“When the nobles returned with hundreds of thousands of francs,” he added, “they spent their money royally. Many of these houses are filled with splendid carved furniture and tapestries. As long as Bern was suzerain of Vaud, and governed it, there was small chance for Government service and this state of things led to a peculiar atmosphere—one of frivolity and pleasure-seeking. The men hadn’t anything to do except to amuse themselves and few were the years when some foreign prince was not studying here and spending any amount of money in dinners and dances.”
“Yes,” said I, “considering that Lausanne was in the very centre of Calvinism, it must have been pretty gay. I suppose the influence of France was even stronger than that of Geneva or Bern.”
By this time we had reached our own street and were climbing the flight of steps that led to the handsomely arched portal.
[CHAPTER V]
GIBBON AT LAUSANNE
THE next day it rained. The whole valley was filled with mist. The sudois, as they call the southwest wind, moaned about the windows. But I did not care; explorations or excursions were merely postponed. There would be plenty of time, and it was a pleasure to spend a quiet day in the library. We devoted it mainly to Gibbon and old Lausanne—that is, the Lausanne of Gibbon’s day, and, before we were tired of the subject, I think we had visualized the vain, witty, delightful, pompous, lazy, learned exile who so loved his “Fanny Lausanne,” as he liked to call the little town.
When he first arrived there from England, he was only sixteen—a nervous, impressionable, ill-educated youth. He had been converted to Roman Catholicism, and, glorying in it with all the ardour of an acolyte, he was taken seriously by the college authorities at Oxford and expelled. His father had to do something with him; he was just about to get married for the second time and, as the boy would be in his way, he decided to “rusticate” him in Lausanne.