[Illustration: THE DENTS D'OCHE, SAVOY ALPS.]
_Beautiful Europe_
_The Lake of Geneva_
_By
Joseph E Morris_
[Illustration]
_A. & C. Black, Limited.
Soho Square London W
1919_
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. THE DENTS D'OCHE, SAVOY ALPS _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. THE JURA RANGE FROM THONON, HAUTE SAVOIE 9
3. GENEVA FROM THE ARVE 16
4. SUNSET ON MONT BLANC FROM ABOVE GENEVA 25
5. THE DENTS DU MIDI FROM GRYON, ABOVE BEX 32
6. THE SAVOY ALPS IN WINTER, FROM THE ROAD TO CAUX 35
7. EVIAN-LES-BAINS, HAUTE SAVOIE 38
8. NYON CASTLE, LOOKING ACROSS THE LAKE TO MONT BLANC 43
9. THE SAVOY ALPS IN SUMMER, FROM VILLENEUVE 46
10. LAUSANNE CATHEDRAL FROM MONTBENON 49
11. MONTREUX FROM THE LAKE: AUTUMN 56
12. CHILLON AND RHONE VALLEY FROM VEYTAUX _On the cover_
THE LAKE OF GENEVA
I.
Whether you feel sympathy, or not, with Calvin, the theologian, who
gave us, at not more than twenty-eight years of age, the epoch-making
Christian Institutes, or with Calvin, the inflexible governor, who
helped to put to death poor Michael Servetus outside the city wall of
Geneva, on the garden slopes of Champel, you can hardly fail to realize
at least some transient flicker of interest when you contemplate,
beneath its solitary fir-tree, and hard by a clump of box, the small,
white, oblong stone--it is less than a foot long, and marked simply
with the initials J. C.--that is supposed to mark the grave, in the
old crowded cemetery near the Plaine du Plainpalais, of Jean Calvin,
the politician and man. The cemetery itself is a little hard to find,
for it lies hidden away in a commonplace back-quarter of the city,
in a part that is far removed from all that is brightest, and most
cosmopolitan, and therefore most familiar, in Geneva. Nor, even when
you find it, is this grave of Calvin obvious, lost, as it is, amongst
a thousand other tombs which rise in some disorder from amidst an
inextricable tangle of daisies and long rank grass, of lady's-smock and
dandelions. As happens almost always in old burial-grounds in Scotland,
there is here an eloquent lack of Christian symbols: Catholics are
buried here as well as Protestants, but the spirit of iconoclasm is
none the less supreme--plenty of broken columns, of import purely
Pagan, but never, I think, the Cross, lest it savour of superstition.
This, too, was Wordsworth's experience in the burial-ground at Dumfries:
"'Mid crowded obelisks and urns
I sought the untimely grave of Burns."
Yet here, in this half-forgotten old graveyard, where Calvin was
laid to rest when not quite fifty-five years of age, at least there
is none of that nightmare horror that broods over Knox's cenotaph in
the Necropolis at Glasgow. Calvin and Knox! We group the two in fancy
when we stand here in this silent spot, on the edge of that same
Geneva--how transfigured to-day in outward aspect not less than in
mental outlook!--where Knox once ministered for more than a year in
the little church of the Auditoire, and where Calvin once ruled with a
rod of iron. At any rate this sombre old burial-ground, when so much
else in the Geneva of to-day is almost aggressively gay and modern, is
surely not unfitted for the last repose of a spirit so austere, and of
logic so relentless. And this is what is written above the entrance:
"Heureux ceux qui meurent au Seigneur. Ils reposent de leurs travaux et
leurs oeuvres les suivent."
Calvin, indeed, is inseparably connected with the greatest moment in
Geneva's history. His rule for nearly a quarter of a century of this
little city state is chosen by Lord Morley in his Romanes lecture
at Oxford in 1897 as an outstanding illustration of what can be
accomplished by moral forces in the absence of giant armies and big
guns. It is impossible, in fact, to think of historical Geneva without
thinking of Calvin, though Calvin himself was by birth a Frenchman,
and hailed from the sleepy little city of Noyon (the German guns have
spared it), in the department of the Aisne. Rousseau, on the other
hand, though Genevese by birth, seems to belong more properly to the
French Revolution, and to France. The tall, white tenement where the
future author of the "Contrât Social" lived as a child may still be
seen in the St. Gervais quarter, on the right bank of the river, at
the junction, if I recollect rightly, of the present Rue Rousseau with
the Place de Chevelu, in close proximity to a modiste's establishment
and to a shop for the sale of fishing-tackle, and virtually, if not
wholly, within sight and hearing of the music and blue swiftness of the
Rhone. Actually, however, he was born in his maternal grandfather's
house, which has since been pulled down, in the Grande Rue, towards the
summit of the hill that is crowned by the Cathedral, in the high-town
of Geneva. The old workman's quarter of St. Gervais is perhaps seldom
visited by Englishmen, though everybody skirts it, perhaps half-a-dozen
times a day, as they traverse the very modern Rue du Mont Blanc
on their way to the main railway station, or to the splendid new
Hôtel-des-Postes. Yet its eighteenth-century streets--this is possibly
their date--are at least as full of interest, and are certainly far
more typical, than the Parisian-like blocks of new houses that front
the modern quays. If you want to realize the aspect of old Geneva
properly, before the advent of the railway and the hordes of modern
trippers, you should study the curious model now preserved in the
splendid new Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, in the Rue des Casemates.
