IV

The Pays de Vaud is also the land of castles, and the visitor to Vevay

should not fail to see Blonay Castle, the seat of the ancient family

which, with intervals of dispossession, has possessed it ever since the

Crusades. It is only a little way off, on the first rise of the hills,

from which it looks over the vineyards on inexpressible glories of lake

and distant mountains, and it is most nobly approached through steeps of

vine and grove. Apparently it is kept up in as much of the sentiment of

the past as possible, and one may hire its baronial splendor fully

furnished; for the keeper told it had been occupied by an English family

for the last three winters. The finish, like that of the castle of

Aigle, is rude, but the whole place is wonderfully picturesque and

impressive. The arched gateway is alone worth a good rent; the long

corridors from which the chambers open are suitable to ghosts fond of

walking exercise; the superb dining-room is round, and the floor is so

old that it would shake under the foot of the lightest spectre. The

_répertoire_ of family traditions is almost inexhaustible, and doubtless

one might have the use of them for a little additional money. One of the

latest is of the seventeenth century, when the daughter of the house was

"the beautiful Nicolaïde de Blonay, before whom many adorers had bent

the knee in vain. Among them, a certain Tavel de Villars, vanquished the

proud beauty by his constancy. But the marriage was delayed. Officer in

the service of France, Tavel was detained by his military duties. In the

mean time Jean-François de Blonay, of another branch of the family, the

Savoyard branch, fell in love with his cousin, and twice demanded her in

marriage. Twice he was refused. Then, listening only to his passion, he

assembled some of his friends, and hid himself with them near the

castle. They watched the comings and goings of the baron, and suddenly

profiting by his absence, they entered his dwelling and carried off the

fair Nicolaïde, who, transported to Savoy, rewarded the boldness of her

captor by becoming his wife. This history, which resembles that of the

beautiful Helen, and is not less authentic, kindled the fiercest

hostilities between the Tavel and Blonay families; the French and

Italian ambassadors intervened; and it all ended in a sentence

pronounced at Berne against the Blonays--a sentence as useless as it was

severe--for the principal offenders had built a nest for their loves in

domains which they possessed in Savoy. The old baron alone felt its

effects. He was severely reprimanded for having so ill fulfilled his

paternal duties."

The good burghers of Berne--the Lords as they called themselves--were in

fact very hard with all their Vaudois subjects. "Equally merciless to

the vanities and the vices, they confounded luxury and drunkenness in

their rules, pleasures and bad manners. They were no less the enemies of

innovations. Coffee at its introduction was stigmatized as a devilish

invention; tea was no better; as to tobacco, whether snuffed or smoked,

it was worse yet. Low-necked dresses and low-quartered shoes were

rigorously forbidden. Games and all dances, 'except three modest dances

on wedding-days,' were unlawful.... The Sabbath was strictly observed;

silence reigned in the villages, even those remotest from the church,

until the divine service of the afternoon was closed; no cart might pass

in the street, and no child play there.... In short, all their

ordinances and regulations witness a firm design on the part of their

Excellencies 'to revive among all those under their domination a life

and manners truly Christian.' The Pays de Vaud under this régime

acquired its moral and religious education. A more serious spirit

gradually prevailed. The Bible became the book _par excellence_, the

book of the fireside, and on Sunday the exercises of devotion took the

place of the public amusements."

[Illustration: _Church Terrace, Montreux_]

When the regicides fled from England after the Restoration they could

not have sought a more congenial refuge than such a land as this. One of

them, as is known, died in Vevay by the shot of an assassin sent to

murder him by Charles II.; with another he is interred in the old Church

of St. Martin there; and I went there to revere the tombs of Ludlow and

Broughton. While I was looking about for them a familiar name on a

tablet caught my eye, and I read that "William Walter Phelps, of New

Jersey, and Charles A. Phelps, of Massachusetts, his descendants beyond

the seas," had set it there in memory of the brave John Phelps, who was

so anxious to be known as clerk of the court which tried Charles Stuart

that he set his name to every page of its record.

