The Spell of Switzerland
by
Nathan Haskell Dole

THE SPELL SERIES

Each volume with many illustrations from original drawings or special photographs. Octavo, with decorative cover, gilt top, boxed.
Per volume $2.50 net, postpaid $2.70

THE SPELL OF ITALY
By Caroline Atwater Mason

THE SPELL OF FRANCE
By Caroline Atwater Mason

THE SPELL OF ENGLAND
By Julia de W. Addison

THE SPELL OF HOLLAND
By Burton E. Stevenson

THE SPELL OF SWITZERLAND
By Nathan Haskell Dole

THE SPELL OF THE ITALIAN LAKES
By William D. McCrackan

In Preparation
THE SPELL OF THE RHINE
By Frank Roy Fraprie

L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
53 BEACON STREET, BOSTON, MASS.

Evening near Saas-Fee

[See [page 369]]

The Spell of Switzerland

BY
Nathan Haskell Dole

ILLUSTRATED
from photographs and original paintings by
Woldemar Ritter

Publishers
L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
BOSTON MDCCCCXIII

Copyright, 1913, by
L. C. Page & Company
(INCORPORATED)
Entered at Stationers’ Hall, London
All rights reserved

First Impression, October, 1913

THE COLONIAL PRESS
C. H. SIMONDS & CO., BOSTON, U. S. A.

[PREFACE]

The present book is cast in the guise of fiction. The vague and flitting forms of my niece and her three children are wholly figments of the imagination. No such person as “Will Allerton” enters my doorway. The “Moto,” which does such magical service in transporting “Emile” and his admirers from place to place is as unreal as Solomon’s Carpet.

After Lord Sheffield and his family had started back from a visit to Gibbon at Lausanne, his daughter, Maria T. Holroyd, wrote the historian: “I do not know what strange charm there is in Switzerland that makes everybody desirous of returning there.” It is the aim of this book to express that charm. It lies not merely in heaped-up masses of mountains, in wonderfully beautiful lakes, in mysterious glaciers, in rainbow-adorned waterfalls; it is largely due to the association with human beings.

The spell of Switzerland can be best expressed not in the limited observations of a single person but rather by a concensus of descriptions. The casual traveller plans, perhaps, to ascend the Matterhorn or Mount Pilatus; but day after day may prove unpropitious; clouds and storms are the enemy of vision. One must therefore take the word of those more fortunate. Poets and other keen-eyed observers help to intensify the spell. These few words will explain the author’s plan. It is purposely desultory; it is not meant for a guide-book; it is not intended to be taken as a perfectly balanced treatise covering the history in part or in whole of the twenty-four cantons; it has biographical episodes but they are merely hints at the richness of possibilities, and if Gibbon and Tissot and Rousseau stand forth prominently, it is not because Voltaire, Juste Olivier, Hebel, Töpfer, Amiel, Frau Spyri, and a dozen others are not just as worthy of selection. One might write a quarto volume on the charms of the Lake of Constance or the Lake of Zürich or the Lake of Lucerne. Scores of castles teem with historic and romantic associations. It is all a matter of selection, a matter of taste. It is not for the author to claim that he has succeeded in conveying his ideas, but whatever effect his work may produce on the reader, he, himself, may, without boasting, claim that he is completely under the spell of Switzerland.

Nathan Haskell Dole.

Boston, October 1, 1913.

[CONTENTS]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

SWITZERLAND

THE SPELL OF SWITZERLAND

[CHAPTER I]
UNCLE AND NIECE

I MUST confess, I did not approve of my niece and her husband’s plan of expatriating themselves for the sake of giving their only son and heir, and their twin girls, a correct accent in speaking French. But I had the grace to hold my tongue. I wonder if my wife would have been equally discreet—supposing I possessed such a helpmeet. Probably she would not have done so, even if I had; and probably also I should not, if she had. For the very fact of my having a wife would prove that I should be different from what I am.

There is an implication in this slight exhibition of boastfulness; but it is not subtle. Any one would see it instantly—namely, that I am a bachelor. A bachelor uncle whose niece takes it into her head to marry and raise a family, is as deeply bereaved as he would be were he her father. More so, indeed, for a father has his wife left to him....

The relationship between uncle and niece has never been sufficiently celebrated in poetry. It deserves to be sung. Besides the high, noble friendship which it implies, there is also about it a touch of almost lover-like sentiment. The right-hearted uncle loves to lavish all kinds of luxuries on his niece and feels sufficiently repaid by the look of frank affection in her eyes, the unabashed kiss which is the envy of young men who happen to witness it.

Here are the facts in my case. After my brother’s wife died, he urged me to make my home at his house. I suppose I might have done so long before; but I had been afraid of my sister-in-law. She was a tall imperious woman; she did not approve of me at all. She could not see my jokes, or, if she did, she frowned on them. I suppose she thought me frivolous. She was one of those women who make you appear at your worst. She was sincere and genuine and good, but our wireless apparatus was not tuned in harmony. As long as she was at the helm of my brother’s establishment I preferred to enjoy less comfortable quarters elsewhere.

But when, as the Wordsworth line has it, “Ruth was left half desolate” (though her father did not “take another mate”), and they showed me how delightfully I could dispose of my library and have an open fire on cold winter evenings, and what a perfect position was, as it were, destined for my baby grand—for I am devoted to music—en amateur, of course,—I yielded, and for ten happy years, saw Ruth grow from a young girl into the woman “nobly planned, to warn, to comfort and command.”

Command? What woman does not?

At my advice she took up the violin, and I shall never forget the hours and hours when we practised and really played mighty well—if I do say it, who shouldn’t—through the whole range of duets, beginning with simple pieces for her immature fingers and ending with the strange and sometimes—to me—incomprehensible fantaisies of the super-modernists.

But all these simple home-joys came to their inevitable end. The right man appeared and did as the right men always have done and will do. Uncles are as prone to jealousy as any other class of bipeds; but here again the philosophy of life which I trust I have made evident I cherish, and which, as one good turn deserves another, cherishes me, enabled me to preserve a front of discreet neutrality. I may have been over-zealous to look up the young man’s record; but there was nothing to which the most scrupulous could take exception. He was a clean, straight, manly youth with excellent prospects.

Will Allerton lived in Chicago; that was a second count against him, but equally futile as a valid argument for dissuasion. After their wedding-journey, they went to a delightful little house in East Elm Street in Chicago. Business called me to that city two or three times, and I visited them. So many of my friends had been unhappily married that I was more or less pessimistic about that kind of life-partnership; but my niece’s happy home was an excellent cure for my bachelor cynicism. The coming of their first child,—they did me the honour of making me his godfather, though I do not much believe in such formalities; and they also named him for me,—the coming of this little mortal made no change other than a decided increase in the bliss of that loving home.

When little Lawrence was four years old, and the twins were two, his grandfather died suddenly. It was a tremendous change to have my good brother removed from my side. My niece and her husband came on from Chicago. They were pathetically solicitous for my welfare. Most insistently they urged me to come and live with them. There was plenty of room in the house, they said.

I was greatly touched by their generous kindness, but I set my face sternly against any uprooting of the sort. I said I much preferred to stay on where I was. I had consulted with my Lares and Penates and found that they opposed any such bouleversement. The old housekeeper who had looked after our comfort was still capable of doing all that was necessary for me. My wants were few; I lived the simple life and its cares and pleasures amply satisfied my ambition. I had a small circle of congenial friends, particularly among my books. I did not know what it meant to be lonely. If I needed company, I could always fortify myself with the presence of college classmates. I had organized a quartet of fairly capable musicians who came once or twice a week to play chamber-music with me, and for me. I had several protégés studying music at the conservatory and my Sunday afternoon musicales were a factor in my satisfaction. So it was arranged that I should make no radical change for the present, at least. I would spend my vacations with them at the seashore, where we had a comfortable little datcha, and at least once during the winter I would make them a visit in Chicago.

Thus passed two more years. Then out of a clear sky came the report that my niece and her husband were going to take their young hopeful and his sisters to Switzerland, so that he might learn to speak French with a perfect accent! Will had a rich old aunt—a queer, misanthropic personage, who lived the life of a hermit. She, too, took the long journey into the Unknown and, as she could not carry her possessions with her, they fell to her nephew.

I saw them off, and the last word my niece said, as we parted tenderly, was, “You must run over and make us a visit.”

I shook my head: “I am afflicted with a fatal illness. I am afraid of the voyage.”

Her sweet face expressed such concern that I quickly added: “It is nothing serious; but there is no hope for it—it is only old age.”

“That’s just like you,” she exclaimed, “and I know you do not dread the ocean.”

“Well, we’ll see,” I tergiversated. “I don’t believe you’ll stay. You’ll miss all the American conveniences and you’ll get so tired of hearing nothing but French.”

“Nonsense!” she exclaimed. “Of course we shall stay, and of course you’ll come.”

[CHAPTER II]
JUST A COMMON VOYAGE

IT was inevitable. I, who had always jestingly compared myself to a brachypod, fastened by Fate to my native reef, and getting contact with visitors from abroad only as they were brought by tides and currents, began to feel the irresistible impulse to grow wings and fly away. How could I detach my clinging tentacles?

Every letter from Lausanne, where my dear ones had established themselves, urged me to “run over” and make them a long visit. My room was waiting for me. They depicted the view from its windows; splendid sweeps of mountains, snow-clad, tinged rose-flesh tints by the marvellous, magical kiss of the hidden sun; the lake glittering in the breeze, or dazzlingly azure in the afternoon calm; the desk; the comfortable, old, carved bedstead; the quaint, tiled stove which any museum would be glad to possess. There were excursions on foot or by automobile; mountains to climb; the Dolomites to visit. Each time new drawings, new seductions. With each week’s mail I felt the insidious, impalpable lure.

In the Engadine Valley

[See [page 444]]

I have many friends who put faith in astrology. One of my acquaintances is making a large income from constructing horoscopes. She is sincere; she has a real faith. She acts on the hypothesis that from even the most distant of the planets radiate baleful or beneficent influences which move those mortals who are, as it were, keyed or tuned to them. Saturn, whose density is less than alcohol, a billion miles away; Neptune, almost three billion miles away, infinitesimal specks in the ocean of space, make men and women happy or miserable. How much more then is it possible that the heaped-up masses of mighty mountains may work their spell on men half-way around this globe of ours? I began to be conscious of the Spell of Switzerland.

A half-crazy friend of mine, a painter, who loved mountains and depicted them on his canvases, once broached a theory of his, as we stood on top of Mount Adams:—

“The time will come,” he said with the conviction of a prophet, “when we shall be able to take advantage of the electric current flowing from this mountain-mass to Mount Washington, yonder, and commit ourselves safely and boldly to its control. Then we shall be able to practise levitation. It will be perfectly easy, perfectly feasible to leap from one peak to another.”

I am sure I felt stirring within me the impulse to leap into the air with the certainty that I should land on top of the Jungfrau or of Mont Blanc. It was a cumulative attraction. Every day it grew more intense. I got from the library every book I could find about Switzerland. I soaked myself in Swiss history. I began to know Switzerland as familiarly as if I had already been there.

Then came the decisive letter. My niece absolutely took it for granted that I was coming. She said: “We will meet you at Cherbourg with the motor. Cable.”

This time I was obedient. I wound up my affairs for an indefinite absence.

I took passage on a slow steamer, for I was in no hurry, and I wanted to have time enough to finish some more reading. I wanted to know Switzerland before I actually met her. I knew that I was destined to love her.

THE ALPENGLOW ON THE JUNGFRAU.

Theoretically one may understand psychology, even the psychology of woman—may, I say, not insisting too categorically upon this point, especially since the recent discovery that woman has, to her advantage over man, a superfluous and accessory chromosome to every cell in her dear body—one may know anatomy and physiology; but, when one falls in love with her, all this knowledge is as nought; she becomes, in the words of Heine, die eine, die feine, die reine. In this spirit, I studied the geology of Switzerland, realizing in advance that, as soon as I saw the Alpenglow on the peak of the Wetterhorn or of Die Jungfrau, I should not care a snap of my finger for the scientific constitution of the vast rock-masses, or for the theories that explain how they are doubled over on themselves and piled up like the folds of a rubber blanket.

On the first day out, as I sat on the deck as far forward as possible, I became in imagination the prehistoric ancestor of the frigate-bird, spreading my broad wings, tireless, above the waste of that Jurassic Sea which, only a brief geologic age ago, swept above what is now the highest land of Europe, with its south-most boundary far away in Africa. By the same power of the imagination I saw mighty islands emerge from the face of those raging waters. To the imagination a thousand or a million years is but as a wink; it can see in the corrugated skin of a parched apple all the vast cataclysms of a continent. Through the ages these seas deposited their strata to be pressed into rock; those strata were upheaved and, as they became dry land, the torrential rains, the mighty rivers, gnawed them away and spread them out over the central plain of what is now Switzerland, and filled the valleys of the Rhine and the Rhône and the Reuss, the Po and the Inn and the Danube, making the plains of Lombardy and Germany, of Belgium, of Holland and southeastern France. Almost three solid miles, it is estimated, have been eroded and carried away from the mountain-tops—sedimentary rocks and crystalline schists and even the tough granite.

As Sir John Lubbock well says, “true mountain ranges, that is to say, the elevated portions of the earth’s surface, are the continents themselves, on which most mountain-chains are mere wrinkles.” Under enormous pressure, and as the interior of the earth gradually cooled and shrank, the crust remaining at the same temperature, through the force of gravity great plaques of the crust sank in and perhaps, as in the case of mesas, left great mountain-masses, which the streams and rivers immediately began to carve into secondary hills and valleys. Sometimes these mountain-masses resisted pressure; “these,” says Sir John, “form buttresses, as it were, against which surrounding areas have been pressed by later movements. Such areas have been named by Suess ‘Horsts,’ a term which it may be useful to adopt, as we have no English equivalent. In some cases where compressed rocks have encountered the resistance of such a ‘Horst,’ as in the northwest of Scotland and in Switzerland, they have been thrown into the most extraordinary folds, and even thrust over one another for several miles.”

Sir John, whose book, “The Scenery of Switzerland,” I had with me as I sat in my cozy nook in the bow, asserts boldly that Switzerland was not formed, as people used to think, by upheaving forces acting vertically from below. “The Alps,” he says, “have been thrown into folds by lateral pressure, giving every gradation from the simple undulations of the Jura to the complicated folds of the Alps.”

Thus the strata between Bâle and Milan, a distance of one hundred and thirty miles, would, if horizontal, occupy two hundred miles. In some cases the most ancient portions are thrown up over more recent ones. The higher the mountain is, however, the more likely it is to be young; whereas low ranges are like the worn-out teeth of some ancient dame. “The hills of Wales,” says Sir John, “though comparatively so small, are venerable from their immense antiquity, being far older, for instance, than the Vosges themselves, which, however, were in existence while the strata now forming the Alps were still being deposited at the bottom of the ocean. But though the Alps are from this point of view so recent, it is probable that the amount which has been removed is almost as great as that which still remains. They will, however, if no fresh elevation takes place, be still further reduced, until nothing but the mere stumps remain.”

Now I read geology as if I understood all about it; but, five minutes after I have put the book down, I get the ages inextricably mixed; Eocene and Pleiocene and pre-Carboniferous and Cambrian and Silurian are all one to me. Jurassic sounds as if it were an acid and I can not possibly remember in which era fossils lived and impressed themselves into the soft clay like seals on wax.

It is tremendously interesting. When I am reading about those old days, I have no difficulty in picturing before my mental vision a great jungle filled with eohippuses and megatheriums and ichthyosauruses and other monstrous creatures. When I get to Oeningen I mean to make a study of fossils: I am told it has the richest collection in the world.

That night I dreamed that I stood on the highest peak of the primitive Alps and a great earthquake shook off colossal blocks of gneiss; vast rivers went rushing down the valleys. I awoke suddenly with a sort of involuntary terror. It was nothing but the tail-end of a gale which tossed the ship like a cockle-shell. The rivers were the streams of water rushing down the deck as the ship plunged her nose into the smothering spume of the angry sea. I slipped on my storm-coat and, clinging to the jamb of my stateroom, gazed out on the wild scene. The sky was clearing, and a moon, which must have been in its second childhood—it looked so slim and young—was riding low in what I supposed was the east; the morning star was darting among scurrying clouds; great phosphorescent splashes of foam were flying high; the ship was staggering like the conventional, or perhaps I should say unconventional, drunken man. A splash of spray in my face counselled me to retire behind my door, and I made a frantic dash for my berth, and slept the sleep of the just the rest of the night.

To a man free of care, without any reason for worry, in excellent health, capable of long hours of invigorating sleep, an ocean voyage is an excellent preparation for a season of sightseeing, of mountain-climbing, of new experiences.

I considered myself quite fortunate to discover on board two Swiss gentlemen. One was a professor from the University of Zürich; the other was an electrical engineer from Geneva. I had many interesting talks with them about Helvetic politics and history.

Professor Heinrich Landoldt was a tall, blond-haired, middle-aged man, with bright blue eyes and a vivid eloquence of gesticulation. He was greatly interested in archaeology and had been down to Venezuela to study the lake dwellings, still inhabited, on the shores of Lake Maracaibo. Here, in our own day, are primitive tribes living exactly as lived the unknown inhabitants of the Swiss lakes, whose remains still pique the curiosity of students. Painters, like M. H. Coutau, have drawn upon their imagination to depict the kind of huts once occupied on the innumerable piles found, for instance, at Auvergnier. But Dr. Landoldt had actually seen half-naked savages conducting all the affairs of life on platforms built out over the shallow waters of their lake. Their pottery, their ornaments, their weapons, their weavings of coarse cloth, belong to the same relative age, which, in Switzerland, antedated history. Probably Venice began in the same way; not without reason did the discoverer, Alonzo de Ojeda, in 1499, call the region of Lake Maracaibo Venezuela—Little Venice.

The same conditions bring about the same results since human nature is everywhere the same. One need not follow the worthy Brasseur de Bourbourg and try to make out that the Aztecs of Mexico were the same as the ancient Egyptians simply because they built pyramids and laid out their towns in the same hieroglyphic way.

The presence of enemies, and the abundance of growing timber along the shores, sufficed to suggest the plan of sinking piles into the mud and covering them over with a flooring on which to construct the thatched hovels. The danger of fire must have been a perpetual nightmare to these primitive peoples, the abundance of water right at hand only being a mockery to them. The unremitting, patient energy of those savages, whether then or now, in working with stone implements, fills one with admiration. Professor Landoldt had many specimens which he intended to compare with the workmanship of the lacustrians of Neuchâtel, Bienne and Pfäffikersee, antedating his by thousands of years.

He has invited me to make him a visit in Zürich and I mean to do so. He tells me that the museum there is exceedingly rich in relics of prehistoric peoples. Perhaps we can go together and pay our respects to the shades of the lake-dwellers. I always like to pay these delicate attentions to the departed. So I would gladly burn some incense to Etruscan or Kelt, whoever first ventured out into the placid waters of the lake—any lake, it matters not which—there are dozens of them—and pray for the repose of their souls; they must have had souls and who knows, possibly some such pious act might give pleasure to them, if perchance they are cognizant of things terrestrial.

My electrical friend, M. Pierre Criant, was also very polite and, when he learned that I was bound for Switzerland to spend some months—Heaven alone knows how many—he urged me to look him up, whenever I should reach Geneva. He would be glad to show me the great plans that were formulating for utilizing the tremendous energy of the Rhône. This was particularly alluring to my imagination for I have a high respect for electrical energy. M. Criant seemed to carry it around with him in his compact, muscular form.

We three happened to be together one morning and I had the curiosity to ask them, as intelligent men, what they thought of the “initiative and referendum,” which I understood was a characteristic Swiss institution, and which a good many Americans believed ought to be introduced into our American system of conducting affairs, as being more truly democratic than entrusting the settlement of great questions to our Representatives in Congress or in Legislature assembled. I remarked that some good Americans looked to it as a cure for all existing political evils. We adopted the Australian ballot and it immediately worked like a charm; undoubtedly its success prepared the way for receiving with greater alacrity a novelty which promised to be a universal panacea. “How does it really work in Switzerland?” I demanded.

“In our country,” replied M. Criant, “a certain number of persons have the right to require the legislature to consider any given question and to formulate a bill concerning it; this must be submitted to the whole people; it is called the indirect initiative. They may also draft their own bill and have this submitted to the whole people. This is of course the direct initiative. Some laws cannot become enforceable without receiving the popular sanction. This is called the compulsory referendum. Other bills are submitted to the people only when the petition of a certain number of citizens demand it. This is the optional referendum. This right may apply to the whole country, or to a Canton, or only to a municipality: the principle is everywhere the same. Suppose an amendment to the Federal Constitution is desired. At least fifty thousand voters must express their desire; then the question is submitted to all the people. Again, if thirty thousand voters, or eight of the Cantons, consider it advisable to support any federal law or federal resolution, they must be submitted to the popular vote; but this demand must be made within three months after the Federal Assembly has passed upon them. Of course this does not apply to special legislation or to acts which are urgent.”

“Has the initiative proved a working success?” I asked.

“Well,” replied Professor Landoldt, “in 1908, more than two hundred and forty-one thousand voters carried the initiative, proposed by almost one hundred and sixty-eight thousand signatures, against the sale of absinthe. In the same way, locally, vivisection was partially prohibited in my Canton in 1895. In Zürich there was a strong feeling in the community that the public service corporations and the large moneyed interests had altogether too much influence in the government; even the justice of the courts was called in question, and, under the leadership of Karl Bürkli, who was a follower of Fourier, the initiative and referendum were adopted especially as a protest against the high-handed autocracy of such men as Alfred Escher. It has been principally used as a weapon against the party in power; but not always successfully. Sometimes it has worked disastrously, as for instance when, in November, the unjust prejudice against the Jews was sufficiently strong to introduce into the Constitution an amendment prohibiting the butchering of cattle according to the old Bible rite. They professed to believe in the Bible, but not in what it says! In this case the societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals combined with the Jew-baiters.”

“A measure which affects me personally,” said M. Criant, taking up the theme, “but which is really in the line of progress, was passed in 1908, when by an overwhelming majority—some three hundred and five thousand against about fifty-six thousand—the Federal Government took over from the individual cantons the right to legislate concerning the water resources when any national interest might be at stake. There are such tremendous hydraulic possibilities in Switzerland that it would be a national misfortune to have them controlled by local or by private corporations.”

“We have the same problem in America,” I remarked. “One of the greatest and most insidious dangers threatening our people is the Water Trust, which is already strongly intrenched behind special privileges and protected by enormous moneyed interests. I believe the people ought to control the natural monopolies.”

“So do I,” exclaimed Professor Landoldt fervently. And he went on: “We have recently stood fast by those principles by taking over the railways, the last item in this tremendous business being the acquisition, a few months ago, of the St. Gothard line which, with its debt, has cost, or will cost, some fifty millions. It took us about seven years to get worked up to the pitch of government ownership. The price seemed extravagant in 1891, and the measure was defeated more than two to one; in 1898 there was a majority of more than two hundred thousand in favour of it; the vote brought out almost the whole voting strength of the country.

“The citizens of Zürich, a few years ago, refused to spend their money in building an art-museum; but thought better of it in 1906. The truth of the matter is, the people like to show their power; they like to discipline their representatives, often at the expense of their own best interests. In 1900 they turned down by a majority of nearly two hundred thousand a Workmen’s Compulsory Insurance bill which both houses had carried with only one opposing vote.

“The interference of the people with the finances of the cantons, or of the cities, often works mischief. How, indeed, could they be expected to show much wisdom in deciding on questions which even an expert would find difficult? They are willing to reduce water-rates, but they object to increase taxes, except on large fortunes. They will readily authorize incurring a good big debt, but they do not like to face the necessity of paying it, or providing for the payment of it. As a people we are a little near-sighted; we are not gifted with imagination.”

“I should think this popular interest in government would tend to educate the masses,” I suggested.

“It certainly does,” replied M. Criant. “Questions are discussed on their merits and though, of course, a tricky orator may mislead, it will not be for long.”

At this point we were interrupted, so that nothing more was said at the time about Swiss politics. Both my friends, however, renewed their invitations for me to be sure to look them up. It is one of the great pleasures and advantages of travelling that one may make delightful acquaintances. I had no intention of letting slip the opportunity of further intercourse with men so genial and well informed as Professor Landoldt and M. Criant.

The voyage came to an end, as do all things earthly. Nothing untoward happened; and we reached Cherbourg on schedule time.

[CHAPTER III]
A ROUNDABOUT TOUR

RUTH and her husband were waiting for me. Will took charge of my luggage. He sent my trunk by express to Lausanne. He even insisted on paying the duties on my cigars—several boxes of Havanas. I always smoke the best cigars, though, thank the Heavenly Powers, I am not a slave to the habit. I suppose every man says that, if for no other reason than to contradict his wife.

When everything was arranged, we took our places in the handsome French touring-car, which, like a living thing instinct with life, proud of its shiny sides, of its rich upholstery, of its wide, swift tires, of its perfectly adjusted machinery, was to bear us across France.

Emile, in green livery, managed her with the skill of a Bengali mahout in charge of an obedient and well-trained elephant. Emile was a character. Born in French Switzerland, he spoke French, German and Italian with equal fluency, and he had a smattering of English which he invested with a picturesque quality due to transplanted idioms and a variegated accent. Had he worn an upward-curling mustache and a pointed Napoleonic beard, one might have taken him for at least a vicomte. He knew every nook and corner of the twenty-two cantons and he had a sense of locality worthy of a North American Indian.

I could write a book about that trip from Cherbourg to Lausanne. Time meant nothing to us. We could follow any whim, delay anywhere, without serious fillip of conscience. The children were in trustworthy hands; the weather was fine. If there is anything in astrology, the stars may be said to have been propitious. We stopped for a day at the little town of Dol in Bretagne. In honour of some problematic ancestor I had the portal of the cathedral decorating my book-plate, and it was an act which a Chinese mandarin would approve—to pay our respects to the dim shades of Sir Raoul, or Duc Raoul, who is said to have accompanied William the Conqueror to England and to have killed Hereward the Wake in a hand-to-hand contest among the fens. Fortunate little town to have such a cathedral, though why Samson should be its patron saint I do not pretend to understand. His conduct with Delilah was hardly saint-like, as we are accustomed to regard conduct in these days.

We climbed Mont Dol and saw the footprints made by the agile archangel Michael when he crouched to spring over to the rock that bears his name. Generally such marks are attributed to the fallen angel who switches the forked tail. That unpleasant personage must have been in ancient days as diligent in travel as the Wandering Jew. The book of Job contains his confession to the Lord that he was even then in the habit of going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it.

We saw Mont Michel, too, and wandered all over its wonderful castle. We did not think it best to make a long sojourn in Paris. No longer is it said that good Americans go there when they die. They had been having rain and the Seine was on a rampage. What a strange idea to build a big city on a marsh! it is certain to be deluged every little while; and house-cleaning must be a terrible nuisance after the muddy waters have swept through the second story floors, even if the foundations do not settle or the house itself go floating down stream. The river was threatening to pour over the quais; the arches of the bridges were almost hidden and men were working like beavers to protect the adjoining streets from inundation.

