Just off Yvoire, which looks very attractive with its glistening beaches and its fine old castle, between a kilometer and a half and two kilometers away, and at a depth of about sixty meters, is a fishing-bank called L’Omblière. There the much esteemed fish “l’omble chevalier,” or in German der Ritter, comes to breed and be caught. There will generally be seen clustered together the fishermen’s boats with their lateen sails cock-billed. Occasionally a storm comes up suddenly and works havoc. They still talk of the tornado of 1879, when eleven Savoy fishermen were drowned.
There are about twenty-two different kinds of fish inhabiting the lake, several of them good eating. I should think it might be possible to introduce the whitefish of our Great Lakes: the Leman salmon is not superior to that noble ranger of the depths.
We saw a good many wild birds. Emile gave us their names in French: les besolets or sea-swallows—the kind that Rousseau went out to shoot, les gros-sifflets with their sharp whistle, les crênets as Rousseau calls the curlews, les sifflasons which we could see running along the beach just beyond Yvoire, and the grèbe which he said was mighty good eating. Most of the Mediterranean sea-gulls which, like human beings, like a change of scenery, and which in winter add greatly to the life of the lake, had returned to the south.
Beyond Nernier the shores contract and we enter “the Little Lake,” which it is supposed occupies the valley excavated by the Arve. We were fortunate to round the point in good time, for our weather had been too good to last; the hard greenish coloured clouds streaking toward the southeast after a reddish sunrise had betokened a change; it had been clouding up all the forenoon, and before we got out into the open off La Pointe d’Yvoire, Le Sudois was blowing “great guns” and a heavy sea was running. It seemed best to take the swallow’s swiftest flight for Geneva, not pausing as we intended to do at Beauregard or the Port de Tougües or indulging in historic reminiscences suggested by the valley of Hermance where the torrent of that name serves to separate the canton from the département—Switzerland from France. Afterwards, when we passed through it in our Moto, we had a chance to see its quaint streets, its houses with vines clambering over them, its red-tiled roofs. Once we had to turn out carefully to avoid a yoke of oxen which seemed to think they owned the whole place.
The glimpse of La Belotte (to mention only one of the dozen places that charmed us as we approached the great city) would have inspired a painter. Boats were drawn up along the gently shelving shore; there were several picturesque brown houses which looked from the distance like fish-houses, only neater than most of those we see along our New England coast. A naue with two butterfly sails was just coming in from up the lake. Men were evidently hurrying to make the boats safe from the gale, if it should develop into a real storm.
The lake approach to Geneva even under a grey and threatening sky gives as it were the key-note to its extraordinary charm. Its noble waterfront, its lofty buildings, its background of escarped rocks and its general air of prosperity, beckon a friendly welcome. We darted in between the two phares or lighthouses which decorate the long jetties, and turning aside from the surf current, we came alongside the pleasant Quai du Mont Blanc.
THE WATERFRONT AND THE ILE ROUSSEAU, GENEVA