We are still here; detained by the charm of the place and the heat, which exceeds any I ever felt in Paris. It has been impossible to go out except during the very brief time the twilight lasts, when we have made excursions on horseback in the environs to Voltaire’s Ferney; Madame de Staël’s Coppet; and though last, not least, to Lord Byron’s villa Diodati at Cologny; the green heights on the opposite side of the lake, and which must be visited if you would duly appreciate its beauty. From among its trees you look to the right far along its clear expanse; to the left on Geneva, by which it is closed and terminated; while the range of the Jura stretches opposite. A few evenings since I saw this view in the red light of a stormy sunset, which a poet should have described.
We have had time to become familiar with the whole establishment, even to learn that the grave stork has a sense of ridicule more exquisite than I believed possible in a bird. He has the ungraceful walk of his species, and D——, aware of his self-love, one day presumed to imitate his hopping stride, whereupon he flew at him in fury indescribable. I too insulted his dignity, and was glad to summon the German coachmaker to my assistance. Since then the stork, who bears malice, when we cross the yard, advances with most warlike demeanour, and when we are put to flight, triumphantly throws his long bill backwards, and claps it eight or ten times in token of victory.
Certainly the Germans of the lower class are strangely civilized, and the working coachmaker and head waiters of the Secheron fair specimens of it. The two latter are from the German cantons on the Swiss frontier; they speak French, Italian, and English fluently as their own language, and one of them passes his leisure hours in playing on the flute, which he does skilfully. The coachmaker toils early and late, almost his only time for rest being on the Sunday, and spent by him in long walks into the country, of whose beauty he is an enthusiastic admirer, or in reading on the lake shore, where we have found him several times. Last night his workmen were in the boat, singing in parts and splendidly; he was standing at the edge in meditation, listening to their fine voices borne along it, and watching the faint summer lightning which flashed at intervals, muttering in the pauses of their song a poem by Kotzebue, which the scene recalled to him. When he saw us, he was anxious that we too should acknowledge its beauty, and tried as he went on to translate it into his imperfect French. He then began to criticize Goethe and Schiller, and Madame de Staël,—he had read them all.
This morning he passed in anxiety. In the coach-house roof a swallow has built a nest, in which the gentle creature takes great interest, watching with solicitude the young ones, who are just fledged, and trying their wings. One of these was to-day too adventurous, and alighted on the floor, whence he wanted strength to reascend. The German was absent, and D——, who found the stray swallow, deposited him on a beam near his abode, but not, to his patron’s dismay, within it. When he returned, he ascended the ladder to count his birds, and found that one was wanting. He carried it round and round, examined every hole and corner, peeped into all parts of the roof, and went sadly to work, saying, “Du moins je n’ai rien à me reprocher;” but he could not fix his attention, and every ten minutes left his occupation to remount his ladder.
This evening, as we passed him on our way to the park, his good-natured face had brightened; his last pilgrimage was satisfactory, the fugitive had returned to the nest.
I have amused myself by painting from the water’s edge a view of the lake, and its opposite green shore, and distant mountains. The coachmaker in ten minutes made me an easel, and D—— particularly desires me to tell you that I wash my brushes in the lake! At first sight it disappointed me, for I had grown accustomed to the cliffs overhanging Chambéry, and the country round Geneva wants the boldness which Mont Blanc is too distant to supply; but I have altered my opinion. Seen from this spot it has a soft beauty which grows upon you; it is clear as a mountain rivulet, and to view it in all its charm you must sit here on a sunny evening when it is sufficiently agitated to come murmuring in small waves to your feet, and there are just so many clouds in the sky as to vary its water’s blue with a thousand tints of green, and gold, and pale violet, changing like a chameleon, while its surface is dotted with boats sweeping along with their elegant peculiar sails like the outspread wings of a bird, and those shaded by bright coloured awnings, in which the Genevese are rowed out to catch the evening air, and pass singing and laughing in the distance, the voices floating to us over the expanse as if they were at our side. The mountain, which grows higher as it nears Geneva, is the Salive; the blue hill of a conical form, the Mole; between which and the Salive towers Mont Blanc; and beyond the Mole, stretches along the shore the wooded Voiron. The most beautiful effect possible is produced by a rainbow across this range of hills. Yesterday, anxious to insert a threatening thundercloud in my little picture, I hurried to the shore for the purpose, forgetting that the same cloud I admired might inopportunely discharge itself on my head. It did not fail, and I had only time to run to the boat-house, which is close by, whence I peeped through the arch at a most splendid rainbow: during which time the violent shower floated my palette, and made the oil a set of useless globules.
