George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers

by George Edmund Street

February 24.

Left London at 8.35, and reached Paris at 7 A.M. ...

Towns generally built on hills. Curious number of churches in which the tower and spire at one end and a very high choir at the other have a low nave between them. The scenery has the large French character, owing to absence of hedgerows and the very long lines of trees—generally lanky poplars closely set. Just before Dijon, at Plombières, I saw a very pretty tiled spire, tiles of golden yellow, green, etc., very rich and charming in colour;—green not at all blue-green.

Reached Mâcon at 8.30 and after coffee walked out to try to see something. Moon rose beautifully over the opposite side of the Saône, here a very fine looking river. Walked about nearly in vain but came at last on remains of a church of some interest.[10] It has two octagonal towers, the lower part of which seems to be Romanesque, and a nave of some forty feet long with an enormous central doorway of the fifteenth century, and aisle arches on each side of it (now glazed) of the twelfth century,—choir entirely destroyed, and a small cloister arcade built up in front. The whole has been all but destroyed and then I suppose just patched up by some good-intentioned antiquary. It is (at least in the dark) an architectural puzzle.

February 25.

Called at 4.30 and off by train for Genoa via Turin at 6 A.M. As we left and crossed the Saône saw that the church I had discovered last night was the only old looking church, and that the cathedral is an entirely new stone building. It was a fine frosty morning and we could do no more than keep ourselves warm by shutting up windows, and so seeing but little through the hoar frost on the glass.

At Culoz we had a second breakfast and found the hills all about us suddenly looking like mountains owing to the snow on all their higher points. When we came back from Geneva last year, fresh from the Alps, we hardly deigned to look at them, and to-day they seem to all of us about as lovely and grand as they could be. At Culoz we changed carriages and then, keeping by the pretty Lac du Bourget, were soon at Chambéry, and then all the way to Modane we entertained ourselves by the discovery, first on one side then on the other, of snow mountains of the first magnitude! At Modane carriages are changed again for Italy, passports are examined, and then we start for the tunnel. The railway runs round Lons-le-Bourg, where we used to take sledges for the Mont Cenis, and then ascends winding round until the mountain above Modane is reached. Here the tunnel begins and we were just twenty-six minutes passing through it. I promised every one spring, oranges in fruit, and trees in full foliage when we really reached Italy; but it was just the opposite, for there was more snow, by very much, when we reached Bardonnecchia than when we left Modane. We caught one or two views of churches and I just managed to secure a note of Susa seen in the most picturesque way far below us. We reached Turin at 6.42, got some dinner at the railway station and had some much too sweet vin d’Asti, and started again at 7.35 for Genoa, where we arrived at midnight.

February 29, Genoa.

A glorious morning welcomed us to this most delightful town. It was really like summer and the views in all directions were most exquisite. Even before I got up I saw through my window the beautiful outline of the mountains of the Riviera all covered with snow, and just a line of the blue Mediterranean above and beyond the crowd of vessels below us in the port. We had rooms at Feder’s hotel—now Trombetta’s—and our bedroom had an oratory in it with a very elaborately carved altar, etc., which has been not very reverently turned now into a sleeping room.

I spent most of my day at the new English church directing the workmen, etc. Lunched with the Shelbells, but did not see Brown the consul, who had gone off to a castle he had bought near Sestri. The church looks fairly well, but it is difficult to make anything lofty enough to compete with the enormous houses which it is the fashion to build now in Genoa and with which it is surrounded.