Sculpture at its best is the most decorative of all the arts, at least for out-of-doors, but mediocre statuary ought to be regarded as what Mrs. Malaprop called a statuary offence. Geneva is not much more fortunate than other cities in the appropriateness of its sculptures.
Victor Hugo, who made a flying visit to Geneva in September, 1839, thought the city had lost much by its so-called improvements. He did not like it that the row of old worm-eaten dilapidated houses in the Rue des Domes, which made such a picturesque lake-front, had been demolished, and he thought the white quais with the white barracks which the worthy Genovese regard as palaces could not compare with the old dirty ramshackle city which he had known a dozen or so years previous. He complained bitterly because they had been putting it through a process of raking, scraping, levelling and weeding out, so that with the exception of the Butte Saint-Pierre and the bridges across the Rhône there was not an ancient structure left. He called it “a platitude surrounded by humps.”
“Nothing,” he said, “is more unattractive than these little imitation Parises which one now finds in the provinces, in France and out of France. In an ancient city with its towers and its carved house-fronts, one expects to find historic streets, Gothic or Roman bell-towers; but one finds an imitation Rue de Rivoli, an imitation Madeleine resembling the façade of the Bobino Theater, an imitation Column Vendôme looking like an advertising-tower.”
I wonder what he would have thought of the Duke Charles II imitation. Nevertheless time has justified the Genevans; its brand-new quais are no longer glaringly new, and “its yellow and its white and its plaster and its chalk” have been toned down by time. It has grown into a truly imperial city. I was surprised at the number of buildings of seven stories and more; it cannot be called an imitation of Paris.
In one of the second-hand book-shops—I wonder why they are always on quais, where there are quais—I picked up an amusing little volume entitled, “The Present State of Geneva,” published in 1681 and purporting to have been composed in Italian for the Great Duke of Florence by Signior Gregorio Seti. He begins with this bold statement:—“Geneva, as appears by some chronicles of the County of Vaux, is one of the ancientist cities of Europe, being commonly supposed to have been built by Lemanus, son of Hercules, the great King of the Gaules, who gave his name likewise to the Lake Lemanus. The first foundation of it was laid in the Year of the World 3994, upon a little rising Hill covered with Juniper Trees called by the French Geneuriers, from whence it afterwards took the name of Geneura.”
He goes on to say:—“In the time of Julius Cæsar this City was of great renown and by him called the Bulwork of Helvetia and frontiere town of the Allobrogi, which name at present it deserves more than ever.
“When the eruption was made upon the Swissers in the year of God 230, by the Emperor Heliogabalus Geneva was almost utterly destroyed by Fire but in the Time of Aurelian the Emperour about the Year of Grace 270, it was by the same Emperour rebuilt, who having bestowed many priviledges on those that came to repair it, commanded it for the future to be called Aurelia, but the inhabitants could not easily banish from their minds the ancient name of Geneva which to this day it bears, though during the Life of Aurelian they called it Aurelia.”
He tells how on the south it is “adorned with a spatious Neighboring Plain reaching to the very Walls and encompassed by two large Rivers, the Rone and the Arue. This Plain,” he says, “serves the Citizens for a place of diversion and Recreation and here they walk to take the Air and refresh themselves in the delightful Gardens which inviron it, of which there is a great number. There likewise they train and exercise their Souldiers and divert themselves at Play in a long Mall.
“This Plain is commonly called the Plain Palace and in a Corner thereof where the Arue falls into the Rone there is a spatious burying place for the dead.”
At that time there were four bridges. All four had originally houses and shops on them but in 1670 a terrible fire broke out on one of the largest and most inhabited of them and destroyed seventy houses, leaving one hundred and thirty families homeless and taking the lives of more than a hundred persons. The new bridges that took the places of the old ones were by edict freed from all such incumbrances, which, however picturesque, are certainly dangerous and unsanitary.