LETTER LXVI.
PRACTICAL BATHOS OF CELEBRATED PLACES—TRAVELLING COMPANIONS AT THE SIMPLON—CUSTOM-HOUSE COMFORTS—TRIALS OF TEMPER—CONQUERED AT LAST!—DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF FRANCE, ITALY, AND SWITZERLAND—FORCE OF POLITENESS.
Whether it was that I had offended the genius of the spot, by coming in an omnibus, or from a desire I never can resist in such places, to travesty and ridicule the mock solemnities with which they are exhibited, certain it is that I left Ferney, without having encountered, even in the shape of a more serious thought, the spirit of Voltaire. One reads the third canto of Childe Harold in his library, and feels as if "Lausanne and Ferney" should be very interesting places to the traveller, and yet when he is shown Gibbon's bower by a fellow scratching his head and hitching up his trousers the while, and the nightcap that enclosed the busy brain from which sprang the fifty brilliant tomes on his shelves, by a country-girl, who hurries through her drilled description, with her eye on the silver douceur in his fingers, he is very likely to rub his hand over his eyes, and disclaim, quite honestly, all pretensions to enthusiasm. And yet, I dare say, I shall have a great deal of pleasure in remembering that I have been at Ferney. As an English traveller would say, "I have done Voltaire!"
Quite of the opinion that it was not doing justice to Geneva to have made but a three days' stay in it, regretting not having seen Sismondi and Simond, and a whole coterie of scholars and authors, whose home it is, and with a mind quite made up to return to Switzerland, when my beaux jours of love, money, and leisure, shall have arrived, I crossed the Rhone at sunrise, and turned my face toward Paris.
The Simplon is much safer travelling than the pass of the Jura. We were all day getting up the mountains by roads that would make me anxious, if there were a neck in the carriage I would rather should not be broken. My company, fortunately, consisted of three Scotch spinsters, who would try any precipice of the Jura, I think, if there were a lover at the bottom. If the horses had backed in the wrong place, it would have been to all three, I am sure, a deliverance from a world in whose volume of happiness,
"their leaf
By some o'er-hasty angel was misplaced."
As to my own neck and my friend's, there is a special providence for bachelors, even if they were of importance enough to merit a care. Spinsters and bachelors, we all arrived safely at Rousses, the entrance to France, and here, if I were to write before repeating the alphabet, you would see what a pen could do in a passion.
The carriage was stopped by three custom-house officers, and taken under a shed, where the doors were closed behind it. We were then required to dismount and give our honors that we had nothing new in the way of clothes; no "jewelry; no unused manufactures of wool, thread, or lace; no silk of floss silk; no polished metals, plated or varnished; no toys, (except a heart each); nor leather, glass, or crystal manufactures." So far, I kept my temper.
Our trunks, carpet-bags, hat-boxes, dressing-cases, and portfeuilles, were then dismounted and critically examined—every dress and article unfolded; shirts, cravats, unmentionables and all, and searched thoroughly by two ruffians, whose fingers were no improvement upon the labors of the washerwoman. In an hour's time or so we were allowed to commence repacking. Still, I kept my temper.