A SAVOY TOWN IN SNOW
At Annecy we delayed only long enough for me to get rooms in the Hôtel de l'Abbaye at Talloires, where we stayed from the 14th to the 22nd in stormy, snowy weather. He was quite well at first, and proud of leading the way down the steep mountain-tracks—well known to him—in the dark after long walks; but some days we could not get out at all. I sat writing by the log fire in the dining-room; he preferring his bedroom, with what glimpses could be got of the lake through snowstorms; and in the night the wind howled through deserted corridors—for the place was once a real monastery—until it became quite uncanny. His bad dreams had gone, but he could not get exercise enough to sleep well. The lecture was variously rewritten, monks and myths chasing one another through his brain, instead of the crystal-cleavages and rock-forms he had set out to study. St. Benedict had been too strong for us, and the ghost of St. Bernard of Talloires (or of Menthon, not the St. Bernard of his former pilgrimage, but a tenth-century hermit, whose cave is still shown) who saw "not the Lake of Annecy, but the dead between Martigny and Aosta," and founded the hospice that bears his name—as Ruskin would fain have founded, in another way, a refuge for those who fall in the nineteenth-century struggle for life; but fell himself in attempting it.
I did not know at the time that he was meditating a return to his Professorship at Oxford. He kept that a secret, and sent me off on a special mission to draw Alps in snow. Rejoining him at Geneva I found him in the depths of misery, with the weather bad and his work going too slowly forward, and the glamour all gone out of his "mother town" of Geneva, "or what was once Geneva," he said, ruined by touristry and luxury into a mere suburb of Paris, which was a suburb of hell. So through cold and flooded France he took his way homeward. At Paris, Hôtel Meurice was no longer what it had been; the pneumatic clock in his room, with its minute-gun of a tick and a jerk, got on his nerves, and he demanded of the bewildered waiter that it should be stopped. The Tuileries were in ruins, placarded for sale as building material. In the bookshops he could not buy the books he sought, but, as it seemed, only photographs of actresses. The Louvre, even, in such surroundings gave him only suggestions of irritation. And it was a thankful secretary who saw him safely over the Channel and back to Herne Hill on the first Saturday in December.
But the journey was not a failure. At Lucca he made some of his best drawings, and the descriptive passages in "Præterita" and elsewhere, written on that tour, or from notes then made, are among his finest; and he was able to write in his "Cashbook" on December 3: "Slept well, and hope to be fit for lecture to-morrow; very happy in showing our drawings and complete sense of rest after three months' tossing." Early in the next year he found himself able to take up his old work at Oxford, and for awhile—but only for awhile—it seemed that the storm-cloud of his life had cleared away.