In fact, there was a great deal to make one think of Italy in that region; but the resemblance ended mostly with the Southern architecture and vegetation. Our lake coast had its own features, one of the most striking of which was its apparent abandonment to the use and pleasure of strangers. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the water was everywhere bordered by hotels and pensions. Such large places as Vevay and Lausanne had their proper life, of course, but of smaller ones, like Montreux, the tourist seemed to be in exclusive possession. In our walks thither we met her—when the tourist was of that sex—young, gay, gathering the red leaves of the Virginia-creeper from the lakeward terraces of the highway; we met him, old, sick, pale, munching the sour grapes, and trying somehow to kill the time. Large listless groups of them met every steamboat from which we landed, and parties of them encountered us on every road. "A hash of foreigners," the Swiss call Montreux, and they scarcely contribute a native flavor to the dish. The Englishman no longer characterizes sojourn there, I should say; the Americans, who pay and speak little or no French, and the Russians, who speak beautiful French but do not pay, are there in about equal abundance; there are some French people; but if it came to my laying my hand upon my heart, I should say there seemed more Germans than any other nationality at Montreux. They are not pretty to look at, and apparently not pleasant; and it is said that the Swiss, who digest them along with the rest of us, do not like them. In fact, the Germans seem everywhere to take their new national consequence ungraciously.
Besides the foreigners, there is not much to see at Montreux, though one must not miss the ancient church which looks out from its lofty place over the lake, and offers the visitor many seats on its terrace for the enjoyment of the same view. The day we went he had pretty well covered the gravel with grape-skins; but he had left the prospect undisturbed.
What struck me principally in Montreux was its extreme suitability to the purposes of the international novelist. It was full of sites for mild incidents, for tacit tragedies, for subdued flirtations, and arrested improprieties. I can especially recommend the Kursaal at Montreux to my brother and sister fictionists looking about for a pretty entourage. Its terrace is beaten by the billows of the restless lake, and in soft weather people sit at little tables there; otherwise they take their ices inside the café, and all the same look out on the Dent-du-Midi, and feel so bored with everybody that they are just in the humor to be interested in anybody. There is a very pretty theatre in the Kursaal, where they seldom give entertainments, but where, if you ever go, you see numbers of pretty girls, and in a box a pale, delicate-looking middle-aged Englishman in a brown velvet coat, with his two daughters. The concert will be very good, and a young man of cultivated sympathies and disdainful tastes could have a very pleasant time there. For the rest, Montreux offers to the novelist's hand perhaps the crude American of the station who says it is the cheapest place he has struck, and he is going to stick it out there awhile; perhaps the group of chattering American school-girls; perhaps the little Jewish water-color painter who tells of his narrow escape from the mad dog, which having broken his chain at Bouveret, had bitten six persons on the way to Clarens, and been killed by the gendarmes near Vevay; perhaps two Englishwomen who talk for half an hour about their rooms at the hotel, and are presently joined by their husbands, who pursue the subject. These are the true features of modern travel, and for a bit of pensive philosophy, or to have a high-bred, refined widow with a fading sorrow encountered by a sensitive nature of the other sex, there is no better place than the sad little English church-yard at Montreux. It is full of the graves of people who have died in the search for health far from home, and it has a pathos therefore which cannot be expressed. The stones grow stained and old under the laurels and hollies, and the rain-beaten ivy creeps and drips all over the grassy mounds. Yes, that is a beautiful, lonely, heart-breaking place. Now and again I saw black-craped figures silently standing there, and paid their grief the tribute of a stranger's pang as I passed, happy with my children by my side.
VI
I did not find Aigle and Blonay enough to satisfy my appetite for castles, and once, after several times passing a certain château meublé à louer in the levels of the Rhone Valley, I made bold to go in and ask to look at it. I loved it for the certain Louis XV. grandiosity there was about it; for the great clock in the stable wall; for the balcony frescos on the front of the garden-house, and for the arched driveway to the court. It seemed to me a wonderfully good thing of its kind, and I liked Napoleon's having lodged in it when his troops occupied Villeneuve. It had, of course, once belonged to a rich family, but it had long passed out of their hands into those of the sort of farmer-folk who now own it, and let it when they can. It had stood several years empty, for the situation is not thought wholesome, and the last tenant had been an English clergyman, who kept a school in it for baddish boys whom no one else could manage, and who were supposed to be out of harm's way there.
I followed a young man whom I saw going into the gateway, and asked him if I could see the house. He said "Yes," and summoned his mother, a fierce-looking little dame, in a black Vaudois cap, who came out of a farm-house near with jingling keys, and made him throw open the whole house, while she walked me through the sad, forgotten garden, past its silent fountain, and through its grove of pine to the top of an orchard wall, where the Dent-du-Midi showed all its snow-capped mass. Within, the château was very clean and dry; the dining-room was handsomely panelled, and equipped with a huge porcelain stove; the shelves of the library were stocked with soberly bound books, and it was tastefully frescoed; the pretty chambers were in the rococo taste of the fine old rococo time, with successive scenes of the same history painted over the fireplaces throughout the suite; the drawing-room was elegant with silk hangings and carved mirrors; and the noble staircase, whose landing was honored with the bust of the French king of the château's period, looked as if that prince had just mounted it. All these splendors, with the modern comfort of hot and cold water wherever needed, you may have, if you like, for $500 a year; and none of the castles I saw compared with this château in richness of finish or furnishing. I am rather particular to advertise it because a question, painfully debating itself in my mind throughout my visit, as to the sum I ought to offer the woman was awkwardly settled by her refusing to take anything, and I feel a lingering obligation. But, really, I do not see how the reader, if he likes solitary state, or has "daughters to educate," or baddish boys to keep out of mischief, or is wearing out a heavy disappointment, or is suffering under one of those little stains or uneasy consciences such as people can manage so much better in Europe—I say I do not see how he could suit himself more perfectly or more cheaply than in that pensively superb old château, with its aristocratic seclusion, and possibly malarious, lovely old garden.