When human beings put themselves in the way of the forces of nature they are likely to be relentlessly wiped out of existence. Mountains have a way of nervously shaking their shoulders as if they felt annoyed at the temples or huts put there by men, just as a horse scares away the flies on his flank, and, as the flies come back, so do men return to the fascinating heights. It has been remarked that large rivers always run by large cities, but the intervales through which the rivers run, the flat lands which offer such opportunities for laying out streets at small expense, are the creations of the busy waters, and they seem to resent the trespassing of bipeds, and they sometimes rise in their wrath and sweep the puny insects away.

I ought not to speak disparagingly of Paris: it was in my plan to return later and stay as long as I pleased. How can one judge of a person or of a city in a moment’s acquaintance? We left by the Porte de Clarenton; we sped through the famous forest of Fontainebleau—Call it a forest! It is about as much of a forest as a golf links are a mountain lynx. We stayed long enough to look into the famous palace, and evoke the memories of king and emperor.

We spent a night at Orléans. I dreamed that night that Julius Cæsar was kind enough to show me about. He pointed out the spot where his camp was established and he told me how he burnt the town of Genabum, the capital of the Carnutes. I had not long before read Napoleon’s “Life of Cæsar.”

To think of two thousand years of continuous existence; the same river flowing gently by. If only rivers could remember and relate! It would have reflected Attila in its gleaming waters. It would also have its memories of the Maid whose courage freed the former city of the Aurelians from its English foes.

When we reached Tours the question arose whether we should not take the roundabout route through Poitier, Angoulême and Biarritz, thence zigzagging over to Pau, with its memories of Marguerite de Valois, and the birthplace of Bernadotte, pausing at Carcassonne—if for nothing else to justify one’s memory of Gustave Nadaud’s famous poem:—

“Yet could I there two days have spent

While still the autumn sweetly shone,

Ah me! I might have died content,

When I had looked on Carcassonne”—

getting wonderful views of the Pyrenees—only three hundred and fifty-two miles from Tours to Biarritz, less than three hundred miles to Carcassonne.

One hundred and thirty miles farther is Montpellier, once famous for its school of medicine and law. Here Petrarca studied almost six hundred years ago and here, in 1798, Auguste Comte, the prophet of humanity, was born.

At Nîmes, thirty miles farther on, beckoned us the wonderful remains of the old Roman civilization—the beautiful Maison Carrée, its almost perfect amphitheatre, where once as many as twenty thousand spectators could watch naval contests on its flooded arena, where Visigoths and Saracens engaged in combats which made the sluices run with blood. Here were born Alphonse Daudet and the historian Guizot. Was it not worth while to make a pilgrimage to such birthplaces? I would walk many miles to meet Tartarin.

Only twenty-five miles farther lies Avignon, on the Rhône, once the abiding-place of seven Popes, and from there a run of one hundred and eighty-five miles takes one to Grenoble, whence, by way of Aix-les-Bains, it is an easy and delightful way to reach Geneva. Then Lausanne—home, so to speak!—a lakeside drive of a couple of hours!

The other choice led from Tours, through Bourges, Nevers, Lyons, tapping the longer route at Chambéry.

“We will leave it to you to decide,” said my niece. “It makes not the slightest difference to us. We have plenty of time. Emile says the roads are equally good in either itinerary. I myself think the route skirting the Pyrenees would be much more interesting.”

“So do I! I vote for the longer route.”

Now there is nothing that I should better like than to write a rhapsody about that marvellous journey—not a mere prose “log,” giving statistics and occasionally kindling into enthusiasm over historic château or medieval cathedral or glimpse of enchanting scenery; but the “journal” of a new Childe Harold borne along through delectable regions and meeting with poetic adventures, having at his beck and call a winged steed tamer than Pegasus and more reliable. But I conscientiously refrain. My eyes are fixed on an ultimate goal, and what comes between, though never forgotten, is only, as it were, the vestibule. So I pass it lightly over, only exclaiming: “Blessed be the man who first invented the motor-car and thrice blessed he who put its crowning perfections at the service of mankind!” In the old days the diligence lumbered with slow solemnity and exasperating tranquillity through landscapes, even though they were devoid of special interest. The automobile darts, almost with the speed of thought, over the long, uninteresting stretches of white road. There is no need to expend pity on panting steeds dragging their heavy load up endless slopes. And when one wants to go deliberately, or stop for half an hour and drink in some glorious view, the pause is money saved and joy intensified. There is no sense of weariness such as results from a long drive behind even the best of horses. Not that I love horses less but motos more!

Twenty days we were on the road and favoured most of the time with ideal weather. It was one long dream of delight. We had so much to talk about; so much we learned! So many wonderful sights we saw!

How could I possibly describe the first distant view of the Alps? It is one of those sensations that only music can approximately represent in symbols. Olyenin, the hero of Count Tolstoï’s famous novel, “The Cossacks,” catches his first glimpse of the Caucasus and they occupy his mind, for a time at least, to the exclusion of everything else. “Little by little he began to appreciate the spirit of their beauty and he felt the mountains.”

I have seen, on August days, lofty mountains of cloud piled up on the horizon, vast pearly cliffs, keenly outlined pinnacles, and I have imagined that they were the Himalayas—Kunchinjunga or Everest—or the Caucasus topped by Elbruz—or the Andes lifting on high Huascarán or Coropuna—or more frequently the Alps crowned by Mont Blanc or the Jungfrau. For a moment the illusion is perfect, but alas! they change before your very eyes—perhaps not more rapidly than our earthly ranges in the eyes of the Deity to whom a thousand years is but a day. They, too, are changing, changing. Only a few millions of years ago Mont Blanc was higher than Everest; in the yesterday of the mind the little Welsh hills, or our own Appalachians, were higher than the Alps.

Like summer clouds, then, on the horizon are piled up the mighty wrinkles of our old Mother Earth. We cannot see them change, but they are dissolving, disintegrating. Only a day or two ago I read in the newspaper of a great peak which rolled down into the valley, sweeping away and burying vineyards and orchards and forests and the habitations of men. The term everlasting hills is therefore only relative and their resemblance to clouds is a really poetic symbol.

Oh, but the enchantment of mountains seen across a beautiful sheet of water! It is a curious circumstance that the colour of one lake is an exquisite blue, while another, not so far away, may be as green as an emerald. So it is with the tiny Lake of Nemi, which is like a blue eye, and the Lake of Albano, which is an intense green. Here now before our eyes, as we drove up from Geneva to Lausanne, lay a sheet of the most delicate azure, and we could distinctly see the fringe of grey or greenish grey bottom, the so-called beine or blancfond, which the ancient lake-dwellers utilized as the foundation for their aerial homes. My nephew told me how a scientist, named Forel, took a block of peat and soaked it in filtered water, which soon became yellow. Then he poured some of this solution into Lake Geneva water, and the colour instantly became a beautiful green like that of Lake Lucerne.

I found that Will Allerton is greatly interested in the geology of Switzerland. Indeed, one cannot approach its confines without marvelling at the forces which have here been in conflict—the prodigious energy employed in sweeping up vast masses of granite and protogine and gneiss as if they were paste in the hands of a baby; the explosive powers of the frost, the mighty diligence of the waters. Here has gone on for ages the drama of heat and cold. The snow has fallen in thick blankets, it has changed by pressure into firn, and then becomes a river of ice, flowing down into the valleys, gouging out deep ruts and, when they come into the influence of the summer sun, melting into torrents and rushing down, heaping up against obstacles, forming lakes, and then again finding a passage down, ever down, until they mingle with the sea.

As we mounted up toward Lausanne, the ancient terrace about two hundred and fifty feet above the present level of the lake is very noticeable. In fact the low tract between Lausanne and Yverdun, on the Lake of Neuchâtel, which corresponds to that level, gives colour to the theory that the Lake of Geneva once emptied in that direction and communicated with the North Sea instead of with the Mediterranean as now. How small an obstacle it takes entirely to change the course of a river or of a man’s life!

These practical remarks were only a foil to the exclamations of delight elicited by every vista. I mean to know the lake well, and shall traverse it in every direction. It takes only eight or ten minutes from my niece’s house by the funicular, or, as it is familiarly called, la ficelle, down to Ouchy, the port of Lausanne. I parodied the lines of Emerson—

I love a lake, I love a pond,

I love the mountains piled beyond.

But I must confess I was not sorry to dismount from the motor-car in front of the charming house that was destined to be my abode for so many months.

[CHAPTER IV]
HOME AT LAUSANNE

THE house stands by itself in a commanding situation on the Avenue de Collanges. It is of dark stone, with bay windows. The front door seemed to me, architecturally, unusually well-proportioned. It was reached by a long flight of steps. It belonged to an old Lausanne family who were good enough to rent it completely furnished. I noticed, in the library, shelves full of interesting books bound in vellum. Interesting? Well, I doubt if I should care to read many of them—they are in Latin for the most part. How in the world could men in those old days induce printers to manufacture such stately tomes filled with so much wasted learning, on hand-made paper?

I suppose it was characteristic of me to be attracted first of all by the library, but, as soon as I got to my own room, I went to the window—I confess it, the tears came to my eyes! It must be a dream. I recognize the cathedral with its massive Gothic tower and its slender spire and over the house-tops, far below, four hundred feet below, gleams the azure lake, and beyond rise the mountains. A steamboat cuts a silvery furrow through the blue, and a pearly cloud clings to the side of—yes, it must be La Dent du Midi! Below me, for the most part, lies Lausanne. I shall have plenty of time to know it thoroughly, and never, never shall I tire of that view from my chamber-window, looking off across the azure lake.

So absorbed was I in my contemplation that I had not realized how near luncheon-time it was. My trunk was at hand, unstrapped, and I quickly changed from ship and automobile costume into somewhat more formal dress. I was still looking out of the window with my collar in my hand when a miniature cyclone burst open the door. Yes, it was my nephew and namesake with the twin girls, blue-eyed Ethel and blue-eyed Barbara, who came to sweep me down with them to luncheon. How friendly, how gay, how excited, they were to see their Oncle Américain! We became great friends on the spot!

How delightful it is, after weeks of desultory meals at restaurants and hotels, to sit once more at a well-ordered home table! The dining-room was a large, stately apartment, with wide window-recesses. There was fine stained glass in the windows. A number of admirable chamois heads with symmetrical horns were attached to the walls. In one corner stood a superb example of the ancient pottery stoves. It was of white and blue faïence à émail stannifère with gaily painted flowers in the four corner vases. An inscription informed those that could read the quaint lettering that it was made at Winterthür in 1647. How many generations of men it had warmed and comforted! How many happy families had gathered about its huge flanks! What stories it might relate of the days of yore! In spite of its artistic and antiquarian charm, however, it does not compare to the old New England or English open fireplace with fire-dogs supporting great logs of flaming wood which, as they burn down, turn into visions of rose-red palaces. I wonder how many of these old stoves are to be found in Switzerland. The art of making them is said to have been brought from Germany, but it soon acquired an individuality of its own. I am told that there are superb specimens of them in the various museums. The stannifer enamel is made by including some of the oxide of tin in the biscuit. It makes the enamel opaque.

A WINTERTHUR STOVE.

After luncheon Will asked me if I would like to go over to the University, where he said he had a little business. I was very glad to do so. The Avenue de Collanges passes by the Free Theological Institute, the Ecole de Saint Roche, and, after joining with the Rue Neuve, leads into the Place de la Riponne, facing which stands the Palais de Rumine in which are the offices of the University.

After the Reformed Church was established in Lausanne there was a great demand for ministers, and a sort of theological school was founded in 1536. Pierre Viret, a tailor’s son, was active in this work. The famous Konrad von Gesner, the following year, became professor of Greek there, though he was only twenty-one. He won his great reputation as a zoölogist and botanist. An indefatigable investigator, he published no less than seventy-two works and left eighteen partly completed. They covered medicine, mineralogy and philology, as well as botany. He collected more than five hundred different plants which the ancients knew nothing about.

Another of the early professors was Theodore de Bèze. I remembered seeing his name on my Greek Testament but I had forgotten what an interesting character he was. It is a tremendous change from being a dissipated cavalier at the court of François I, writing witty and improper verses, to teaching Greek and morals at Lausanne; but it was brought about by an illness which made him see a great light. While teaching at Lausanne he wrote a Biblical drama, entitled, “Abraham’s Sacrifice.” I am sorry to say he approved of the sacrifice of Servetus. He was at Lausanne for ten years and then was called to Geneva, where he became Calvin’s right-hand man and ultimately succeeded him. I wonder if he kept a copy of his early verses and read them over with mingled feelings.

It is rather odd that one of Bèze’s successors, Alexandre Rodolphe Vinet, who is regarded in Lausanne as the greatest of all her professors, had a somewhat similar experience. He, too, was gay and dissipated and wrote rollicking verses when he was a young man; he, like old Omar, urged his friends to empty the wine-cup (or rather the bottle, as it rhymed better) and let destiny go hang: “The god that watches o’er the trellis is now our only reigning king.” Perhaps, later, he may have found a hidden spiritual meaning in his references. Ascetics converted from rather free living have been known thus to argue. Vinet, Will told me, began by teaching theology; but he demanded greater freedom of utterance than the directors of the Academy were prepared to allow. He detested the Revivalists and called them lunatics. He opposed any established church. He was simply ahead of his day. He was a brilliant preacher, and his lectures on literature were highly enjoyed; but, after the Revolution of 1845, he was obliged to resign. Two years later he died. He, too, wrote many valuable books, mostly theological works, half a dozen of which have been translated into English.

Talking about these early days, we had reached the Palais Rumine, that monument of Russian generosity—a new building—one might call it almost a parvenu building—compared with the old Gothic cathedral, only a few steps farther on.

In a way, however, the cathedral is even later than the palace, because its restoration, in accordance with plans designed by the famous French architect, Viollet-le-Duc, was not completed until 1906, two years after the other building was dedicated to its present uses. The palace, which was built from the fifteen hundred thousand francs left by Gavriil Riumin (to spell the name in the Russian way), contains the various offices of the University, as well as picture galleries and museums.

“So this is the famous University of Lausanne,” I exclaimed, as we entered the learned portal.

“It has been a University for only about a quarter of a century,” remarked Will. “Gibbon and others wanted the Academy raised to a University more than a hundred years ago; but there seemed to be some prejudice against it. Its various schools were added at intervals. There has been a Special Industrial School ‘of Public Works and Constructions’ for about sixty years. In 1873 a school of pharmacy was started, and in 1888, when the Academy became a full-fledged University, it established a medical school. Theology still stands first; then come the schools of letters, of law, of science, of pedagogy, and of chemistry. Instruction is given in design, fencing, riding and gymnastics, and the University grants three degrees, the baccalaureate, the licentiate and the doctorate. It has an excellent library.”

“My errand will take me only a moment,” he added. “It is too fine a day to waste indoors; we shall have plenty of times when the atmosphere is not so clear, for the museums and the cathedral. I propose we stretch our legs by walking up to the Signal. Are you fit for such a climb?”

“What do you take me for?” I asked, with a fine show of indignation. “It is only about four hundred feet above where we are now.”

I had not studied the guide-book for nothing.

There may be a great exhilaration and excitement and delight in climbing to the top of lofty mountains, but, when one has achieved the summit, even if the view be not cut off by clouds, the distances are so enormous that for poor mortal eyes the result is most unsatisfactory. Huddled together, peak with peak, an indistinguishable mass, lie other mountains and ranges of mountains, with bottomless valleys; the effect is as unsatisfactory as the air is rare. One can see nothing clearly; one is out of one’s element, so to speak; one can hardly breathe.

But from a height of a thousand feet, or so, one gets a comprehensive view of the world; one can distinguish the habitations of men; their farms and fields are marked off with fences; the rivers and brooks are not voiceless. It is a satisfying experience. Such is the impression that I got from the top of the Signal. The city is fascinating, seen from above. There is the great bulk of the cathedral with its massive tower and the tall slender spire; the red roofs of innumerable houses; chimneys of factories in the lower town; then the exquisite lake; and, beyond it, the singularly silent and solemn masses of Les Diablerets, Le Grand Muveran and the jagged teeth of the Savoy Mountains, biting into the sky. They are so high that they shut off the grand bulk of Mont Blanc. It was certainly most thoughtful of my Lord Rhône to pause in the great valley and make a sky-blue lake for the delectation of mortals! Like swans with raised wings are the sail-boats. How far the wake made by that excursion steamboat extends across the placid water; it is curved like a scimetar of damascened steel!

“What a host of hotels!” I exclaimed. “I wonder how many foreigners are staying at Lausanne.”

“There must be five or six thousand regular residents from other parts of the world, besides the multitude of transients; Lausanne is a convenient stopping-place for several routes, to say nothing of the Simplon Tunnel line to Italy. There are probably fourteen hundred students at the University, and half of that number are Germans, Russians and Poles. The German Minister of Public Instruction permits students of the Empire to spend the first three semesters at certain of the Swiss universities. But a suspicion arose in some Vaterland circles that these young men were being corrupted by Russian radicalism and Vaudois democracy—undermining their monarchical principles. There was also some jealousy, especially in the Law School. Herr Kuhlenbeck and Herr Vleuten were the so-called treaty professors, and the fees were not equally distributed. The Rundschau charged that young men learned socialism.

“It has always seemed to me an excellent notion to exchange students, just as we are beginning to exchange professors. It might serve to undermine narrow, sectional patriotism, but it would teach a broader, world patriotism.”

The view back of Lausanne also claimed my attention.

“These heights of Jorat,” said Will, “are rather interesting geologically. It seems to be a sort of subsidiary wave, filling the space between the Jura and the Alps; but it has an individuality of its own. It was always covered with great sombre forests which gave it a melancholy aspect. The basis of the soil is sandstone, covered with pudding-stone. The ridge is all cut up with deep valleys. I have heard it said that the inhabitants had quite distinguishing characteristics and I don’t know why the people who live on some particular soil should not develop in their own way, just as the trees and plants and even the animals do. The stature diminishes as men inhabit higher and higher altitudes. The Swiss of the plains are generally rather heavy and slow, serious and solid. In the same way the people who live along the Jorat ought to be self-contained, close-mouthed, rather sad in temperament, perhaps uncertain in their movements, like the brook, the Nozon, which can’t quite make up its mind whether to flow to the Mediterranean by way of the Rhône or to the German Ocean by way of the Rhine.”

“It used to be a pretty important region, I should judge,” said I, “from all I have read of Swiss history. One flood of invasion after another dashed up against its walls and poured through its valleys.”

“It was, indeed. Some day I will show you the old tower which was called the Eye of Helvetia because it looked down and guarded the chief routes south and north, which crossed at its feet. It can be seen on a clear day from the top of Mont Pélerin. Then there is the tower of Gourze, where Queen Berthe took refuge when the Huns came sweeping over this land. Lausanne itself, as it is now, is a proof of the old invasions; it used to stand on the very shores of the lake, but, when the Allemanni came, the inhabitants took refuge in the heights.”

“I think this is a charming view, but, do you know, to me its greatest charm is in the signs of a flourishing population. See the church spires picturesquely rising above clumps of trees, and, here and there, the tiled roofs of some old château—of course I do not know them from one another, but I know the names of several—Moléson, Corcelles, Ropraz, Ussières, Chatélard, Hermenches.”

Several of these my nephew and I afterwards visited. I recall with delight our trip to the Château de Ropraz, where once lived the wonderfully gifted Renée de Marsens. It now belongs to the family of Desmeules. Near it, on a hill, lies the little village, the church of which was reconstructed in 1761, though its interior still preserves its venerable, archaic appearance. A grille surmounted by the Clavel arms separates the nave from the choir. There are tombs with Latin inscriptions, and on the walls are escutcheons painted with the arms of the old seigneurs. They still show the benches reserved for the masters of the château, flanked by two chairs with copper plates signifying that they are the “Place du Commandant” and the “Place du Chef de la Justice.” Seats were provided for visiting strangers and also for the domestics of the château. On the front of the pulpit is a panneau of carved wood bearing the words Soli Deo Gloria.

Renée, after her father’s fortune was lost, failed to make a suitable marriage, but she lived in Lausanne until 1848, and people used to go to call on her. They loved her for the brilliancy of her mind and her exquisite old-fashioned politeness. She knew Voltaire and all the great men of his time.

Another of the châteaux which we mentioned but were not certain that we could see was that of l’Isle, situated at the base of Mont Tendre in the valley of the Venoge. To this, also, we made an excursion one afternoon. It must have been splendid in its first equipment. It was built for Lieutenant Charles de Chandieu on plans furnished by the great French architect, François Mansard, whose memory is preserved in thousands of American roofs. In its day it was surrounded by a fine park. One room was furnished with Gobelin tapestries, brilliant with classic designs. Other rooms had tapestries with panels of verdure in the style of the Seventeenth Century. The salon was floored with marble (“the marble halls” which one might dream of dwelling in) and hung with crimson damask, setting forth the family portraits and the painted panels. On the mantels were round clocks of gilt bronze, while huge mirrors, resting on carved consoles, reflected the brilliant companies that gathered there to dance or play. There was an abundance of high-backed armchairs and sofas, or as they called them, canapés, upholstered in velvet, commodes in ebony adorned with copper, and marquetry secretaries.

On the ground floor there was a great ballroom hung with splendid Cordovan leather. As it had a large organ it was probably used as a chapel, for the family was musical and several of the ladies of the Chandieu family composed psalms—Will called them chants-Dieu, which was not bad.

From the entrance-hall a splendid stairway, still well-preserved, with its wrought-iron railing led up to the sleeping-rooms, which were furnished with great beds à la duchesse with satin baldaquins. Among the treasures was a beautiful chest of marquetry bearing the coat-of-arms quartered; it was a marriage-gift. Another, dated 1622, came from the Seigneur de Bretigny.

In front was a terrace with steps at the left leading down to the water. On each side of the stately main entrance, which reached to the roof, well adorned with chimneys, were three generous windows on each floor. In front there was a wide and beautifully kept lawn. The property was sold in 1810 for one hundred and seventy thousand francs. It came into the hands of Jacques-Daniel Cornaz, who, in 1877, sold it again for two hundred thousand. It now belongs to the Commune and is used for the écoles séculaires. The wall that once surrounded it has disappeared and the prosperous farms once attached to it were sold.

There is nothing in the literature of domestic life more fascinating than the diary and letters of Catherine de Chandieu, who married Salomon de Charrière de Sévery. They inherited the charming estate of Mex with its châteaux, and one of them, with a queer-shaped apex at each corner and a fascinating piazza, became their summer home. Another of these fine old places was the Château de Saint-Barthélemy, which belonged to the Lessert family for three or four generations; then came into the possession of the famous Karl Viktor von Bonstetten, the author and diplomat, and was bought in 1909 by M. Gaston de Cerjat. In the hall hung pictures of several French kings, probably presented because of diplomatic services. Many of these old manor-houses on the shores of the Lakes of Geneva and of Neuchâtel have come into the possession of wealthy foreigners who have modernized them; others are now asylums, or schools, or boarding-houses.

But in those days they were filled with a cultivated and hospitable gentry who were always paying and receiving visits.

Really there is no end to the romance of these old houses; yet, curiously enough, most of them were carefully set down in little valleys which protected them from cold winds, but also from the magnificent views which they might have had. Even when they were on hills, trees were so planted as to hide the enchanting landscape, the lake and the gleaming mountains. Albrecht von Haller, the Bernese poet and novelist, Charles de Bonnet of Geneva, and Rousseau at Paris, “lifted the veil from the mountains” and made the world realize that the lake was something else than a trout-pond.

A SWISS CHÂTEAU.

It was time for us to be getting back. While we were on Le Signal some aerial Penelope had woven a web of delicate cloud and spread it out half-way up the Savoy Mountains across the lake; everything had changed as everything will in a brief half-hour. There were different gorges catching sunbeams, and tossing out shadows; there was another tint of violet over the waters. I suggested a plan for describing mountain views. It was to gather together all the adjectives that would be appropriate—high, lofty, massive, portentous, frowning, cloud-capped, craggy, granitic, basaltic, snow-crowned, delectable and so on, just as Lord Timothy Dexter did with his punctuation-marks, delegating them to the end of his “Pickle for the Knowing Ones,” so that people might “pepper and salt” it as they pleased. If I wrote a book about Switzerland—that is, if I find that my impressions, jotted down like a diary, are worth publishing, I mean to add an appendix to contain a sort of armory of well-fitting adjectives and epithets for the use of travellers and sentimental young persons. In this way I may be recognized as a benefactor and philanthropist.

“Do you know what is the origin of the name, Lausanne?” asked Will, arousing me from a revery caused by the compelling beauty of those gem-like peaks, that rippling ridge of violet-edged magnificences that loomed above the glorious carpet of the lake. The pedigree of names is always interesting to me. Philology has always been a hobby of mine.

“Why, yes,” said I, “that is an easy one. It comes from the former name of the river, Flon. The Romans used to call the settlement here Lousonna. Almost all names of rivers have the primitive word meaning water, or flow, hidden in them. The Aa, the Awe, the Au, the Ouse, the Oise, the Aach and the English Avon, and a lot more, come from the Old High German aha, and that is nothing but the Latin aqua. The Greek hudor is seen in the Oder, the Adour, the Thur, the Dranse and even in the Portuguese Douro; and the Greek rheo, ‘I flow,’ is in the Rhine and the Rhône and the Reuss and in the Rye.”

“So I suppose you derive Lausanne from the French l’eau.”

As I passed in silent contempt such an atrocious joke as that, he seized the opportunity to tell me about the Frenchman who had some unpleasant associations with the inhabitants and declared it was derived from les ânes—the asses.

“From all I have read about them,” I replied, “they must have been a pretty narrow-minded, bigoted set of people here. Way back in 1361 an old sow was tried and condemned to be hanged for killing a child; and about the middle of the next century a cock was publicly burned for having laid a basilisk’s egg. One of the worthy bishops of Lausanne,—did you ever hear?—went down to the shores of the lake and recited prayers against the bloodsuckers that were killing the salmon.”

“Was that any more superstitious than for present-day ministers to pray for rain?”

“I suppose not; only it seems more trivial,” I replied absently, as I gazed down upon the housetops. “I did not realize Lausanne was so large.”

“The city is growing, Uncle. Toward the south and the west you can see how it is spreading out. There is something tragic to me in the outstretch of a city. It is like the conquest of a lava-flow, such as I once saw on the side of Kilauea, in the Hawaiian Islands; it cuts off the trees, it sweeps away the natural beauties. Lausanne has trebled its population in fifty years. It must have been much more picturesque when Gibbon lived here. For almost eighty years they have been levelling off the hills. It took five years to build the big bridge which Adrien Pichard began, but did not live to finish. The bridge of Chauderon has been built less than ten years.”

“They must have had a tremendous lot of filling to do.”

“They certainly have, and they have given us fine streets and squares—especially those of La Riponne and Saint-François. It was too bad they destroyed the house of the good Deyverdun, where Gibbon spent the happiest days of his life. It had too many associations with the historic past of Lausanne. They ought to have kept the whole five acres as a city park. What is a post office or a hotel, even if it is named after a man, compared to the rooms in which he worked, the very roof that sheltered him?”

“We have still time enough,” said I, consulting the elevation of the sun; “let us go down by way of the cathedral. I should like to see it in the afternoon light.”

“We can take the funiculaire down; that will get us there quicker.”

We did so, and then the Rue l’Industrie brought us, by way of the Rue Menthon, to the edifice itself.

