First and last, we hung about Chillon a good deal, both by land and by
water. For the latter purpose we had to hire a boat; and deceived by the
fact that the owner spoke a Latin dialect, I attempted to beat him down
from his demand of a franc an hour. "It's too much," I cried. "It's the
price," he answered, laconically. Clearly I was to take it or leave it,
and I took it. We did not find our fellow-republicans flatteringly
polite, but we found them firm, and, for all I know, honest. At least
they seemed as honest as we were, and that is saying a great deal. What
struck us from the beginning was the surliness of the men and the
industry of the women; and I am persuaded that the Swiss Government is
really carried on by the house-keeping sex. At any rate, the postmaster
of Villeneuve was a woman; her little girl brought the mail up from the
railway station in a hand-cart, and her old mother helped her to
understand my French. They were rather cross about it, and one day, with
the assistance of a child in arms, they defeated me in an attempt I made
to get a postal order. I dare say they thought it quite a triumph; but
it was not so very much to be proud of. At that period my French, always
spoken with the Venetian accent of the friend with whom I had studied it
many years before, was taking on strange and wilful characteristics,
which would have disabled me in the presence of a much less formidable
force. I think the only person really able to interpret me was the
amiable mistress of the Croix Blanche, to whose hostelry I went every
day for my after-dinner coffee. She knew what I wanted whenever I asked
for it, and I simplified my wants so as to meet her in the same spirit.
The inn stood midway of the village street that for hundreds of yards
followed the curve of the lake shore with its two lines of high stone
houses. At one end of it stood a tower springing out of an almost
fabulous past; then you came to the first of three plashing fountains,
where cattle were always drinking, and bareheaded girls washing
vegetables for the pot. Aloft swung the lamps that lighted the village,
on ropes stretching across the street. I believe some distinction was
ascribed to Villeneuve for the antiquity of this method of
street-lighting. There were numbers of useful shops along the street,
which wandered out into the country on the levels of the Rhone, where
the mountains presently shut in so close that there was scarcely room
for the railway to get through. What finally became of the highway I
don't know. One day I tried to run it down, but after a long chase I was
glad to get myself brought back in a diligence from the next village.
[Illustration: _"They helped to make the hay in the marshes"_]
The road became a street and ceased to be so with an abruptness that
admitted nothing of suburban hesitation or compromise, and Villeneuve,
as far as it went, was a solid wall of houses on either side. It was
called Villeneuve because it was so very, very old; and in the level
beyond it is placed the scene of the great Helvetian victory over the
Romans, when the Swiss made their invaders pass under the yoke. I do not
know that Villeneuve witnessed that incident, but it looks and smells
old enough to have done so. It is reasonably picturesque in a
semi-Italian, semi-French fashion, but it is to the nose that it makes
its chief appeal. Every house has a cherished manure heap in its back
yard, symmetrically shaped, with the projecting edges of the straw
neatly braided: it is a source of family pride as well as profit. But it
is chiefly the odor of world-old human occupation, otherwise
indescribable, that pervades the air of Villeneuve, and makes the
mildest of foreign sojourners long for the application of a little
dynamite to its ancient houses. Our towns are perhaps the ugliest in the
world, but how open to the sun and wind they are! how free, how pure,
how wholesome!
On week-days a cart sometimes passed through Villeneuve with a most
disproportionate banging over the cobble-stones, but usually the walls
reverberated the soft tinkle of cow-bells as the kine wound through from
pasture to pasture and lingered at the fountains. On Sundays the street
was reasonably full of young men in the peg-top trousers which the Swiss
still cling to, making eyes at the girls in the upper windows. These
were the only times when I saw women of any age idle. Sometimes through
the open door I caught a glimpse of a group of them busy with their
work, while a little girl read to them. Once in a crowded café, where
half a hundred men were smoking and drinking and chattering, the girl
who served my coffee put down a volume of Victor Hugo's poems to bring
it. But mostly their literary employments did not go beyond driving the
cows to pasture and washing clothes in the lake, where they beat the
linen with far-echoing blows of their paddles. They helped to make the
hay on the marshes beyond the village, and they greatly outnumbered the
men in the labors of the vintage. They were seldom pretty either in face
or figure; they seemed all to have some stage of goitre; but their
manners were charming, and their voices, as I have said, angelically
sweet. Our pasteur's wife said that there was a great deal of pauperism
in Villeneuve, "because of the drunkenness of the men and the disorder
of the women;" but I saw only one man drunk in the streets there, and
what the disorders of the women were I don't know. Possibly their labors
in the field made them poor house-keepers, though this is mere
conjecture. Divorce is theoretically easy, but the couple seeking it
must go before a magistrate every four months for two years and insist
that they continue to desire it. This makes it rather uncommon.
[Illustration: _Cattle at the Fountains_]
If the women were not good-looking, if their lives of toil stunted and
coarsened them, the men, with greater apparent leisure, were no
handsomer. Among the young I noticed the frequency of what may be called
the republican face--thin and aquiline, whether dark or fair. The
Vaudois as I saw them were at no age a merry folk. In the fields they
toiled silently; in the cafés, where they were sufficiently noisy over
their new wine, they talked without laughter, and without the shrugs and
gestures that enliven conversation among other Latin peoples. They had a
hard-favored grimness and taciturnity that with their mountain scenery
reminded me of New England now and again, and gave me the bewildered
sense of having dropped down in some little anterior America. But there
was one thing that marked a great difference from our civilization, and
that was the prevalence of uniforms, for which the Swiss have the true
European fondness. This is natural in a people whose men all are or have
been soldiers; and the war footing on which the little republic is
obliged to keep a large force in that ridiculous army-ridden Europe must
largely account for the abandonment of the peaceful industries to women.
But the men are off at the mountain chalets too, and they are away in
all lands, keeping hotels, and amassing from the candle-ends of the
travelling public the fortune with which all Swiss hope to return home
to die.
[Illustration: _Washing Clothes in the Lake_]