IMMEDIATELY after luncheon we reembarked in the swift Hirondelle, which was impatiently waiting for us, and started Lausanneward. As in our trip down, we hugged the shore. High up on the hillside we saw the Musée Ariana in its beautiful park. Later we visited it and saw its pictures, its antiquities,—especially interesting the old Genevan pewter-ware, furniture, weapons and stained glass and its still more ancient relics of the Alemanni; nor did we forget the Alpine Garden and other curiosities of the Botanical Park. This is situated directly on the Lausanne highway.
High up also, and affording a magnificent view, stands the Château Rothschild dominating Pregny. Then we rushed by Genthod, the home of Switzerland’s most famous scientists. There was a regular nest of them there. Birds of a feather! not the least of them being the zoölogist François Jules Pictet de la Rive. I wondered what Raoul Pictet, who did good work in liquefying gases, would think of the latest developments in the use of liquid air. A professor whom I met in Lausanne informed me that it now cost only a half-cent a pound. As it is composed of two liquids, nitrogen and oxygen, which boil at different temperatures, it is easy to eliminate the nitrogen and leave pure oxygen, which, of course, is invaluable in foundries to stimulate a high temperature.
The possibility that the enormous drafts on the nitrogen of the atmosphere for manufacturing nitrates, and which have made some people conjecture that we might ultimately become so excitable through the preponderance of oxygen, need no longer bother us. The nitrogen will go into nitrates all right but the balance will be kept even by the withdrawal of oxygen for blast-furnaces, and all we need fear is that there won’t be any air left. But let us not worry; après nous le vide! The Swiss torrents offer many chances for the electrical manufacture of these liquid gases at small expense.
At Genthod also lived the De Saussures. Will suggested that from their exploits in climbing mountains they should have been named the Snowshoers, a slight change not comparable with that exemplified in his earliest known ancestor, Mongin Schouel de Saulxures, Grand Falconer to the Duke of Lorraine!
“The illustrious” Horace-Bénédict de Saussure’s father was an authority on farming in its scientific aspects as they were then understood; his mother was the sister-in-law of the naturalist Charles de Bonnet, who, until his eyesight failed him and he had to take to philosophical speculations and to controversy with Voltaire, was interested in studying parthenogenesis, the respiration of insects and leaves, and kindred abstruse subjects. After a truly Rousseauesque education, whereby he was trained to bear hardships and fatigue and all unavoidable inconveniences without complaining, Horace de Saussure became professor of philosophy at Geneva at the age of twenty-two. Two years earlier he had offered a prize to the first person who should find a practicable route to the top of Mont Blanc, though it was then, and for years afterwards, believed to be inaccessible. He had been to the peak of Le Brévent on the other side of the Valley of Chamonix—in itself no small climb for those days at least—and he looked across that tremendous chasm and up to the forbidding white dome of the monarch of mountains, towering almost twice as high, and that intense ambition to get to the top of the world came over him. He believed it could be accomplished.
For fifteen years no serious attempt was made to win the prize. Then four peasants thought they might do it in a day, but dared not spend the night on the ice and so they came down. In 1783 three chamois hunters spent the night at the Montagne de la Côte, and the following morning started up over the icy slope, but one of them grew sleepy, and as it was regarded as dangerous to sleep on ice and they were afraid of sunstroke they also relinquished the task. One of them told De Saussure that if he tried it again all he would take with him would be a parasol and a bottle of smelling salts! In 1787 De Saussure caused a hut to be built near the Glacier of Bionnassay and tried to win the prize for himself. But it was too late in the season and he had to give it up.
The next attempt was made in August, 1788, by Marc-Théodore Bourrit, called “the Historian of the Alps.” He was a miniature painter. He was also precentor of the Cathedral at Geneva. There was a tradition that it was possible to cross the Alps from Geneva to Turin in thirty-eight hours. Bourrit provided himself with a fourteen-foot ladder, a couple of hatchets, ropes and staves, and started with a small party. They had a terrible time among the crevasses but reached Courmayeur at ten p. m. He was the first to discover the Col du Géant. He believed Mont Blanc to be inaccessible. He tried it, however, a second time with his son, an Englishman named Woodley and a Dutchman named Kampfer. They had twenty-two guides, nineteen of whom were overcome. He claimed that he got beyond the Camel’s Humps within ten minutes of the top but was prevented by a hurricane from actually reaching it. He gave himself away by declaring that he could see the Mediterranean. He would have had to see it not only through a snow-storm but also through the top. It is now believed that he did not get above the Rochers Rouges. M. Auldjo traced the limitation of vision by a map and showed it was impossible to see the Mediterranean.
The next year partisans of two different routes tried in rivalry to go up from opposite sides. Each party was made up of three men; a fourth, named Jacques Balmat, attached himself to one of them, and, when they deserted him, he continued alone, and by digging steps in the ice along the crest of the Rochers Rouges got within less than three hundred meters of the summit. He realized that if he went alone no one would believe him; when he managed to retrace his steps and reached the Grand Plateau he was overcome by snow-blindness. He kept his eyes shut for half an hour and his sight returned, but it was growing dark. He was obliged to spend the night where he was. He burrowed into the snow and kept alive.
When he reached Chamonix the next day he was so worn out that he slept twenty-four hours at a stretch. Then he went to the doctor of Chamonix, Michel Paccard, and told him his secret. They determined to try it. They started August 8, 1786, not together but one taking the right bank, the other the left bank of the Arve, so as not to awaken suspicion of their purpose. They camped on the Montagne de la Côte, and the next day attained Les Petits Mulets, about a hundred meters below the tip-top. Here they were nearly blown off the crest by a fierce gust of icy wind. The doctor refused to take another step. People were watching them from the village with a telescope. Balmat went alone to the top, and wigwagged a greeting to the villagers, who answered it. Then he went down and got the doctor by main force to the top. Balmat had practically to drag him down to the valley; the poor man was completely blinded and half frozen to death.
The next year De Saussure, with Balmat as guide, and a large party, bearing scientific apparatus, successfully reached the summit—the professor dressed in a long-tailed silk coat with huge buttons, which is preserved as a mute witness of the achievement in the De Saussure house at Genthod. Balmat lived to be an old man and was proud of the patent of nobility which the King of Sardinia conferred on him in honour of his feat.