“I want you to notice the stone of which the cathedral is built,” said Will.

“Yes, it’s sandstone.”

“It is called Lausanne stone. A good many of the old houses are built of it, and it came from just one quarry, now exhausted, I believe. It seems to have run very unevenly. Some of the big columns are badly eaten by the tooth of time; in others the details are just as fresh as if they had been done yesterday. Notice those quaint little figures kneeling and flying in the ogives of the portal; some are intact, others look as if mice had gnawed them. It is just the same with some of the fine old houses; one will be shabby and dilapidated; the very next will be well-preserved.”

“I think it is a rather attractive colour—that greyish-green with the bluish shadows.”

We stood for a while outside and looked up at the mighty walls and the noble portal. We walked round on the terrace from which one gets such a glorious view.

There is something solemn and almost disquieting in a religious edifice which has witnessed so many changes during a thousand years. Its very existence is a curious and pathetic commentary on the superstitions of men. Westerners, interpreting literally the symbolism of the Orient, believed that the world would come to an end at the end of the first millennium. It was a terrible, crushing fear in many men’s minds. When the dreaded climacteric had passed and nothing happened, and the steady old world went on turning just as it had, the pious resolved to express their gratitude by erecting a shrine to the Virgin Mother of God. Before it was completed its founder was assassinated. In the thirteenth century it was thrice devastated by fires which were attributed by the superstitious to the anger of God at the sins of the clergy and of the people. The statue of the Virgin escaped destruction and the church was rebuilt between 1235 and 1275. When it was consecrated, in October, 1275, Pope Gregory X, with the Emperor, Rudolf of Hapsburg, his wife and their eight children, and a brilliant crowd of notables, cardinals, dukes, princes and vassals of every degree, were present. The great entrance on the west was completed in the fifteenth century. The nave is three hundred and fifty-two feet long; its width is one hundred and fifty feet and it is divided into eight aisles. There are seventy windows and about a thousand columns, many of them curiously carved.

The well-known Gate of the Apostles is in the south transept. It commemorates only seven of them, though why that invidious distinction should have been made no one knows. Old Testament characters fill up the quota. These worthies stand on bowed and cowed demons or other enemies of the Faith.

In the south wall is the famous rose-window, containing representations of the sun and the moon, the seasons and the months, the signs of the zodiac and the sacred rivers of Paradise, and quaint and curious wild beasts which probably are visual traditions of the antidiluvian monsters that once inhabited the earth, and were still supposed to dwell in unexplored places.

The vaulting of the nave is sixty-two feet high. It gave plenty of room for the two galleries which once surmounted the elaborately carved façade. One of them was called the Monks’ Garden, because it was covered with soil and filled with brilliant flowers.

Back of the choir is a semicircular colonnade. The amount of detail lavished on the various columns is a silent witness of the cheapness of skilled labour and of the time people had to spend. The carved choir stalls, completed in 1506, were somehow spared by the vandal iconoclasts of the Reformation; but thirty years later Bern, when taking possession of Lausanne, carried off eighteen wagon-loads of paintings, solid gold and silver statues, rich vestments, tapestries, and all the enormous wealth contributed to the treasures of the church.

We were fortunate to find the cathedral still open, and in the golden afternoon light we slowly strolled through the silent fane—the word fane always sounds well. We paused in front of the various historic tombs. Especially interesting was that dedicated to the memory of Otho de Grandson, who, having been charged with having instigated the murder of Amadée VII, was obliged to enter into a judicial duel with Gérard d’Estavayer, the brother of the fair Catherine d’Estavayer whom he expected to marry.

Gérard apparently stirred up great hatred against him. Otho had in his favour the Colombiers, the Lasarraz, the Corsonex, and the Rougemonts; while with Gérard were the Barons de Bussy, de Bonvillar, de Bellens, de Wuisternens, de Blonay and, especially, representatives of the powerful family of d’Illens whose great, square castle is still pointed out, beetling over the Sarine opposite Arconciel. These men were probably jealous of Otho. His friends wore a knot of ribbons on the tip of their pointed shoes, while his enemies carried a little rake over their shoulders.

Otho shouted out his challenge to Gérard: “You lie and have lied every time you have accused me. I swear it by God, by Saint Anne and by the Holy Rood. But come on! I will defend myself and I will so press forward that my honour will be splendidly preserved. But you shall be esteemed as a liar.”

So Otho made the sign of the Cross and threw down the battle-gage. But, although he was undoubtedly innocent, the battle went against him. His effigy is still to be seen in the cathedral. The hands resting on a stone cushion are missing but this probably was due to some accident and not to any symbolism. This all happened about a hundred years before Columbus discovered America—in 1398.

Here, too, lies buried, under a monument by Bartolini, Henrietta, the first wife of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, minister from England to Switzerland. She died in 1818.

There are monuments also commemorating the Princess Orlova, who was poisoned by Catharine II of Russia, and Duc Amadée VIII, who caused Savoy to be erected into a duchy and became Pope Felix V in 1439, after he had lived for a while in a hermitage on the other shore of the lake. He is not buried in the cathedral but his intimate connection with the history of Lausanne is properly memorialized by his monument.

A city is like an iceberg. Its pinnacles and buttresses tower aloft and glitter in the sun; it seems built to last for ever. But it is not so; its walls melt and flow away and are put to other uses. A temple changes into a palace, and a fortification is torn down to make a park. Where are the fifty chapels that once flanked Notre Dame de Lausanne? Where is the fortified monastery of Saint Francis? Where is the lofty tower of La Grotte, and the moat in which it was reflected?

A great pageant took place in the cathedral in 1476. After Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, had been defeated at Grandson, he collected what remained of his army of 50,000 men, and encamped in the plains of Le Loup. Then on Easter Sunday, he attended high mass. The cathedral was lavishly decorated and a brilliant throng “assisted” at the ceremonies. The Duchess Yolande of Savoy came from Geneva, bringing her whole court and an escort of three thousand horsemen. The Pope’s legate and the emperor’s ambassadors brought their followers, while representatives of other courts were on hand, for the occasion was made memorable by the proclamation of peace between the duke and the emperor. There was a great clanging of bells and fanfare of trumpets and the whole city was overrun with soldiers. The commissary department was strained to feed such multitudes. It is said that an English knight, serving in the duke’s army, was reduced to eating gold; at any rate his skull was found some years ago with a rose noble tightly clenched between its teeth!

A few months later the battle of Morat was fought; the duke was defeated and Lausanne was doubly sacked, first by the Comte de Gruyère and, a few hours later, by his allies, the Bernese troops, who spared neither public nor private edifices.

Just sixty years later Lausanne fell definitely into the hands of the Bernese, and they, by what seems an almost incredible revival of the judicial duel—only with spiritual instead of carnal weapons—ordered a public dispute on religion to decide whether Catholicism or Protestantism should be the religion of the city.

The comedian of the occasion seems to have been the lively Dr. Blancherose, who was constantly interrupting and interpolating irrelevant remarks, to the annoyance of the other disputants and to the amusement of the audience which packed the cathedral. On one occasion he declared that the word cephas was Greek and meant head; Viret replied that it was a Syriac word and meant stone. The Pope could have well dispensed with such an advocate.

The superiority of the Protestant debaters resulted in converting some of the opposite party, and the establishment of the Academy of Lausanne was the direct outcome of this debate, which was declared in all respects favourable to the Reformers.

The day after the decision was rendered, a crowd of bigots broke into the cathedral, overturned the altars and the crucifix, and desecrated the image of the Virgin. Workmen were paid for fifteen days at the rate of four and one sixth sous a day to clear Notre Dame of its altar-stones. And yet Jean François Naegueli (or Nägeli), when he took possession of Lausanne, had promised to protect the two Christian faiths.

It is a question whether one would rather live in those days under the easy-going régime of the superstitious Catholics or under that of the stern, forbidding bigotry of the Protestants. Geneva could not endure the latter and banished Farel and Calvin two years later; but back they came and established the tyranny more solidly than ever. Calvin drove Castellio out of Geneva, caused Jacques Gruet to be tortured and put to death, mainly because he danced at a wedding and wore new-fangled breeches, and had Servetus burned at the stake. It was a cruel age.

A cloud evidently passed over the face of the sun; the colours in the great rose window grew almost pallid. We left the church and again stood on the terrace.

“We are just about one hundred and fifty-two meters above the lake,” said Will. “Do you know, in the harbour of Geneva there are two big rocks which the early inhabitants of this region used to worship. They are granite, or protogen, and must have been brought down from some distant mountain, probably from the Saint-Bernard, by a glacier. In the old Roman days they were worshipped. On the top of one of them is a bronze plaque, put there in 1820 by General Dufour, and regarded as the standard, or rather the base, for all Swiss hypsometry. If you want to know how high above the level of the sea the Dent du Midi is, you will find it on the map ‘R. P. N.’ plus its height above the plaque. For instance the Cathedral here is R. P. N. plus a little more than one hundred and fifty-two meters. But the queer thing is that no two people who have tried to correct or verify General Dufour’s reckoning of the height of the plaque have been able to agree. General Dufour made it a fraction over three hundred and seventy-six meters and a half, which would give the level of the lake as three hundred and seventy-five meters; but it has since been corrected to a bit less than three hundred and seventy-three meters—a loss of almost ten feet.”

“What does that mean—that the scientists blundered?”

“It looks to me as if the whole level of the valley had perhaps settled. Every one knows that it is changing all the time—but come on, I want you to see the cathedral from the Place de Saint Laurent. It isn’t far from here.”

When we got there Will stopped and said:

“There! Isn’t that worth coming for? I wonder if there is any other cathedral in the world that has a more magnificent site.”

We paused for some time, looking up at its solid bulk, which seemed to touch the gathering clouds.

THE CATHEDRAL, LAUSANNE.

“I brought you here especially,” continued Will, “because one of Switzerland’s few poets praises its aspect from this spot. He says something like this: ‘It is a great crag fixt there. Contemplate it when heavy clouds are passing over. Standing below it and letting your eye follow the radiant field which creeps up to its flanks, you imagine that it grows larger amid the wild clouds which it tears as they fly over, leaving it unshaken. You might believe yourself in some Alpine valley, over which towers a solitary peak while around it cluster the mists driven by the wind.’ He grows still more enthusiastic at the beauty of it when the chestnut-trees are in bloom, contrasting with the violet roofs below and surrounded by the azure aureole of the lake and the mountains and he speaks of its ‘graceful energy’ against the golden background.”

“Who is the poet?” I asked.

“Oh, Juste Olivier. I will introduce you to him some day—I mean to his works. He himself died in 1876, if I am not mistaken. I have the two volumes which his friends edited as a sort of memorial to him.”

“I didn’t suppose there were any Swiss poets—I mean great Swiss poets. Of course I know Hebel—”

“Yes, back in Gibbon’s time, the society founded by his friend Deyverdun discussed the question, ‘Why hasn’t the Pays de Vaud produced any poets?’ Juste Olivier deliberately set to work to fill the gap.”

“Did he succeed? He is not much known outside of Switzerland, is he?”

“Probably not; you shall see for yourself. But I remember one stanza on Liberty which has a fine swing to it—

“‘La Liberté depuis les anciens ages

Jusqu’à ceux où flottent nos destins

Aime à poser ses pieds nus et sauvages

Sur les gazons qu’ombragent nos sapins.

Là, sa voix forte éclate et s’associe

Avec la foudre et ses roulements sourds.

Nous qui t’aimons, Helvétie, Helvétie,

Nous qui t’aimons, nous t’aimerons toujours.’

“That is a fine figure—Liberty loving to set her foot on the soil shaded by the Swiss pines,—and so is that of Helvetia mingling her voice with the rolling of the thunder. That stanza has been praised as one of the finest of the century.”

As we leisurely strolled homeward my nephew called my attention to the northern slope of the Flon, just beyond the magnificent bridge, Chauderon-Montbénon. “That,” he remarked, “is called Boston.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t know, unless to commemorate the fact that Lausanne is built on three hills. The north part was called La Cité, that to the south was le Bourg—the Rue du Bourg was the court end of the town, and had especial privileges—and the western side was called Saint-Laurent. It was only a little town when Gibbon came here to live; but it had unusually good society and there was a great deal of wealth, as you can imagine from the fine old houses.”

“Where did they get their money?”

“A good many of them through fortunate speculation. The men used to seek service in foreign countries. It is surprising how many of them became tutors to royal or princely families, or, if they were trained in the profession of arms, got commissions as officers in Russia, France, Spain and Holland. Some of them even went to India and America. A good many of them returned, if they returned at all, with handsome fortunes.”

“Isn’t it strange that a country which is always supposed to stand for liberty and patriotism should, next the Hessians, furnish the very best type of the mercenary! For a hundred years the French kings had to protect themselves with a Swiss guard, and the Pope’s fence of six-footers have been recruited from Lucerne and the Inner Cantons during more than four centuries.”

“Do you remember what Rousseau said about mercenary military service? It runs something like this: ‘I think every one owes his life to his country; but it is wrong to go over to princes who have no claim on you, and still worse to sell yourself and turn the noblest profession in the world into that of a vile mercenary.’ But Lausanne’s best contribution to foreign countries was education. The Academy, or college as they used to call it, attracted many people from abroad. Ever since it was founded—and the Protestants deserve that credit—it provided remarkably good professors and lecturers. The old families that had country estates got into the habit of spending their winters in town. They were wonderfully interrelated and many of them, through marriage, had several baronies. They were enormously proud of their titles and position. I have recently been reading Rousseau—especially his ‘Nouvelle Héloïse’—you know about a year ago they were celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of his birth,—and I was struck with what he makes My Lord Edward Bomston say about the petty aristocracy of this Pays de Vaud: ‘Why does this noblesse of which you are so proud claim such honors? What does it do for the glory of the country or for the happiness of the human race? Mortal enemy of laws and of liberty, what has it ever produced except tyrannical power and the oppression of the people? Do you dare in a republic boast of a condition destructive of the virtues and of humanity, a condition which produces slavery and makes one blush at being a man?’”

“It seems to have been a regular feudalism.”

“It was. Gibbon was much struck by the unfairness of the régime which obtained in his day, and he speaks somewhere of three hundred families born to command and of a hundred thousand, of equally decent descent, doomed to subjection. They used to have a queer custom here, for a man, when he married, to add the wife’s name to his own....”

“Just as in Spain,” I interpolated.

“Yes, only hyphenated. They worked the particle de to death. As almost every one of the great families was related more or less closely to every other, and the estates were constantly passing from one branch to another, a man would at one time be Baron de Something-or-other, and the next year, perhaps, would appear with quite a different appellation. For instance, there was Madame Secretan, whose family name was taken from the Seigneurie d’Arnex-sur-Orbe. Antoine d’Arnay—he spelt his name phonetically—was Seigneur de Montagny-la-Corbe, co-seigneur de Luxurier, Seigneur de Saint-Martin-du-Chêne and Seigneur de Mollondin. And the husband of the famous Madame de Warens appears under several aliases. It is very confusing.

“When the nobles returned with hundreds of thousands of francs,” he added, “they spent their money royally. Many of these houses are filled with splendid carved furniture and tapestries. As long as Bern was suzerain of Vaud, and governed it, there was small chance for Government service and this state of things led to a peculiar atmosphere—one of frivolity and pleasure-seeking. The men hadn’t anything to do except to amuse themselves and few were the years when some foreign prince was not studying here and spending any amount of money in dinners and dances.”

“Yes,” said I, “considering that Lausanne was in the very centre of Calvinism, it must have been pretty gay. I suppose the influence of France was even stronger than that of Geneva or Bern.”

By this time we had reached our own street and were climbing the flight of steps that led to the handsomely arched portal.

[CHAPTER V]
GIBBON AT LAUSANNE

THE next day it rained. The whole valley was filled with mist. The sudois, as they call the southwest wind, moaned about the windows. But I did not care; explorations or excursions were merely postponed. There would be plenty of time, and it was a pleasure to spend a quiet day in the library. We devoted it mainly to Gibbon and old Lausanne—that is, the Lausanne of Gibbon’s day, and, before we were tired of the subject, I think we had visualized the vain, witty, delightful, pompous, lazy, learned exile who so loved his “Fanny Lausanne,” as he liked to call the little town.

When he first arrived there from England, he was only sixteen—a nervous, impressionable, ill-educated youth. He had been converted to Roman Catholicism, and, glorying in it with all the ardour of an acolyte, he was taken seriously by the college authorities at Oxford and expelled. His father had to do something with him; he was just about to get married for the second time and, as the boy would be in his way, he decided to “rusticate” him in Lausanne.

It was arranged that young Gibbon should be put into the care of the worthy Pastor Daniel Pavilliard, a rather unusually broad-minded, sweet-tempered, and highly educated professor, the secretary and librarian of the Academy, afterwards its principal. He was then probably living in the parsonage of the First Deacon in the Rue de la Cité derrière, now a police-station, a picturesque house with high roof, with long vaulted corridors and wide galleries in the rear, from which could be seen the Alps beyond the Flon and the heights to the southeast of the city.

The plan of giving the boy a good cold bath of Presbyterianism worked better than would have been believed possible. Like a piece of hot iron dipped into ice-water he came out quite changed. He hissed and sizzled for a while, and then hardened into a free-thinker. It is odd how people can throw off a form of religion as if it were a cloak.

It was a trying experience for the lad. Madame Pavilliard, whose name was Carbonella, did not pattern after her husband. According to Gibbon she was narrow, mean and grasping, disagreeable and lacking in refinement. He could not speak French; they could not speak English. He gives a pathetic account of his misery; telling how he was obliged to exchange an elegant apartment in Magdalen College “for a narrow, gloomy street, the most infrequented of an unhandsome town, for an old inconvenient house and for a small chamber, ill-contrived and ill-furnished, which at the approach of winter, instead of a companionable fire, must be warmed by the dull, invisible heat of a stove.” His earliest entry in the diary which he kept said:—“First aspect horrid—house, slavery, ignorance, exile.” He felt that his “condition seemed as destitute of hope as it was devoid of pleasure.”

After a while, however, his natural good spirits rallied. He wrote his father: “The people here are extremely civil to strangers, and endeavor to make this town as agreeable as possible.”

He began to join the young people in making excursions, and he wrote home asking permission to take riding lessons. Pastor Pavilliard encouraged him to join in the gayeties of the town. There were dances; there were concerts with violins, harpsichords, flutes and singing.

He soon made the acquaintance of Georges Deyverdun, a young man a little older than himself, of high character and aristocratic connections. Deyverdun’s early diaries are extant and often mention walking with M. de Guiben or de Guibon. They became life-long friends. A book which had great influence on Gibbon was a “Logic” written by Professor Jean Pierre de Crousaz, who, after a life of great honours and wide experiences, had died three years before Gibbon’s arrival at Lausanne.

Voltaire wrote him: “You have made Lausanne the temple of the Muses and you have more than once caused me to say that, if I had been able to leave France, I would have withdrawn to Lausanne.”

De Crousaz’s “Logic” fortified Gibbon to engage in a battle for his faith. He had lively discussions with Pavilliard, but gradually “the various articles of the Romish creed disappeared like a dream;” and after a full conviction, on Christmas-day, 1754, he received the sacrament in the church of Lausanne.

Gibbon’s “return to the light” caused a lively joy in the Assembly which voted that the Dean should congratulate him on such a sensible act. He was examined and found “perfectly enlightened upon religion and remarkably well informed on all and each of the articles separating them from the Church of Rome.”

Whether Gibbon may not have had a weather eye open to material benefits at home is a question which falls with several other of his expressions of opinion. He had a wealthy aunt who was much offended by his defection from her Church. Only a month later Pastor Pavilliard wrote this Mrs. Porten:—

“I hope, Madame, that you will acquaint Mr. Gibbon with your satisfaction and restore him to your affection, which, though his errors may have shaken, they have not, I am sure, destroyed. As his father has allowed him but the bare necessities, I dare beg of you to grant him some token of your satisfaction.”

In the Autumn of 1755 Gibbon and his guardian made “a voyage” through Switzerland by way of Yverdun, Neuchâtel, Bienne, Soleure, Bâle, Baden, Zürich, Lucerne and Bern. He kept a journal of his experiences, written in not very accurate French. He was more interested in castles and history, in persons and customs than in scenery; indeed, he scarcely mentions the magnificence of the mountains, but he devotes considerable space to the linen-market of Langental and the surprising wealth of the peasantry, some, he says, having as much as six hundred thousand francs. He explained it by the profits from their linen and their cattle and especially by their great thrift. Fathers brought up their children to work and to be contented with their state in life—simple peasants; they wore fine linen and fine cloth, but wore peasants’ clothes; they had fine horses, but plowed with them; and they preferred that their daughters marry persons in their own condition rather than those who might bring them titles.

LAUSANNE AND THE SAVOY MOUNTAINS.

On reaching Bern he gives no description of the city but elaborately explains the curious system of government which obtained there. The inhabitants, he thought, were inclined to be proud, but he found a philosophical cause for it, and wondered that more of the natives were not guilty of that sin. He thought the environs of Bern had not a cheerful appearance, but were on the contrary rather wild.

Soon after his return began the one romantic episode in Gibbon’s life—his love affair with Suzanne Curchod, daughter of the Protestant pastor at Crassy or Crassier, a village on the lower slopes of the Jura, between Lausanne and Geneva. Gibbon himself tells what she was: “The wit, the beauty, the erudition of Mlle. Curchod were the theme of universal applause. The report of such a prodigy awakened my curiosity; I saw and loved. I found her learned without pedantry, lively in conversation, pure in sentiment, and elegant in manners; and the first sudden emotion was fortified by the habits and knowledge of a more familiar acquaintance.”

She had fair hair, and soft blue eyes which, when her pretty mouth smiled, lighted up with peculiar charm; she was rather tall and well proportioned; an extremely attractive girl.

The young men and women, particularly of La Cité, had formed a literary society, at first called l’Académie de la Poudrière but afterwards reorganized and renamed “from the age of its members” La Société du Printemps.

Suzanne was the president of this society. They used to discuss such questions as these: “Does an element of mystery make love more agreeable?” “Can there be a friendship between a man and a woman in the same way as between two women or two men?” and the like.

Suzanne seems to have been inclined to treat young theological students in somewhat the same way as fishermen play salmon when they are “killing” them. Her friends expostulated with her on her cruelty.

Gibbon, who had the reputation of being the son of a wealthy Englishman, caused her to forget the sighing students. At that time he must have been an attractive youth—that is, if we can put any confidence in her own description of him. After praising his beautiful hair and aristocratic hand, his air of good-breeding, and his intellectual face and his vivacity of expression, she crowns her encomium by declaring that he understood the respect due to women, and that his courtesy was easy without verging on familiarity. She adds: “He dances moderately well.”

They became affianced lovers. Years afterwards, Gibbon in his autobiography declared that he had no cause to blush at recollecting the object of his choice. “Though my love,” he says, “was disappointed of success, I am rather proud that I was once capable of feeling such a pure and exalted sentiment. The personal attractions of Mademoiselle Susan Curchod were embellished by the virtues and talents of her mind. Her fortune was humble, but her family was respectable.”

He visited at her parents’ home—“happy days,” he called them—in the mountains of Burgundy, and the connection was honourably encouraged. She seems to have made it a condition of her engagement that he should always live in Switzerland. When he returned to England in 1758 he found that his father opposed the match, and evidently his love speedily cooled. The absence of letters does not necessarily prove that none were written, but certainly there was no lively correspondence, and at length, after a lapse of four years, he calmly informs the young lady that he must renounce her for ever, and he lays the blame on his father, who, he says, considered it cruelty to desert him and send him prematurely to the grave, and cowardice to trample underfoot his duty to his country.

Considering the fact that Father Gibbon was busily engaged in dissipating his fortune, and had endured his son’s absence for many years, this excuse strikes one as decidedly thin. At the end of his letter of renunciation he desires to be remembered to Suzanne’s father and mother. Pastor Curchod had been dead two years, and Suzanne was then living in Geneva, where she was supporting herself and her mother by teaching.

Just ten years after his first arrival at Lausanne, Gibbon made a visit there on that memorable journey to Rome which resulted in the writing of his history. He made no attempt to see Suzanne, who seems to have deceived herself with the hope that his indifference was only imaginary. She wrote him that for five years she had sacrificed to this chimera by her “unique and inconceivable behavior.” She begged him on her knees to convince her of her madness in loving him and to end her uncertainty.

She got a letter from him that brought her to her senses. She replied that she had sacrificed her happiness not to him but, rather, to an imaginary being which could have existed only in a silly, romantic brain like hers, and, having had her eyes opened, he resumed his place as a mere man with all other men; indeed, although she had so idealized him that he seemed to be the only man she could have ever loved, he was now least attractive to her because he bore the least possible resemblance to her chimerical ideal.

Gibbon chronicled in his diary in September, 1763, the receipt of one of Suzanne’s letters, and in questionable French he called her “a dangerous and artificial girl” (“une fille dangereux et artificielle”) and adds:—“This singular affair in all its details has been very useful to me; it has opened my eyes to the character of women and will long serve as a safeguard against the seductions of love.”

Suzanne was no Cassandra, either; the very next year she married the young Genevan banker, Jacques Necker, then minister for the Republic of Geneva at Paris.

About two years later Gibbon wrote to his friend, J. B. Holroyd:—

“The Curchod (Madame Necker) I saw in Paris. She was very fond of me, and the husband particularly civil. Could they insult me more cruelly? Ask me every evening to supper; go to bed and leave me alone with his wife. What an impertinent security! It is making an old lover of mighty little consequence. She is as handsome as ever; seems pleased with her fortune rather than proud of it.”

The Platonic friendship was never again ruffled; if anything it grew more confidential and almost sentimental. The Neckers visited Gibbon in London more than once, and, when political and financial storms drove them from Paris, Gibbon found their Barony of Copet (as he spells it—he was not very strong in spelling!) a most delightful harbour, though he was too indolent to go there very often. This was in after years, when Lausanne again became his home.

He had published the first volume of his history of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” and had immediately leaped into fame. The same year Necker was made Director of the Treasury of France, and began that remarkable career of success and disappointment. Perhaps his greatest glory was his daughter, afterwards so well known as Madame de Staël, whose loyalty to him in all the vicissitudes of his life was one of her loveliest characteristics.

Gibbon was back in Lausanne again in 1783; he seems to have reckoned time in lustrums, his dates there being 1753, 1763 and 1783, and he returned to London in 1793 where he died the following year, just a century after Voltaire was born. He certainly had pleasant memories of Lausanne and, after losing his one public office, and the salary which came in so handy, he formed what his friends called the mad project of taking up his permanent residence there. This came about through his old-time friend, Georges Deyverdun, who through the death of relatives and particularly of an aristocratic old aunt, had come into possession of the estate known as La Grotte, one of the most interesting historical buildings in the town, with memories covering centuries of ecclesiastical history. He and Deyverdun formed a project whereby the two should combine their housekeeping resources and live in a sort of mutually dependent independence.

Gibbon had a very pretty wit. A year or two after he had taken this decisive step, had bade a long farewell to the “fumum et opes strepitumque Romae,” and had sold his property and moved with his books to Lausanne, the report reached London that the celebrated Mr. Gibbon, who had retired to Switzerland to finish his valuable history, was dead. Gibbon wrote his best friend, Holroyd, who was now Lord Sheffield:—“There are several weighty reasons which would incline me to believe that the intelligence may be true. Primo, It must one day be true; and therefore may very probably be so at present. Secundo, We may always depend on the impartiality, accuracy and veracity of an English newspaper.”—And so he goes on.

