The Pays de Vaud is also the land of castles, and the visitor to Vevay should not fail to see Blonay Castle, the seat of the ancient family which, with intervals of dispossession, has possessed it ever since the Crusades. It is only a little way off, on the first rise of the hills, from which it looks over the vineyards on inexpressible glories of lake and distant mountains, and it is most nobly approached through steeps of vine and grove. Apparently it is kept up in as much of the sentiment of the past as possible, and one may hire its baronial splendor fully furnished; for the keeper told it had been occupied by an English family for the last three winters. The finish, like that of the castle of Aigle, is rude, but the whole place is wonderfully picturesque and impressive. The arched gateway is alone worth a good rent; the long corridors from which the chambers open are suitable to ghosts fond of walking exercise; the superb dining-room is round, and the floor is so old that it would shake under the foot of the lightest spectre. The répertoire of family traditions is almost inexhaustible, and doubtless one might have the use of them for a little additional money. One of the latest is of the seventeenth century, when the daughter of the house was "the beautiful Nicolaïde de Blonay, before whom many adorers had bent the knee in vain. Among them, a certain Tavel de Villars, vanquished the proud beauty by his constancy. But the marriage was delayed. Officer in the service of France, Tavel was detained by his military duties. In the mean time Jean-François de Blonay, of another branch of the family, the Savoyard branch, fell in love with his cousin, and twice demanded her in marriage. Twice he was refused. Then, listening only to his passion, he assembled some of his friends, and hid himself with them near the castle. They watched the comings and goings of the baron, and suddenly profiting by his absence, they entered his dwelling and carried off the fair Nicolaïde, who, transported to Savoy, rewarded the boldness of her captor by becoming his wife. This history, which resembles that of the beautiful Helen, and is not less authentic, kindled the fiercest hostilities between the Tavel and Blonay families; the French and Italian ambassadors intervened; and it all ended in a sentence pronounced at Berne against the Blonays—a sentence as useless as it was severe—for the principal offenders had built a nest for their loves in domains which they possessed in Savoy. The old baron alone felt its effects. He was severely reprimanded for having so ill fulfilled his paternal duties."
The good burghers of Berne—the Lords as they called themselves—were in fact very hard with all their Vaudois subjects. "Equally merciless to the vanities and the vices, they confounded luxury and drunkenness in their rules, pleasures and bad manners. They were no less the enemies of innovations. Coffee at its introduction was stigmatized as a devilish invention; tea was no better; as to tobacco, whether snuffed or smoked, it was worse yet. Low-necked dresses and low-quartered shoes were rigorously forbidden. Games and all dances, 'except three modest dances on wedding-days,' were unlawful.... The Sabbath was strictly observed; silence reigned in the villages, even those remotest from the church, until the divine service of the afternoon was closed; no cart might pass in the street, and no child play there.... In short, all their ordinances and regulations witness a firm design on the part of their Excellencies 'to revive among all those under their domination a life and manners truly Christian.' The Pays de Vaud under this régime acquired its moral and religious education. A more serious spirit gradually prevailed. The Bible became the book par excellence, the book of the fireside, and on Sunday the exercises of devotion took the place of the public amusements."
Church Terrace, Montreux
When the regicides fled from England after the Restoration they could not have sought a more congenial refuge than such a land as this. One of them, as is known, died in Vevay by the shot of an assassin sent to murder him by Charles II.; with another he is interred in the old Church of St. Martin there; and I went there to revere the tombs of Ludlow and Broughton. While I was looking about for them a familiar name on a tablet caught my eye, and I read that "William Walter Phelps, of New Jersey, and Charles A. Phelps, of Massachusetts, his descendants beyond the seas," had set it there in memory of the brave John Phelps, who was so anxious to be known as clerk of the court which tried Charles Stuart that he set his name to every page of its record.
That tablet was the most interesting thing in the old church; but I found Vevay quaint and attractive in every way. It is, as all the world knows, the paradise of pensions and hotels and boarding-schools, and one may live well and study deeply there for a very little money. It was part of our mission to lunch at the most gorgeous of the hotels, and to look upon such of our fellow-countrymen as we might see there, after our long seclusion at Villeneuve; and we easily found all the splendor and compatriotism we wanted. The hotel we chose stood close upon the lake, with a superb view of the mountains, and its evergreens in tubs stood about the gravelled spaces in a manner that consoled us with a sense of being once more in the current of polite travel. The waiter wanted none of our humble French, but replied to our timorous advances in that tongue in a correct and finally expensive English. Under the stimulus of this experience we went to a bric-à-brac shop and bought a lot of fascinating old pewter platters and flagons, and then we went recklessly shopping about in all directions. We even visited an exhibition of Swiss paintings, which, from an ethical and political point of view, were admirable; and we strolled delightedly about through the market, where the peasant women sat and knitted before their baskets of butter, fruit, cheese, flowers, and grapes, and warbled their gossip and their bargains in their angelic Suissesse voices, while their husbands priced the cattle and examined the horses. It was all very picturesque, and prophesied of the greater picturesqueness of Italy, which we were soon to see.