_Calvin—The Diodati House—Primroses._
THE house in which Calvin lived and died has never been photographed.
“Madame does not reflect how narrow is the street!” pleaded the
picture-dealer to whom I expressed my surprise at this.
But the camera would have been set up in one of the windows across the
way had there been a lively demand upon the thrifty Swiss for mementoes
of the Reformer. John Calvin is out of fashion on the Continent, and
Geneva is not an exception to the prevalent obsoleteness of reverence
for his character and doctrines.
“_Fanatique!_” ejaculated a Genevese lady who worshiped statedly in the
Protestant Cathedral, and called herself “dévôte.”
Our friend Mrs. G—— the artist, _par excellence_, of our happy family,
had made an excellent copy of an original portrait of Calvin which M.
Reviliod had, as an especial favor, lent her from his fine collection
of pictures, a compliment of which we were proud for her. Herself the
daughter of a clergyman who had fought a good fight for the truth as he
held it, she had copied the picture _con amore_.
“I have lived in Calvin’s age—not in this, while I painted,” she said
when I looked into her parlor to see how the work was getting on. “An
age that needed such men! The face is not lovely in any sense, but I
have laid in each stroke tenderly. My father used to say that the
Church at large owes more to-day to John Calvin than to any other one
man who ever lived.”
The face was, as she had said, not lovely. It was not benign. The
hollow temples, deep-set eyes; the small, resolute mouth were the
lineaments of an ascetic whose warfare with the world, the flesh and
the devil—and the church he conceived in his honest, stubborn soul to
be a compound of all three—was to the death. He wore the Genevan cap
and gown, the latter trimmed with fur. His black beard was long, but
scanty. One thin hand was lifted slightly in exhortation. A man of
power, he was one whom not many would dare to love.
“Greater in thought and in action than Luther; as brave as Zwingli; as
zealous as Knox!” pursued his admirer, touching the canvas lightly with
her brush, as if reluctant to demit the work. “Ah, mademoiselle!” to
the entering visitor, the Genevese Protestant aforesaid. “You are just
in time to see my finished Calvin!”
Then, the Genevese said, with a grimace, “_Fanatique! Moi, je déteste
cet homme!_”
If she had been one man, the artist another—(and unregenerate) I am
afraid the predestined portion of the last speaker would have been a
blow of the maul-stick.
The Genevese have swung completely around the circle in three hundred
years.
“They would be insupportable to me, and I to them!” replied Calvin to
the recall of the Council after his two years of banishment.
But how earnestly he served them and Protestantism in the
quarter-century that intervened from the time of the refusal and
the months during which he lay “long a-dying” in the strait Rue des
Chanoines, almost in the shadow of the Cathedral!
The ground-floor and part of the second-story of the “plain house
provided for him,” are now used as a dispensary and doctor’s office,—a
charitable institution. A placard at the door sets forth the hours at
which patients can be admitted to the consulting-rooms. After Calvin’s
death, and until within a few years, it was occupied as a convent and
school by a Roman Catholic sisterhood. The building is of brick and
“plain” to humbleness, two stories in height, and built around four
sides of an open court. We saw the closet in which Calvin studied and
wrote—so overwhelmed by preparations for the pulpit, the university
lecture-room, and with voluminous correspondence with churches at home
and abroad, that he passed whole nights without laying by his pen, and,
by day, had not, he says, “time to look up to the light of the blessèd
sun;”—and the chamber in which he died. This is low-ceiled and of fair
size, wainscoted with dark wood. Over the doors are paneled paintings
representing the Four Seasons. These were there during Calvin’s
occupancy, as was the carved mantel of black oak. Two windows open upon
a balcony hung thickly with ivy.
One speculates fruitlessly touching the incidents of the private life
of him of whom it was said that “he was never for one day unfaithful to
his apostolate.” We questioned the woman who showed us the house and
who said she was a Protestant,—hoping to glean some interesting local
traditions. But she knew nothing beyond her lesson—a brief and a dry
one. We longed to know if in this apartment came and went the child
whose biography is comprised by the father in one line:—
“GOD gave us a little son. HE took him away.”