In another letter, after speaking of his old enemy, the gout, and assuring Sheffield that he had never regretted his exile, he pays his respects to his fellow-countrymen: “The only disagreeable circumstance,” he says, “is the increase of a race of animals with which this country has been long infested, and who are said to come from an island in the Northern Ocean. I am told, but it seems incredible, that upwards of forty thousand English, masters and servants, are now absent on the Continent.”

Byron, a third of a century later, had the same ill opinion of his fellow-countrymen:—“Switzerland,” he wrote Moore, “is a curst selfish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic regions of the world. I never could bear the inhabitants and still less their English visitors.”

In a somewhat different spirit Lord Houghton pays his respects to the throng of foreigners who find pleasure and recreation and health in Switzerland. He says:—

“Within the Switzer’s varied land

When Summer chases high the snow,

You’ll meet with many a youthful band

Of strangers wandering to and fro:

Through hamlet, town and healing bath

They haste and rest as chance may call;

No day without its mountain-path,

No path without its waterfall.

“They make the hours themselves repay

However well or ill be shared,

Content that they should wing their way,

Unchecked, unreckoned, uncompared:

For though the hills unshapely rise

And lie the colours poorly bright,—

They mould them by their cheerful eyes

And paint them with their spirits light.

“Strong in their youthfulness they use

The energies their souls possess;

And if some wayward scene refuse

To pay its part of loveliness,—

Onward they pass nor less enjoy

For what they leave;—and far from me

Be every thought that would destroy

A charm of that simplicity!”

Gibbon and Deyverdun were remarkably congenial; interested in the same studies and the same people. Which was the more indolent of the two it would be hard to say. But by this time Gibbon had grown into the comically grotesque figure which somehow adds to his fascination. He had become excessively stout; his little “potato-nose” was lost between his bulbous cheeks; his chin was bolstered up by the flying buttress of much superfluous throat. He had red hair. A contemporary poem describes him:—

“His person looked as funnily obese

As if a pagod, growing large as man,

Had rashly waddled off its chimney-piece,

To visit a Chinese upon a fan.

Such his exterior; curious ’twas to scan!

And oft he rapped his snuff-box, cocked his snout,

And ere his polished periods he began

Bent forward, stretching his forefinger out,

And talked in phrases round as he was round about.”

Early in his career Gibbon was rather careless in his dress, but he could not afford not to be in style as the lion of Lausanne, and he had any number of changes of apparel. He had a valet de chambre, a cook who was not put out if he had forty, or even fifty, guests at a dinner, and who received wages of twelve or fifteen livres a month—a little more than a dollar a week, but money went farther in those primitive days—he had a gardener, a coachman and two other men. Altogether he paid out for service a little more than eleven hundred livres a year. He spent generously, also, for various magazines and other periodicals, French and English, and he was constantly adding to his library. After the French Revolution, when many French émigrés came to Lausanne, there were loud complaints at the increased cost of living.

In 1788 Gibbon required a new maid-servant and his faithful friend, Madame de Séverin, recommended one to him in these terms:—

“She will make confitures, compotes, winter-salads, dried preserves in summer; she will take charge of the fine linen and will herself look after the kitchen service. She will keep everything neat and orderly in the minutest details. She will take care of the silver in the English fashion; she can do the ironing; she can set the table in ornamental style. You must entrust everything to her (except the wine) by count; so many candles, so many wax-tapers in fifty-pound boxes; so much tea, coffee and sugar. The oftener the counting is made, the more careful they are; three minutes every Sunday will suffice. I have excepted nothing of what can be expected of a housekeeper. She will look after the poultry-yard. She will make the ices and all the pastry and all the bonbons, if desired, but it is more economical to buy the latter.”

Gibbon was generous to others; he subscribed to various charities and he paid all the expenses of an orphan boy, Samuel Pache.

Lord Sheffield’s daughter, Maria Holroyd, could not understand why he should prefer Lausanne to London. She declared that there was not a single person there whom he could meet on a footing of equality or on his height; she thought it was a proof of the power of flattery. But there were always distinguished visitors at Lausanne, and Gibbon knew them all. His letters are full of references to the celebrities whom he is cultivating.

He writes to Lady Sheffield to tell her how he “walked on our terrace” with Mr. Tissot, the celebrated physician; Mr. Mercier, the author of the “Tableau de Paris;” the Abbé Raynal, author of “L’Histoire Philosophique des Etablissements et du Commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes,” the clever free-thinker with whom Dr. Johnson refused to shake hands because he was an infidel; M. and Mme. Necker; the Abbé de Bourbon, a natural son of Louis XV; the hereditary Prince of Brunswick; Prince Henry of Prussia; “and a dozen counts, barons and extraordinary persons, among whom was a natural son of the Empress of Russia.”

In London, great as he was (even though he was a Lieutenant Colonel Commandant and Member of Parliament), he had found himself eclipsed by larger and brighter planets; in Lausanne he was the bright particular star. “I expected,” he says, “to have enjoyed, with more freedom and solitude, myself, my friend, my books and this delicious paradise; but my position and character make me here a sort of public character and oblige me to see and be seen.”

He used to give great dinners. Thus, in 1792, the beautiful and witty Duchess of Devonshire made a visit to Lausanne and Gibbon gave her a dinner with fourteen covers. The year before he gave a ball at which at midnight one hundred and fifty guests sat down to supper. He was well pleased with it and boasted that “the music was good, the lights splendid, the refreshments abundant.” He himself went to bed at two o’clock in the morning and left the others to dance till seven. It was as common in those days, even in Calvinistic Lausanne, to dance all night as it is now in stylish society. He had assemblies every Sunday evening, and rarely did a day pass without his either dining out or entertaining guests at his own hospitable board.

In a pleasure-loving community like that of Lausanne eating was one of the chief employments of life. On their menus they had all kinds of game, for hunting was one of the recreations of the gentry of the lake shore, and they brought home hares, partridges, quails, wood-cock from the Jura, heath-hens, roe-bucks and that royal game, the wild-boar, not to speak of the red foxes and an occasional wolf or bear.

A party would leave one house and drive or ride out into the country and come in upon some baronial family which would be hard put to it to accommodate so many—ladies and gentlemen and their valets and maids. On such occasions they would have to send out and borrow porcelain plates, glass compote dishes, silverware of every kind. How they managed the cooking for such large dinner-parties is a mystery. On one occasion my Lord Bruce gave a ball in honour of the Queen of England’s birthday. There were between one and two hundred people invited. Fifty sat down in the big room of the Redout, twenty in the Green Room. On an earlier occasion the genial Prince of Würtemberg gave a ball and eighty sat down to a supper costing fifteen louis d’or for each person.

On less formal evenings the guests, after eating their dinner, would go to some other house and have a “veillé,” where they played such games as “Twelve Questions” or “Commerce” or “Loto” or took part in acting charades.

One season La Générale de Charrière wrote a little play in verse entitled “L’Oiseau vert”—“The Green Bird.” This mythical creature personated Truth, just as Maeterlinck’s “Blue Bird” personates Happiness. The Green Bird is consulted by various characters and replies in piquant verse. Mr. Gibbon, who is represented as “un gros homme de très bonne façon,” asks the bird to indicate his country, and the bird replies that, by his gentle and polished mien, he would be taken for a Frenchman; by his knowledge, his energy, his writings and his success, his wit, his philosophy, the depth of his genius, it might be suspected that he was an Englishman; but his real country is that to which his heart had brought him, where he is loved, and they tell him so, and where he must spend his life. Gibbon used to speak of himself as a Swiss—nous autres Suisses—until the French Revolution broke out; that scared him.

They also had musicales. Deyverdun liked to play the spinet. One evening the Saxon Comte de Cellemberg, being present at the house of the Saint-Cierges’, “sang delicious airs and played the clavecin like a great master.” On another occasion Madame de Waalwyck, daughter-in-law to Madame d’Orges, gave a concert at which all the chief musicians of Lausanne, more than twenty in number, took part. Again, Benjamin Constant de Rebecque, who afterwards won fame by calling Napoleon a Genghis Khan,—he was one of the great men of his day,—made his appearance as a musician, and a Herr Köppen, in the service of the Duchesse de Courland, played the flute and made up such horrible faces and grimaces that people could not help laughing.

They also had elaborate picnics on the shores of the lake, or in the glorious forest back of the city. Their favourite place was the grove of Saint-Sulpice. There they would spread a great table under the trees and have chocolate, coffee, good butter, and thick cream at noon. To one of these festivities came the Duchess of Würtemberg in grand style, in a coach drawn by six horses, and dressed in a taffetas robe and a tremendous hat. The real picnic dinner followed and all had huge appetites, fostered by the open air. Then appeared in the distance a great boat accompanied by musicians. Young girls, dressed like shepherds, presented baskets of flowers. A touch of distinction was added by the arrival of the bishop. Every one was gay and happy. Déjardin and his musicians played. They had country dances, allemandes and rondes. It was a pretty sight—the gay equipages and liveries, the pretty girls. The people of Saint-Sulpice clustered around. The rustic touch was communicated by sheep and cows. Merry children were there to take an interest in the festivity. The duchess sat in an armchair, holding a white parasol over her head. More or less damage was done to the property of the inhabitants, and they made it up by taking a collection which, when counted, amounted to forty crowns. At this same Saint-Sulpice, Napoleon, when First Consul, in 1800 reviewed the army that was to fight later at Marengo.

It must not be supposed, however, that Gibbon’s laziness and his dislike of exercise prevented him from working. Delightful invitations could not allure him from his work. Often, as his History neared completion, he had to spend not only the mornings but also the evenings in his library. The fourth volume was completed in June, 1784, the fifth in May, 1786, and the last on June 27, 1787.

The year after the last volume was published his friend Deyverdun, who had been for some time in failing health, passed away. He bequeathed to Gibbon for life the furniture in the apartment which he occupied. There is no known inventory of it, but we know what gave distinction to the grand salon—tapestried armchairs, tall pier-glass, marble and gilt console table, crystal lustres, bronze candelabras, a fine, old clock in carved and gilded black wood, and other luxurious articles. He left him also the entire and complete use and possession of La Grotte, its dependencies, and the tools and utensils for caring for it. He was to make all repairs and changes necessary and pay his legal heir, Major Georges de Molin de Montagny, the sum of four thousand francs, and an annuity of thirty louis neufs or, if he desired, he might purchase the property for thirty-five thousand francs. Gibbon was in London at the time, superintending the publication of his History; he had to come back to Lausanne and to a quite different existence. He entered into amicable relations with Major de Montagny. He lent him money and was entirely willing to take La Grotte in accordance with the will. He began to make improvements in the estate and he tells how he had arranged his library, or rather his two libraries—“book-closets,” they used to be called—and their antechamber so that he could shut the solid wooden doors of the twenty-seven bookcases in such a way that it seemed like a bookless apartment.

He boasts of his increasing love for Nature:

“The glories of the landscape I have always enjoyed; but Deyverdun has almost given me a taste for minute observation, and I can now dwell with pleasure on the shape and color of the leaves, the various hues of the blossoms, and the successive progress of vegetation. These pleasures are not without cares; and there is a white acacia just under the windows of my library which, in my opinion, was too closely pruned last Autumn, and whose recovery is the daily subject of anxiety and conversation.

“My romantic wishes led sometimes to an idea which was impracticable in England, the possession of an house and garden, which should unite the society of town with the beauties and freedom of the country. This idea is now realized in a degree of perfection to which I never aspired, and if I could convey in words a just picture of my library, apartments, terrace, wilderness, vineyard, with the prospect of land and water terminated by the mountains; and this position at the gate of a populous and lively town where I have some friends and many acquaintances, you would envy or rather applaud the singular propriety of my choice.”

He says further on in the same letter:

“The habits of female conversation have sometimes tempted me to acquire the piece of furniture, a wife, and could I unite in a single woman, the virtues and accomplishments of half a dozen of my acquaintance, I would instantly pay my addresses to the Constellations.”

The requirements were that one should be as a mistress; the second, a lively entertaining acquaintance; the third, a sincere good-natured friend; the fourth should preside with grace and dignity at the head of his table and family; the fifth, an excellent economist and housekeeper; the sixth, a very useful nurse!

It was suggested to him by Madame Necker that he might do well to marry, though she assured him, with, perhaps a bit of malice, that to marry happily one must marry young. He thus expressed himself regarding the state of celibacy:—

“I am not in love with any of the hyaenas of Lausanne, though there are some who keep their claws tolerably well pared. Sometimes, in a solitary mood, I have fancied myself married to one or another of those whose society and conversation are the most pleasing to me; but when I have painted in my fancy all the probable consequences of such a union, I have started from my dream, rejoiced in my escape, and ejaculated a thanksgiving that I was still in possession of my natural freedom.”

Perhaps it was fortunate that Gibbon did not marry Suzanne; we might not have had the History of Rome; we should not have had Madame de Staël!

[CHAPTER VI]
AROUND THE LAKE LEMAN

IT was a cozy and restful day and pleasant indoors, sheltered from the driving rain. I had a fine romp with the children in the nursery. I was delighted to find that the oldest, Lawrence,—a fine, manly little chap with big brown eyes—was fond of music and was already manifesting considerable talent. The twin girls, Ethel and Barbara, were as similar as two green peas; they were quick-witted enough to see that I could hardly tell them apart and they enjoyed playing little jokes on me. Toward the end of the afternoon, becoming restless from being so long indoors, I proposed taking a walk. Lawrence wanted to go with us, and his mother dressed him appropriately, and he and his father and I sallied out together.

We had hardly reached the big bridge when Will uttered some words which I could not understand. “What is that?” I asked.

“It is a weather proverb in the local dialect.”

“Please repeat it slowly.”

He did so: “Leis niollez van d’avau devétion lo sélau.”

“Give it up,” I said.

“It means: ‘When the clouds fly down the lake and give a glimpse of the sun, it is a sign of fair weather.’ The wind has changed.”

He had hardly uttered this prophecy when there was a break in the west and a gleam of sunlight flitted across the upper part of the town, though down below all was still smothered in grey mist.

“It is surely going to be pleasant to-morrow, and I think we had better arrange to make a tour of the lake. We can go either by the automobile or on the water by motor-boat. We can do it by the car in a day; but if we go by boat we might have to be gone a couple of days or even longer. A storm like this is likely to be followed by a spell of fair weather.”

“I should vote for the boat,” said I.

The next morning was perfectly cloudless. The air was deliciously bracing and everything was propitious for our trip. We had an early breakfast. Emile was waiting to take us down to the quai at Ouchy. A graceful—and from its lines evidently swift-running—motor-boat was moored alongside the Place de la Navigation. The chauffeur drove off to leave the car at a convenient garage and, while we were making ourselves at home on the boat, he came hurrying back to take charge of the engine. This paragon was equally apt on sea and on land. We were soon off and darting out into the lake which in the early morning, when no wind had as yet arisen, lay like a mirror. Looking back, we had the steep slope of the Jorat clearly outlined; the city of Lausanne clinging to its sides, and the cathedral perched on its height and dominating all with its majestic dignity. Gleaming among the trees could be seen dozens of attractive villas—“the white houses,” as Dumas cleverly said, resembling “a flock of swans drying themselves in the sun.” Many of these would be worthy a whole chapter of history and romance, the former “noble” possessors having connected themselves with literary, educational, or military events in all parts of Europe. But, seen from the lake, they were like the details of a magnificent panoramic picture.

As a wild duck flies, the distance from Ouchy to Vevey is only about twelve miles across the blue water; but we hugged the shore, so as to get the nearest possible views. Emile was an admirable cicerone and pointed out to us many interesting places. As we came abreast the valley of the Paudèze we could see some of the eleven arches of the viaduct of La Conversion.

“You see that hill just to the East of the city,” said Will. “That is Pierra-Portay. There, in 1826, some vintagers found several tombs made of calcareous stone and they were quite rich in objects of the stone age—hatchets and weapons and other things, besides skeletons. All along the shores of the lake similar discoveries were made. The people didn’t know much about such things then, and many were opened carelessly and the relics were often scattered and lost. I think in 1835 about a hundred were opened. In one of them, covered with a flat stone, there were articles from the bronze age—spiral bracelets, bronze hatchets, brass plaques ornamented with engraved designs. Probably when they were made the lake was much higher. There are traditions that the water once bathed the base of the mountains, and that there were rings, to fasten boats to, on Saint Triphon, which must then have been an island. Almost every town along the shore has its prehistoric foundation. The name of the forest beyond Lausanne,—you can see it from here,—Sauvabelin, which means sylva Bellini, suggests Druidical rites and about thirty tombs were found there with interesting remains. And just above the Mont de Lutry, above the viaduct—where you see those arches—a huge old oak-tree was struck by lightning and overturned; in its roots were a number of deep bowls, cups and earthen plates bearing the name of Vindonissa, which was an important Roman settlement, and also fragments of knives and other copper utensils, probably used for sacrifices, perhaps hidden there by some Druid priest.”

It was a queer notion to spring this recondite subject when we were flying along the crystalline waters of the lake and new splendours of scenery were every second bursting into view. I did not even care very much to know the names of the multitudinous mountains that seemed to be holding a convention on the horizon, though Emile told us that those were the Rochers de Verraux, those the Rochers de Naye, and others various Teeth—La Dent de Jaman, La Dent de Morcles, La Dent du Midi. I did learn to distinguish the latter, and also Le Grand Muveran, and especially La Tour d’Aï, where I knew that a wonderful echo—un écho railleur—has her habitat and mocks whatever sounds are flung in her direction.

Perfectly beautiful also stood out the peak of what the Western “Cookie” called “the grand Combine”—like the pyramid of Cheops beatified and changed into sugar. As we expected to stop at the Castle of Chillon I had brought with me an amusing “Guide” to that historic shrine and I discovered in it a description of La Dent du Midi. It says:—

“What a magnificent object that Dent du Midi is, if we regard it, standing out so clearly from its base to its summit, rising so boldly and by endless degrees from the depth of the valley up to the gigantic wall, the strata of which are intersected by narrow passes, where the snow lodges and gives birth to the glaciers, the largest of which are spread out like a streak of silver as far down as the pasture-fields. In its central and unique position, the Dent du Midi, with its seven irregular peaks, crowns and worthily completes the picture.”

Then the author goes off into poetry:—

“Dost thou know it, the dull blue wave

Which bathes the ancient Wall of Chillon?

Hast seen the grand shadow of the rocks of Arvel

Reflected in that azure sea?

Knowest thou Naye and its steep crest

And the toothed ridge of Jaman?

Hast thou seen them, tell me, hast thou seen them?

Come here to these scenes and never leave them!”

LA DENT DU MIDI FROM MONTREUX.

I suppose it is really one’s duty to know the names of the mountains, just as one must know the botanical names of flowers. Nevertheless, only within comparatively few years have distinctive names been actually fastened to special mountains. The names, foreign to English, when translated into English are often to the last degree banal. A typical example is the Greek headland with its high-sounding appellation, Kunoskephale, which means merely Dog’s Head; and those that first gave the Alps a generic name could not devise anything better than a word which means “White.” What would not the imaginative American Indians have called Mont Blanc! Very probably the Keltic inhabitants of these regions, with their poetic nature, would have named it something better than just “White Mountain!” The Romans might have the practical ability to build roads over the hills, but they could not name them!

Juste Olivier, however, goes into ecstasies over the names of some of the Swiss mountains. He says:—

“What more charming, more fresh and morning-like than the name of the Blümlisalp? What more gloomy than that of the Wetterhorn, more solid than that of the Stockhorn, more incomparable than that of the Jungfrau, more aerial and whiter than that of the Titlis, more superb and high sounding than that of the Kamor, more sparkling and vivid than that of the Silberhorn, more terrible than that of the Finsteraarhorn which falls and echoes like an avalanche!”

He is still more enthusiastic over the Alps of Vaud:—Moléson with its round and abundant mass so frequently sung by the shepherds of Gruyères, the slender, white, graceful forms of La Dent de Lis and Le Rubli. And he finds in the multitude of names ending in az—Dorannaz, Javernaz, Oeusannaz, Bovannaz—something peculiarly alpestrine and bucolic, as if one heard in them the horn-notes blown by the herdsmen, and their long cadenzas with the echoes from the mountain walls; and the solemn lowing of the cows as they crop the flowery grass and shake the big copper bells fastened to their necks. There is an endless study in names of places as well as in names of people. Often centuries of history may be detected in a single word.

Meantime we have been speeding along, cutting through the fabric of the lake as if we were a knife. Behind us radiated two long, dark blue lines tipped with bubbles and mixing the reflections of the gracious shores. Oh, this wonderful lake! Vast tomes have been devoted to its poetic, picturesque, scientific characteristics. Almost every inch of its vast depths has been explored. No longer has the wily boatman, as he steers his lateen-sailed lochère, any excuse for telling his occasional passenger (as he used to tell James Fenimore Cooper) that the water is bottomless. Every fish that swims in it is known and every bird that floats on its broad bosom.

A lake is by no means a lazy body of water and Leman, or Lake Geneva, as it is often called, is not so much a lake as it is a swollen river. If the Rhône is an artery, the lake is a sort of aneurism; there is a current from one end to the other which keeps it constantly changing. Then, owing to atmospheric conditions, at least twice a year (as in even the most stagnant ponds) the top layers sink to the bottom and the bottom layers come to the top. There is also a sort of tide or tidal fluxes, called seiches. The word means originally the flats exposed by low water, but is applied here to variations averaging ten inches or so in the level of the lake, but sometimes greatly exceeding that. There were three or four in one day in September, 1600, when the lake fell five feet and boats were stranded. De Saussure, one August day in 1763, measured a sudden fall of 1.47 meters, or four and a half feet, in ten minutes’ time. Eight years previously, the effect of the great earthquake which destroyed Lisbon was noticed in the vibration of the lake. Various explanations of this curious phenomenon have been given. One was that the Rhône was stopped and, as it were, piled up at the so-called Banc du Travers—a bar or shallow between Le Petit Lac and Le Grand Lac which begins on a line between La Pointe de Promenthoux on the north and La Pointe de Nernier in Savoy on the south. It is probably due to the sweeping force of the winds. When there is a heavy storm waves on the lake have been observed and measured not less than thirty-five meters long and a meter and seven tenths in height.

James Fenimore Cooper in his novel “The Headsman of Berne,” published anonymously while he was United States Consul at Lyons, thus describes this wonderful body of water:—“The Lake of Geneva lies nearly in the form of a crescent, stretching from the southwest towards the northeast. Its northern or the Swiss shore is chiefly what is called, in the language of the country, a côte, or a declivity that admits of cultivation, and, with few exceptions, it has been, since the earliest periods of history, planted with the generous vine.

“Here the Romans had many stations and posts, vestiges of which are still visible. The confusion and the mixture of interests that succeeded the fall of the Empire gave rise in the middle ages to various baronial castles, ecclesiastical towns and towers of defence which still stand on the margin of this beautiful sheet of water, or ornament the eminences a little inland.... The shores of Savoy are composed with unmaterial exceptions of advanced spurs of the high Alps, among which towers Mont Blanc, like a sovereign seated in the midst of a brilliant court, the rocks frequently rising from the water’s edge in perpendicular masses. None of the lakes of this remarkable region possess a greater variety of scenery than that of Geneva, which changes from the smiling aspect of fertility and cultivation at its lower extremity to the sublimity of a savage and sublime nature at its upper.”

It seems almost incredible, but Lausanne lies a good deal nearer to the North Pole than Boston does. The degree of latitude that sweeps across the lake where we started cuts just a little below Quebec, nearly touches Duluth and goes a bit south of Seattle. There are really three lakes, forming one which, in its whole extent, has a shore-line of one hundred and sixty-seven kilometers, the north shore being twenty-three longer than the south. Its greatest width is thirteen and eight-tenths kilometers, and it covers an area of about five hundred and eighty-two square kilometers. Its maximum depth is 309.7 meters. It is a true rock basin. The Upper Lake is, for the most part, a level plain, filled by the greyish-muddy Rhône which uses it as a sort of clearing-house. Being denser than the lake, the water of the river sinks and leaves on the bottom its perpetual deposits of mud, coarser near the shore, finer the farther out one goes. When the bottom of the Grand Lake is once reached, it is as flat as a billiard-table. Sixty meters from the Castle of Chillon it is sixty-four meters deep and shelves rapidly to three times that depth.

Deep as it seems—for a thousand feet of perpendicular water is in itself a somewhat awesome thought—still, in proportion to its surface-extent, the lake is shallow. Pour out a tumbler of water on a wooden chair and the comparative depth is greater.

Pure as it seems to be—and the beauty of its colour is a proof of it—the Rhône carries down from it to the sea a vast amount of organic matter and, as it drains a basin of eight thousand square kilometers, it is not strange that Geneva, which has used the lake-water for drinking purposes since 1715, has occasionally suffered from typhoid fever. In 1884 there were sixteen hundred and twenty-five cases; but, since the intake-pipes have been carried farther into deep water, the danger seems to have passed. Ancient writers supposed that the Rhône ran through Lake Leman without mixing its waters; they did not know that the lake is the Rhône.

Emile told us that after the bise, that is, the northeast wind, had blown for several days, the muddy water of the Rhône shows green along the shore for several kilometers. This is called les troublons du Rhône. He told us also that the lake-water is warmer than the air in every month except April and May. I asked him if it ever froze over, and he replied that there was a legend that once it did, but never within his memory.

One of the most interesting things in winter is the mirage. Almost every day one can see the land looming; it seems as if there were great castles and cities, and sometimes boats are sailing in the air. Places that are out of sight rise up, and gigantic walls and colossal quais appear where there are no such constructions.

This Fata Morgana gave ground for the magical Palace of the Fairy—le Palais de la Fée—and is perhaps the basis of the legend of the fairy skiff of the lake. Those that have the vision see it drawn along by eight snow-white swans. In it sits a supernaturally tall woman with golden locks and dressed in white robes, accompanied by chubby sprites. If one’s ears are keen enough one can hear the song that she sings, accompanied by a beautiful harp. Wherever her bark touches the shore bright flowers spring into bloom. Unlike many of the magical inhabitants of the mountains, she is a beneficent creature. Even the sight of her brings good fortune. But, since steamboats began to ply up and down and across the blue waters of the lake, she has not been seen; she was scared away. She appears only on post-cards accompanied by the German words “Glück auf”—“Cheer up.”

“By the way,” said Will, “did you know that the first steamboat to sail on Lake Geneva was built by an American?”

“No? What was his name?”

“That I don’t know; but he made a great success of it so that an association was formed to go into competition with him with two new boats and, when they were launched, they offered the American a sovereign a day to let his boat lie idly at the dock. He accepted the proposition and was spared all the worries of navigating the lake and of seeing his profits cut down by opposition. That was about a century ago.”

We were interrupted by an odd, droning noise from the direction of Montreux and, looking back, we saw what might have been taken for one of those huge birds, the roc, which we used to read about in the Arabian Nights. It came rapidly nearer and we saw it was a hydro-aeroplane darting down the lake. It must have been at least a thousand feet in the air, but with the spyglass we could see the faces of its passengers.

