Servetus died with warm feet, and his ashes were scattered to the four winds. He and Calvin differed about the exact meaning of some passages of scripture and as it had not been revised at that date, Calvin made himself the authority. As he had supreme power and could do as he pleased he succeeded in having a tolerable degree of unanimity. After the burning of Servetus there were but few who desired to argue with Calvin.
I have observed that burning and otherwise killing for the up-building of the kingdom of the Prince of Peace has been common in all ages, and that the sect that does the most of it is always the one that happens to be in power. The Jesuits have published a sort of Catholic “Fox’s Book of Martyrs,” which sets forth with ghastly wood engravings the histories of the persecutions of Catholics by Protestants. The burning of Servetus by Calvin is the subject of one of the illustrations, though the editor carefully omits the fact that Servetus was not a Catholic at all.
Rosseau, the great Socialist, was born here, and here he wrote the works that have consigned his memory to infamy or glory, according as the reader believes. He was a man of wonderful genius, one of the foremost writers of the world, but he was as fantastic as any other Frenchman, and his doctrines were based upon a condition of things which only a dreamy poet could imagine as possible. He was a Socialist, a latitudinarian, and one of the kind of “world reformers” who hold that everything that is, is wrong, and that to destroy anything is to better the condition of the world.
It is a curious commentary upon French morals that after he had been the lover, (with all that the word implies) of a dozen or more of French titled women who affected men of letters, and while living openly with his cook, who bore him five illegitimate children, a French college invited him to write a treatise upon the “Effect of Science and Art Upon Morals,” which invitation he most cheerfully accepted. He was the reverse of Calvin, but like Calvin, he left his impress upon the thought of the little city.
Geneva is a pleasant place to come to, and, but for the extortionate hotels, would be a place that one would be loth to leave. Swiss hotel keepers have got swindling down to so fine a point that further progress in that direction is impossible. There is a legend afloat that hotel keepers from all over Europe come to Geneva to learn the business, and that lectures on the art of swindling travelers are given regularly by the managers of Geneva hotels; in short, that Geneva is a sort of hotel college, but I don’t know as to its truth. Any hotel keeper here, however, is competent to fill a professorship—in such an institution.
You are charged for candles, a franc each. You never use a candle, except during the minute necessary to disrobe for your bed, but you are charged a franc for it just the same. The more conscientious hotel manager wants to satisfy you with a new candle every night, and so he has a little machine, something like a pencil sharpener, with which he tapers off the top of the burned candle, making it look as though it had never been lighted, and charges you right over again for it.
Tibbitts exasperated his landlord by putting his candle in his pocket every morning, and from the front of the hotel giving it to the first poor person who passed. But the landlord smiled grimly, in French, when he saw the little trick, and promptly instructed his clerk to charge Monsieur Tibbitts two francs a day for broken glass.
THE CHAMBERMAID’S TRICK.
You are to depart to-morrow morning, and you charge the clerk with great distinctness to have your bill made out before you retire. You want to go over the items and see that everything is correct. The clerk, with great suavity, assures you that it shall be done, but it isn’t. You come for it and find the office closed. The next morning you arise betimes and make the same request; you say you want your bill immediately, to which the same answer is given with an apology for its not having been done the night before. You get through your breakfast—it is not yet done. Minutes fly, the carriage is at the door to take you to your train, and just as the last minute possible to catch the train is on you, it comes—as long as your arm, written in French, which you can’t understand if you had time to, but which now is utterly impossible. You glance at the grand total—it is a grand total—and you pay it, objurgating because it is a trifle over twice what it should be.
Then comes the long array of servants, the chambermaid, the boots, the elevator boy, the head waiter, the table waiter, and so on, all of whom expect and plumply demand recognition, and you think you are done. But you are not.