Rollo in Geneva

by Jacob Abbott

One of the greatest sources of interest and pleasure for travellers who visit Switzerland and the Alps for the first time, especially if they are travellers from America, is the novelty of the arrangements and usages of the hotels.

One reason why every thing is so different in a Swiss hotel from what we witness in America is, that all the arrangements are made to accommodate parties travelling for pleasure. Every thing is planned, therefore, with a view of making the hotel as attractive and agreeable to the guests as possible.

The Hotel de l'Ecu, where our party have now arrived, is very pleasantly situated on the quay facing the lake. It stands near the further end of the bridge, as seen in the engraving on page 58. It is the building where you see the flag flying.

Indeed, all the principal hotels in Geneva are situated on the quay. Quite a number of the large and handsome edifices which you see in the engraving, on both sides the water, are hotels. The hotel keepers know very well that most of the travellers that come to Switzerland come not on business, but to see the lakes, and mountains, and other grand scenery of their country. Accordingly, in almost every place, the situation chosen for the hotels is the one which commands the prettiest views.

Then, in arranging the interior of the house, they always place the public apartments, such as the breakfast and dining rooms, and the reading room, in the pleasantest part of it; and they have large windows opening down to the floor, and pretty little tables in the recesses of them, so that while you are eating your breakfast or reading the newspapers you have only to raise your eyes and look out upon the most charming prospects that the town affords.

Then, besides this, they have gardens, and summer houses, and raised terraces, overlooking roads, or rivers, or beautiful valleys, and little observatories, and many other such contrivances to add to the charms of the hotel, and make the traveller's residence in it more agreeable.

They hope in this way to induce the traveller to prolong his stay at their house. And it has the intended effect. Indeed, at almost every hotel where a party of travellers arrive, in a new town, their first feeling almost always is, that they shall wish to remain there a week.

What a pleasant place! they say to each other; and what a beautiful room! Look at the mountains! Look at the torrent pouring through the valley! What a pretty garden! And this terrace, where we may sit in the evening, and have our tea, and watch the people across the valley, going up and down the mountain paths. I should like to stay here all summer.

Then the next place where they stop may be on a lake; and there, when they go to the window of their rooms, or of the breakfast room, they look out and say,—

Ah! see what a beautiful view of the lake! How blue the water is! See the sail boats and the row boats going to and fro. And down the lake, as far as I can see, there is a steamer coming. I see the smoke. And beyond, what a magnificent range of mountains, the tops all covered with glaciers and snow!