“I’d like to go up in one of those,” said Will, “but this tyrannical little wife of mine has made me promise that I won’t. Don’t you think that she is exhibiting an undue interference with her lord and master?”

“Am I not perfectly right, Uncle?” asked Ruth with a show of indignation. “I suppose some time they will be made safe; but, till they are, a man who has a wife and children has no business to take such a risk. Suppose a bise should suddenly come down from the mountains.”

Of course I took Ruth’s side; Will would not have liked it if I hadn’t; but I made up my mind then and there that, at the first opportunity, I, not being cramped by any marital obligations, would have a sail in a hydro-aeroplane. What is more, I carried out my purpose. One day everything seemed to favour me; the weather was fine and promised to continue so; Will and Ruth were occupied in some domestic complication; so I went out ostensibly for a walk, but hurried to the station and took a train for Vernex. I found the quai where the hydro-aeroplane starts, and, having been told that it cost a hundred francs, I had the passage-money ready in a bank-note.

I have seen a wild fowl rise from the surface of an Adirondack lake; the wings dash the water into foam, but after it has made a long, white wake, it rises and speeds down the horizon. So, as soon as I had taken my place with one other passenger, a Russian gentleman, the motor was set in motion and we glided out on the lake. Then, with a slight motion of the rudder, as our speed increased, we left the surface and, in an easy incline, mounted high into the air. I liked it all except the noise of the motor; that was deafening.

My favourite dream has always had to do with an act of levitation. I would seem to be standing on the great, granite step of my grandfather’s old house, and then by sheer will power lift myself—only there was no sense of lifting—high out over the river which flowed between the steep banks, a wide, calm stream, and, having made a turn above the swaying elms, come back to my starting-point without any sense of shock.

This came nearest to that dream. I had no sense of fear at all. Looking down, I could say with Tennyson’s eagle, “The wrinkled sea beneath me crawls.” The whole lake lay, as it were, in the palm of my hand. It was an indescribable panorama, flattened except where very high hills arose, and in the distance an infinitude of blended details. It was vastly more exciting than being on a mountain-top. The wind whistled through the wires and almost took away my breath. Thanks to having twice circled the lake—once by motor-boat and once in the automobile—I knew pretty well what the towns were over which we sailed. We made a wide circuit over Geneva and, mounting still higher, cleared the crest of the Salève and then returned like an arrow to Vernex. I now knew how an eagle feels when in splendid spirals it soars up toward the sun until it is lost to human sight, and then, with absolute command of its motions, descends to its eyrie on the top of a primeval pine planted on the mountain’s dizzy side. I now knew how Icarus dared fit those wax-panoplied wings to his strong arms and with mighty strokes ply the upper skies, looking down on the sea which it was worth dying for to name through all the ages.

Over this very lake once floated the balloon sent up by Madame de Charrière de Bavois, kindled to enthusiasm by the invention of the celebrated Montgolfier brothers. It was nearly two meters high and two or three times that in circumference and was made of paper and a network of wires. But it caught fire, and fell like a meteor, and Lausanne forbade any more experiments of the sort without permission; there was too great risk of setting the woods on fire. What would Rousseau and Voltaire have said to see men flying a thousand feet above their heads? But what at first seems like a miracle soon becomes a commonplace and, now that I have been up in a “plane,” ordinary locomotion will seem rather tame.

But, to return to our trip around the lake. The buzzing hydro-aeroplane sped over our heads, going at a tremendous clip and of course filling us with wonder and admiration. While those above us were free from every obstacle, except the air itself, which Kant, in one of his poetic passages in the “Critique,” shows is the very support of the bird’s flight, we were making good progress in the “Hirondelle,” running not far from the shore, but of course avoiding the shelving edge of the beine—to use the local term.

We were near enough to admire the beautiful villas which occupied commanding and lovely sites at frequent intervals between Lutry and Cully. When Emile pointed out Villette I wondered if Charlotte Brontë got the name of her autobiographical romance from it. Pretty soon we glided slowly by Vevey, where we could see the crowds of people on the Place du Marché, and the green fields with scattered houses, and enjoyed the tall trees and the fine old château de l’Aile and, farther back, the noble tower of Saint Martin.

Vevey has been rather unfortunate in its piers. In 1872 the municipality began to build a solid and handsome structure along La Place de l’Ancien Port. Several years were spent on it and it had been completed about eighteen months when one hundred and nine meters—all of the western part—suddenly, and without any warning, sank into the lake. The physical explanation of the catastrophe was very simple. Almost a hundred years earlier—in June and again in November, 1785—some of the houses on what was then La Rue du Sauveur, now La Rue du Lac, being founded on the same unstable basis, gave way. It happened again in 1809. The weight of the superimposed structure caused the mud and gravel deposits to slide down into deeper water. Even now one almost expects to see the white, gravelly beach, just beyond, sink into the depths, with all the chattering washer-women who use the lake as a bath-tub. Similar catastrophes have happened on several other Swiss lakes.

It was like a moving-picture to see the succession of interesting places. Beyond Vévey-la-Tour were the clustered villas of La Tour-de-Peilz, where Count Peter of Savoy once enjoyed the beauties of the lake; then Clarens, suggesting memories of Rousseau and Byron. Far up on the height we could see the Château des Crêtes. We made beautiful scallops in around by Vernex, and doubled the picturesque point on which Montreux roosts, and looked up to the far-away Dent de Jaman; we skirted Territe and then came close under the frowning, historic walls of Chillon.

LAKE LEMAN AT VEVEY.

[CHAPTER VII]
A DIGRESSION AT CHILLON

CHILLON is probably the best-known castle in Switzerland. It commands the one pass between the mountains and the lake, and there, in the old days, two horsemen could defend the passage against a host. On Mont Sonchaux, a spur of the high crags of Naye, with Mont Arval rising on the east, and torn with ravines and landslides, between the two torrents, the Veraye and the Tinère, it stands, “a mass of towers placed on a mass of rocks.”

We sailed all around, from one side of the bridge to the other, and managed to approach near enough to clamber ashore. We fastened the boat to a tree by the long maille, as they call the painter on the lake. Then we went all over the ancient fortress. Happily the Canton has at last awakened to the propriety of not merely keeping it in repair, but also of restoring it to something like its pristine condition. In the earlier castle Louis le Débonnaire confined his kinsman, Count Walla, the friend of Lothaire, on the ground that he was the instigator of that prince’s revolt against his father. At that time the country was a wilderness, and there was only a chapel where now Montreux gathers a wealthy and luxurious population. Walla spent many years in Chillon, but was ultimately transferred to the fortified Island of Noirmontier. Then he was set free, and died in 835 in the Abbey of Bobbio, sixteen leagues from Milan.

In 1235, Duke Pierre de Savoy received the Province of Chamblais, extending from Saint Bernard to the torrent of the Veveyse and to the Arve on both sides of the lake.

He erected many castles—one at Martigny, at the entrance to the pass leading up to Saint Bernard; one at Evian, on the south side of the lake; and still another at the village of Peilz—and he reconstructed Chillon. Having mastered the Pays de Vaud, he governed with moderation. He organized troops of archers and halberdiers, established shooting-societies, and maintained strong garrisons at various points. In 1265, Rodolphe, Duke of Hapsburg, invaded Vaud and besieged Chillon. Pierre suddenly attacked him and won a great victory. They took the duke prisoner, together with eighty barons, lords, knights and nobles of the country. After this Pierre had things his own way; he settled down at the Castle of Chillon and one of his pleasures was to go out rowing on the lake.

In 1358, when the plague ravaged Europe, the Jews were accused of poisoning the water. “The Court of Justice of Chillon,” says the local hand-book, “caused these unhappies to be tortured and they would confess and then were burnt.” So roused against them were the population that on one occasion a rabble forced the gates of the castle and put a number of them to death.

In Pierre’s day it must have been a magnificent residence. Even now, viewed with the eye of imagination, one can get some notion of what it was in its period of splendour, though Thomas Jefferson Hogg, in his “Journal of a Traveller,” declares that it is ugly, with its whitewashed walls crowned with a red-tiled roof. It is built in the form of an irregular oval. In the centre is a high, square tower which contained a great alarm-bell, the deep tones of which must have often echoed over the waters to call the defenders to resist the attacks of fierce enemies. On the north side are two ranges of crenelated walls and three round towers. On the east is the massive square of the principal tower, through which is the only entrance, formerly closed by a drawbridge extending from the shore to the rock. The rooms where the counts and their ladies dwelt in state were on the south side. On the first floor is the great apartment once occupied by the Governor of Chillon. In one of the rooms is a magnificent fireplace with sculptured columns. In the story above are the chambers where knights habited. Here are pillars richly carved, ornamented with ancient coats of arms, and once draped with banners. Then come the chambers of the duke and duchess, communicating by a private door. The duchess’s windows look down on the blue waters of the lake, while that of the prince looks into the courtyard.

THE CASTLE OF CHILLON.

Religion was not neglected in those days; in the chapel one admires the beautiful ogive of the nave. From the Hall of Justice a stairway leads down into the vaults below. These are caverns about a hundred meters long. The floors are only eight feet above the lake, which goes off very abruptly down to the deepest depths. These vaults are partitioned off into chambers of different sizes, separated by narrow, dark spaces and used for dungeons. Each of the subterranean cells contains a row of pillars, surmounted by ogive arches. They are like the sombre and almost magical dungeons under the ancient King Arkel’s castle, where Pélléas and his jealous brother grope in Maeterlinck’s marvellous drama.

The last and largest of these terrible apartments is the one where Bonivard was confined. It is entered by a low, narrow doorway, and is divided by seven huge pillars, around one of which is the legendary groove hollowed by the restless pacing of the prisoner’s circling feet. Above are several narrow slits admitting a dim light. On bright days the light reflected from the lake casts a weird radiance on the ceiling. Little trembling waves go chasing one another across. Bonivard could tell when it was morning, for then the light is blue, while in the afternoon it has a sickly, greenish hue.

Francis Bonivard was born at Seyssel and was educated at Turin. At twenty he became prior of Saint Victor, a small monastery near Geneva. He joined the political organization, called “The Children of Geneva,” which was engaged in a revolt against the Bishop and Duke of Savoy. He said—“I foresee that we shall finally do what our friends in Berne have done—separate from Rome. I was twenty years old and I was led like the others more by affection than by counsel, but God granted a happy issue to all our foolish undertakings, and treated us like a good father.”

The duke managed to capture him and imprisoned him for two years at Gex and Gerolles. Later, he fell a second time into the duke’s clutch.

Bonivard tells how it happened:—“At Moudon I resolved to return to Lausanne. When we were in the Jorat, lo, the Captain of the Castle of Chillon, Antoine de Beaufort, with some of his companions, comes out of the forest where he was concealed and approaches me suddenly. These worthy gentlemen fall on me all at once and make me a prisoner by the captain’s order and, though I show them my passport, they carry me off tied and bound to Chillon, where I was compelled to endure my second suffering for six years.”

This was from 1530 till 1536. He was treated mildly at first, but afterwards he was thrown into the dungeon and fastened to one of the pillars. “I had so much time for walking,” he says with a sort of grim humour, “that I wore a little pathway in the rock, as if it had been done with a hammer.”

In 1536 the Bernese sent troops to help Geneva, which was besieged by Duke Charles III. Reinforced by the Genevese fleet after the relief of Geneva, they in turn besieged Chillon. The governor with his escort fled to Savoy and Bonivard was set free. His first words were:—“And Geneva?”

“Also free,” was the laconic reply.

After Bern had conquered Savoy, Auguste de Luternan (an appropriate name for a Lutheran) was the first Bernese bailiff of Chillon, and he and his successors made various alterations in the buildings. In 1733 the bailiwick was transferred to Vevey and just seventy years later the castle became the property of Vaud. For some time it was grievously neglected. For its sole garrison it had two gens-d’armes, and it was used only as a military magazine and a prison.

A prison? Ay! One must never forget the most illustrious prisoner ever confined in its gloomy oubliettes—though, to tell the honest truth, Chillon never had any oubliettes. Tartarin de Tarascon, tamer of camels, destroyer of African lions, slayer of the super-Alpine chamois—we see him passing disdainfully amid the attractions of the glittering shops of Montreux, only to be arrested as a Russian Nihilist and, under threat of being gagged unless he keep his mouth shut, borne away to the very castle sacred to the memory of Bonivard, in whom he had lost faith, since William Tell had become a myth! Here is the vivid picture as chronicled by Daudet:—

“The carriage rolled across a drawbridge, between tiny shops where trinkets were for sale—chamois-skin articles, pocket-knives, button-hooks, combs and the like—passed under a low postern and came to a stop in the grass-grown courtyard of an old castle flanked by round pepper-box towers, with black balconies held up by beams. Where was he? Tartarin understood when he heard the police captain talking with the doorkeeper of the castle, a fat man in a Greek cap, shaking a huge bunch of rusty keys.

“‘In solitary confinement?—But I haven’t any more room. The rest of them occupy all the—unless we put him in Bonivard’s dungeon.’

“‘Put him in Bonivard’s dungeon then; it’s quite good enough for him,’ said the captain authoritatively. And his commands were obeyed.

“This Castle of Chillon, which the President of the Alpine Club had been for two days constantly talking about to his friends, the Alpinists, and in which, by the irony of fate, he suddenly found himself imprisoned without knowing why, is one of the historical monuments of Switzerland. After having served as a summer residence of the Counts of Savoy, then as a State prison, a dépôt of arms and stores, it is now only an excuse for an excursion, like the Rigi-Kulm or the Tellsplatte. There is however a police-station there and a lock-up for drunkards and the wilder youths of the district; but such inmates are rare, as La Vaud is a most peaceful canton; thus the lock-up is for the most part untenanted and the keeper keeps his winter fuel in it. So the arrival of all these prisoners had put him in a bad humour, particularly when it occurred to him that he should no longer be able to pilot people through the famous dungeons, which was at that season attended with no little profit.

THE PRISON OF BONIVARD IN THE CASTLE OF CHILLON.

“Filled with rage, he led the way and Tartarin timidly followed him, making no resistance. A few worn steps, a musty corridor, smelling like a cellar, a door as thick as a wall, with enormous hinges, and there they were in a vast subterranean vault, with deeply worn floor and solid Roman columns on which hung the iron rings to which in former times prisoners of state were chained. A dim twilight filtered in and the rippling lake was reflected through the narrow loop-holes, which allowed only a slender strip of sky to be seen.

“‘This is your place,’ said the jailer. ‘Mind you do not go to the end; the oubliettes are there.’

“Tartarin drew back in horror.

“‘The oubliettes! Noudiou!’ he exclaimed.

“‘What would you have, man alive? I was ordered to put you in Bonivard’s dungeon. I have put you in Bonivard’s dungeon. Now, if you have the wherewithal, I can supply you with some luxuries, such as a mattress and a coverlet for the night.’

“‘Let me have something to eat first,’ said Tartarin, whose purse fortunately had not been taken from him.

“The doorkeeper returned with fresh bread, beer and a Bologna sausage, and these were eagerly devoured by the new prisoner of Chillon, who had not broken his fast since the day before, and was worn out with fatigue and emotion. While he was eating it on his stone bench, in the dim light of the embrasure, the jailer was steadily studying him with a good-natured expression.

“‘Faith,’ said he, ‘don’t know what you have been doing and why you are treated so severely....’

“‘Eh! coquin de sort, no more do I. I know nothing at all about it,’ replied Tartarin, with his mouth full.

“‘At any rate, one thing is certain—you don’t look like a criminal and I am sure you would never keep a poor father of a family from gaining his living, eh? Well, then, I have upstairs a whole throng of people who have come to see Bonivard’s dungeon. If you will give me your word to keep still and not attempt to escape—’

“The worthy Tartarin at once gave his word and five minutes later he saw his dungeon invaded by his old acquaintances of the Rigi-Kulm and the Tellsplatte—the stupid Schwanthaler, the ineptissimus Astier-Réhu, the member of the Jockey Club with his niece (hum!—hum!), all the Cook’s tourists. Ashamed and afraid of being recognized, the unhappy man hid behind the pillars, retiring and stealing away as he saw the tourists approach, preceded by his jailer and that worthy’s rigmarole, recited in a lugubrious tone, ‘This is where the unfortunate Bonivard—’

“They came forward slowly, retarded by the disputes of the two savants, who were all the time quarrelling, ready to fly at each other—one waving his camp-stool, the other his travelling-bag, in fantastic attitudes which the half-light magnified along the vaulted dungeon roof.

“By the very exigency of retreat, Tartarin found himself at last near the opening of the oubliettes—a black pit, open level with the floor, breathing an odor of past ages, damp and chilling. Alarmed, he paused, crouched in a corner, pulling his cap over his eyes; but the damp saltpeter of the walls affected him and suddenly a loud sneeze, which made the tourists start back, betrayed him.

“‘Hold! Bonivard!’ exclaimed the saucy little Parisienne in the Directoire hat, whom the member of the Jockey Club called his niece.

“The Tarasconian did not permit himself to display any signs of being disturbed.

“‘These oubliettes are really very interesting,’ he remarked, in the most natural tone in the world, as if he also were a mere pleasure-seeker visiting the dungeon. Then he joined the other tourists, who smiled when they recognized the Alpinist of the Rigi-Kulm, the mainspring of the famous ball.

“‘Hé! Mossié!—ballir, ‘dantsir!’

“The comical outline of the little fairy Schwanthaler presented itself before him ready to dance. Truly he had a great mind to dance with her. Then, not knowing how to get rid of this excited bit of womanhood, he offered his arm and gallantly showed her his dungeon—the ring whereon the prisoner’s chain had been riveted; the traces of his footsteps worn in the rock around the same column; and, hearing Tartarin speak with such facility, the good lady never suspected that he who was walking with her was also a state prisoner—a victim to the injustice and the wickedness of man. Terrible, for instance, was the parting, when the unfortunate ‘Bonivard,’ having led his partner to the door, took leave of her with the smile of a society gentleman, saying, ‘No, thank you,—I will stay here a moment longer.’ She bowed, and the jailer, who was on the alert, locked and bolted the door to the great astonishment of all.

“What an insult! He was bathed in the perspiration of agony, as he listened to the exclamations of the departing visitors. Fortunately such torture as this was not inflicted on him again that day. The bad weather deterred tourists....”

In the morning he is rudely awakened, and brought before the prefect, charged with being the dreaded Russian incendiary and assassin, Manilof.

It is soon made manifest that there is a dreadful mistake. The prefect, angry at having been sent for under false pretences, cries in a terrible voice:—“Well, then, what are you doing here?”

“‘That is just what I want to know,’ replies the V. C. A., with all the assurance of innocence.”

And Tartarin is set free. Verily, we look among the names scribbled on the walls—names of great writers and men of less distinction—Rousseau, Byron, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Shelley, Eugène Sue—for the immortal autograph of Tartarin de Tarascon. It must have been carried off bodily, like the picture of Mona Lisa! But Tartarin himself is just as much an inhabitant of the vaults as Byron’s Bonivard. And was not the policeman whom we caught sight of on the quai at Montreux the very one whose long blue capote was turned so persistently toward the omnibus in which rode the Tarasconian quartet?

[CHAPTER VIII]
LORD BYRON AND THE LAKE

LORD BYRON, in 1816, landed on this very spot with his friend John Cam Hobhouse. They came over from Clarens, probably in a naue, whose name, as well as its shape, harked back to olden days. Byron wrote about it:—

“I feel myself under the charm of the spirit of this country. My soul is repeopled with Nature. Scenes like this have been created for the dwelling-place of the Gods. Limpid Leman, the sail of thy barque in which I glide over the surface of thy mirror appears to me a silent wing which separates me from a noisy life. I loved formerly the warring of the furious ocean; but thy soft murmuring affects me like the voice of a sister.

“Chillon! thou art a sacred place. Thy pavement is an altar, for the footsteps of Bonivard have left their traces there. Let these traces remain indelible. They appeal to God from the tyranny of man.”

Byron made the fame of Chillon, and his Bonivard (or, as he spelt the name with two n’s, Bonnivard) was a far more ideal patriot than the actual prisoner, whose character has been shown of late years in a somewhat unfavourable light. Byron was devoted to the Lake of Geneva. He commemorated some of the great names associated with its shores in a sonnet, one of the few that he ever wrote:—

“Rousseau—Voltaire—our Gibbon—and De Staël—

Leman! these names are worthy of thy shore,

Thy shore of names like these. Wert thou no more

Their memory thy remembrance would recall:

To them thy banks were lovely as to all

But they have made them lovelier, for the lore

Of mighty minds doth hallow in the core

Of human hearts the ruin of a wall

“Where dwells the wise and wondrous; but by thee

How much more, Lake of Beauty, do we feel

In sweetly gliding o’er thy crystal sea

The wild glow of that not ungentle zeal

Which of the Heirs of Immortality

Is proud and makes the breath of Glory real.”

Can it be that Lord Byron pronounced “real” as if it were a monosyllable? But he also wrote “There let it lay!”

There are, on the shores of Lake Geneva, several hotels associated with Byron. At the Anchor Inn, still extant at Ouchy, he wrote that misleading rhapsody—“The Prisoner of Chillon.”

He had in 1816 definitely separated from his wife and had shaken the dust of England from his poetic shoes. Percy Bysshe Shelley with his wife and daughter, Williams, and Jane Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s half-sister, were established at Sécheron, a suburb of Geneva. Byron had never met the Poet of the Sky-lark, but Jane Clairmont, who was a passionate, fiery-eyed brunette, imbued with her father’s ideas of free love, had begun her unfortunate liaison with him, having deliberately thrown herself into his arms. They had met clandestinely a number of times just before their departure from England.

Byron and Shelley were both fond of sailing and they had many excursions on the lake. One evening they were out together when the bise, as the strong northwest wind is called, was blowing. They drifted before it and, getting into the current of the Rhône, were carried swiftly toward the piles at the entrance of Geneva harbour. It required all the strength of their boatmen to extricate them from the danger.

“I will sing you an Albanian song,” cried Byron. “Now be sentimental and give me all your attention.”

They expected a melancholy Eastern melody, but, instead, he uttered “a strange, wild howl” admirably suited to the dashing waves with which they were struggling. A few days later the Shelleys moved across to the south side of the lake, and settled down at Campagne Mont-Allègre. Byron stayed at Sécheron, but used often to row over to visit them. Finally, he himself rented the Villa Diodati, which stands a little higher up.

He and Shelley made a tour of the lake and had some exciting experiences. They left Mont-Allègre on June 23 and spent the first night at Nerni, where Byron declared he had not slept in such a bed since he left Greece five years before. At Evian, on the French side, they had trouble with their passports, but, when the Syndic learned Byron’s name and rank, he apologized for their treatment of him and left him in peace. On June 26 they were at Chillon. Off Meillerie they were attacked by what Byron called a squall. Shelley described it in a letter to Thomas Love Peacock:—

“The wind gradually increased in violence, until it blew tremendously; and as it came from the remotest extremity of the lake, produced waves of a frightful height, and covered the whole surface with a chaos of foam. One of our boatmen, who was a dreadfully stupid fellow, persisted in holding the sail at a time when the boat was on the point of being driven under water by the hurricane. On discovering his error he let it entirely go and the boat for a moment refused to obey the helm; in addition the rudder was so broken as to render the management of it very difficult; one wave fell in, and then another. My companion, an excellent swimmer, took off his coat, I did the same, and we sat with our arms crossed, every instant expecting to be swamped. The sail was, however, again held, the boat obeyed the helm, and still in imminent peril from the immensity of the waves, we arrived in a few minutes at a sheltered port, in the village of Saint-Gingoux.”

Byron, in a letter to John Murray, wrote:—“I ran no risk, being so near the rocks, and a good swimmer; but our party were wet and incommodated a good deal; the wind was strong enough to blow down some trees, as we found at landing.”

He was at this very time engaged in composing the third canto of “Childe Harold.”

MONT BLANC.

On the third of June he had been dazzled by a glimpse of “yonder Alpine snow—Imperishably pure beyond all things below,” and a month later he wrote, “I have this day observed for some time the distinct reflection of Mont Blanc and Mont Argentière in the calm of the lake, which I was crossing in my boat. The distance of these mountains from their mirror is sixty miles.” In the poem he sings—I believe that is the proper verb!—

“Lake Leman woos me with its crystal face,

The mirror where the stars and mountains view

The stillness of their aspect in each trace

Its clear depth yields of their far height and hue:

There is too much of man here, to look through

With a fit mind the might which I behold;

But soon in me shall Loneliness renew

Thoughts hid, but not less cherished than of old,

Ere mingling with the herd had penned me in its fold....

“Is it not better, then, to be alone

And love Earth only for its earthly sake

By the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhône,

Or the pure bosom of its nursing lake,

Which feeds it as a mother who doth make

A fair but froward infant her own care,

Kissing its cries away as these awake;—

Is it not better thus our lives to wear,

Than join the crushing crowd, doomed to inflict or bear?

“I live not in myself, but I become

Portion of that around me; and to me,

High mountains are a feeling, but the hum

Of human cities torture: I can see

Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be

A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,

Classed among creatures, when the soul can flee,

And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain

Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.”

And again further along:—

“Clear, placid Leman! thy contrasted lake,

With the wide world I dwelt in, is a thing

Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake

Earth’s troubled waters for a purer spring.

This quiet sail is as a noiseless wing

To waft me from distraction; once I loved

Torn ocean’s roar, but thy soft murmuring

Sounds sweet as if a Sister’s voice reproved,

That I with stern delights should e’er have been so moved.”

And how beautifully he describes night on the lake:—

“It is the hush of night, and all between

Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear,

Mellowed and mingling, yet distinctly seen,

Save darkened Jura, whose capt heights appear

Precipitously steep; and drawing near,

There breathes a living fragrance from the shore,

Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear

Drops the light drip of the suspended oar,

Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more;

“He is an evening reveller, who makes

His life an infancy, and sings his fill;

At intervals, some bird from out the brakes

Starts into voice a moment, then is still.

There seems a floating whisper on the hill,

But that is fancy, for the starlight dews

All silently their tears of love instil,

Weeping themselves away, till they infuse

Deep into Nature’s breast the spirit of her hues.

“Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven,

If in your bright leaves we would read the fate

Of men and empires,—’tis to be forgiven,

That in our aspirations to be great,

Our destinies o’erleap their mortal state,

And claim a kindred with you; for ye are

A beauty and a mystery, and create

In us such love and reverence from afar,

That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star.

“All heaven and earth are still—though not in sleep,

But breathless, as we grow when feeling most:

And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep:—

All heaven and earth are still: From the high host

Of stars, to the lulled lake and mountain-coast,

All is concentered in a life intense,

Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost,

But hath a part of being, and a sense

Of that which is of all Creator and defence.”

He is in his darkest, gloomiest, most characteristic pose when he describes a storm at night:—

“The sky is changed! and such a change! O night

And storm and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,

Yet lovely in your strength, as in the light

Of a dark eye in woman! Far along,

From peak to peak, the rattling crags among,

Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone cloud,

But every mountain now hath found a tongue;

And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,

Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!

“And this is in the night:—Most glorious night!

Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be

A sharer in thy fierce and far delight—

A portion of the tempest and of thee!

How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,

And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!

And now again ’tis black,—and now, the glee

Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth,

As if they did rejoice o’er a young earthquake’s birth.

