The Counts of Gruyère

by Anna De Koven

LACE-MAKERS

Or again on the first Sunday in May all would assemble for the sport called Château d'Amour of ancient Celtic origin. In the midst of a green field or in the square before the Hotel de Ville, a wooden fortress was erected, surrounded by a little moat and with high towers and a donjon. Maidens and more maidens, smiling and flower-crowned and with white arms outstretched, poured down a rain of arrows and wooden lances from the battlements, or oftener pelted their lovers the assailants with showers of roses. Then at a given signal, in a sudden escalade, the besiegers broke over the walls, each to receive a kiss and a rose as prize of victory. Then besiegers and besieged together burned the fortress, and the day ended with bacchic libations and with dances. Meeting by moonlight nights to sing their love songs and rhymed legends in the city square, the Gruyère people better loved their dances, the long Celtic Korols (or Coraules), when, singing in chorus in wild winding farandoles, they went dancing over vales and hills, day in and day out until human strength could bear no more. Such was the famous dance quaintly recounted in ancient French by a Gruyère chronicler.

"It happened one day that the Count de Gruyère returning to his castle, found thereby a great merry-making of young lads and maidens dancing in Koraule. The same Count, greatly loving of such sport, forthwith took the hand of the loveliest of the maidens and joined the company. Whereupon, no one tiring, they proceeded, dancing always, through the hard-by village of Enney up to Château D'Oex in the Pays-d'en-Haut, and wonderful was it to see the people in all the villages they passed joining in that joyous band. Seven hundred were they when they finished, having danced continuously for three days over the mountain leagues between Gruyère and Château D'Oex, and great was the fame of Count Perrod and his dancing in this Grande Coquille."

Such was life in this idyllic country, the beloved Grévire of the melodious Romand speech, where "the houses are high with roofs leaning far towards the ground, where the plums are so ripe they fall with the breeze, where there are oats and tressed wheat, cows black and white and rich cheese, black goats, too, and horned oxen—and beautiful maids who would wed."

Nourished on rich milk smelling of the aromatic grasses of their pastures, white and pink as the apples of their orchards; light-footed and vigorous from their mountain life, their dancing and their athletic sports, the Gruyère people developed a beauty celebrated even in the grave pages of the historians. From their hearts warm with the sun, their fancy fed by the beauty of their ravishing country, issued songs witty and sad, and always melodious with their soft Italian vocables, a literature in Romand patois. Thus the golden age of chivalry, rhyming harmoniously with the golden age of the herdsmen, in the blue circle of the Gruyère heights, grew to its noon day.

Then, suddenly as a tempest gathering across the sun pours quick destruction over a parterre of flowers, black horror swallowed up Gruyère. The plague called the Black Death, born in the Levant and rushing like a destroying flood with terrifying rapidity over the borders of Switzerland, penetrated even into the mountain-encircled country of Count Pierre. The devils and evil spirits of the caverns and the forests seemed now in the imagination of the Celtic people to be the sinister authors of this mysterious and devastating curse. The youths and maidens, no longer dancing to rhymed choruses of love and joy, swung wildly in dances of death among the abandoned corpses.

Sprung from the carnival dances, where the masked Death forcing the terrified maidens to his embrace led them to the cemeteries to celebrate the memory of the dead, the priest countenanced these masks as religious rites and taught the superstitious people that their gifts would ease the souls of those sent suddenly unshrived to hell. With solemn phrase and syncopated notes, the danse macabre wound through the darkened street around the shadowed crucifix up to the chapel door, where in hideous masks, and dancing still, the hallucinated people, cast their gold before the altar. "And as the coins, tin, tin, fell in the basins, so, ha, ha, hi, hi! the poor souls laugh in purgatory." So, taught by the priests and prelates ignorant as themselves, the sadly altered Gruyère people incessantly danced and prayed, sometimes giving themselves to the strange lascivious customs to which the whole country was abandoned, and sometimes joining in the cruel persecution of the Jews, accused of poisoning their fountains and their streams. Nothing was lacking in the reign of terror which overwhelmed Gruyère in the last years of Count Pierre's reign. Fires and earthquakes succeeded to the plague, and in the midst of their terrors their implacable enemies, the Bernois, attacked them.

"O! Misfortune, and three times misfortune, beware how you touch Berne!" the refrain of an old song too often forgotten by Count Pierre, was once more exemplified in the revenge which the Bernois wreaked upon the Gruyère châteaux of Laubeck and Mannenburg, for the thefts of their herds.