The Spell of Switzerland

by Nathan Haskell Dole

“The beauty of the panorama was singularly heightened by the presence of some thirty or forty large barks with lateen sails, a rig particularly Italian, and which, to my eye, was redolent of the Mediterranean, a sea I had not beheld for twenty years. They were lying lazily on the glassy lake as if placed there by Claude himself to serve as models.

BARKS ON LAKE LEMAN.

“I shall not affirm that this was the finest view we had yet seen in Switzerland, but I do think it was the most exquisite. It was Goethe compared to Schiller, Milton to Shakespeare, Racine to Corneille.”

Just about two centuries earlier Auguste de Sales in the life of his uncle Saint Francis, showed that he too loved the same view. Here is his picture, dated 1632:—

“Voiron is a very high mountain separating Le Chablais from Le Faucigny, looking east from Geneva. Toward the north the view embraces the great Lake Leman, and almost all the mountains of Burgundy and those of Switzerland in the distance distinguished by blue shadows. Nearer are the cities and lands of Geneva and Bern, an infinity of villages, churches, castles, rivers, ponds, forests, meadows, vineyards, hills, roads, and the like in such variety that the eye receives from it a wonderful recreation and nothing in the world can be seen more beautiful. Toward the south one sees with a sudden horror the mountains of Le Faucigny and at their extremity the haughty summits (cimes sourcilleuses) of Champmuni, covered with eternal ice and snow, so that the eye of him who looks now one way now another, receives an unequalled satisfaction.”

I shall never forget the first expedition that I made to Les Treize Arbres and the Crêt de Grange Tournier, the highest point of the Salève, with their superb view up the lake and far into the valley of the Rhône. Yet the Salève is not a part of Geneva; it is not even Swiss; it belongs to France. If Switzerland and Savoy should at the present time have a war it would be easy enough for big guns to be mounted on those heights and batter down the helpless city; compared with what war is now the most dramatic event in Genevan history seems rather ludicrous; but the Fountain of the Escalade commemorates an heroic achievement.

Quietly around the city were gathering the hostile armies. Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy was planning to strike a final blow; he had more than six thousand men—Savoyards, Spaniards, Neapolitans and Piedmontese—collected in various places within convenient distance. On the night of December 12, 1602, a storming party of two hundred men marched up to the Corraterie rampart carrying fagots, hurdles, ladders, and implements for breaking and smashing things. Each man also had an amulet warranted to keep him from trouble in this world or the world to come; it was given to each one by a Scotch Jesuit named Father Alexander. They filled the moat with their hurdles and fagots; they fastened their ladders to the walls. They killed the one sentinel on guard, for the Genevans had no thought of such a treacherous attack upon them, and they annihilated a small body of the watch, all except one man, a drummer, who escaped and gave the alarm. The battle was on.

The Genevans at La Porte Neuve happened to fire off a gun loaded with chains and iron scrap; the discharge smashed all the scaling ladders and swept them off the walls; the army of four thousand men led by General d’Albigni, who was expecting to follow up the success of the two hundred, was helpless in the moat outside. All able-bodied citizens got out their guns and swords and gave battle. Hot soup and other scalding fluids and a rain of deadly missiles were flung down on the unhappy invaders, who finally fled, leaving thirteen prisoners and a large number of dead. The Genevans themselves had seventeen killed and a score wounded. Duke Charles Emmanuel is said to have called his defeated general a booby (misérable butor) and expressed himself in somewhat the same kind of vulgar language as Victor Hugo attributed to Marshal Ney in “Les Misérables.”

Geneva was saved, and the next morning the venerable Pastor de Bèze, who had slept all through the tumult, having learned of the battle, went to the cathedral and helped to conduct a thanksgiving service—the last public appearance which his failing health permitted him to make. And ever since the Genevans celebrate the day of the Escalade.