“Now, where the swift Rhône cleaves his way between

Heights which appear as lovers who have parted

In hate, whose mining depths so intervene,

That they can meet no more, though broken-hearted;

Though in their souls, which thus each other thwarted,

Love was the very root of the fond rage

Which blighted their life’s bloom, and then departed;

Itself expired, but leaving them an age

Of years all winters—war within themselves to wage.

“Now, where the quick Rhône thus hath cleft his way,

The mightiest of the storms hath ta’en his stand:

For here, not one, but many, make their play,

And fling their thunderbolts from hand to hand,

Flashing and cast around; of all the band,

The brightest through these parted hills hath forked

His lightnings, as if he did understand

That in such gaps as desolation worked,

There the hot shaft should blast whatever therein lurked.

“Sky, mountains, river, winds, lake, lightnings! ye,

With night, and clouds, and thunder, and a soul

To make these felt and feeling, well may be

Things that have made me watchful; the far roll

Of your departing voices, is the knoll

Of what in me is sleepless,—if I rest.

But where of ye, O tempests! is the goal?

Are ye like those within the human breast?

Or do ye find at length, like eagles, some high nest?

“Could I embody and unbosom now

That which is most within me,—could I wreak

My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw

Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,

All that I would have sought, and all I seek,

Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe—into one word,

And that one word were Lightning, I would speak;

But as it is, I live and die unheard,

With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.”

The Swiss poet, Juste Olivier, grows enthusiastic over the beauty of Chillon:—

“What perfection!” he exclaims, “What purity of lines, what suavity of harmony! In this gulf which one might describe as merging from the lake like a thought of love, in this manoir growing out of the bosom of the billows with its dentelated towers, petals bourgeonning from a noble flower, in this encirclement of mountains and these white or rosy peaks which hold them in close embrace, there is something which bids you pause, takes you out of yourself and in order to complete the enchantment compels you to love it.”

And he goes on to tell how once dwelt here the little Charlemagne, brave Count Pierre, who, when he was ill, used to look out on the joyous waves, living in memory his battles, his tourneys and his festivities. Here, too, his brother, the Seigneur Aymon, used to lie on a vast bed with hangings of armorial silk and surrounded by candles, while he listened to melancholy tales or comic adventures from the poor pilgrims whom he sheltered. In that day the feudal kitchen, with its marquetrie floor, used to see a whole ox roasted to give meat to the visitors, and great casks of wine from the Haut Crêt used to cheer the down-hearted. Little did the revellers care for the poor wretches below in the dungeons where the light filtering through the loop-holes failed to dissipate the gloomy shadows or make clearer the visions which solitude evoked from the stormy strip of sky.

The finest aspect of Chillon is from a point just a few hundred meters out into the lake. There it has a double background; the steep, green-wooded slope tumbling down from the Bois de la Raveyre, and, beyond the head of the lake, the saw-like roof of the snow-capped Dent du Midi. It does indeed look like a tooth—like the colossal molar of the king of the mastodons. It was too early in the day to see the Alpenglow; but afterwards many times I saw it, not only on this imperial height but also on the heads of Mont Blanc and his haughty vassals and on many another sky-defying range, either bare of snow or wearing the ermine of the clouds.

As it happened, that beautiful day in May, not a cloud, not a wisp of cloud, hovered over the rugged bosom of the mighty mountain. It stood out with startling clearness against a dazzling blue sky, and was framed between the converging slopes of the mountains that meet the lake beyond Chillon and on the other side, beyond Villeneuve. The lofty red-capped central tower of the ancient castle seemed as high, or rather made the first step up to the mountains that cut off the view of the base of the grander height.

Taken all in all, is there on earth any bit of landscape more interesting and thrilling in its combination of picturesque beauty and historical association?

[CHAPTER IX]
A PRINCESS AND THE SPELL OF THE LAKE

YEARS ago I used to know the Princess Kóltsova-Masálskaya, who under the name of Dora d’Istria wrote many stories and semi-historical works. She was a most cultivated and fascinating woman. In her book, “Au Bord des Lacs Helvétiques,” she criticizes Lord Byron’s description of Lake Leman. She says:—

“When one comes in the spring to the Pays de Vaud, one does not at first see all the beauty so many times celebrated by poets and travelers. In rereading Byron and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one is inclined to conjecture that they were obliged to have recourse to quite fanciful descriptions, in order to justify their boasts.

“Byron, in spite of the power of his genius, is a rather vulgar painter of the splendors of nature. He contents himself with vague traits and what he says of the Lake of Geneva would apply just as well to the Lake of the Four Cantons or the Lake of Zürich. Rousseau himself seems to have found the subject only partly poetic, for he exhausts himself in describing Julie’s imaginary orchard, which would have been much better situated in the Emmenthal than on the vine-covered slopes above Lake Leman. In gazing at the hillsides, rough with the blackened grape-vines, one can easily understand the motive which prompted the author of ‘La Nouvelle Héloïse’ to prefer an ideal picture to the reality.

“When one leaves the plain in the month of April, one has already enjoyed the smiles of the Spring. The fresh young grass covers the earth with an emerald-colored carpet. The willows swing their silvery catkins at the edges of the streams, while along the edges of the forests gleams the silvery calix of the wood-anemone. Here, the vines are slower; the walnut-trees have not been hasty in opening their big buds and, as the shores of the Lake of Geneva have very little other vegetation than walnut-trees and vines, this region presents, during the first fine days, an aspect not calculated to seduce the eye or speak to the imagination.

“We should get a very false idea of it, however, if at this season of the year we visited only the shores of the lake, and did not make our way up into the mountains where so many fruit trees spread over the rejuvenated turf the fragrant snow of their petals.”

The Princess tells how Eléonora de Haltingen came to reside at Veytaux with her mother in November, 1858. She liked to go down to Montreux, “the principal group of houses in that parish.” She used to follow a path thus described:—“A foot-path worn among the vines led toward the grotto surmounted by the terrace of the church. This foot-path was impracticable for crinolines; no dust was found, or pallid misses with blue veils, or tourists with airs of conquerors, or noisy children—all such things spoil the most delicious landscapes. But one could admire at one’s ease the luxurious vegetation of the vines, the transparent grapes, the flexible and shining leaves of the maise growing amid the vineyards....

“We admired the magnificent spectacle spread before our eyes,” continues her biographer, “as we picked bouquets of the silène which makes great, rosy clusters in the old walls. These walls are placed there to hold up the vines and they serve as a retreat for a multitude of swift lizards which sleep there during the winter and whose bright little faces and infantile curiosity were a delight to us. As soon as we had passed a few steps beyond their holes we could see them emerge, cock up their heads, turning to the right and then to the left, with their bright eyes sparkling, and then dart away whenever there would be heard on the path the heavy shoes used by the Vaudois women, for it is said that their musical ear likes only harmonious noises. This inquisitiveness must cost the poor little saurians dear. The bald-buzzards, wheeling in the blue above our heads, seemed by no means indifferent to their movements. And so we kept finding one and another that showed traces of an existence very difficult to preserve. One would lack a paw, another its tail. Finally several, covered with dust, their skins faded and their eyes dulled, fled precipitately so as to leave the foot-path free to those of their brethren whose bright and gilded garb contrasted with their air of wretchedness and suffering, so deeply does misfortune modify the most sociable character.”

Then, after they had enlarged their bouquets by jasmine and syringa blossoms, with Alpine roses and golden-tinged cytisus, they would go to the grotto and from there to the terrace behind the church. The Princess thus describes the scene:—

“Sheltered by enormous walnut-trees, this grotto, which opens in a crag hung with ivy, gives passage to a brook which falls with a gentle murmur past a bathing establishment, a three-storied, rustic châlet charming to look at. Jasmines and rose-bush boxes deck the ground-floor and the first story with their graceful branches and give the place the appearance of a mass of verdure and of flowers.

“A foot-path, worn under the walnut-trees along the mountain, gives passage to the church and the terrace, which extends south of the edifice and affords one of the most beautiful views in the Pays de Vaud. Of a summer morning, toward nine o’clock, one can find the most marvellous tints spread over the lake. Over a sparkling azure ground wander designs in graceful silvery curves. The sapphire itself seems robbed of its brilliancy beside these waters. The metallic glitter of the bright blue wing of the king-fisher may give some idea of this almost fantastic shade, which seems to belong to another universe.

“We could never tire of contemplating this spectacle, the face of which changes with the color of the sky. Sometimes a cloud, passing across the mountains of Savoy, cast on their bald brows, or on their verdant sides, a shadow as gigantic as that of the Roumanian monster, the winged zmeou; again a steam-boat, proudly wearing the banner with the silver cross, would pour forth into the air a black plume of smoke and leave on the waves a glittering, foamy wake.

“Facing the terrace of Montreux can be seen the villages of the Catholic shore,—Boveret and Saint-Gingolph, separated by a big mountain, La Chaumény, marked by an immense ravine. This shore by its stern aspect makes a strong contrast with the shore of Vaud, but this very contrast adds to the originality and the grandeur of the landscape. The old fortress which served as Bonivard’s prison emerges at the left from the bosom of the waters, which form a graceful gulf around its walls. Opposite Chillon, a bouquet of verdure surrounded by a solid wall forms in the middle of the lake that islet on which that unknown captive, whose griefs Byron sang, used to feast his eyes.

“In the midst of this smiling landscape, the towers of Chillon, I confess, saddened my imagination more than it did Eléonora’s. When, as we sat on the terrace, I told her about the long captivity of Bonivard, who left in the pave- ment the circle of his footprints as he went round and round his pillar like a wild beast; when I spoke with animation of the instruments of torture and the oubliettes, which, in that sinister fortress, are a witness to the violences and the iniquities of feudal society, I noticed without a pang that she gave these questions only slight heed....

THE CASTLE OF CHÂTELARD AND THE SAVOY ALPS.

“When one wishes to go to Clarens without straying far from the lake, one passes at some distance from the principal village of the parish of Montreux. We almost always stopped at the end of a wide and picturesque ravine watered by a torrent called the baie of Montreux; here the view is lovely. If one looks toward the lake, Veytaux is to be seen at the right, hidden like a doves’ nest between Mont Cau and Mont Sonchaud; beyond Veytaux, Chillon thrusts its massive walls into the waters. At the right, the quadrangular manoir of Châtelard, with its thick walls, and narrow windows, stands in its isolation on its hill. When one turns toward the church of Montreux, one is astonished at the small space occupied by the chief village of this parish, formed by the houses of Les Planches and Le Châtelard and known by that name all over Europe. Concealed among thick walnut-trees and Virginian poplars, these houses are built between two rounded hills, one of which, called Le Rigi Vaudois, lifts aloft a great châlet in red wood. Behind the habitations appears in the distance a mountain with ragged summit, which the winter makes white with its snows and the summer covers with a pallid verdure diversified with fir-trees here and there.”

The Princess also paints a pretty picture of the lake in winter:—

“The gulls had reappeared along the shore. The vines were completely despoiled. Over the whole landscape spread a thick fog, which sometimes concealed the mountains and thus gave Lake Leman the appearance of a sea. By the beginning of December the sun was still struggling with the mists; often the mountains seemed cut in two by a luminous band which fell thickly over the lake, and stretched toward Vevey in dark folds. Above the peaks of Savoy, whose summits, now marked with streaks of snow, glittered in the sun, still shone the Italian sky like a consolation or like a hope.

“The lake itself was losing its lovely azure tints. I remember one day when we were seated on the road leading from Veytaux to the church, behind a low hedge of Bengal roses. Lake Leman was still blue in patches, but, for the most part, somber clouds with silver fringes were reflected in its melancholy waters. The gulf of Chillon was filled with a dark triangle, the shadow of the neighboring mountains. At the right the gulf of Vernex was glittering in the sunlight, a light the appearance of which we loved to salute, for its struggle with the darkness interested us as much as it would the worshipers of Ormuzd.

“When the landscape seemed completely asleep in the fog, suddenly a ray of sunlight would give it back all its brilliancy and life. One afternoon, as I was coming home with Eléonora from the terrace of the church, the sun appeared over the crest of Mont Sonchaud. The fir-trees arising above the snow then put on their loveliest tints. Whole masses of these trees remained in the shadow; a few were of a greenish yellow; others bore on their crests what seemed like a fantastic aureole.

“Arriving at Veytaux by the path which crosses the vineyards by a murmuring brook, we found a still more beautiful view. Between the two mountains that shelter the village, there rise at some distance two peaks of unequal shape; and these two are the only ones at this season as yet covered with snow. Their alabaster summits, standing out against a faint mist, shone as if one of the Olympians, celebrated in the song of the divine Homer, had touched them with his immortal foot.

“But at sunset especially did we most enjoy the magnificent sight of the lake, which could be seen from my windows in its whole length. An orange light then stained the west at the place where the mountains of Savoy dip down into the lake. These mountains stood out boldly against the blazing horizon. At the right a purple zone crowned the hills and grew feebler toward Vevey; in the midst of the lake flamed a marvellous fire, while the waters were somber under Villeneuve, of a pallid blue under Veytaux, and of a pearly gray color, cut by red bands, along the shores of Savoy.

“One evening this spectacle, though still fascinating, had something saddening about it. The mountains of Savoy were enveloped in a thick veil, surmounted by a canopy of pale azure illuminated by the dying sun. The veil grew larger toward Lausanne and formed a sort of chain of vapors, heaped up and climbing into space. A few lines of the color of blood streaked these gloomy masses. Such might have been the earth after the deluges of primitive times, when a ray of light began to smile across the darkness on a desolate universe.

“In the last week of December the snow, which had grown deep on the mountains, kept us from all walking. Nothing is so sad as a lake when it is surrounded by a winter landscape. The dazzling brilliancy of the snow spreads across the water, which was formerly the rival of the sapphire, a leaden hue more funereal than that of stagnant pools of the marsh. Here and there the steeper crags pierce through the pall with which they are covered and stand up like lugubrious sentinels. A miserly light comes down from the ashen-hued sky. One hears nothing but the hoarse cries of the gulls and the reiterated cawing of the crows as they fly in flocks along the shores of the lake and seem to delight in this spectacle of death.

“I have lived too long among the frozen fens of Ingria to love these melancholy pomps of winter, though they charm the imagination of some persons. Eléonora, though born on the foggy banks of the Rhine, was like me in loving the glory of the Day. She would have agreed with Gœthe, who, as he lay dying, cried: ‘More light! More light!’”

[CHAPTER X]
THE ALPS AND THE JURA

WE spent so much time at Chillon that we decided to put in for the night at Evian; but first we circled round the Ilot de Peilz (or, as some call it, L’Ile de Paix), one of the three artificial islands of the lake, which has none of its own. It was created about the middle of the eighteenth century on the beine. It still bears the three elms which shade its seventy-seven square meters of surface. The waters at one time undermined it and it had to be repaired.

Later we got a good look at the other two islets. The one called La Rocher aux Muettes, near Clarens, was built up on a reef of rocks about one hundred and twenty-five meters from the shore and was walled up in 1885. It covers about sixteen hundred square meters.

The third is the Ile de la Harpe, in front of Rolle. It was protected by a wall in 1838 and bears a white marble monument in memory of the patriotic General F. C. de la Harpe—he who, by telling the Emperor of Russia that he wished he might use the words “My Country,” had his support in the struggle with Bern and was instrumental in winning the freedom of Vaud. This islet stands, or sits, on what is called a tenevière or group of stones heaped up by nature or by the work of man, and in prehistoric times served as a palafitte or village of lake-dwellers. This proves that the level of the lake was about the same two thousand years ago as it is now. The sluiceway at Geneva tends to make an artificial difference of height throughout the lake and there has been for two centuries a law-suit between Geneva and Le Pays de Vaud growing out of this disturbance. The Vaudois claim that raising the level of the water has flooded their roads and fields.

We ran over to Villeneuve and had an excellent luncheon at the Hôtel du Port. About half-way between Villeneuve and the pretty town of Saint-Gingolph, on the Morge, we crossed the current of the Rhône, which, I suppose, owing to its swirling force and the sometimes really dangerous whirlpools it creates, particularly when there is a strong wind, is called “la Bataillère,” and is dangerous for small craft. When the Rhône is much colder than the lake it makes a subaqueous cataract, pouring down almost perpendicularly to the gloomy caverns below.

For a wonder there was very little air stirring from the lake at that time of the day, though there are always winds enough for one to choose from, not counting the bise or la bise noire, as it is called when it is particularly cold and disagreeable. Emile told us the various names of them; the bornan, which blows south from La Dranse; the joran, from the northwest; the molan, which (at Geneva) blows southeast from the valley of the Arve; the vaudaire, which blows from the southeast over the upper lake from the Bas Valais; the sudois, which, having full sweep across the widest part of the lake, dashes big waves against the shores of Ouchy. Then there are the day breezes, called rebat or séchard, and the night wind, the morget, which shifts up and down the mountains, owing to changes in temperature. In summer, he said, there is a warm, south wind, known as the vent blanc, which accompanies a cloudless sky. The natives call it maurabia, which means the wheat-ripener, from maura or murit and blla, blé.

“There is a charming excursion,” said Will, “from Saint-Gingolph. First a walk along the bank of the Morge to Novel, and then up to the top of Le Blanchard. Or, from Novel one can go almost twice as high to the Dent d’Oche. Perhaps a little later, when the snow is all gone, we can arrange to make it, if the climb would not be too much for you.”

“Too much for me!” I exclaimed, “What do you take me for—a valley-lounger?”

“There is an easier climb,” continued Will, ignoring my indignation, “up to the top of Le Grammont, which is only about fifty meters less in height. I have been up there several times. At the side of Le Grammont there are two charming lakes, Lovenex and—and—”

“Tanay,” suggested Emile.

“One gets an excellent chance, from the top, to compare the mountains of the Jura across the lake with the Alps. The Jura has been compared to a great, stiff curtain, without fringes or folds; even its colours are rather monotonous, its distant blue is a bit gloomy and tragic. It is curious, but this solemnity and monotony is said to affect the inhabitants. On the other hand, the Alps sweep up with green forests, and there are coloured crags, and the snows that crown them take on wonderful prismatic tints and sometimes look as if they were on fire—as if copper were burning with crimson and violet flames. The difference has been explained partly by the way the valleys run; those of the Jura are longitudinal and follow the axis of the range, so that the mountains are easy to climb, while the Alps are shot through with transverse valleys.

“In the Alps one finds even at this day, certainly in the remoter regions, a primitive, natural, pastoral life, while the natives of the Jura are quicker to take up industries and are broader-minded. One could hardly imagine a native of an Alpine valley interesting himself in politics. The Alpine herdsman looks down on the world; but the man of the Jura might even belong to a labour-union! It has been well said that just as in the Middle Ages, the common people of the Jura were under feudal lords, so, up to the present time, the manufacturers have controlled a large part of their time and their work, even of their lives. But the natives of the Alps never submitted to any such tyranny.

“I remember reading somewhere that the Alps gallop, as it were, with their heads erect far over the earth, while the Jura Mountains march peacefully along, noiselessly and unboundingly, to follow their career in a graceful and courteous fashion, but without any sublime éclat. The Jura shows a simplicity, and spreads out distinctly and, as it were, prudently, offering nothing unexpected, exuberant, mad or magnificently useless, but, rather, a well-regulated behaviour, a calm and dignified, but somewhat gloomy, austerity, a cold and melancholy air.—Don’t you think that is pretty good?—

ALPINE HERDSMEN.

“This same lover of mountains finds even the snow different. On the Jura it falls on dark-green firs and pines and, mingling with the dreary foliage, gives forth only a sad and cautious half-smile. But in the Alps the white snow makes the mountains joyous. He compares it to a virginal mantle, embroidered with green and azure. When the morning has, for them, brought on the early day, they seem to sing gaily their reveille and their youth; a hymn of light floats high in the air above their heads and finds an echo of joy and of love in the hearts of mortals. In the evening they smoke like incense and, bending under the circling sky, they then offer a strangely fascinating image of prayer and of melancholy. From afar the Jura listens, and, like a dreamer, pursuing his way, plunges into the darkness.”

I may as well say, here and now, that a month later we carried out the plan of climbing Le Grammont, (which, of course, means the Great Mountain). We went to Vouvry and first admired the exquisite view where the pretty church, as it were, guides the eye up to the mountains, and contemplated the canal which the descendants of that fine old “robber-baron,” Kaspar Stockalper, who claimed the right to dominate the trade over the Simplon and guarded it by a body of seventy men, built to connect with the Rhône, though it remains unfinished. Then we easily followed the trail to the mountain-top. We chose a day which promised to be remarkably clear, and it fulfilled its promise. Words fail, and must always fail, to describe that panorama of splendour which includes the aerial heights of Mont Blanc and the Jungfrau to the south, the whole extent of the lake and the tamer peaks of the Jura to the north, and a rolling sea of petrified and frozen billows in every direction.

When one speaks of Switzerland one instinctively thinks of Mont Blanc, and it seems an unfair advantage which France has taken to keep possession of Savoy, which used to belong to Switzerland, and the crown of the Swiss Alps. History has made strange partitions of territories; but the more one sees of Switzerland the more one wonders that it could have ever become a united country, composed as it is of isolated valleys, separated by lofty mountain-walls, intercommunicable only by treacherous passes. That same dividing construction of the country was the ruin of Greece, where each little province or city, set by itself and developing various qualities of character, was opposed in ideals and ambitions to every other.

It is curious, too, that the general notion that the Swiss are peculiarly liberty-loving should be based on a legend. Probably no other country in the world ever furnished so many mercenaries. But it is now one united country and largely freed from the crushing burden of rampant militarism.

It was a fine view also we had from the top of Le Grammont, overlooking the delta of the Rhône, which, from the height of nearly twenty-two hundred meters, lay below us. We could see how it was building the level marsh land into the lake. Perhaps some day the débris from the mountains will quite fill up the gulf. It is amazing how much material is brought down in the course of a single year, even by a single freshet. We could see, also, the confining walls of the dykes which, together with breakwaters, form what is called la correction du Rhône, preventing any riotous behaviour of that torrent when the floods sweep over the plain. The disreputable exploits of the river, before it was thus tamed and disciplined, explain why the region back of Villeneuve, regarded as desolate and uncultivated, is or has been compared to the vineyard-laden and fertile slopes of the Jorat.

But we are really not mountain-climbing; we are circling the lake and, except where some river or torrent forms what is technically called a cone, projecting out into the water, we are able to skirt close to the beine, often under tremendous, beetling cliffs. They become higher and higher, more and more romantic and magnificent. Only occasionally is there room for a village to cuddle in between the lake and the mountains, as, for instance, Meillerie, back of which one can see the great quarries gashing the mountain, and the tunnel through which the railway runs.

Samuel Rogers, in 1822, winging south on his Italian journey, so beautifully illustrated by Turner, was moved by the beauty of Meillerie to break out into song:—

“These gray majestic cliffs that tower to heaven,

These glimmering glades and open chestnut groves,

That echo to the heifer’s wandering bell,

Or woodman’s ax, or steersman’s song beneath,

As on he urges his fir-laden bark,

Or shout of goat-herd boy above them all,

Who loves not? And who blesses not the light,

When through some loop-hole he surveys the lake

Blue as a sapphire-stone, and richly set

With châteaux, villages and village-spires,

Orchards and vineyards, alps and alpine snows?

Here would I dwell; nor visit, but in thought,

Ferney far South, silent and empty now,

As now thy once-luxurious bowers, Ripaille;

Vevey, so long an exiled Patriot’s home;

Or Chillon’s dungeon-floors beneath the wave,

Channeled and worn by pacing to and fro;

Lausanne, where Gibbon in his sheltered walk

Nightly called up the Shade of ancient Rome;

Or Coppet and that dark untrodden grove

Sacred to Virtue and a daughter’s tears!

“Here would I dwell, forgetting and forgot,

And oft methinks (of such strange potency

The spells that Genius scatters where he will)

Oft should I wander forth like one in search,

And say, half-dreaming:—‘Here St. Preux has stood.’

Then turn and gaze on Clarens.”

The picture now is not so different from what it was almost a hundred years ago.

“Day glimmered and I went, a gentle breeze

Ruffling the Leman Lake. Wave after wave,

If such they might be called, dashed as in sport

Not anger, with the pebbles on the beach

Making wild music, and far westward caught

The sun-beam—where alone and as entranced,

Counting the hours, the fisher in his skiff

Lay with his circular and dotted line

On the bright waters. When the heart of man

Is light with hope, all things are sure to please;

And soon a passage-boat swept gayly by,

Laden with peasant-girls and fruits and flowers

And many a chanticleer and partlet caged

For Vevey’s market-place—a motley group

Seen through the silvery haze. But soon ’twas gone.

The shifting sail flapped idly to and fro,

Then bore them off.

“I am not one of those

So dead to all things in this visible world,

So wondrously profound, as to move on

In the sweet light of heaven, like him of old

(His name is justly in the Calendar)

Who through the day pursued this pleasant path

That winds beside the mirror of all beauty,

And when at eve his fellow pilgrims sate

Discoursing of the Lake, asked where it was.

They marveled as they might; and so must all,

Seeing what now I saw: for now ’twas day

And the bright Sun was in the firmament,

A thousand shadows of a thousand hues

Chequering the clear expanse. Awhile his orb

Hung o’er thy trackless fields of snow, Mont Blanc,

Thy seas of ice and ice-built promontories,

That change their shapes for ever as in sport;

Then traveled onward and went down behind

The pine-clad heights of Jura, lighting up

The woodman’s casement, and perchance his ax

Borne homeward through the forest in his hand;

And, on the edge of some o’erhanging cliff,

That dungeon-fortress never to be named,

Where like a lion taken in the toils,

Toussaint breathed out his brave and generous spirit.

Little did he who sent him there to die,

Think, when he gave the word, that he himself,

Great as he was, the greatest among men,

Should in like manner be so soon conveyed

Athwart the deep.”

A half dozen kilometers farther down the shore is the famous castle of Blonay. The days of feudalism were certainly tragic not only for the baronial masters who were subject to feuds and duels, but also to the common people. Lords and villeins, however, die and forget their woes, and the turreted castles which they built and had built are a splendid heritage for those who live under different conditions. The gorgeous tapestries which they hung on their walls become food for generations of moths or, if they escape, and still preserve their brilliant colours and their quaint and curious designs, display them to thousands of visitors at the museums where at last they are pretty sure to gravitate. The solid gold plate is perhaps melted into coin to pay the price of liberty. And so the cost of a picturesque château, erected high on an almost inaccessible crag, and lifting its frowning battlements against a background of snowy mountains, even though it be reckoned in human lives, may be small compared to the value which it has in after ages, especially if it comes into the possession of the people themselves, to be for ever prized as a memorial of a stormy past.

The Living-Room of an Alpine Castle

[CHAPTER XI]
THE SOUTHERN SHORE

BY a strange coincidence I found in the room where I slept that night a tattered copy of “Anne of Geierstein,” and almost the first thing I turned to the description of an Alpine castle. Now, Sir Walter Scott had never been in the Alps, but his picture of the ruin of Geierstein is quite typical and worth rereading:—

“The ancient tower of Geierstein, though neither extensive nor distinguished by architectural ornament, possessed an air of terrible dignity by its position on the very verge of the opposite bank of the torrent, which, just at the angle of the rock on which the ruins are situated, falls sheer over a cascade of nearly a hundred feet in height, and then rushes down the defile, through a channel of living rock, which perhaps its waves have been deepening since time itself had a commencement. Facing and at the same time looking down upon this eternal roar of waters, stood the old tower, built so close to the verge of the precipice that the buttresses with which the architect had strengthened the foundation seemed a part of the solid rock itself, and a continuation of its perpendicular ascent. As usual throughout Europe in the feudal times the principal part of the building was a massive square pile, the decayed summit of which was rendered picturesque by flanking turrets of different sizes and heights, some round, some angular, some ruinous, some tolerably entire, varying the outline of the building as seen against the stormy sky.

