“We have, beside, a medical luminary here—you remember him—Dr. Bouchereau, the man whom mamma went to consult about our poor Andrew. I do not know whether he has recognized us, but he never bowed—a regular old bear!
“I have just come from drinking my half-glass of water at the spring. This precious spring is ten minutes away, as one ascends in the direction of the high peak, in a gorge where a torrent all feathery with foam rolls and thunders, having come from the glacier which closes the view, a glacier shining and clear between the blue Alps that seems to be forever crumbling and dissolving its invisible and snowy base into that white mass of beaten water. Great black rocks dripping constantly among the ferns and lichens, the groves of pine and a dark green foliage, a soil in which spicules of mica glitter in the coal dust—that is the place; but something that I cannot express to you is the tremendous noise of the torrent tearing among the stones and of the steam-hammer of a lumber mill, which the water sets in action; and then, besides, in this narrow gorge, on its single road, which is always crowded, there are coal-carts, long files of mules, riding parties of excursionists and the water drinkers going and coming. I forgot to mention the apparition at the doors of wretched dwellings of some horrible male or female cretin, displaying a hideous goitre, a great big idiotic face with an open and grumbling mouth! Cretinism is one of the products of the country; it seems that Nature here is too strong for human beings and that the minerals and the rest—copper, iron and sulphur—seize, strangle and suffocate them; that that water flowing from the peaks chills them as it does those wretched trees which one sees growing all dwarfed between two crags. There’s another of those impressions made upon a new arrival, the mournfulness and horror of which disappear in the course of a few days.
“For now, instead of flying from them, I have my special pet sufferers from goitre, one in particular, a frightful little monster, perched on the border of the road in a chair fit for a child of three years old; but he is sixteen, exactly the age of Mlle. Bachellery. When I near him, he dodders about his head, as heavy as a stone, and gives forth a hoarse cry, a crushed cry without understanding and without style; and as soon as he has received his piece of silver, he raises it in triumph toward a charcoal-woman, who is watching him from the corner of a window. He is a piece of good fortune envied by a great many mothers, for this hideous creature takes in, by himself alone, more than his three brothers do, who are at work at the furnaces of La Debout. His father does nothing at all; afflicted with consumption, he passes the winter by his poor man’s hearth and in summer installs himself on a bench with other unhappy ones in the warm mist which the hot springs create as they pour forth.
“The young lady of the springs, in her white apron and with dripping hands, fills the glasses which are held out to her, as they come along, while in the courtyard near by, separated from the road by a low wall, heads are seen, the bodies of which one cannot perceive, heads thrown backward, contorted with their efforts, grinning in the sunshine, their mouths wide open; ’tis an illustration for the Inferno of Dante: the sinners damned to gargling!
“Sometimes, when we leave, we go the big round while returning to the establishment and descend by the country way. Mamma, whom the noise of the hotel fatigues and who particularly fears lest I should dance too much in the drawing-room, had indulged the dream of hiring a little house in Arvillard, where there is plenty of choice at every door; on every story there are bills, which flutter among the potted plants between the fresh and tempting curtains. One asks oneself what on earth becomes of the inhabitants during the season; do they camp in bands on the surrounding mountains, or do they go and live in the hotel at fifty francs a day? It would surprise me if it were so, for that magnet which they carry in their eye when they look at the bather seems to me terribly rapacious—there is something in it which glitters and catches hold.
“Yes, that same shining something, that sudden gleam on the forehead of my little boy with the goitre, reflected from his piece of silver—I find it everywhere; on the spectacles of the little nervous doctor who auscults me every morning, in the eyes of the good sugarly-sweet ladies who ask you in to examine their houses, their most convenient little gardens, crammed with holes full of water and kitchens on the ground floor to serve the apartments in the third story; in the eyes of carmen with their short blouses and lacquered hats decked with big ribbons, who make signs to you from the boxes of their carryalls; in the look cast by the donkey-boy standing in front of the wide-open barn in which long ears switch to and fro; yes, even in the glances of these donkeys, in their long look of obstinacy and gentleness, I have seen that metallic hardness which the love of money gives; I have seen it, it exists.
“After all, their houses are frightful, huddled together and mournful, having no outlook, full of disagreeable points of all kinds which are impossible to ignore, because your attention has been drawn to them in the house next door. Decidedly we shall stick to our caravansary, the Alpes Dauphinoises, which lies hot in the sun on its height and steeps its red bricks and uncountable green shutters in the middle of an English park not yet of age, a park with hedges, labyrinth and sanded roads, the enjoyment of which it shares with five or six other overgrown hotels of the country—La Chevrette, La Laita, Le Bréda, La Planta.
“All these hotels with Savoy names are in a state of ferocious rivalry; they spy upon each other, watch each other across the copses, and there is a merry war as to which shall put on the most style with its bells, its pianos, the whip-cracking of its postilions, its expenditure of fireworks; or which one shall throw its windows widest open in order that the animation there, the laughter, songs and dances shall appeal to the visitors lodged in the opposite hotel and make them say:
“‘How they do amuse themselves down there! What a lot of people they must have!’
“But the place where the hottest battle goes on between the rival taverns is in the columns of the Bathers’ Gazette, where those lists of new arrivals are printed, which the little sheet gives with minute exactness, twice a week.