The very Pierres de Niton which entered into the foreground of the picture which I was contemplating have been traced to the Saint Bernard, and it is estimated that it took a thousand years for the glacier to bring them down from that height and deposit them in what is now the lake.
As I stood there I was especially led to think of the influence that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is supposed to have exerted in stimulating people to enjoy the grander aspects of Nature. Literature, before Rousseau’s time, has little to say of the beauty of mountains. They were regarded with annoyance as obstacles, with terror as filled with dangers. Joseph Addison, speaking of the Savoy Alps, says they are “broken into so many steeps and precipices that they fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror and form one of the most irregular, mis-shapen scenes in the world.”
I am not sure but Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who became Baron d’Aubonne, from the name of his estate near Geneva, does not deserve priority. After he had ended his travels in the Far East and had decided to settle in Switzerland he wrote his friends in Paris of his choice:
“Friends, I have long been looking for a country-house where to end my life in tranquillity.
“Now you would doubtless choose France; it is the loveliest country in the world; no other approaches it.
“Gentlemen, France is a charming, delightful country, I agree with you, ... but my heart and my eyes are in Switzerland.
“‘What! That country of ice and sterile mountains, whose inhabitants would not have a quarter of the subsistence necessary for them, if other countries did not support a large part of its inhabitants!’
“You know Switzerland very well, as I can see. Gentlemen, such as it is, for me it is the loveliest country in the world.”
It was one of the boasts before Rousseau’s time that a seigneur’s place should have no view. Both Madame de Genlis, in Voltaire’s lifetime, and James Fenimore Cooper, fifty years after the great Frenchman’s death, noticed the fact that the view from Ferney was quite cut off by shrubbery, evidently showing that he cared little for it. Madame de Staël, though she was sympathetic enough with Rousseau, cared little for natural scenery. When some enthusiastic visitors were praising the beauties of Lake Leman she exclaimed:—“Oh for the gutters of the Rue de Bac.”