VII

Early in October, before the vintage began, we seized the first fine

day, which the Dent-du-Midi lifted its cap of mists the night before to

promise, and made an early start for the tour of the lake. Mademoiselle

and her cousins came with us, and we all stood together at the steamer's

prow to watch the morning sunshine break through the silvery haze that

hung over Villeneuve, dimly pierced by the ghostly poplars wandering up

the road beside the Rhone. As we started, the clouds drifted in

ineffable beauty over the mountain-sides; one slowly dropped upon the

lake, and when we had sailed through it we had come in sight of the

first town on the French border, which the gendarmes of the two nations

seemed to share equally between them. All these lake-side villages are

wonderfully picturesque, but this first one had a fancy in chimney-tops

which I think none of the rest equalled--some were twisted, some shaped

like little chalets; and there were groups of old wood-colored roofs and

gables which were luxuries of color. A half-built railroad was

struggling along the shore; at times it seemed to stop hopelessly; then

it began again, and then left off, to reappear beyond some point of hill

which had not yet been bored through or blown quite away. I have never

seen a railroad laboring under so many difficulties. The landscape was

now grand and beautiful, like New England, now pretty and soft, like Old

England, till we came to Evains-les-Bains, which looked like nothing but

the French watering-place it was. It looked like a watering-place that

would be very gay in the season; there were lots of pretty boats; there

was a most official-looking gendarme in a cocked hat, and two jolly

young priests joking together; and there were green, frivolous French

fishes swimming about in the water, and apparently left behind when the

rest of the brilliant world had flown.

Here the little English artist who had been so sociable all the way from

Villeneuve was reinforced by other Englishmen, whom we found on the much

more crowded boat to which we had to change. Our company began to

diversify itself: there were French and German parties as well as

English. We changed boats four times in the tour of the lake, and each

boat brought us a fresh accession of passengers. By-and-by there came

aboard a brave Italian, with birds in cages and gold-fish in vases, with

a gay Southern face, a coral neck button, a brown mustache and imperial,

and a black-tasselled red fez that consoled. He was the vividest bit of

color in our composition, though we were not wanting in life without

him. There began to be some Americans besides ourselves, and a pretty

girl of our nation, who occupied a public station at the boat's prow,

seemed to know that she was pretty, but probably did not. She will

recognize herself in this sketch; but who was that other pretty maiden,

with brown eyes wide apart, and upper lip projecting a little, as if

pulled out by the piquant-nose? I must have taken her portrait so

carefully because I thought she would work somewhere into fiction; but

the reader is welcome to her as she is. He may also have the

_spirituelle_ English girl who ordered tea, and added, "I want some

kätzchens with my tea." "Kätzchens! Kätzchen is a little cat." "Yes;

it's a word of my own invention." These are the brilliant little

passages of foreign travel that make a voyage to Europe worth while. I

add to this international gallery the German girl in blue calico, who

had so strong a belief that she was elegantly dressed that she came up

on deck with her coffee, and drank it where we might all admire her. I

intersperse also the comment that it is the Germans who seem to prevail

now in any given international group, and that they have the air of

coming forward to take the front seats as by right; while the English,

once so confident of their superiority, seem to yield the places to

them. But I dare say this is all my fancy.

I am sure, however, of the ever-varying grandeur and beauty of the Alps

all round us. Those of the Savoyard shore had a softer loveliness than

the Swiss, as if the South had touched and mellowed them, as it had the

light-colored trousers which in Geneva recalled the joyous pantaloons of

Italy. These mountains moulded themselves one upon another, and deepened

behind their transparent shadows with a thousand dimmer and tenderer

dyes in the autumnal foliage. From time to time a village, gray-walled,

brown-roofed, broke the low helving shore of the lake, where the poplars

rose and the vineyards spread with a monotony that somehow pleased; and

at Nyon a twelfth-century castle, as noble as Chillon, offered the

delight of its changing lines as the boat approached and passed.

At Geneva we had barely time to think Rousseau, to think Calvin, to

think Voltaire, to drive swiftly through the town and back again to the

boat, fuming and fretting to be off. There is an old town, gravely

picturesque and austerely fine in its fine old burgherly, Calvinistic,

exclusive way; and outside the walls there is a new town, very clean,

very cold, very quiet, with horse-cars like Boston, and a new

Renaissance theatre like Paris. The impression remains that Geneva is

outwardly a small moralized Bostonian Paris; and I suppose the reader

knows that it has had its political rings and bosses like New York. It

also has an exact reproduction of the Veronese tombs of the Scaligeri,

which the eccentric Duke of Brunswick, who died in Geneva, willed it the

money to build; like most fac-similes, they are easily distinguishable

from the original, and you must still go to Verona to see the tombs of

the Scaligeri. But they have the real Mont Blanc at Geneva, bleak to the

eye with enduring snow, and the Blue Rhone, rushing smooth and swift

under the overhanging balconies of quaint old houses. With its neat

quays, azure lake, symmetrical hotel fronts, and white steamboats,

Geneva was like an admirable illustration printed in colors, for a

holiday number, to imitate a water-color sketch.

When we started we were detained a moment by conjugal affection. A lady,

who had already kept the boat waiting, stopped midway up the gang-plank

to kiss her husband in parting, in spite of the captain's loud cries of

"Allez! Allez!" and the angry derision of the passengers. We were in

fact all furious, and it was as much as a mule team with bells, drawing

a wagon loaded with bags of flower, and a tree growing out of a tower

beside the lake, could do to put me in good-humor. Yet I was not really

in a hurry to have the voyage end; I was enjoying every moment of it,

only, when your boat starts, you do not want to stop for a woman to kiss

her husband.

Again we were passing the wild Savoyard shore, where the yellow tops of

the poplars jutted up like spires from the road-sides, and on the

hill-sides tracts of dark evergreens blotted their space out of the

vaster expanses of autumn foliage; back of all rose gray cliffs and

crags. Now and then we met a boat of our line; otherwise the blue

stretch of the water was broken only by the lateen-sails of the

black-hulked lake craft. At that season the delicate flame of the

Virginia-creeper was a prominent tint on the walls all round the lake.

Lausanne, which made us think Gibbon, of course, was a stately stretch

of architecture along her terraces; Vevay showed us her quaint market

square, and her old church on its heights; then came Montreux with its

many-hotelled slopes and levels, and chalets peeping from the brows of

the mountains that crowd it upon the lake. All these places keep

multitudes of swans, whose snow reddened in the sunset that stained the

water more and more darkly crimson till we landed at Villeneuve.