“A projecting sallyport, descending by a flight of steps from the tower, had in former times given access to a bridge connecting the castle with that side of the stream on which Arthur Philipson and his fair guide now stood. A single arch or rather one rib of an arch, consisting of single stones, still remained and spanned the river immediately in front of the waterfall. In former times this arch had served for the support of a wooden drawbridge, of more convenient breadth and of such length and weight as must have been rather unmanageable, had it not been lowered on some solid resting-place. It is true, the device was attended with this inconvenience that even when the drawbridge was up, there remained the possibility of approaching the castle-gate by means of this narrow rib of stone. But as it was not above eighteen inches broad and could only admit the daring foe who should traverse it to a doorway regularly defended by gate and portcullis and having flanking turrets and projections from which stones, darts, melted lead and scalding water might be poured down on the soldiery who should venture to approach Geierstein by this precarious access, the possibility of such an attempt was not considered as diminishing the security of the garrison.

“The gateway admitted them into a mass of ruins, formerly a sort of courtyard to the donjon, which rose in gloomy dignity above the wreck of what had been destined for external defence or buildings for internal accommodation. They quickly passed through these ruins, over which vegetation had thrown a wild mantle of ivy and other creeping shrubs and issued from them through the main gate of the castle into one of those spots in which nature often embosoms her sweetest charms, in the midst of districts chiefly characterized by waste and desolation.

“The castle in this respect also rose considerably above the neighboring ground, but the elevation of the site, which towards the torrent was an abrupt rock, was on this side a steep eminence which had been scarped like a modern glacis to render the building more secure. It was now covered with young trees and bushes, out of which the tower itself seemed to rise in ruined dignity.”

Then he goes on to describe the ample grounds which “seemed scooped out of the rocks and mountains.”

Scott’s imagination was probably aided by various pictures; but it is remarkably correct. It is amazing to think how many such castles, almost always situated on inaccessible peaks or islands, must have been built since the world began, when mighty stones had to be brought and fitted and lifted and there was no help from steam or electricity. The colossal fortifications of prehistoric Greece, the edifices of the stone age, the dizzy escarpments raised by the Incas in their mountain fastnesses, and all the marvels of barbaric architecture in the depths of the Caucasus, to say nothing of the hundreds of castles vanished or still left more or less ruined throughout Europe, are a proof of the industry and the faithfulness of millions of human beings whose names, if they had any designation, are gone for ever.

There was not any special reason for spending the night at Evian: we might almost as well have run straight across to Lausanne and slept in our own beds; but we were out for a special purpose—to circle the lake—and it seemed rather good fun to have a glimpse of the French life which gathers in this typical Savoyard village, turned into a resort of fashion. We got a berth for our swift Hirondelle near the Quai Baron Blonay and left Emile to make himself comfortable in it, and we ourselves, having satisfied the customs authorities that we were not smugglers even of Vevey cigars, took lodgings at the Hôtel Royal above the lake. Then we sallied out to see the town, not failing to ride over to the curious spring of Amphion where we admired the fine old chestnut-trees. In the evening we attended the Casino Theatre where a fairly good company was playing “Les Affaires sont les Affaires.”

The next morning we intended to start early but had to wait until the fog cleared away. Anything more beautiful than its final disappearance could hardly be imagined. When I first arose and looked out of my window, I seemed to be gazing across a tumbling sea which must just about have reached the old level of the lake when it emptied out into the Aar and the Rhine, and therefore was a contributary to the German Ocean and not to the Mediterranean.

Some of the Swiss rivers seem to be like the Swiss themselves and divide their allegiance. Thus the Venoge, which rises between Rolle and Mont Tendre, at first determined apparently to give itself up to the Lake of Neuchâtel; but it pauses at La Sarraz and quarrels with itself; some of the stream is faithful to its old purpose and joins the Mozon, which falls into the Lake of Neuchâtel at Yverdon; while the main river turns to the south and falls into the Lake of Geneva east of Morges.

It was not long before the glories of the Jura began to appear above the mist. Stretching along in a wall-like perspective, with their summits glittering white in the morning sun, it was a sight never to be forgotten. I dressed and went down to the veranda and there fell into conversation with a most courteous English lady who knew the lay of the land. She pointed out to me Le Crêt de la Neige, Mont Tendre, Dôle and other elevations. I found that we had mutual friends and we were soon on a footing of very charming acquaintance. This is worth mentioning because the English perhaps cherish the reputation of pursuing their selfish way aloof from other human beings unfortunate enough not to have first seen the light of day on their tight little Island.

There is a beautiful chance here to introduce the golden thread of romance and let it begin to weave a glowing design. My niece, whom I have not mentioned for a long time, when I told her of my chance rencontre, immediately jumped at the conclusion that the spider had caught the fly, that my heart was already in a net. She actually began to lay her plans for inviting Lady Q. to come and make her a visit. I assured her that there was not the slightest danger. I potentially prevaricated and boldly declared that Lady Q. was neither a maid nor a widow.

“And why,” said I, “are you so anxious to marry me off? You must be getting tired of me.”

That suggestion brought on a pretty little quarrel, especially when I added that I should be perfectly content to stay right where I was, even if I never saw my trunk again. At any rate, I got in the last word, which was a triumph, though at the expense of my reputation for delicacy of feeling. For my niece pretended to be shocked too much to let fly a Parthian arrow. I declared—and I am sure I looked as if I meant it—that Lady Q. was too old for me anyway.

I afterwards showed my niece the copy of “Anne of Geierstein” and she outdid my memory by calling my attention to Scott’s description of Mount Pilatus. I had forgotten all about it, but wishing still to be disagreeable—for I could not possibly forget her unworthy attempt to marry me forthwith to a lady whom I had never seen but once in my life—I said: “We will keep it till we get there.”

“You may not get there,” she retorted.

I tore out the pages and put them into my pocket. Maybe I shall produce them when I arrive at Lucerne.

We had an excellent cup of coffee and by ten o’clock we were doubling the “cone” of the Dranse. This promontory offers one of the best illustrations of the generosity of a river in forming village sites. It is the generosity of a fluvial Robin Hood, who steals from the wealthy to confer benefactions on the poor. There is a closer likeness here than one sees at first. The Robin Hood type of robber, erratic, generous, picturesque, romantic, sympathetic, humourous, belongs to a medieval epoch; he would be unthinkable when civilization has levelled all differences. So the wild, fierce, brawling, unscrupulous river, taking from one region and handing its loot to another or throwing it away, is uncivilized compared to the river that has reached its plain, and has become slow and dignified.

We went near enough to the shore to see the castle of Ripaille, where Duke Victor Amédée of Savoy had his hermitage. No wonder he did not want to leave it for the burdens of a contested papal tiara. I would not object to settle down in such a retreat—provided I had a few friends to share it. In his day probably the Jura was much more beautiful, because their slopes were clad in splendid forests. It is a nature-tragedy that when mountains are once deforested either by the axe of man or by fire, the flesh of the range melts away and can never form again; only the uncompromising rock is left like mighty bones.

The lake must have been even more beautiful when the great forests of chestnuts and birches and beeches still existed, before there had come the endless monotonies of terraced vineyards; before the valleys with their native châlets were sophisticated into summer resorts with smug villas and huge hotels filled with staring strangers.

I liked the look of the old town of Thonon, and the name of the department in which it is situated and of which it used to be the capital suggested the delicate wines. One complains of monotonous vine-terraces, and they certainly are not effective when seen at a distance, but at close range, especially when the trellises are loaded with ripe grapes, they have a double charm. The grape cure attracts thousands of people to all the shores of the lake and to dozens of charming little towns of which one only hears by accident.

If I were certain of several incarnations I should like to spend one whole life on the borders of Lake Leman. Perhaps in the next reincarnation one may be able to be in two places at once. We have two eyes that blend impressions into one resultant. Why not be in two places at once, and after that in four, in sixteen, and so on, till one would be coterminous with the universe and know everything: if we have two eyes, some other insects have a thousand. The gracious lady, Madame Sévery, whose letters, written a century and more ago, filled me with the rather melancholy yearning—for it can never be fulfilled—for that delightful life which she led: a winter in Lausanne or Geneva; the spring in one of her country châteaux; the summer in another, the autumn in still another. The houses, full of luxurious furniture, always ready for occupancy; friends happening around to spend a week or a month or only a night. But when one family had so much thousands had not much of anything, though probably the peasants then were as happy as the working-people now who have tasted of the intoxicating “Fraternité” cup, perhaps poisonous when the third ingredient is left out—the cup, invented by Rousseau, and drunk to the full in the French Revolution.

Thonon looked exceedingly tempting as it rose above the lake. My nephew declared that it was built even more Chablais than it looked—a pun which would have resulted in a scene of decapitation had we been under Alice’s Duchess. He atoned for it however by promising to take me on an excursion up the valley of the Dranse, which is one of the most fascinating rivers in Savoy.

As usual he fulfilled his promise. We equipped ourselves for walking, and, taking it leisurely, climbed along the river to the little hamlet of Saint Jean d’Aulph, where we admired the taste of the eleventh-century Cistercians who built their monastery in such a nook of the mountains. We finally arrived at Champéry, and, of course, admired the primitive calvaire and the stunning view. There, I remember, my worthy Will quoted that charming passage from Henri-Frédéric Amiel, which indeed might be applied to dozens of other horizon-aspects. He says—but it is much more effective in French:—

“The profile of the horizon takes on all forms: needles, pinnacles, battlements, pyramids, obelisks, teeth, hooks, claws, horns, cupolas; the denticulation is bent, is turned back on itself, is twisted, is accentuated in a thousand ways, but in the angular style of sierras. Only the lower and secondary ranges present rounded tops, fleeting and curving lines. The Alps are more than an upheaval, they are a tearing asunder of the surface of the earth.”

These calvaires, or rustic shrines, frequently met with in the Catholic cantons, are picturesque in their setting and though not in themselves beautiful, add much to the charm of a prospect, giving the human element, at its most humble expression, that of devotion, in contradistinction to the awful and inhuman wildness of Nature in her most tremendous and imposing aspect. Even common names here take a religious colour, as for instance the Crêt d’eau, which becomes the Credo.

Those that climb the Haute Cime of the Dent du Midi find Champéry a convenient starting-point. I, who had once in one day climbed over all the peaks of the Presidential Range, felt an ambitious stirring to repeat the feat on a higher and grander scale—taking all the six peaks in succession—La Dent Noire, La Forteresse, La Cathédrale, La Dent Jaune, and Le Doigt up to the Haute Cime.

Such an exploit would be too fatiguing for one of my venerable years, but I have seen photographs of the view from the top of the Dent du Midi, and when one has been on one mountain, even though it be not quite thirty-three hundred meters high, the views are only variants, even when one has Mont Blanc piled up across a marvellous valley filled with glaciers and azure lakes.

It is wonderful how quickly in her slow way this same cruel Mother Nature repairs the damage she does—damage as seen by human eyes. Down the side of the Dent du Midi in 1835 swept a rock-fall. Two years later, on the road between Geneva and Chamonix, a pretty little lake which was the delight of travellers was filled by a similar avalanche of rocks.

Etienne Javelle gives a vivid description of some of these catastrophes:—

“If one would take a keen pleasure in climbing the Col de Jorat,” he says, “one must be interested in something more than simple picturesque effects; especially must the climber, facing the contorted and tottering condition of these immense rocks, seek to realize the cataclysms of which these places have been the scene and those that still threaten them. When this sympathetic attitude has been attained, nothing can be more impressive than the glen and torrent of Saint-Barthelémy.

“These mountains could add many pages to the chapter of Alpine catastrophes; they have more than once terribly alarmed the inhabitants, and each generation can relate to the succeeding one the convulsions which it has witnessed.

“But the events that happened when life had not as yet appeared in the primeval chaos of these mountains cannot be retold by posterity. Who knows by what terrific throes the breach, to-day so vast and complete, was opened at the place where the Rhône flows and where now stand the houses and meadows of Evionnaz?

“Unquestionably it was narrow at first and the furious waters gradually forced a passage for themselves by unceasing assaults; unquestionably also during the glacial epoch, the tremendous glacier of the Rhône, compelled to be shut in within this gorge, exerted an enormous pressure on the sides of its channel. From La Dent de Morcles to La Dent du Midi what peaks have one after the other been worn down and disappeared! The great glaciers have carried far away all this early détritus, an enormous bulk the secret of which the waters of Lake Leman possibly know more than we do.

“What has taken place since then, from the time when men first appeared in these localities cannot compare with those primal convulsions; still there is enough to overwhelm the imagination of man; it is too much for their feeble dwellings to endure. Terrible events of days long gone by are recorded in the local annals. The catastrophe which swallowed up the little town of Epaune when Mont Taurus fell on it. One of the most ancient of these falls was the catastrophe in which the hot spring was lost, though it has since been rediscovered at Lavey.

“On October 9, 1635, in the middle of the night, a strange and terrific noise alarmed the inhabitants of Evionnaz and the neighboring hamlets; suddenly awakened from sleep they sprang out of their beds in alarm. A rumbling noise, growing ever louder, was heard. The Noviorroz, a mountain near by, fell into the valley with a monstrous crash. The curé of Saint-Maurice was hastily informed of the catastrophe and he had the tocsin rung. As soon as daylight came a band of rescuers went to the scene of the disaster but hardly had it got there, when an even more tremendous downfall compelled a retreat to a neighboring height.

“The noise of it resounded throughout the valley. For more than a quarter of an hour the sun was hidden by a cloud of dust from the Bois Noir down to the lake. The current of the Rhône was blocked; the torrent of the Marre—now Saint-Barthélemy—formed at the foot of the Jorat a lake the overflow of which was a new danger to the valley.

“As popular superstition attributed this catastrophe to demons which haunted the mountain, the Bishop of Sion, Hildebrandt Jost, spent nine days in exorcising the place. His trouble was wasted; the waters went on with their work and at intervals of every few years the same threats were repeated with minor falls and great deposits of mud.

“At last, on August 26, 1835, about eleven o’clock in the morning, there was a sudden noise, like that of many discharges of artillery uninterruptedly following one another. All eyes were turned to the mountain. The eastern peak was surrounded by mist. Thence came the fall. A thick fog filled the glen of Saint-Barthélemy; violent gusts of wind shook the houses of Mex and uprooted whole rows of forest trees.

“An enormous mass of rock detached itself from the Eastern Peak, striking and smashing the front part of the glacier. Ice and boulders rolled with a frightful fracas down two thousand meters of precipice and filled the valley and the gorge with their débris.

“The ice, disintegrated and in a state of thaw, mingling with this débris, formed a barrier of mud thickly strewn with enormous boulders, which overflowed the high banks of the torrent, crossing the Bois Noir, and plunged into the valley of the Rhône. A part of the stream swept over on the right bank and covered the hamlet of La Rasse with mud.

“To reëstablish the communications which had been interrupted on the road the people made a bridge of long ladders, planks and trunks of fir-trees. Ropes attached to these ladders stretched over the top of the bank. At each fresh onslaught—and there were three or four a day—a man stationed in the gorge blew a whistle to announce it and the ropes were immediately pulled to prevent the bridge from being carried away.

“M. de Bons, an eye-witness, described one of these coulées. ‘A whitish vapor rose into the air as it left the gorge. At the same instant a dull noise and a violent gust of wind apprised us of the approach of the coulée. The moving mass came down upon us with irresistible force but so slowly that a man at his ordinary walking pace could have gone on his way without being overtaken by it. Enormous blocks of stone seemed literally to float on the stream; at times they stood out of the liquid mass as if they were as light as a feather; then again they would tip and sink into the mud till nothing could be seen of them. A little farther down they could be seen again coming gradually to the surface, to float for a while until finally swallowed up, repeating at various stages of their progress the same scenes and the same accidents.

“‘The bed of the torrent was remarkably narrow at one point. Huge boulders were stopped there and formed a barrier against which the fragments carried along by the river were collected. For some minutes a strange conflict was waged here, the rushing débâcle of ice and water endeavoring to flow back for a long distance; the river rose till it almost caused a freshet. At last by carrying the débris along, it succeeded in effecting an outlet and overthrew all the obstacles impeding its course. Rocks, trees, lumps of ice, débris of every kind all went whirling round and round with a long, savage roar, then disappeared in the current and were borne downwards across the slopes of the Bois Noir.’

“Since 1835 there has been scarcely any disturbance in the mountain. The waters, however, are at work, and who can predict that a still more terrible catastrophe will not some day desolate the valley of the Rhône?

“The people no longer see the hand of demons in these devastations nor do they exorcize the mountain; but a pious custom has it that each year a procession makes its way to a hill above La Rasse with a cross standing on it and there invokes the Creator’s protection by their prayers.”

To the eye that sees, the solid rock is just as much liquid and in commotion as the flowing river; it is all in a state of flux. The mountain-tops are plunging down into the valleys and then the rains and the rivers grasp them and roll them and reduce them, until the porphyry and the granite and the limestone become almost microscopic sand, which, as every one knows, blows and flows like water. These beautiful little lakes, which one sees everywhere in Switzerland, if they should be able to write their autobiographies—indeed they are able to write their autobiographies and in hieroglyphics which Science can read—would tell us and do tell us of many a rock-fall which has stopped the descent of rivers.

I remember some weeks later, as we were riding in the “Moto,” as I call the touring-car, up to Flims—a most absurd and flimsy squashing up of the Latin name flumina, the streams—my attention was called to the enormous glacial rock-fall which ages ago blocked up the whole valley of the Rhine to a depth of between two and three thousand feet. The river, much surprised, had to go to work to cut through the mass of débris. There are still several of the lakes which came from the same catastrophe—if that can be called a catastrophe—which probably affected no human being for the worse. Many of these rock-falls, however, have ruined whole populations; churches and houses have been swept away. Sometimes, after a long-continued rain, the whole side of a mountain-slope will begin to sweep down. One sees the same thing in a smaller scale on the side of a gulley where a road has been lowered. The laws of gravitation, the erosive powers of water, the effects of frost, are just the same at wholesale as they are at retail.

The bay sweeping in between the cone of the Dranse and the Pointe d’Yvoire is called La Grande Conche. We lengthened our course by following the shore, though we kept well out beyond the mouths of the two torrents which Emile told us were Le Redon and Le Foron. Yvoire is different from the other promontories of the lake: the huge blocks of stone which are scattered about make it evident that it is the remains of a terminal moraine. This and huge boulders which have been discovered in the bottom of the lake prove that the hollow valley in which the lake lies was scooped out by a glacier which as it melted left its freight of stone brought down from distant mountain-sides.

Just off Yvoire, which looks very attractive with its glistening beaches and its fine old castle, between a kilometer and a half and two kilometers away, and at a depth of about sixty meters, is a fishing-bank called L’Omblière. There the much esteemed fish “l’omble chevalier,” or in German der Ritter, comes to breed and be caught. There will generally be seen clustered together the fishermen’s boats with their lateen sails cock-billed. Occasionally a storm comes up suddenly and works havoc. They still talk of the tornado of 1879, when eleven Savoy fishermen were drowned.

There are about twenty-two different kinds of fish inhabiting the lake, several of them good eating. I should think it might be possible to introduce the whitefish of our Great Lakes: the Leman salmon is not superior to that noble ranger of the depths.

We saw a good many wild birds. Emile gave us their names in French: les besolets or sea-swallows—the kind that Rousseau went out to shoot, les gros-sifflets with their sharp whistle, les crênets as Rousseau calls the curlews, les sifflasons which we could see running along the beach just beyond Yvoire, and the grèbe which he said was mighty good eating. Most of the Mediterranean sea-gulls which, like human beings, like a change of scenery, and which in winter add greatly to the life of the lake, had returned to the south.

Beyond Nernier the shores contract and we enter “the Little Lake,” which it is supposed occupies the valley excavated by the Arve. We were fortunate to round the point in good time, for our weather had been too good to last; the hard greenish coloured clouds streaking toward the southeast after a reddish sunrise had betokened a change; it had been clouding up all the forenoon, and before we got out into the open off La Pointe d’Yvoire, Le Sudois was blowing “great guns” and a heavy sea was running. It seemed best to take the swallow’s swiftest flight for Geneva, not pausing as we intended to do at Beauregard or the Port de Tougües or indulging in historic reminiscences suggested by the valley of Hermance where the torrent of that name serves to separate the canton from the département—Switzerland from France. Afterwards, when we passed through it in our Moto, we had a chance to see its quaint streets, its houses with vines clambering over them, its red-tiled roofs. Once we had to turn out carefully to avoid a yoke of oxen which seemed to think they owned the whole place.

The glimpse of La Belotte (to mention only one of the dozen places that charmed us as we approached the great city) would have inspired a painter. Boats were drawn up along the gently shelving shore; there were several picturesque brown houses which looked from the distance like fish-houses, only neater than most of those we see along our New England coast. A naue with two butterfly sails was just coming in from up the lake. Men were evidently hurrying to make the boats safe from the gale, if it should develop into a real storm.

The lake approach to Geneva even under a grey and threatening sky gives as it were the key-note to its extraordinary charm. Its noble waterfront, its lofty buildings, its background of escarped rocks and its general air of prosperity, beckon a friendly welcome. We darted in between the two phares or lighthouses which decorate the long jetties, and turning aside from the surf current, we came alongside the pleasant Quai du Mont Blanc.

THE WATERFRONT AND THE ILE ROUSSEAU, GENEVA

[CHAPTER XII]
GENEVA

SHORTLY after we reached the Grand Hôtel des Bergues, which is so beautifully situated on the quai of the same name, it began to rain. My room looked down on the Ile Rousseau with its clustering trees. The five tall poplars stood dignified and disdainful and only bent their heads when a gust of wind swept them; but the old chestnut-trees turned up their pallid green leaves and looked unhappy. Pradier’s bronze monument streamed with raindrops. The white swans ignored the downpour and sailed about like little boats. The enforced monotony of quietude required by confinement even in a commodious cockpit made exercise indispensable, and, after luncheon, we protected ourselves against the weather and sallied out for a walk. We had all the long afternoon. I proposed to go to Ferney and pay our respects to the memory of Voltaire, but we found it was too early in the season. A few weeks later, however, one beautiful bright Wednesday, we ran over in the Moto and carried out my pious desire.

My next proposition was to walk down to the junction of the two rivers. There is nothing more fascinating on earth than such an union; it is a perpetually renewed marriage. From far-separated sources, as if from different families, the two streams come. Like human beings, each has received a multitude of accessions as if from varied ancestry. Then at last they meet and cast in their lots together, never again to be parted till they are swallowed up in the great Ocean of Death which is Life.

With them it is a perpetual circle or cycle of reincarnation or rather redaquation. The greedy air sucks up the water and carries it away on its windy wings until it is caught like a thief by the guardian mountains and compelled to disgorge. The mountains are unable to keep it even in the form of snow. It flows down their sides in the slower rivers called glaciers, which toss up mighty waves and carry with them great freight of boulders. Then the fierce Sun shouts down: “Surrender,” and he liberates the imprisoned ice and, once more changed into water, it gallops down the mountains revenging itself for its years or centuries of imprisonment in the chains of the Frost by carrying away with it the very foundations on which the mountains rest, until, undermined, the proud peaks fall with a mighty crash.

The Rhône and the Arve do not fulfil the marriage injunction all at once and become one. The muddy grey Arve brings down a quantity of sand and rolls considerable-sized pebbles along its channel. The Rhône emerges clear and blue. Read Ruskin’s famous description from the Fourth Book of the “Modern Painters:”—

“The blue waters of the arrowy Rhône rush out with a depth of fifteen feet of not flowing but flying water; not water neither, melted glacier matter, one should call it; the force of the ice is in it and the wreathing of the clouds, the gladness of the sky and the countenance of time.”

So we plashed along, crossing the Rhône by the Pont de la Coulouvrenière, where we paused to wonder at the great city water works installed in 1886 by the clever engineer, Turretini. The so-called Forces Motrices, utilizing the swift descent of the Rhône makes Geneva an ideal manufacturing city. Imagine six thousand horses at work, never wearied, never requiring grain, noiseless, joyous! Indeed there is something rather fine in the idea of turning the old element, Water, into its Protean manifestation, light and electric power. It goes through the turbines, sets them whirling and comes out, having lost nothing by this tremendous output of energy—just as clear, just as beautiful, just as sparkling. It does not harm an element any more than it harms a man or a horse to do some useful work.

But it is evident that Switzerland, like other parts of the world, is going to have some trouble to unite the interests of those that would convert her hundreds of waterfalls into centres of manufacturing-power and the interests of those that would keep scenic beauties free from all mercantile desecration. What would the World of Travel say if some concessionaire should take possession of the Staubbach, or as more certain the Trümmelbach, and pipe it in an ugly steel stand-pipe to create electrical energy for the purpose of manufacturing nitrates! Yet even now there is a project for damming the Rhône between Pyremont and Bellegarde. This structure would be one hundred and one meters in height and would cause the water to back up even to the Swiss frontier, submerging the whole valley.

I may as well say here that I renewed acquaintance with my steamship friend, M. Criant, and had the pleasure of going with him and my nephew, some weeks later, when the river was much diminished in volume, to that wonderful curiosity of nature called La Perte du Rhône. We examined the narrow deep gorge between the Crêt d’Eau and the Vuache Mountain and just above where the Rhône and the Valserine meet, the river narrows to about fifteen meters in width. Here for a distance of twenty kilometers it suddenly disappears. M. Criant explained the cause of this “loss.” The bed of the stream consisted of two strata or matrasses—the upper harder than the lower. Stones of various sizes brought down by the Arve and whirled around by the swift current of the big torrent—falling not far from twenty-five meters between Bellegarde and Malpertuis made pot-holes, and then when they reached the softer strata they excavated it, making a tunnel: through this the stream when reduced in volume makes its tortuous and invisible way.

M. Criant did not believe at all in the wisdom of building this dam which would be one of the highest in the world. It would cover the Perte du Rhône with a lake nearly seventy meters deep, and although power enough would be created to supply all Lyons and perhaps be carried as far as Paris, still it would be a menace to the safety of the towns below. He agreed with his friend Professor Blondel, of the Ecole Superieure des Ponts et Chaussées, that the whole valley of the Rhône is in unstable equilibrium, and such a mass of water with its enormous weight would be likely to tear out its walls and overwhelm even Lyons with its catastrophe. He told me what was said by another friend of his, M. E. A. Martel. He did this as a compliment, and I hardly dared tell him what the Congress of the United States was likely to do in turning over the wonderful Hetch-Hetchy Valley to the water-seeking vandals of San Francisco. M. Martel said:—

“In the United States, that great country, famous for its monumental works and the utilization of hydraulic forces, the discussion of the two projects would not even be entered into; for the Americans who, generally speaking, are not embarrassed with a sentiment for art, at least respect and worship the natural beauties of their country. We must recognize their talent for being able to conciliate at once the protection of nature and the development of industries. Long since they would have declared the Perte and the Canyon of the Rhône to be a National Park and the two dams (lower down) would have become an accomplished fact.