The mother who “always aided, never opposed” her husband, survived the
boy eight years. Calvin never married again. Henceforward, his earthly
ties were the Reformed Church and Geneva. “I offer to my GOD my slain
heart as a sacrifice, forcing myself to obedience to His will,” became
the motto of a life that had, no more, in it the sweet elements of
home-happiness and repose.
The sun set while we stood upon the balcony, the room behind us growing
darker and more desolately-silent, while the heavens brightened,
ruddying the tiled roofs and time-stained walls of the “Old Town”
in which the house stands. The wife may have sat here at even-tide,
thinking of the babe that was coming to cheer her lonely, frugal
dwelling, and, in those eight childless years, of the little son
GOD took away. Her husband had no time for loverly converse or sad
reverie—with his daily sermon every other week; his Theology lectures;
his semi-weekly Consistory-meeting; his written controversies with
Unitarians and Anabaptists, and the government, in all its details, of
a municipality that owned him Dictator of letter and of spirit.
“Geneva”—wrote Knox to a friend during a visit to Calvin’s model
town—“is the most perfect school of Christ the world has seen since the
days of the Apostles.”
Scoffers said that Calvin resisted the Divine decree in his own case
when the physicians pronounced him to be dying from _seven_ mortal
diseases. When he could no longer eat or sit up, he dictated, between
the paroxysms of nausea and faintness, letters to all parts of Europe
to one scribe, comments upon the Book of Joshua to another. He fainted
in the pulpit, his sermon unfinished, the last time he was carried to
the Cathedral. One month before his death, the most eminent medical
authorities in Switzerland declaring that he could not survive a day
longer, civil and ecclesiastical officers were collected to receive his
solemn farewell. Still he lived—in such agony of body as chills the
blood to read of, but in calm joyfulness of soul, until the end of May,
almost four months after the Sabbath when he was brought back from the
Cathedral fainting—it was believed, in a dying condition. The Battle
of Life was with him a favorite figure in speech and writings. How he
fought it until the last drop of blood was drained from his veins and
heart is worthily told by Theodore Beza.
His handsome face hangs near Calvin’s in the Reviliod Gallery. So
genial and _débonnaire_ does this one of the Reformers look that we
marvel—not at the charge of French levity brought against him by
certain of his _confrères_—but that he should have loved so well
his stern, joyless brother-in-arms. Yet gentle Melanchthon sighs,
oppressed by the conviction that “Old Adam is too strong for young
Melanchthon,”—“If I could but lay my weary head upon thy” (Calvin’s)
“faithful heart and die there!”
Beza carries his affectionate partizanship so far as to defend the
burning of Servetus for obstinate heresy, by the Genevan authorities.
Men have chosen to execrate Calvin as the author of an act which
was in exact accordance with the temper of the State-Church at that
time. The Council of Geneva, after long and stirring debate, and much
advisement with other Cantons, condemned the Spanish heretic-physician
to the stake as a political necessity. Farel was earnest in advocating
this extreme penalty of the law, and exhorted him, at the place
of execution, to recantation. Melanchthon gave it unqualified, if
sorrowful sanction, as did Bullinger. The one voice raised against the
horrible cruelty was Calvin’s. He pleaded, vainly—since the man must
die—that he should be beheaded, not burnt.
The Genevese declare they do not know “just where” this violation of
the avowed principles of Protestantism occurred. The burning-place was
upon the Champel, a pretty green hill, south of the city.
