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.