“At Niagara Falls an agreement was made with the Canadian Government so that the primitive natural aspect of the banks themselves was preserved. Its immediate shores are freed from all installations, constructions and parasitic shops. But this has not prevented the establishment and development, in a discreet and invisible way, of methods of taking the water above the falls, while the machinery that transforms the force of the water into electric energy is placed below, thereby not injuring the beautiful features of the landscape.”

M. Criant showed how easy it would be to solve the difficulty here in a more economical way and at the same time make the approach to this wonderful curiosity of nature more feasible.

My nephew and I walked down as far as the end of the fascinating Sentier des Saules, out to the very point where the two swirling streams begin their passionate wooing. If it had been a pleasant afternoon we should have crossed the Arve by the Pont de Saint-Georges and penetrated the Bois de la Bâtie, but an umbrella has no place in a grove, and so we came back by the boulevard named for the same popular saint, past the Vélodrome and the gas works, the cemetery of Plainpalais to the Place Neuve. Here we admired Le Grand Théâtre, standing by itself with ample approaches and artistic façade adorned with sculptures and stately columns.

It is a splendid thing for a man, whether prince or pawnbroker, enriched through the forced or accidental gift of the people, to return his fortune in the form of a benefaction en bloc. This the true osmose of wealth, to use a chemical figure. The slow flowing of countless littles into the hands of the One Overmaster Great is suddenly reversed. So it was with the fortune of Duke Charles II of Brunswick, who died in 1873 and left Geneva twenty millions of francs for public purposes. This has enabled Geneva to build the opera-house, and to carry on many other municipal undertakings. Duke Charles had fifteen years of sovereignty though a good part of that time he had to be studying his lessons while a regent ruled for him. When he became of age he became a tyrant and his people drove him out. He gave Napoleon the Little pecuniary aid and expected to be reinstated, but after 1848 that was hopeless. In 1870 he retired to Geneva and died there.

Of course the duke himself had to be commemorated by a decorative monument and place was found for it between the Quai du Mont Blanc and the plaza des Alpes. It takes up considerable room. There is a platform more than sixty-seven meters long (two hundred and twenty-two feet) and nearly twenty-five meters (seventy-eight feet) wide and about twenty-one meters (sixty-six feet) high. On this stands a three-story hexagonal canopy sheltering a sarcophagus bearing a recumbent figure of the duke by Iguel, who also designed the reliefs depicting historic events in Brunswick. At each of the six corners are marble statues of his Guelf kinsmen. At a pedestal to the right is a bronze equestrian statue of Charles II. Two colossal lions of yellow marble, like those in Pilgrim’s Progress warranted not to bite, guard the entrance. The architect, Franel, went for his inspiration to the flamboyant Gothic tomb of the Della Scala princes at Verona but it is generally considered that he did not improve on his model. The equestrian statue was at first mounted on top of the monument and there are pictures of it in that position but apparently people wondered how a horse could have climbed so high and so they made him back down.

Sculpture at its best is the most decorative of all the arts, at least for out-of-doors, but mediocre statuary ought to be regarded as what Mrs. Malaprop called a statuary offence. Geneva is not much more fortunate than other cities in the appropriateness of its sculptures.

Victor Hugo, who made a flying visit to Geneva in September, 1839, thought the city had lost much by its so-called improvements. He did not like it that the row of old worm-eaten dilapidated houses in the Rue des Domes, which made such a picturesque lake-front, had been demolished, and he thought the white quais with the white barracks which the worthy Genovese regard as palaces could not compare with the old dirty ramshackle city which he had known a dozen or so years previous. He complained bitterly because they had been putting it through a process of raking, scraping, levelling and weeding out, so that with the exception of the Butte Saint-Pierre and the bridges across the Rhône there was not an ancient structure left. He called it “a platitude surrounded by humps.”

“Nothing,” he said, “is more unattractive than these little imitation Parises which one now finds in the provinces, in France and out of France. In an ancient city with its towers and its carved house-fronts, one expects to find historic streets, Gothic or Roman bell-towers; but one finds an imitation Rue de Rivoli, an imitation Madeleine resembling the façade of the Bobino Theater, an imitation Column Vendôme looking like an advertising-tower.”

I wonder what he would have thought of the Duke Charles II imitation. Nevertheless time has justified the Genevans; its brand-new quais are no longer glaringly new, and “its yellow and its white and its plaster and its chalk” have been toned down by time. It has grown into a truly imperial city. I was surprised at the number of buildings of seven stories and more; it cannot be called an imitation of Paris.

In one of the second-hand book-shops—I wonder why they are always on quais, where there are quais—I picked up an amusing little volume entitled, “The Present State of Geneva,” published in 1681 and purporting to have been composed in Italian for the Great Duke of Florence by Signior Gregorio Seti. He begins with this bold statement:—“Geneva, as appears by some chronicles of the County of Vaux, is one of the ancientist cities of Europe, being commonly supposed to have been built by Lemanus, son of Hercules, the great King of the Gaules, who gave his name likewise to the Lake Lemanus. The first foundation of it was laid in the Year of the World 3994, upon a little rising Hill covered with Juniper Trees called by the French Geneuriers, from whence it afterwards took the name of Geneura.”

He goes on to say:—“In the time of Julius Cæsar this City was of great renown and by him called the Bulwork of Helvetia and frontiere town of the Allobrogi, which name at present it deserves more than ever.

“When the eruption was made upon the Swissers in the year of God 230, by the Emperor Heliogabalus Geneva was almost utterly destroyed by Fire but in the Time of Aurelian the Emperour about the Year of Grace 270, it was by the same Emperour rebuilt, who having bestowed many priviledges on those that came to repair it, commanded it for the future to be called Aurelia, but the inhabitants could not easily banish from their minds the ancient name of Geneva which to this day it bears, though during the Life of Aurelian they called it Aurelia.”

He tells how on the south it is “adorned with a spatious Neighboring Plain reaching to the very Walls and encompassed by two large Rivers, the Rone and the Arue. This Plain,” he says, “serves the Citizens for a place of diversion and Recreation and here they walk to take the Air and refresh themselves in the delightful Gardens which inviron it, of which there is a great number. There likewise they train and exercise their Souldiers and divert themselves at Play in a long Mall.

“This Plain is commonly called the Plain Palace and in a Corner thereof where the Arue falls into the Rone there is a spatious burying place for the dead.”

At that time there were four bridges. All four had originally houses and shops on them but in 1670 a terrible fire broke out on one of the largest and most inhabited of them and destroyed seventy houses, leaving one hundred and thirty families homeless and taking the lives of more than a hundred persons. The new bridges that took the places of the old ones were by edict freed from all such incumbrances, which, however picturesque, are certainly dangerous and unsanitary.

The little book contained a good deal of information in small space, in spite of its erratic spelling. It stated, for instance, that Calvin was originally buried in Plain Palace, but when the Genevians heard that the Savoyards were coming “to dig up and insult over his bones they were removed and buried within the cloyster of Saint Peter’s Church.”

We had plenty of time to go there. We could see its towers and spire high in the driving clouds, and its roof, which reminded me of a Western political-convention hall. Considering that it was built so early as the Tenth Century, it ought to have the deepest historical interest. Probably the Emperor Conrad, who founded it, would probably hardly recognize it, so much has it been altered since his stormy life closed. No wonder he wanted a cathedral in those Alps which he was for ever crossing. As soon as he got out of sight down in Italy his German subjects revolted; then when he had returned and punished them the Italians would try to throw off his yoke. Life was not smooth for him either as King of the Germans, or as Emperor of the Romans or as ruler of the Burgundians, but five years before he died he saw his cathedral consecrated. Something happened to it a couple of hundred of years later (about the middle of the eighteenth century): it was probably enlarged. Then its Romanesque style of architecture was made ridiculous by a Corinthian portico.

A Corinthian portico, being Greek, perhaps was not theoretically so out of place if Don Gregorio Seti was right in telling us that “Saint Peter’s Church was in ancient times dedicated to Apollo, as is to be seen in some very old inscriptions.”

SWISS MEDIAEVAL CARVINGS.

We went into the venerable edifice and my nephew suggested that I had better initiate myself first of all by sitting down in the sacred chair that once belonged to John Calvin. If there had been any risk of inoculating myself with his grim and forbidding theology by sitting in the seat of the Calvinists, be sure I should have refrained. Calvin was a wonderful man, but at heart a tyrant. He could not endure contradiction. Jerome Bolsec found that out when he got the better of him in his argument on predestination: “You make God the author of sin,” said he, “for you say in your Institution, ‘God foresaw Adam’s Fall and in this Fall the ruin of all mankind; but He willed it, He ordered it and predetermined it in His eternal plan. God willed that the Israelites should worship the golden calf and that men should be guilty of the sins that they commit every day.’ God being a simple and changeless Being, how can He be in accord with Himself, since in Him are two things contrary, Will and Not-will? How can He order and forbid the same thing? On the other hand, if the Will of God is the substance of God Himself, it is the cause of the sins committed by men; consequently God is the author of evil.”

Calvin tried to creep out of the dilemma by saying:—“I have said that God’s will as a supernatural cause is the necessity for all things; but I have declared at the same time that God does what He does with such justice that even the wicked are constrained to glorify Him.”

Bolsec, who could see no equity in such a justice as that, would not give in and Calvin used his power to exile him. He was forbidden to return under pain of being whipped through all the squares of the city.

It is wonderful what an influence and for so long a time was exercised by Calvin. Certainly during all the years while the fortifications stood and the gates were shut at night no one dared contravene the strict regulations which his theocracy enjoined.

There are other famous people buried in the Cathedral of Saint Peter. Near the main entrance is a tablet commemorating Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné, the Huguenot adviser to Henry IV who spent the last twenty years of his life in Geneva and died there in 1630. He was the grandfather of Madame de Maintenon, wife of a poet and wife of a king. We noted the black tombstone to Cardinal Jean de Brogny who built the lovely Gothic Chapelle des Macchabées, now excellently restored. “Anno 1628,” says our friend Signior Seti, “was interred Emilia of Nassau and sometime after the Princess her sister, both Sisters to the Prince of Orange, Emilia being Wife to Don Antonio, King of Portugal, who was banished by the Spaniards. In another Chappel lies the Body of the Duke of Rohan, buried in the year 1638 in a most magnificent monument built by the Dutchess, who was laid there also near her husband in the year 1660, as their son Tancred was in the year 1661.”

Perhaps the “magnificent monument” is the black marble sarcophagus, but the statue of the duke who was leader of the French Protestants and fell at the battle of Rheinfelden is modern—the work of Iguel.

His “Dutchess” was the daughter of the famous “reformer of finances,” the Duc de Sully, whose great scheme for an International Amphyctionic Council supplied by the fifteen Christian States of Europe seems to have fore-shadowed the modern Interparliamentary Union.

By rare good fortune some one was practising on the excellent organ. Whoever it was played a prelude and fugue of Bach and a brilliant piece which I recognized as by Saint-Saëns.

On our way back from the cathedral we swung round by the English Garden and the National Monument with its two figures representing symbolically Helvetia and Geneva. Like most such colossal sculptures the farther away one gets the better it looks: that may be carried to its logical extreme! Then we crossed the long Pont du Mont Blanc but his Majesty was wholly hidden in the clouds. There were people fishing, however, just as they have always fished from the beginning of time. What says Signior Seti?—“Fishing in the Lake of this City is very considerable both for the profit and pleasure; they commonly take trouts of four score pound weight at twelve ounces the pound and in the Middle of the River opposite it the Town preserve their fish alive for use on two little deal board houses made for that purpose. In the Summer time it is a very pleasant recreation to go a Fishing here and both strangers and Citizens mightily delight in it.”

Not then, but at another time, I amused myself watching the dozens of washerwomen by the riverside, in booths roofed over and closed at the ends—leaning forward on their bare arms and spending more time gossiping in their terrible dialect or watching the little boats flying by. The Billingsgate of a Genevan blanchisseuse is not so melodious as the notes of a Vallombrosan nightingale, but it has a picturesque quality all its own.

As it was still raining we decided not to go out after dinner. But in spite of the rain I confessed to myself that I liked my first sight of Geneva and cherished a sneaking regret in my heart that Will and Ruth had not chosen their residence there instead of locating at Lausanne. Any place that is cheerful in a rain-storm is the place for me, and I thought Geneva actually smiled through her tears, if I may so express myself.

[CHAPTER XIII]
SUNRISE AND ROUSSEAU

THE weather showed unusual good humour by clearing in the night. Geneva woke up to bright sparkling sunshine. I went out before breakfast, indeed before sunrise, on the bridge, and had a most glorious view up the lake and up to the very summit of Mont Blanc. White as sugar, it lifted its aerial head into the azure—a solid cloud which looked as if it might at any moment take wings and fly away. A well-informed policeman told me the names of the other peaks: L’Aiguille du Midi, nearly a thousand meters lower than the crowning height: La Dent du Géant; Les Grandes Jorasses (from that same word, joux, meaning rock); Les Aiguilles Rouges; La Mole, contrasting with the sharp peak of the Aiguille d’Argentière, rightly suggesting silver. If any one is satisfied with a distant prospect of mountains, his eye would never weary of that glorious sight; but there is an attractive power in the great mountain-masses. They beckon, they say:—“Come to us; we want you; you are ours.”

LES GRANDES JORASSES.

That is, however, a wholly modern conception. If in the old days human consciousness felt the call, heard the summons, it was with the horror with which a bird feels the impulse to fly into the serpent’s jaws. Not so many years ago the popular imagination filled the ravines of the higher mountains with other terrors besides the frost. Dragons haunted caverns; with bated breath men told of having seen the dance of Wotan on the Diablerets, or of having heard fiends playing nine-pins with great stones which, when they missed their mark, went dashing and crashing down into the valleys. What herdsman would dare approach the Grotte de Balme, that cavern, hollowed out in the limestone rock, where dark-skinned fairies, with no heels to their feet, but with long, rippling hair, lured young men to their destruction! There was the spectral ram of Monthey; there was the three-legged horse of Sion; there was the giant ox of Zauchet, with glowing horns and flaming torch of a tail; there was the blue-haired donkey of Zermatt. Down from the mountains to Neuchâtel there used to come a ghost, wearing a cloth dripping with blood, and vanishing toward the lake. It was that of the widow of Walther, Comte de Rochefort, publicly accused of forgery and beheaded in 1412. The sight of her presaged a conflagration.

The Lord of Grimmelstein killed a doe and her fawns and was condemned to hunt through the mountains—one of those famous Wild Hunts which are accompanied by terrible tempests, and overwhelming snows.

There was a herd of chamois tended by dwarfs. Woe to those hunters who killed too many!

As in Schiller’s poem, the gazelle climbs to the ruggedest top of the naked precipice with the huntsman close behind and, just as he is about to fit the arrow to the string, the ancient Spirit of the Mountain, the good Genius of the trembling creature, appears to him:—“Earth has room for all to dwell—Why chase my belov’d gazelle?”

At the entrance of the Rhône into the lake there used to be low banks and wandering islands. Here dwelt the nixies and their queen, Finetta of the White Hand. She wore lilies in her golden hair. Any one who saw her was sure to die within a year.

That most delightful and poetic and enthusiastic of mountain-climbers, Emile Javelle, made friends with the guides and herdsmen, and was for ever eliciting from them avowals of their belief in spirits and dragons. He says that any night passed among the good herdsmen of Salanfe, under the Dent du Midi, will be rich in old tales, and he thus relates the legend of the Monster of the Jorat:—

“The herdsmen tell me that formerly (some even think they can recall the time) there dwelt on the Col du Jorat, a monster, a dragon, in fine an animal of unknown species and horrible aspect, who guarded the passage of the Col by night. He had already claimed many victims and the boldest hunters dared not attack him. Night having fallen, he descended from the glacier. He reigned over the whole mountain, and woe betide the man who approached the Jorat.

“One day, at last, a man of the Rhône valley had been condemned to death. He possessed uncommon strength and boldness. Pardon was offered him on condition that he should fight the monster and succeed in destroying him. He accepted, climbed up to Salanfe, waited for night and mounted the path of the Jorat. It is said that the battle was terrible; but the man was victorious and tranquillity was after that restored to the pastures of Salanfe.”

Javelle explained the reluctance of the mountaineers at climbing to the upper heights by this universal belief in supernatural powers, and he explained the belief in these supernatural powers by their very familiarity with the strange phenomena of the mountains:—“They see the boulders come rolling down from the cliffs, the avalanches breaking off from the heights and dashing down to demolish their châlets—in the heights originate the storms; and there also they hear those mysterious crackings of the glacier. It is not strange that such phenomena should be explained by them in legends.”

Their imagination, too, is shown in the various names which they confer on the Devil. He is Lo Grabbi, the Miser; La Bêta Crotze (Bête-à-griffe), the beast with claws; Le Niton, the Tricky One; Lo Tannai, Cavern-haunter; L’Ozé or Lo Maffi, the Sly One; Lo To-frou, the Always Abroad. One of his assistants is the Nion-neloû (Nul-ne-l’entend), who hides behind trees and jumps out to scare horses. The Diablerets are the very stamping-ground of dwarfs, gnomes, and dragons. When a pinnacle is doomed to fall, they quarrel as to its direction. At Rubli these supernatural beings are called gommes: they guard mines; at night they are seen as meteors going from place to place.

Whence came the great heaps of stones, as for instance at the foot of Jolimont? We know that these vast masses, often of a different kind of rock from that characteristic of the locality, were brought down by glaciers; but the ignorant peasants attribute them to Satan, who, of course, was intending to crush some Christian church with them, but, perhaps through catching sight of a cross, was compelled to drop them. Some of these stones are of enormous size—the Plowstone, for instance, which rises almost twenty meters (sixty feet) above the ground between Erlenbach and Wetzweil and has been traced to its original source in the canton of Glarus.

But there is one more than twice as big at Montet, near Devent, and when, later, we were going over the Monte Moro pass, we saw one near the Mattmark See which it is estimated contains two hundred and forty thousand cubic feet of Serpentine. Clever old Devil to get rid of his burden! The Swiss Government now prohibits breaking up these blocks of stone for building purposes. This was due to the initiative of the Swiss Scientific Societies.

Forbes, in his “Travels through the Alps of Savoy,” gives a very good description of these masses of rock as seen at Monthey, overlooking the valley of the Rhône:—

“We have here a belt or band of blocks—poised, as it were, on a mountain-side, it may be five hundred feet above the alluvial flat through which the Rhône winds below. This belt has no great vertical height, but extends for miles—yes, for miles—along the mountain, composed of blocks of granite of thirty, forty, fifty, and sixty feet to the side, not a few, but by hundreds, fantastically balanced on the angles of one another, their gray weather-beaten tops standing out in prominent relief from the verdant slope of secondary formation on which they rest. For three or four miles there is a path, preserving nearly the same level, leading amidst the gnarled stems of ancient chestnut-trees which struggle round and among the pile of blocks, which leaves them barely room to grow: so that numberless combinations of wood and rock are formed where a landscape-painter might spend days in study and enjoyment.”

The very Pierres de Niton which entered into the foreground of the picture which I was contemplating have been traced to the Saint Bernard, and it is estimated that it took a thousand years for the glacier to bring them down from that height and deposit them in what is now the lake.

As I stood there I was especially led to think of the influence that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is supposed to have exerted in stimulating people to enjoy the grander aspects of Nature. Literature, before Rousseau’s time, has little to say of the beauty of mountains. They were regarded with annoyance as obstacles, with terror as filled with dangers. Joseph Addison, speaking of the Savoy Alps, says they are “broken into so many steeps and precipices that they fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror and form one of the most irregular, mis-shapen scenes in the world.”

I am not sure but Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who became Baron d’Aubonne, from the name of his estate near Geneva, does not deserve priority. After he had ended his travels in the Far East and had decided to settle in Switzerland he wrote his friends in Paris of his choice:

“Friends, I have long been looking for a country-house where to end my life in tranquillity.

“Now you would doubtless choose France; it is the loveliest country in the world; no other approaches it.

“Gentlemen, France is a charming, delightful country, I agree with you, ... but my heart and my eyes are in Switzerland.

“‘What! That country of ice and sterile mountains, whose inhabitants would not have a quarter of the subsistence necessary for them, if other countries did not support a large part of its inhabitants!’

“You know Switzerland very well, as I can see. Gentlemen, such as it is, for me it is the loveliest country in the world.”

It was one of the boasts before Rousseau’s time that a seigneur’s place should have no view. Both Madame de Genlis, in Voltaire’s lifetime, and James Fenimore Cooper, fifty years after the great Frenchman’s death, noticed the fact that the view from Ferney was quite cut off by shrubbery, evidently showing that he cared little for it. Madame de Staël, though she was sympathetic enough with Rousseau, cared little for natural scenery. When some enthusiastic visitors were praising the beauties of Lake Leman she exclaimed:—“Oh for the gutters of the Rue de Bac.”

But, after all, it is only fair to give Rousseau’s own words, his invitation to the world to come to Switzerland and share with him these marvellous scenes. They are eloquent words, indeed! Nor did they fall on unheeding ears.

“I conduct you to the loftiest mountains of the old world, to the most ancient laboratory of Nature, where she operated with boundless energy before man existed, and where she produces objects of inexpressible sublimity and beauty, now that there are mortals to admire them. I conduct you to the secret sources of the rivers that irrigate and fertilize half Europe. I conduct you on one and the same day from the scorching heat of Spain to the cold of Lapland or Spitzbergen; from the vine and the chestnut-tree to the Alpine rose, and from the Alpine rose to the last insignificant moss that grows on the extreme verge of animated Nature.

“You shall find fragrance in flowers, which in the valleys yield no scent; you shall pluck strawberries on the margin of everlasting ice.

“I conduct you to the fountain of the dews and rains that dispense blessings over half our quarter of the globe; to the birthplace of refreshing breezes and of storms which temper and purify the atmosphere.

“I conduct you to the clearest and freshest springs, the most magnificent water-falls, the most extensive glaciers, the most stupendous snow-clad mountains and the most fertile pastures. The tremendous avalanche shall pursue before you its thundering career.

“The brilliant crystal, the swift chamois, the harmless marmot, the soaring eagle, the rapacious vulture, as unusual objects, will strike your eye and excite pleasure and admiration.

“From the toiling husbandman you will ascend to the happy cowherd. Innumerable flocks of cattle, of extraordinary beauty and spirit, will bound about you. In the foaming milk and the clotted cream you will taste of the riches of the country which are poured forth into the most distant regions.

“But, above all, you will be delighted with the inhabitants, men of rare symmetry of form, active and robust, cheerful and independent,—women, decked with unsophisticated charms and graces and manifesting the childlike curiosity and the engaging confidence of the ancient ages of innocence.

“Old traditions and rural songs will meet your ear, and the picture presented in the idyls of Theocritus will be realized, but on a grander scale and with more diversified accompaniments.

“Lastly, in those elevated regions you will yourself become better; you will verify the promise of the moral philosopher; you will feel greater facility of respiration, more suppleness and vigor of body, and greater buoyancy of spirits. All the passions are here softened down and pleasure is less intense. The mind is led into a grand and sublime train of thought, suited to the objects which surround us; it is filled with a certain calm delight unalloyed with anything that is painful or sensual. It seems as if in rising above the habitations of men we left behind us all base and earthly feelings; and as if the soul in approaching nearer to the ethereal heaven acquired somewhat of its unruffled serenity.”

And quite à propos, it seems to me, here is Rousseau’s famous description of the sunrise:

“Let us betake ourselves to some lofty place before the Sun appears. We see him announced from afar by the fiery darts which he sends before him. The fire increases; the east seems all in flames. By their dazzling splendor one looks for the orb long before it shows itself. Each instant one thinks to see it appear. There it is at last! A brilliant point shoots off like a flash and instantly fills all space....

“The veil of darkness is rent and falls; man recognizes his dwelling-place and finds it ever-more more beautiful. During the night the verdure has taken on new vigor; the dawning day which lights it, the first rays which gild it, bring it before us with a glittering panoply of dew, flashing brilliant colors into our eyes. The birds join in chorus and salute the father of life. The concourse of all these objects brings to the senses an impression of freshness which seems to penetrate into the depths of the soul. Here is a half-hour of enchantment which no man can resist. A spectacle so grand, so beautiful, so delicious, leaves no one unmoved.”

Rousseau attributed his love of Nature to the two peaceful years which he spent at the parsonage at Borsey, developing as they did his taste and enabling him later to bring about a complete revolution in the esthetic and literary tendencies of the century. If Rousseau got up to see a sunrise, why, then it became the fashion to get up and see sunrises; if Rousseau went to a high mountain-top, then it became fashionable to go to high mountain-tops. Here is his recipe for mountain-climbing, written after he had made an excursion on foot to Valais in the Autumn of 1759:—

“I gradually realized that the purity of the air was the real cause of the return of that interior peace which I had lost so long. In fact on high mountains, where the air is pure and subtle, we feel a greater facility in breathing, greater physical lightness, greater mental serenity. Our meditations take on a peculiar character of grandeur and sublimity, proportioned to the objects surrounding us. It seems as if in rising above the dwellings of men, we left behind all low and terrestrial thoughts and, in proportion as we approach the upper regions, the soul attains something of their changeless purity. Here we are grave, but not melancholy; peaceful, but not indolent; simply content to be and to think. I doubt if any violent agitation, if any maladie des vapeurs could resist such a sojourn if prolonged, and I am amazed that baths in the wholesome and beneficent mountain-air are not one of the sovereign remedies of medicine and morals.”

The same idea is found in quaint lines in a Mountain Poem by Usteri:

“Uf Bergen, uf Bergen

Da isch’s eim so wohl

De Berg is de Doktor

Für Seel und für Lyb!”

Alexander Pope and other old English writers are always talking about fits of “vapours.” I wonder how the name arose, and why it went out of style. Vapour comes from water, tears are water; hence vapours,—perhaps that is the logic of the term. Of course then they would evaporate in the dry mountain-air.

I recollected how Rousseau loved this very lake. I remembered his apostrophe to it after he had been out sailing on it:—

“As we skirted the shores, I admired the rich and charming landscapes of the Pays de Vaud, where the hosts of villages, the green and well-kept terraces on all sides form a ravishing picture; where the land, everywhere cultivated and everywhere fertile, offers the plowman, the herdman, the vintner the assured fruit of their labors, not devoured as elsewhere by the grasping tax-collector.... The lake was calm. I kept perfect silence. The even and measured noise of the oars set me to dreaming. A cloudless sky, the coolness of the air, the sweet rays of the moon, the silvery shimmer of the water shining around us, filled me with the most delicious sensations. Oh, my lake! thou hast a charm which I cannot explain, which does not arise wholly from the beauty of the scene, but from something more interesting, which affects me and touches me. When the eager desire of this sweet and happy life for which I was born comes to kindle my imagination, it always attaches itself to the lake.”

ACROSS LAKE LEMAN.

And then again his poignant cry of farewell:

“Oh, my lake, on the shores of which I spent the peaceful years of mine infancy, charming landscapes where for the first time I witnessed the majestic and touching sunrise, where I felt the first emotions of my heart, the first impulse of genius, alas! become too imperious.... Oh, my lake, I shall never see thee more.”