Of Calvin, guide-books and travelers have long asserted—“No man
knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.” The truth being that, several
years ago, careful measurement of the cemetery of Plain Palais, and
examination of the record of his burial, pointed out the locality he
desired should be forgotten lest a costly monument might dishonor the
memory of the poverty he had borne for Christ’s sake. His bones rest
not many rods from the wall of the burial-ground. A lofty hemlock grows
directly upon the grave. The boughs have been torn off by relic-hunters
as far up as a tall man can reach. A sloping stone of gray granite,
a foot square and about as tall at the highest side, is lettered,
“J. C.” That is all. There is no mound to warn aside the unwary
foot, although the graves about it are carefully kept, distinguished
by memorial-tablets and adorned with flowers. Upon his return from
Strasbourg, in compliance with the prayers of Geneva—Canton and
town—the people gave him, in addition to the “plain house,” a “piece of
cloth for a coat.” The bald covering of earth is all he would accept
from them in death.
Plain Palais is a dismal last home even for John Calvin. Low, flat and
damp on the sunniest days, it is a pity it should not be, as Baedeker
describes it—“disused.” But one passes on the route to Calvin’s grave,
the gorgeous red granite tomb of the Duke of Brunswick who bequeathed
his wealth to the city. And in our numerous visits to the cemetery we
rarely went in or out without meeting a funeral train. The paths are
greened by moss-slime, and the short winter afternoons are briefer and
gloomier for the mists that begin to rise here by four o’clock.
Very different in location and aspect is the grave of the historian of
the Reformation, Merle d’Aubigné. The walk up the quay took us past his
former residence, a comfortable homestead, now occupied by his widow.
Leaving the lake-edge, about half-a-mile from the town, we turned to
the left into a crooked road paved with cobble-stones. High walls,
covered with ivy and capped by the foliage of fine old trees, rooted
within the grounds, seclude on both sides of the way the _campagnes_ of
wealthy Genevese who desert them in the winter for the confined streets
and noise of the city. A brook of clear water, issuing from the wall,
runs gaily down to the lake. The road winds irregularly up the hill,
yet so sharply that we were content to rest on the brow, and, sitting
upon a wayside bench, enjoy the view of Lake Leman and the Juras on one
hand, the Mont Blanc chain of Alps upon the other. The small cemetery
was gained by an abrupt turn to the right and another rise. It is
enclosed on all sides by a brick wall, entered through strong iron
gates, and, we judged from the lack of traces of recent occupancy,
was in truth “disused.” D’Aubigné is buried in a corner remote from
the gate. Some of his kindred sleep within the enclosure, but none
near him. We had read the names of others of the noble race upon mural
brasses in the old Cathedral. He selected the spot of his interment
“that he might rise in sight of Mont Blanc at the Last Day.”
So runs the story. It was impressive, told, as we heard it, grouped
about the grave, the solemn, eternal whiteness of the mountain in
full view. A profile of the historian in bas-relief is upon the
head-stone. Climbing roses bound this and the mound with lush withes of
grayish-crimson and pale-green, and plumes of golden-rod nodded over
his head. The ancient wall is hung and heaped with ivy, as common in
Geneva and the neighborhood as the grass and field-flowers.
We never knew when we had walked far enough in Switzerland. On this
afternoon we extended our ramble a mile further up the lake beyond
the cemetery, keeping upon the ridge of the range, to the Diodati
House. It is one of the old family seats that stud the hill-sides
in all directions. Milton was here a welcome guest for months, and
under the patronage of the Diodati, a French translation of “Paradise
Lost” was printed. A degenerate son of the house, upon a visit to
England, became intimate with a poet of different mold. When Byron
left his native land after the separation from his wife, he accepted
the invitation of young Diodati to his ancestral home. The host became
so enamored of his guest’s society that he assigned to him a suite
of apartments overlooking the lake, as his own, so long as he would
honor him by occupying them. Shelley had rooms in the neighboring
village of Cologny. The balcony before the second-story front windows
is designated as the habitual lounging-place of the two at sunset and
through moonlight evenings. The morals of Diodati the younger were
not amended by the companionships of the year spent by Byron in the
enjoyment of his hospitality. Tales of the orgies of the comrades are
still rife in the region, to the shame of all three. From this balcony
Byron witnessed the thunderstorm by night upon Lake Leman, described
in the third canto of Childe Harold, written at the Diodati House. Its
pictures of the lake-scenery are faithful and beautiful. The opening
lines recur to the memory of the least poetical tourist who has ever
read them, when he reclines, as we did on that day, and many others, on
the lawn before the mansion.
