I admit all this; but let us well understand one another: it is not the mountains that exist such as we think that we see them then; it is the mountains as the passions, the talents and the muses have drawn their lines, coloured their skies, their snows, their peaks, their declivities, their irised cascades, their "soft" atmosphere, their light and tender shadows: the landscape is on Claude Lorrain's palette, not on the Campo Vaccino. Make me to love, and you shall see that a solitary apple-tree, weather-beaten, flung crooked-wise amid the wheat-fields of the Beauce; the flower of an arrow-head in a marsh; a little water-course in a road; a scrap of moss, a fern, a tuft of maiden-hair fern on the side of a rock; a moist, smoky sky; a tomtit in a vicarage garden; a swallow, flying low, on a rainy day, under the thatch of a barn or along a cloister; even a bat taking the place of the swallow around a country steeple, fluttering on its gauzy wings in the last gloaming of the twilight: all these little things, attached to a few memories, will become enchanted by the mystery of my happiness or the sadness of my regrets. On the upshot, it is the youth of life, it is the persons that make fine sites. The ice-floes of Baffin's Bay can be smiling, with company after one's heart: the banks of the Ohio and the Ganges mournful, in the absence of all affection. A poet has said:
La patrie est aux lieux où l'âme est enchantée[450].
It is the same with beauty.
Here is too much about mountains: I love them as great solitudes; I love them as the frame, the border and the distance of a fine picture; I love them as the rampart and refuge of liberty; I love them as adding something infinite to the passions of the soul: equitably and reasonably, that is all the good to be said of them. If I am not to settle down on the other side of the Alps, my journey across the Saint-Gotthard will remain a disconnected fact, an optical view in the midst of the pictures of my Memoirs: I will put out the lamp and Lugano will relapse into darkness.
Lucerne cathedral.
Scarce arrived at Lucerne, I quickly hastened once more to the cathedral, the Hofkirche, built on the site of a chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas[451], the patron saint of sailors: this primitive chapel served also as a beacon, for, during the night, it was seen lighted up in a supernatural manner. It was Irish missionaries that preached the Gospel in the almost desert country of Lucerne; they brought it the liberty which their unhappy mother-land has not enjoyed. When I returned to the cathedral, a man was digging a grave; in the church, they were finishing a service around a bier, and a young woman was having a child's cap blessed at an altar: she placed it, with a visible expression of joy, in a basket which she carried on her arm, and went away laden with her treasure. The next day, I found the grave in the cemetery closed up, a vessel of holy water placed on the fresh earth, and some fennel-seed sprinkled for the little birds: already they were alone, beside that corpse of a night.
I took some walks in the neighbourhood of Lucerne, in magnificent pine-woods. The bees, whose hives are placed above the farm-doors, under the shelter of the overhanging roofs, live with the peasants. I saw the famous Clara Wendel[452] go to Mass behind her companions in captivity, in her prison dress. She is very common; I found in her the look of all those brutes in France who are present at so many murders, without for that reason being more distinguished than a fierce beast, in spite of all that the theory of crime and the admiration of slaughter would attribute to them. A simple foot-soldier, armed with a carbine, here takes the convicts to perform their day's work and brings them back to the prison.
This evening, I prolonged my walk along the Reuss, to a chapel built on the road: one goes up to it by a little Italian portico. From this portico, I saw a priest praying alone on his knees inside the oratory, while, on the top of the mountains, I saw the last gleams of the setting sun. On returning to Lucerne, I heard women saying the rosary in the cottages; the voices of children made the responses to the maternal adoration. I stopped, I listened through the twining vines to those words addressed to God from within a hut. The comely and graceful young girl who waits on me at the Golden Eagle also most regularly says her Angelus as she draws the curtains of the windows in my room. When I come in, I give her a few flowers which I have gathered; she says to me, gently patting her breast with her hand:
"Per me?"