THE RHONE VALLEY FROM MONT PELERIN
There were other revolutions, and revisions, and reconstructions to follow. When the Holy Alliance remodelled the map of Europe in 1815, the fate of Vaud, like that of so many other minor nationalities, hung in the balance. The Bernese fully expected to be allowed to re-establish their dominion; but Alexander I., prompted by Laharpe, prevented them. 'You have done a great deal for me,' the Emperor is reported to have said to the Liberator. 'What can I do for you?' And the Liberator's answer was: 'Sire, all that I ask is permission to speak to your Majesty of my country whenever I wish.' He spoke in 1815, and the Emperor listened; and the claims of Berne were rejected; and Laharpe took a house at Lausanne, and looked down on the scene of his triumphs, and fought his battles over again, and frequented Madame de Staël, whom in more stormy days he had written of as 'une infernale gueuse,' and was reverenced by all as the 'Grand Old Man' of the Canton.
There were further political changes in 1830, in 1845, and in 1861; but of these we need not speak. Their interest is no more than local. What the English traveller chiefly sees in the Lausanne of the nineteenth century is an increasing English colony, and the loudly vaunted educational facilities.
[CHAPTER VII]
THE ENGLISH COLONY—THE EDUCATIONAL ADVANTAGES
Of the English colony there is not perhaps a great deal to be said, except that it fills two churches on Sundays, and at all times monopolizes the Ouchy road. It has never consisted of distinguished persons like the English colony at Florence; on the other hand, it has never included so large a proportion of disreputable persons as the English colonies at Brussels and Boulogne. Gibbon cannot be said to have belonged to it, since, in his day, it did not yet exist; and it can hardly claim Dickens, since his sojourn there was of comparatively brief duration. In the main it is composed of very young and rather elderly members of the respectable middle classes. There is an English club, and there are opportunities of playing bridge. The life is inexpensive, not because commodities are specially cheap, but because there are no wealthy residents to set extravagant standards. A small income goes a long way there; and the climate is salubrious for all those whose bronchial tubes are in a condition to resist the bise.
These are conditions which please a great many people—notably the wandering spinsters who 'live in their boxes,' and the retired officers and civil servants who have to subsist upon their pensions. At Lausanne they can economize without feeling the pinch of poverty, and without feeling envious—or perceiving that their wives feel envious—of more prosperous neighbours. The sunshine costs nothing, and the amusements cost very little; they can go about in knickerbockers and wear out their old clothes without fearing that their solvency will be suspected. There is no need for them to learn a foreign tongue, since they form their own society, and mix very little with the Swiss who accept them, but do not pretend to like them. They live lazily, but healthily, and, on the whole, contentedly.
Of course, there is another side to the medal, and a price to be paid for the advantages. The colonists are exiles who have severed old ties, and have a difficulty in forming new ones. Their existence is rather animal than human, and rather vegetable than animal. They lose their energy and their intelligence; they are like plants no longer growing in a garden, but uprooted and flung upon the grass. A stranger finds it difficult to converse with them, and fancies that they must be terribly bored. Perhaps they are; but perhaps, too, it is better to be bored in the sunshine than busy in a London fog. So they linger on, persuading themselves that they do so for their children's sake rather than their own, and referring the stranger, if he happens to question them, to the wonderful educational advantages of the town.