bread to be used for the Holy Communion; and the coalition was powerful enough to get Calvin and Farel first forbidden to meddle with politics, and then ordered to leave the town within three days.
They were no sooner gone, however, than they began to be missed. The disorders, rampant during their absence, became intolerable, and there was some danger that the Duke of Savoy might see his way to take advantage of them. A majority of the citizens came to the conclusion that strict regulations were to be preferred to insecurity, and they sent ambassadors to Calvin, inviting him to return, and to ‘stay with them for ever because of his great learning.’ He agreed to do so, and they voted him a small but sufficient salary, and gave him a strip of cloth to make him a new gown. In return, he drafted for their acceptance a new and original constitution, whereby the morals, and even the manners, of the community were placed under ecclesiastical supervision. That was the famous Theocracy, established in 1541, which seemed to John Knox to make Geneva ‘the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles.’ A recital of a few of the enactments, taken from a contemporary translation entitled ‘The Laws and Statutes of Geneva,’ will be the most simple means of presenting the picture of the social life of the town under the regime: