A Ride on Horseback to Florence Through France and Switzerland. Vol. 2 of 2 / Described in a Series of Letters by a Lady

by Augusta Macgregor Holmes

One wondrous instance of preservation occurred in the person of an old man, aged a hundred years: there was a high mound, formed of the wrecks cast there by the former inundation of 1595. He would have been too feeble to climb it for safety; he stood there by chance when the roaring destroyer rushed by, circling round, without wetting the sole of his foot, as if it respected the monument of its former power.

This morning, 17th of September, started early as we conveniently could, the innkeeper having told us, for our comfort, that the overflow of the Rhone has cut the road between Sion and Sierre, and stopped the diligence. The monks of St. Bernard have a convent here, and when the climate has undermined the health of their brothers on the mountain, they are relieved from hence.

The monastery of the Great St. Bernard is distant but a ten hours’ journey; we intended going thither, but feared to over-fatigue our horses, yet I wished it much, from admiration of these self-made martyrs, and also from the romantic story of the founder. The castle of Menthon, for I must tell you this story, is built on the height which overlooks the lake of Annecy, in Savoy. An heir was born to its noble possessors on the 15th of June, 923. From early boyhood his taste and studies were unsuited to close intercourse with the world; and grown to a man, he resisted gently but firmly, the will of his family, who had chosen for his wife the heiress of the house of Dwingt.

As he was the only hope of their line, the sole seedling of their falling tree, his parents entreated and pressed him earnestly, and the youth consented at last, unable to deny them longer. The marriage morning came, the fair young bride was adorned, and the guests assembled, for there was to be feasting at the castle of Menthon. As the hour for the ceremony drew nigh, it became matter of marvel that the bridegroom should so long remain absent. His chamber, where he had not slept, and the domains of Menthon, were searched vainly; Bernard had fled. The wedding guests, one by one and whispering, departed, and the maiden, ere yet she was a wife, was left a widow.

Years went by; the heiress was no longer at Menthon, she had probably formed a more auspicious alliance, and the desolate father and mother had no son seated beside them near the hearth of their hall. They had called up hope till despair came in its place, and believing him dead at last, they set forth on a pilgrimage, not to the shrine of a saint, but the feet of a living man, whose self abnegation and holy life had become the discourse of Christendom.

Travelling by slow journeys, they arrived through the snows at the summit of the mountain, where the solitary lived in the hospital he had founded, compassionating the dangers which awaited travellers from France and Germany to Italy. They found a man old before age, worn with fatigues and hardships, and knelt before him to ask his blessing, and to beg he would say masses for the peace of their son’s soul. The monk knew them, for their old age had altered less than his youth: and while he blessed them tremulously, they knew his voice, and started from his feet to fall on his neck and bless him also.

He had fled from the wedding feast to the city of Aosta, where he received holy orders and became archdeacon of the cathedral. He had preached at the peril of his life, in the heathen Alpine valleys, and rooted out idolatry; thrown down the statue of Jupiter still worshipped on the mount Jou, the little St. Bernard, and founded hospitals on each of the mountains which now bear his name, instituting for each one a congregation of monks. He told his past life and his vocation to the parents who had found him; they wept together, and then they parted, as was his will, they to return to their lone castle of Menthon, to pray for its exiled heir; he to bury himself once more in the tomb he had selected, and forget if he could that he had seen forms and re-awakened affections which drew him back to the world.

St. Bernard preached in the Alpine valleys forty-two years, and afterwards in Lombardy, whence he travelled to Rome; he died at Novara and was canonized.

It is not surprising that the country about Martigny should be unhealthy; the road from this to Riddes, two posts and a half, is raised along the centre of a marsh, now overflowed by the Rhone; the valley produces here only rushes and rank-grass, which feed the thin cattle scantily, and stunted birch trees, and unprofitable barberry bushes, and a kind of furze with a red berry. It seems a fitting habitation only for the frogs, which croaked and jumped by myriads from the wet bank to the muddy stream as we rode along. The unfortunate peasants scarce look like human beings. I did not see two with throats undeformed by enormous goitres. Cretins abound in the valley, and those not belonging to the idiot tribe have an expression of abjectness and misery not much higher in the scale. They are mostly of dwarfish stature, and the women wear the small straw hat with turned-up brim, ornamented with brilliant ribands of gold and silver tissue, which show off in all their ugliness their unwholesome complexions and ill-formed features. At Riddes the Indian corn is cultivated again, and near Riddes to the right is a fine view of chasm and torrent, a castle above and hamlet beside, breaking the sadness of the drear valley and barren mountains. Farther on are pretty villages, surrounded by fine old walnut-trees and pastures, green as those of the Simmenthal. In a field we rode by were hay-makers busy; a woman called to desire I would approach and show my strange figure. I answered, at a like pitch of voice, that I had not time, and we left merriment behind us.

It would be difficult to fancy a finer grouping of crag, river, and valley than approaching Sion. The Rhone to the right; the peaked mountains rising before two crowned with castles; to the left, highest and grandest, Tourbillon; on the right, Valerie. The first ruined, but nobly; turret and tower and battlement standing as in the fine old age which succeeds a strong manhood. Below, as we approached the fortified wall, which, flanked by its look-out towers, surrounds the city, we saw the third castle of Majorie, once the residence of the governors of the Valais. Behind the town, on another and almost inaccessible crag, is the ruin of the castle of Seyon, of which time, and siege, and fire have left small remains.