On the opposite shore of the lake is the Chateau de Duingt, with its white towers piercing the sky in quite the idyllic manner.
The Chateau de Duingt is a pretentious country residence belonging to the Genevois family which in the seventeenth century gave a bishop to the neighbourhood, a bishop, it is true, who was excommunicated and shorn of all his rights by the Comte de Savoie, Amadée V, but a bishop nevertheless.
The environs of the Lac d’Annecy have ever been a retreat for litterateurs and artist folk. Ernest Renan lodged here in the hôtellerie of the famous Abbey, where he occupied a chambre de prieur. José-Maria Héredia came here in company with Taine; Ferdinand Fabre passed many months here in an isolated little house on the very shores of the lake; Albert Besnard, the painter, has recently built a studio here, and a quaint and altogether charming villa; Paul Chabas, too, has resorted hither recently for the same purpose, and indeed scores have found out this accessible but tranquil little corner of Savoy. Another Parisian, a Monsieur Noblemaire, has acquired the picturesque Savoyard Manoir de Thoron, built sometime during the seventeenth century, and lives indeed the life of a noble under the old régime amid the very same luxuriant and agreeable surroundings.
Faverges, at the lower end of the Lac d’Annecy, backed up by the sombre Forêt de Doussard, and in plain view of the snowy top of Mont Blanc off to the eastward, is at once a ville industrielle and a reminiscent old feudal town. Its interest is the more entrancing because of the contrasting elements which go to make up its architectural aspect and the life of its present day inhabitants. A mediæval chateau elbows a modern silk factory, and the idle gossip of the workers as they take their little walks abroad on the little Place blends strangely enough with the amorous escapades of Henri IV which still live in local legend.
On the road from Faverges to Thone, by the switch-back mountain road, following the valley of the Fier, is the Manoir de la Tour, where on a fine mid-summer morning in 1730 Jean Jacques Rousseau climbed a cherry tree and bombarded the coquettish Mademoiselle Graffeny and Mademoiselle Galley with the rich, ripe—not overripe—fruit. We know this because Jean Jacques himself said so, and for that reason this little human note makes a pilgrimage hither the pleasurable occupation that it is. The fine old manor is still intact. But the cherry tree? No one knows. May be it was a mythical cherry tree like that of the George Washington legend. In spite of this the guardian will show visitors many cherry trees, and one may take his choice.
Lac Leman is commonly thought a Swiss lake, as is Mont Blanc usually referred to as a Swiss mountain—which it isn’t. A good third of the shore line of Lac Leman is French—“Leman Français,” it is called.
Practically the whole southern, or French, shore of the Lake of Geneva—or Lake Leman, as we had best think of it since it is thus known to European geographers—is replete with a fascinating appeal which the Swiss shore entirely lacks. It is difficult to explain this, but it is a fact.
The region literally bristles with old castle walls and donjons, though their histories have not in every instance been preserved, nor have they always been so momentous as to have impressed themselves vividly in the minds of the general reader or the conventional traveller. Perhaps they are all the more charming for that. The writer thinks they are.
Mont Blanc dominates the entire region on the east, and may be considered the good genius of Savoy and Upper Dauphiny, as it is of French-speaking Switzerland and the high Alpine valleys of Italy.
The French shore of Lac Leman, the Département of Haute-Savoie, is cut off from Geneva by the neutral Pays de Gex, and from Switzerland on the east by the torrent of the Morge, just beyond Saint Gingolph. For fifty-two kilometres stretches this French shore, or the “Côte de la Savoie” as the Swiss call it, and its whole extent is as romantic and fair a land as it is possible to conceive.