Perhaps it is also worth noting that, in the days before the railways, Nyon was on the highroad from France to Switzerland. The track descended there from Saint-Cergues, where it crossed the Jura; and by it travelled Madame de Staël, and Benjamin Constant, and Voltaire, and many another whom we have met in the course of this rambling narrative. There is a new road now, with wide, sweeping curves, and a gentle gradient; but enough of the old road remains to show us how shamefully bad it was—a narrow road, of uneven surface, plunging headlong through the pine-forest. The lumbering old coaches, with their six horses, must have had a very bad time there, and it is no wonder that Napoleon ordered a road to be made over the Col de la Faucille to supersede it.
But enough of Nyon and the Canton de Vaud! We must cross the lake to the French shore; and, as first impressions are always the most graphic, permission has been obtained to print here the writer's own first impressions, contributed a few years since, to the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette.
[CHAPTER X]
THE FRENCH SHORE
What strikes the holiday traveller about the French shore is that it is so much better managed than the Swiss shore. Its natural advantages are fewer—they are, in fact, very few indeed. Evian—and when one speaks of the French shore one is principally thinking of Evian—stands with its back to the high mountains instead of facing them. Consequently it has no views to compare with the views from Lausanne, Geneva, and Vevey. Its hinterland is commonplace, except for those who make a great effort and go up the Dent d'Oche. The mouth of the Dranse, hard by, is a dreary collection of detritus. There are hardly any literary landmarks, except the few that recall the memory of St. Francis de Sales. Whence English travellers have, almost with one accord, drawn the inference that it is not worth while to go to Evian. But they are wrong. The French think otherwise, and the French are right. They do not go there, as some suppose, because they are crippled with diseases and need the waters to wash poisons out of their blood and their organs: the Evian water is the sort of water that the whole, as well as the sick, can drink by the bucketful without feeling a penny the worse for it. Their purpose in going to Evian is to live a life of luxury and leisure. No doubt they pay through the nose for the privilege. Inquiry at one hotel elicited the statement that the worst rooms were let at eight and the best at eighty francs a day—with service à la carte on the same scale. But other hotels are cheaper, and it is also possible to hire a villa, a flat, a lodging; and, in any case, it is right that Evian should be introduced to the English tourist as the one place on the Lake of Geneva in which the life of leisure and luxury is possible.
There is no real luxury at Geneva itself, though there are high prices and immense hotels. Instead of having good music at fixed hours, they have indifferent music all day long. The whole air is full of a continual tinkle-tinkle; louder than the tinkle-tinkle rises the hooting of the steamers and the trams; louder still are the voices of the trippers, mostly Americans, inquiring the prices of things, or complaining that they have lost their luggage. The society at the boasted Kursaal is an unpolished horde, mainly composed of the Geneva clerks and shop-assistants losing their salaries at petits chevaux. Nor are things much better elsewhere on the Swiss shore. Nyon, for instance, is by nature an earthly paradise, and they have formed a society for developing it. What they really want is a society for cleaning it, since it is the present practice of the inhabitants to empty their dustbins over their garden walls into the lake, with results appalling to the nostrils of the stranger. At Lausanne, or Vevey, or Montreux—other earthly paradises—you escape this nuisance; but even there, in the season, you have the feeling that the place is one vast hotel, and that everybody is waiting with packed boxes for the omnibus. But cross to Evian. The town is a little smaller than Montreux, but just as full. Yet it never seems to be crowded. There is no hurrying or bustling. You are in nobody's way, and nobody is in your way; which means that Evian is properly managed.
They do not encourage you to come to Evian in the capacity of tripper. On the contrary, they try to arrange things so that you must sacrifice your lunch in order to get there, and your dinner in order to get home. But this is a part of the secret of good management, as you will appreciate if you stay there. No knickerbockered army, headed by a polyglot guide in a straw hat with a label on it, will invade your peace, but you will be free to live your lotus-eating life in your own way. You will probably live most of it in the casino, which is a proper casino, differing from the Geneva Kursaal as cheese from chalk. There is so much shade that it is always cool there, even on the hottest day. You will lunch there on a shaded terrace, assisted by a sympathetic waiter, who understands that a good lunch is an end in itself, and not merely a device for keeping body and soul together until the evening. You will linger long and agreeably over the coffee and liqueurs, without feeling that someone else wants your seat. Nor will you be bothered, as in Geneva, by the squeaking of a futile fiddle, or by hawkers offering picture postcards. But, at the appointed hour, there will be a proper concert with a programme, and a well-behaved and well-dressed audience: beautiful French ladies looking as if they had stepped out of fashion plates; beautiful French children looking as if they had been cut out of Aunt Louisa's picture-book; fantastic Frenchmen, looking as if they were dressed for amateur theatricals. Then, when the evening comes, and you have dined as well as you have lunched, there will be a performance in the little theatre, given by artistes from Paris, who come on to Evian from Aix-les-Bains: Réjane, Jeanne Granier, Charlotte Wiehe, or others. Or there will be a ball in the grand style—not in the least like the balls in the Hall-by-the-Sea at Margate—given in as good a ballroom as the heart of a dancer could wish for. But no hurrying, or hustling, or excitement. At Evian, if nowhere else on Lake Leman, life is a leisurely pageant.