With abominable slowness, and very late, "on account of the war," the
train crawled from Geneva, southwards. Among the travellers was a
rhetorical Italian master-mason, from Lyons, an old Garibaldist, the
great event of whose life was that Garibaldi had once taken lunch alone
with him at Varese. He preserved in his home as a relic the glass from
which the general had drunk. He was talkative, and ready to help
everyone; he gave us all food and drink from his provisions. Other
travellers told that they had had to stand in queue for fully twelve
hours in front of the ticket office in Paris, to get away from the town.
The train passed the place where Rousseau had lived, at Madame de
Warens'. In an official work on Savoy, written by a priest, I had
recently read a summary dismissal of Rousseau, as a calumniator of his
benefactress. According to this author, it certainly looked as though,
to say the least of it, Rousseau's memory had failed him amazingly
sometimes. The book asserted, for instance, that the Claude of whom he
speaks was no longer alive at the time when he was supposed to be
enjoying Madame de Warens' favours.
We passed French volunteers in blouses bearing a red cross; they
shouted and were in high good humour; passed ten districts, where
numbers of cretins, with their hideous excrescences, sat by the
wayside. At last we arrived,--several hours behind time,--at St.
Michel, at the foot of Mont Cenis; it was four o'clock in the
afternoon, and I was beginning to feel tired, for I had been up since
four in the morning. At five o'clock we commenced the ascent, to the
accompaniment of frightful groanings from the engine; all the
travellers were crowded together in three wretched little carriages,
the small engine not being able to pull more. Gay young French girls
exulted at the idea of seeing "Italy's fair skies." They were not
particularly fair here; the weather was rough and cloudy, in keeping
with abysms and mountain precipices. But late at night the journey over
Mont Cenis was wonderful. High up on the mountain the moonlight gleamed
on the mountain lake. And the way was dominated, from one rocky summit,
by the castle of Bramans with its seven imposing forts.
The locomotive stopped for an hour, for want of water. We were thus
obliged to sleep at the little Italian town of Susa (in a glorious
valley under Mont Cenis), the train to Turin having left three hours
before. Susa was the first Italian town I saw. When the train came in
next morning to the station at Turin, a crowd of Italian soldiers, who
were standing there, shouted: "The Prussians for ever!" and winked at
me. "What are they shouting for?" I asked a young Turin fellow with
whom I had had some long conversations. "It is an ovation to you," he
replied. "People are delighted at the victory of the Prussians, and
they think you are a Prussian, because of your fair moustache and
beard."