The weather has been constantly broken by storms, the finest and most terrific I ever witnessed. Last night, during two hours, the thunder, repeated by its echoes, rolled without a pause, and the Jura was constantly illuminated with the lightnings, sheeted, forked, or like circles of fire, which, blazing above the heads of the mountain range, made it resemble a line of volcanoes. This evening we rode again to Coppet; the opposite shore, at each step we advanced, becoming bolder; and when we returned, the full red moon was just risen above Mont Blanc, and the yellow glitter danced on the water in a long line, interrupted only by the dark boughs of the Secheron trees, advancing on a little promontory.
The finest view of Mont Blanc is from the hilly road which leads to Ferney Voltaire, and the best hour to see it when the snow looks rosy in the evening. Ferney is on the road from Paris to Gex, and distant but a league from Geneva. We visited it to see Voltaire’s château. On the left, at the extremity of the village, is the avenue which leads up the gentle ascent to the gates; without them, on a mound, stands the church, which once bore the inscription, “Deo erexit Voltaire;” its stones, dark with time, quietly going to ruin under its old trees. It was for some time the parish church, but being no longer large enough to contain the increased numbers, its ornaments have been transferred to the new building which glares with fresh whitewash in the village below, and it is itself converted into a receptacle for firewood. A white-headed villager came to hold the horses in the shade, and we followed our guide, who walked slowly from his dwelling behind the church to the iron gates. He was seventy-six himself, and had served Voltaire the two last years of his life, being his gardener’s son.
On entering the house, we were sorry to be consigned to the care of a most unintelligent lout, who exhibits the drawing-room and bed-chamber, illustrating, by his strange replies to all queries, the proverb of “Ask no questions and you will be told no lies.” These two rooms remain in their original state, furnished with the same tapestry chairs as when he occupied them. In the former are the pictures so often described, the two bad copies of Albano, and the production of an itinerant painter, which immortalizes Voltaire’s vanity; a strange medley of nymphs and garlands, an awkward Glory, the temple of Fame, Apollo, and the author; and in the corner the latter’s enemies, whose name seems to have been Legion, crowded under the weight of their unsold works and the whips of various furies. Whether in jest or earnest, Voltaire persisted in praising this production, and exalting its composer as a worthy successor of Michael Angelo.
The windows of this room, and of the next in which his bed stands in its old place, look on the grounds he planted himself. The narrow bedstead is of rough common wood, and the author’s curtains have been so shortened by the thefts of tourists, that their remnant is at last above the reach of collectors. Against the wall is erected a kind of cenotaph in crockery, surmounted by a bad bust, with the inscription, “Son esprit est partout, mais son cœur est ici;” above is written, “Mes mânes sont consolés, puisque mon cœur est au milieu de vous.” You know the intention was frustrated, as his heart is at the Pantheon in Paris. In the same room are engravings of celebrated men, remarkable only for having been selected and hung there by Voltaire; a tapestry portrait of the Empress of Russia, worked by herself, a bad specimen of art and nature; one of Le Kain, the actor, crowned with bays, hangs over the bed, and on either side that of Voltaire in his youth, and Frederick the Great. Voltaire’s is a more agreeable picture than I had yet seen of him, for the sarcastic expression, though perceptible, is not so forcibly marked as in later years.