Meat comes next—a substantial dish, and an entrée of some sort. These are separated by a course consisting of a single vegetable, potatoes or stewed celery or macaroni au gratin, or, perhaps, cauliflower with sauce tartare. Another vegetable precedes the first meat-course. Salad follows the second. Then, we have pastry or some other sweet, and dessert, meaning fruit, nuts and bon-bons. Finally, coffee. The dinner is à la Russe, no dishes being set upon the table, excepting the dessert. The carving is done in another room and the guests are not tempted to gluttony by the amount served to each.
“If they would only give me a potato with my boiled fish!” lamented an American to me, once. “Or serve the green peas with the lamb! And mutton-chops and tomato-sauce are as naturally conjoined in the educated mind as the English q and u!”
On the Continent the exception to the rule he objurgated is the serving of chicken and salad—lettuce, endive or chervil,—together upon a hot plate. The vinegar and oil cool the chicken. The heated plate wilts and toughens the salad. Common sense might have foretold the result. But chicken-and-salad continue to hold their rank in the culinary succession, and are eaten without protest by those who are loudest in ridicule and condemnation of transatlantic solecisms.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Home-life in Geneva—Ferney.
OUR German experiences, sadly curtailed as to time by Boy’s sickness, scarcely deserve the title of “loiterings.” We passed two days in Strasburg; as many in Baden-Baden, a day and night at Schaffhausen; a week in Heidelberg; a few hours at Basle, etc., etc., too much in the style of the conventional tourist to accord with our tastes or habits. At Heidelberg our forces were swelled by the addition of another family party, nearly allied to ours in blood and affection. There, we entered upon a three weeks’ tour, a pleasant progress that had no mishap or interruption until we re-crossed the Alps into Switzerland, this time by the Brünig Pass, traveling as we had done over the St. Gothard, en famille, but in two diligences, instead of one, taking in Interlaken, The Staubbach, Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald, the Wengernalp, Freiburg, Bern and a host of other notable places and scenes, and brought up, in tolerable order, if somewhat travel-worn, at ten o’clock one September night, in Geneva.
We were to disband here; one family returning to Germany; Miss M—— going on to Paris; ourselves intending to winter again in Italy. I had enjoyed our month of swift and varied travel the more for the continual consciousness of the increase of health and strength that enabled me to perform it. But I had taken cold somewhere. The old cough and pain possessed me, and for these, said men medical and non-medical, Geneva was the worst place one could select in autumn or winter. The bise, a strong, cold, west wind, blows there five days out of seven; for weeks the sun is not visible for the fog; rain-storms are frequent and severe, and the atmosphere is always chilled by the belt of snow-mountains. This was the meteorological record of the bright little city, supplied by those who should have known of that whereof they spoke.
For three days after our arrival, it sustained this reputation. The bise blew hard and incessantly, filling the air with dust-clouds and beating the lake into an angry sea that flung its waves clear across the Pont du Mont Blanc, the wide, handsome bridge, uniting the two halves of the city. I sat by the fire and coughed, furtively. Caput looked gravely resolute and wrote letters to Florence and Rome. Then, Euroclydon—or Bise,—subsided into calm and sunshine, and we sallied forth, as do bees on early spring-days, to inspect the town—“the richest and most popular in Switzerland.” (Vide Baedeker.)