Pour mettre la terre en joie,
Pour faire un monde tout vermeil.
Quand l’hiver m’a crié ‘qui vive!’
J’ai dit: ‘Fais-moi place, il est temps!
Du Paradis tout droit j’arrive:
Je suis le chevalier Printemps!’”
—when, I say, spring thus speaks to us of the rout of winter and the dawn of a wealthier life, it is blue that we look for most upon the frost-stained fields; blue not white—the blue of the type-flowered Gentian, not the white of the Alpine Crowfoot and Crocus.
Whilst writing these lines on the most fascinating spring flower of the Alps, there comes before my mind one spot in particular where it abounds in May—a certain long and rapid grassy slope at Le Planet, above Argentière (Haute-Savoie). Albeit not in Switzerland, Le Planet is only just across the frontier; and, as every one who knows the district will attest, it is difficult to draw a rigid, formal line where flowers and mountains are so knit in common semblance. Other rich scenes of azure I can recall—as on the swelling slopes of the Jura around the Suchet, or on the fields which mount from Naters towards Bel-Alp; but none forces itself to mind with such persistence as does this slope at Le Planet. And it is because the surrounding circumstance illustrates so well all that I have been saying about this Gentian’s presence in the spring.
The slope in question is not five minutes’ stroll from the hotel. On the plateau itself verna is all but absent, but on this broad and steep incline it congregates in such amazing numbers that, as I think on it, I am sure all I have said of this witching flower is poor and paltry. After all, verbal magniloquence is perhaps out of place, and simplicity is the best translator of such magnificence. All shades of brightest blue are here presented; for, excepting a few pale plum-coloured clusters, the brilliant type-flower is ubiquitous, blending delightfully with the little yellow Violet and with the white, fluffy seedheads of the Coltsfoot.
But what, perhaps, makes this particular slope so appropriate in point of illustration for this chapter is, that above it towers the mighty Aiguille Verte, decked as in winter with its snows and ice, and in the foreground lies the frozen remains of a great avalanche strewn with fallen rocks and pierced by stricken larch-trees.