The show sight here is the celebrated Lion of Lucerne, which photographs and pictures have made famous the world over. It is an immense figure, cut in the side of a great rock, about a quarter of a mile from the quay, in memory of the twenty-six officers and seven hundred soldiers who were massacred in the Tuileries, Paris, on the tenth of August, 1792, when the Commune obtained control of the government, and compelled King Louis to fly for his life. An immense lion, twenty-eight feet in length, lies dying in a grotto, transfixed with a broken lance. Under one paw, as though he would shelter it even in death, is the Bourbon lily. On either side of the lion are the names of the officers, and an inscription. The idea is a simple one, but the work was done by a master hand, (the Danish sculptor Thorwalsden being the artist) and is very impressive.
THE SWISS SOLDIERS ABROAD.
As a rule, people thrill when they look upon this famous Lion of Lucerne, but I declined to do anything of the kind. The death of these Swiss, in Paris, was a purely commercial matter. They were the hirelings of an infamous despot, who was crushing the life out of the French people by their aid. I have no sympathy for king, queen or noble, and when one dies I have a hosanna to sing immediately. And I cannot imagine anything more disgraceful than a man, Swiss, or of any other nationality, who would sell himself to a despot. These fellows, who fell in defense of Louis, had but one merit: they sold their blood, bones and sinews, and they carried out their contract. They were simply honest butchers, who contracted to do certain work for a lecherous French king, and did it. But the monument at Lucerne to these hirelings is an insult to humanity, and all the good I got out of it, was the contemplation of a wondrously carved lion, and the drawback to that satisfaction was the frightful fact that the men, to whose memory it stands, never should have had any monument erected at all. This inscription is the only one they deserved:
“Sacred to the memory of some hundreds of hired soldiery, who fought for pay only, had too much animal courage to run, and who died to carry out a contract.”
As a work of art, Thorwalsden’s lion is worth seeing—as a piece of sentiment, excuse me. I have seen too many soldiers in Europe who sell their sinews for pay, and I have seen too many starving people who are kept poor to support them. I do not like any soldiers but volunteers, and whenever the people get the upper hand of the other kind, I want to contribute for a monument to the people, not to their oppressors.
Aside from the bridges, whose only merit is their age, and one or two rather scantily furnished churches, there is but little of interest in Lucerne.
The Glacier Mills are an attraction, and are well worth seeing. There is no humbug about nature. You climb a hill after looking at the lion, and you come to a garden in which are a series of the great pits known as Glacier Mills.
These are simply great holes in solid rock thirty or forty feet deep, and about the same in diameter. In the ages gone by when this country was covered with glaciers, the action of water wore holes in the rock, great stones lost themselves in these cavities, the water came in and the stones, weighing many tons, revolved by the action of the water, wore away the rock and enlarged the pit at every revolution.
This work went on for ages. The water forced itself into the pit, the great rock revolved, by its action enlarging the cavity at every revolution, until finally the glacier disappeared and the rocks were at rest.
And here they are to-day, round as marbles, lying at the bottom of the pits they made, so many evidences of the irresistible forces of nature.