A celebrated physician one day said to his pupils: “Employ this remedy at once, while it still cures.” Medicines, like hats, have their fashions.
Yet what can be said against this remedy? The climate is warm, the gorge sheltered, the air pure, the gayety of the sun is cheering. A change of habits leads to a change of thoughts; melancholy ideas take flight. The water is not bad to drink; you have had a beautiful journey; the moral cures the physical nature; if not, you have had hope for two months—and what, I beg to know, is a remedy, if not a pretext for hoping? You take patience and pleasure until either illness or invalid departs, and everything is for the best in the best of worlds.
II.
Several leagues away, among the precipices, sleeps the lake of Gaube. The green water, three hundred feet in depth, has the reflexes of an emerald.
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The bald heads of the mountains are mirrored in it with a divine serenity. The slender column of the pines is reflected there as clear as in the air; in the distance, the woods clothed in bluish mist come down to bathe their feet in its cold wave, and the huge Vignemale, spotted with snow, shuts it about with her cliffs. At times a remnant of breeze comes to ruffle it, and all those grand images undulate; the Greek Diana, the wild, maiden huntress, would have taken it for a mirror.