And so it is. All the hotel men are in partnership, and, besides this powerful leverage, they know that so many come every year, anyhow; that those flayed at the National this year will go to be fleeced at the Beau Rivage next, and so on around.
Despite this modified piracy, Geneva is a pleasant and hospitable place to visit, and one difficult to leave. It is a thoroughly enjoyable old city, and life there was very full. There is just enough quaintness in its queer, rambling streets to make one wish to be constantly exploring them, hoping, yet fearing, that he would get lost. It was an especial delight to go across the river and prowl among the steep, narrow streets that end finally against a dead wall; to scale high hills, with old fashioned houses forming alleys so narrow that two people could scarcely pass. We loved to plunge into dark, forbidding passages, groping our way along under houses, until, when least expected, we found ourselves in a bright, well-paved street in another portion of the town.
And then the long rambles on the lake shore, especially at night, when, far off in the distance could be seen the twinkling lights of the city on both sides of the lake, connected by a tiny belt of light across the bridge that connected the old with the new.
And the concerts at the Jardin du Lac, a pleasant garden with trees and flowers and fountains, on the south bank of the lake, where a fine orchestra furnishes exquisite music during the soft, balmy Summer evenings. Ah! those were indeed days and nights of rare enjoyment.
Geneva is divided into two sections; one as distinct from the other as an Indiana cabin is from the cathedral at Cologne. On the one side of the river, it is the same as the freshly built and lively looking streets of a new American city. You see the modern cornice on the roofs and over the windows, the elegant plate glass fronts to the shops, the massive buildings for the factories, the orthodox basement dwellings in the main part of the city, and the modern villas with ample grounds farther out.
This is the new part, the part created by the latter day Swiss, who were compelled by the reconstruction of Paris to modernize and wipe out the old to make room for the new. There is less of reverence in a dollar than in anything else in the world. The owner of a historical old rookery didn’t care a straw for the associations connected with his premises; what he wanted was rent, and so the quaint old piles were demolished and new buildings, modeled after the new Paris, went up in their stead. The uncomfortable old streets were widened into something like boulevards, the beautifully smooth and clean asphalt pavement took the place of the wretched old bowlders, and everything that was old, no matter whether its savor was of the Puritanic Calvin, or the antedating monk, was bundled out of the way with as little reverence as a Cromwellian soldier displayed in cleaning out an English or Irish monastery.
But the other side of the river has escaped the hand of the vandal, and whoever hungers for the uncomfortable past can find all he wants of it. The streets are as wretched as the most exacting could desire, and the houses run up as many stories as you choose, and the old notion of a building being so high that you have to look twice to get to the top of it, is well nigh realized. Very like the conductor who was boasting of the speed of his train:
“Thunder,” says he, “we passed Millgrove so fast that the station master had to call out the telegraph operator to help him ketch a glance at us.”
There are passages so tortuous and cavernous, built for no earthly purpose that any one can divine now-a-days, buildings like small Alps, with the quaintest windows, the most absurd staircases, and the most inconvenient arrangements, shops in passages so dark as to require artificial light in mid-day, and human habitations in these underground burrows.
TOO MUCH MUSIC.