“Clear, placid Leman! thy contrasted lake,
With the wild 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.”
Shelley’s second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, was with her husband, and
about the English party collected a jovial company of both sexes for
whom the Diodati homestead was the rendezvous. At the close of the year
they journeyed southward to Ravenna, to Pisa and to Spezzia, near which
latter place Shelley and Williams were drowned.
The old house is very peaceful now in restored respectability. A very
Quaker of a _campagne_, in faded dove-color and broad-brimmed roof,
it is square-built like Ferney, and without tower or battlement. So
English is its expression of home-comfort in spacious rooms, spreading
lawn and clumps of shade-trees, that Byron must have had recalled to
him continually the land he affected to despise and hate.
In the Spring, we found our earliest primroses in the Diodati grounds.
We had never seen them growing wild before, and emulous parties sallied
forth, every day, for fresh spoils of these and the fragrant purple
violets, unknown to American fields. A week later, the meadows upon the
left bank of the lake were yellow as gold with them. But on the day of
my first primrose-hunt they had just begun to show their straw-colored
faces, and so tentatively that our quest had to be close and keen.
We—two of us—strayed into the grounds of a closed country-house on a
warm March afternoon, not sanguine of success after the assurances of
sundry laborers and rosy-cheeked nurses whom we had met and catechized,
that “_les primevères_” were never found thereabouts. The day before,
two of “our girls” had come in to five o’clock tea, with handfuls of
the pale beauties picked in the Diodati woods, so we knew they were
above-ground. The lawn chosen by my friend J—— and myself, as the scene
of our trespass, was level and open to the sun, except where branchy
limes and tent-like chestnuts made cool retreats for the “summer-days
a-coming.” The turf was so deep, our feet sank into it, so elastic,
it was a joy to tread it. We had gone perhaps twenty yards from the
entrance-gates when something smiled up suddenly at us, as if it had,
that instant, broken ground. We were down upon our knees in a second,
tugging so hard at the prize that the tender stems snapped close to the
flowers. Then, perceiving that the stalks were long as well as frail,
we dug down through the turf with our gloved fingers, parasol-handles,
hair-pins—anything that might penetrate to the root. Not a stick
was visible upon the neat lawn. Being only two women, we had not a
pocket-knife between us. I would not declare that we would not have
used our teeth had nothing better offered, so excited were we over our
treasure-trove. They shone at us above the sward on all sides, after
we espied that one cluster. The depth of the roots below the surface
is amazing. Our digging and scraping assumed the dignity of scientific
excavations by the time we had filled handkerchiefs and veils.
The uprooted primroses did not lose their character for bravery.
Embedded in a bank of moss laid within a dish, and supplied with
moisture, they lived for days, unfurling buds and leaves as assiduously
as if the teeming bulk of their native earth had underlain them,
subject to the call of the torn fibers. Our “primrose-bank,” renewed
again and again in the season of their bloom, was a cherished feature
of our _salon_, that happy Spring-time. The fragrance is faint, but
pleasant, and has, in a peculiar degree, the subtle _associativeness_
possessed by some other wood-flowers, granting us, with the inhalation,
visions of the banks on which they grew; of tossing brooks and wet,
trailing grasses, swinging in the eddying water; of ferny glades, cool
in the hottest noons; of moss-grown hollows under shelving rocks; of
bird-call; the grasshopper’s rattle and the whirr of the quail;—the
thousand nameless pleasures of Memory that are the mesmeric passes with
which Imagination beguiles us into forgetfulness of sorrow, time and
distance.