That tablet was the most interesting thing in the old church; but I

found Vevay quaint and attractive in every way. It is, as all the world

knows, the paradise of pensions and hotels and boarding-schools, and one

may live well and study deeply there for a very little money. It was

part of our mission to lunch at the most gorgeous of the hotels, and to

look upon such of our fellow-countrymen as we might see there, after our

long seclusion at Villeneuve; and we easily found all the splendor and

compatriotism we wanted. The hotel we chose stood close upon the lake,

with a superb view of the mountains, and its evergreens in tubs stood

about the gravelled spaces in a manner that consoled us with a sense of

being once more in the current of polite travel. The waiter wanted none

of our humble French, but replied to our timorous advances in that

tongue in a correct and finally expensive English. Under the stimulus of

this experience we went to a bric-à-brac shop and bought a lot of

fascinating old pewter platters and flagons, and then we went recklessly

shopping about in all directions. We even visited an exhibition of Swiss

paintings, which, from an ethical and political point of view, were

admirable; and we strolled delightedly about through the market, where

the peasant women sat and knitted before their baskets of butter, fruit,

cheese, flowers, and grapes, and warbled their gossip and their bargains

in their angelic Suissesse voices, while their husbands priced the

cattle and examined the horses. It was all very picturesque, and

prophesied of the greater picturesqueness of Italy, which we were soon

to see.

V

In fact, there was a great deal to make one think of Italy in that

region; but the resemblance ended mostly with the Southern architecture

and vegetation. Our lake coast had its own features, one of the most

striking of which was its apparent abandonment to the use and pleasure

of strangers. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the water was

everywhere bordered by hotels and pensions. Such large places as Vevay

and Lausanne had their proper life, of course, but of smaller ones, like

Montreux, the tourist seemed to be in exclusive possession. In our walks

thither we met her--when the tourist was of that sex--young, gay,

gathering the red leaves of the Virginia-creeper from the lakeward

terraces of the highway; we met him, old, sick, pale, munching the sour

grapes, and trying somehow to kill the time. Large listless groups of

them met every steamboat from which we landed, and parties of them

encountered us on every road. "A hash of foreigners," the Swiss call

Montreux, and they scarcely contribute a native flavor to the dish. The

Englishman no longer characterizes sojourn there, I should say; the

Americans, who pay and speak little or no French, and the Russians, who

speak beautiful French but do not pay, are there in about equal

abundance; there are some French people; but if it came to my laying my

hand upon my heart, I should say there seemed more Germans than any

other nationality at Montreux. They are not pretty to look at, and

apparently not pleasant; and it is said that the Swiss, who digest them

along with the rest of us, do not like them. In fact, the Germans seem

everywhere to take their new national consequence ungraciously.

Besides the foreigners, there is not much to see at Montreux, though one

must not miss the ancient church which looks out from its lofty place

over the lake, and offers the visitor many seats on its terrace for the

enjoyment of the same view. The day we went he had pretty well covered

the gravel with grape-skins; but he had left the prospect undisturbed.

What struck me principally in Montreux was its extreme suitability to

the purposes of the international novelist. It was full of sites for

mild incidents, for tacit tragedies, for subdued flirtations, and

arrested improprieties. I can especially recommend the Kursaal at

Montreux to my brother and sister fictionists looking about for a pretty

_entourage_. Its terrace is beaten by the billows of the restless lake,

and in soft weather people sit at little tables there; otherwise they

take their ices inside the café, and all the same look out on the

Dent-du-Midi, and feel so bored with everybody that they are just in the

humor to be interested in anybody. There is a very pretty theatre in the

Kursaal, where they seldom give entertainments, but where, if you ever

go, you see numbers of pretty girls, and in a box a pale,

delicate-looking middle-aged Englishman in a brown velvet coat, with his

two daughters. The concert will be very good, and a young man of

cultivated sympathies and disdainful tastes could have a very pleasant

time there. For the rest, Montreux offers to the novelist's hand perhaps

the crude American of the station who says it is the cheapest place he

has struck, and he is going to stick it out there awhile; perhaps the

group of chattering American school-girls; perhaps the little Jewish

water-color painter who tells of his narrow escape from the mad dog,

which having broken his chain at Bouveret, had bitten six persons on the

way to Clarens, and been killed by the gendarmes near Vevay; perhaps two

Englishwomen who talk for half an hour about their rooms at the hotel,

and are presently joined by their husbands, who pursue the subject.

These are the true features of modern travel, and for a bit of pensive

philosophy, or to have a high-bred, refined widow with a fading sorrow

encountered by a sensitive nature of the other sex, there is no better

place than the sad little English church-yard at Montreux. It is full of

the graves of people who have died in the search for health far from

home, and it has a pathos therefore which cannot be expressed. The

stones grow stained and old under the laurels and hollies, and the

rain-beaten ivy creeps and drips all over the grassy mounds. Yes, that

is a beautiful, lonely, heart-breaking place. Now and again I saw

black-craped figures silently standing there, and paid their grief the

tribute of a stranger's pang as I passed, happy with my children by my

side.