XII
First and last, we hung about Chillon a good deal, both by land and by water. For the latter purpose we had to hire a boat; and deceived by the fact that the owner spoke a Latin dialect, I attempted to beat him down from his demand of a franc an hour. "It's too much," I cried. "It's the price," he answered, laconically. Clearly I was to take it or leave it, and I took it. We did not find our fellow-republicans flatteringly polite, but we found them firm, and, for all I know, honest. At least they seemed as honest as we were, and that is saying a great deal. What struck us from the beginning was the surliness of the men and the industry of the women; and I am persuaded that the Swiss Government is really carried on by the house-keeping sex. At any rate, the postmaster of Villeneuve was a woman; her little girl brought the mail up from the railway station in a hand-cart, and her old mother helped her to understand my French. They were rather cross about it, and one day, with the assistance of a child in arms, they defeated me in an attempt I made to get a postal order. I dare say they thought it quite a triumph; but it was not so very much to be proud of. At that period my French, always spoken with the Venetian accent of the friend with whom I had studied it many years before, was taking on strange and wilful characteristics, which would have disabled me in the presence of a much less formidable force. I think the only person really able to interpret me was the amiable mistress of the Croix Blanche, to whose hostelry I went every day for my after-dinner coffee. She knew what I wanted whenever I asked for it, and I simplified my wants so as to meet her in the same spirit. The inn stood midway of the village street that for hundreds of yards followed the curve of the lake shore with its two lines of high stone houses. At one end of it stood a tower springing out of an almost fabulous past; then you came to the first of three plashing fountains, where cattle were always drinking, and bareheaded girls washing vegetables for the pot. Aloft swung the lamps that lighted the village, on ropes stretching across the street. I believe some distinction was ascribed to Villeneuve for the antiquity of this method of street-lighting. There were numbers of useful shops along the street, which wandered out into the country on the levels of the Rhone, where the mountains presently shut in so close that there was scarcely room for the railway to get through. What finally became of the highway I don't know. One day I tried to run it down, but after a long chase I was glad to get myself brought back in a diligence from the next village.
"They helped to make the hay in the marshes"
The road became a street and ceased to be so with an abruptness that admitted nothing of suburban hesitation or compromise, and Villeneuve, as far as it went, was a solid wall of houses on either side. It was called Villeneuve because it was so very, very old; and in the level beyond it is placed the scene of the great Helvetian victory over the Romans, when the Swiss made their invaders pass under the yoke. I do not know that Villeneuve witnessed that incident, but it looks and smells old enough to have done so. It is reasonably picturesque in a semi-Italian, semi-French fashion, but it is to the nose that it makes its chief appeal. Every house has a cherished manure heap in its back yard, symmetrically shaped, with the projecting edges of the straw neatly braided: it is a source of family pride as well as profit. But it is chiefly the odor of world-old human occupation, otherwise indescribable, that pervades the air of Villeneuve, and makes the mildest of foreign sojourners long for the application of a little dynamite to its ancient houses. Our towns are perhaps the ugliest in the world, but how open to the sun and wind they are! how free, how pure, how wholesome!
On week-days a cart sometimes passed through Villeneuve with a most disproportionate banging over the cobble-stones, but usually the walls reverberated the soft tinkle of cow-bells as the kine wound through from pasture to pasture and lingered at the fountains. On Sundays the street was reasonably full of young men in the peg-top trousers which the Swiss still cling to, making eyes at the girls in the upper windows. These were the only times when I saw women of any age idle. Sometimes through the open door I caught a glimpse of a group of them busy with their work, while a little girl read to them. Once in a crowded café, where half a hundred men were smoking and drinking and chattering, the girl who served my coffee put down a volume of Victor Hugo's poems to bring it. But mostly their literary employments did not go beyond driving the cows to pasture and washing clothes in the lake, where they beat the linen with far-echoing blows of their paddles. They helped to make the hay on the marshes beyond the village, and they greatly outnumbered the men in the labors of the vintage. They were seldom pretty either in face or figure; they seemed all to have some stage of goitre; but their manners were charming, and their voices, as I have said, angelically sweet. Our pasteur's wife said that there was a great deal of pauperism in Villeneuve, "because of the drunkenness of the men and the disorder of the women;" but I saw only one man drunk in the streets there, and what the disorders of the women were I don't know. Possibly their labors in the field made them poor house-keepers, though this is mere conjecture. Divorce is theoretically easy, but the couple seeking it must go before a magistrate every four months for two years and insist that they continue to desire it. This makes it rather uncommon.
Cattle at the Fountains
If the women were not good-looking, if their lives of toil stunted and coarsened them, the men, with greater apparent leisure, were no handsomer. Among the young I noticed the frequency of what may be called the republican face—thin and aquiline, whether dark or fair. The Vaudois as I saw them were at no age a merry folk. In the fields they toiled silently; in the cafés, where they were sufficiently noisy over their new wine, they talked without laughter, and without the shrugs and gestures that enliven conversation among other Latin peoples. They had a hard-favored grimness and taciturnity that with their mountain scenery reminded me of New England now and again, and gave me the bewildered sense of having dropped down in some little anterior America. But there was one thing that marked a great difference from our civilization, and that was the prevalence of uniforms, for which the Swiss have the true European fondness. This is natural in a people whose men all are or have been soldiers; and the war footing on which the little republic is obliged to keep a large force in that ridiculous army-ridden Europe must largely account for the abandonment of the peaceful industries to women. But the men are off at the mountain chalets too, and they are away in all lands, keeping hotels, and amassing from the candle-ends of the travelling public the fortune with which all Swiss hope to return home to die.