Then it had no front, in the ordinary sense, towards the lake; and
the islands in the Rhone were laden with quaint old tenements.
Moreover, the whole city was then surrounded by a ring of many-angled
fortifications in the familiar manner of Vauban.
[Illustration: THE JURA RANGE FROM THONON, HTE. SAVOIE.]
If the actual birth-place of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the Grande Rue
has perished, no better piece of luck has befallen the house, at No.
11, Rue des Chanoines (now relabelled Rue Calvin), in which Calvin,
as recorded by an existing tablet, resided from 1543 to his death in
1564. To find authentic associations with Calvin we must pass into
the former Cathedral, now the Protestant Church of St. Pierre, where
is still preserved a chair on which he is said to have sat to preach.
The Cathedral itself, however, is his truest monument, for in this
he constantly preached, and in this he delivered judgment. This last
is a grand old Romanesque pile, with transeptal towers like those at
Exeter; but sadly disfigured externally by an atrocious, Classical,
eighteenth-century west front. This, with its Corinthian pillars, might
be well enough elsewhere, but is quite out of keeping, like the west
front at Fécamp, in Normandy, with the older work behind. It must also
be acknowledged that here, as at Lausanne, the austere Calvinistic
furniture is wholly out of keeping with an interior that was obviously
intended for elaborate Catholic ritual. In a very odd position, at
the south-west corner of the nave, is the striking fifteenth-century
Chapel of the Maccabées that was built in 1406 by Cardinal Jean de
Brogny, who was Bishop of Geneva between 1423 and 1426. The curious
name is met with again as far away as Amiens, and may possibly derive
from "macabre," the Chapel of the Dead: Brogny, indeed, is said to
have built this chapel with a view to his own future interment. In
the body of the church there are really several points to notice,
though at first its general aspect is repellently cold and bare. In
the chancel and south nave aisle remain a number of old stalls with
misericordes, one of the last of which is unexpectedly carved with a
frog. Other stalls have canopies, apparently much restored, the backs
of which are sculptured with figures of Prophets and Apostles, greatly
recalling those in the not far distant French cathedral of St. Claude.
Included among the rest are David and the Sybil, who was credited with
prescience of the coming birth of Christ:
"Teste David cum Sybilla."
In a chapel on the east of the south transept is the tomb, with a
modern statue, of Duke Henri de Rohan, the Protestant leader, who
was slain at the battle of Rheinfelden in 1638. The church has, of
course, been stripped of its ancient coloured glass, for we can hardly
suppose that Calvinistic Geneva of the sixteenth century lacked its
local "Blue Dick" or its incorrigible William Dowsing; but luckily two
splendid windows have somehow escaped, and are now in safe possession
in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire. One is a large figure of St. John the
Evangelist, and another of St. Julian or St. James-the-Less. Preserved
in the same collection are two fifteenth-century bench-ends, and a
fragment of broken stall canopy, that come also from the Cathedral.
Everyone should climb to the top gallery of the great south tower, for
there, on a fine day, we are best in a position--it is the highest
spot in the whole city save the adjoining leaden flèche--to study the
topography of Geneva and the surrounding country. Geneva, we then see,
though different from towns, such as Luxembourg, Richmond, or Le Puy,
whose actual site and immediate environs in themselves are striking and
beautiful, is none the less set in the heart of a general landscape
which for varied splendour and loveliness is hardly to be rivalled by
any other great city--and not at all in my experience--in the western
half of Europe. Immediately to the east spread the waters of the lake,
intensely and uniquely blue, and dotted perhaps with the graceful
lateen sails that are only found here, on Lac Leman, and again on the
Mediterranean. Owing to the direction at this point of the axis of the
lake (more or less to the north-east), which points directly at the
heart of the great central plain of Switzerland, between the Jura and
the Alps, the distance is closed along the water by no lofty chain of
hills, but merely dies away into flat and fruitful vale. To the left
of the lake, however, appears the noble limestone escarpment that
constitutes the eastern boundary of the Jura, stretching for nearly
half-a-hundred miles, like a vast blue wall, from its commencement on
the Rhone, below the city, in the neighbourhood of Bellegarde, far
away to the north-east, in the direction of Neuchâtel. The position of
Bellegarde itself is roughly fixed by the great fort at Ecluse, seen
clearly on its hill above the narrow glen of the Rhone; for at Ecluse
(well named, like Cluses, on the Avre, for the word means strait, or
narrows) Jura and Alp come close together, and confront one another
menacingly across the contracted gorge of the Rhone. The spot is almost
exactly paralleled in England by the deep valley between Tebay and
Lowgill, which is also threaded by a great trunk railway, though it
happily needs no fort; and where the Lake mountains and Howgill Fells,
which are out-liers of the so-called Pennine chain, similarly confront
one another across the shallow stream of the Lune. Commencing then
at Ecluse, where Jura challenges Alp, the line of the lower Alps may
itself be slowly traced, as we slowly turn our faces, past the Grand
and Petit Salève, which tower so immediately above Geneva itself, and
so grandly, with their long, parallel belts of gleaming white limestone
precipice, as we approach it from the lake; past the broad, rich valley
of the lower Avre, which at this point opens deeply into the mountain
bosom of Savoy; to the spot where the richly wooded Voirons sinks
gently to the azure waters of the Lake. This, if the day be dull, or
the distance indistinct, is roughly the view that the eye commands
from the Cathedral tower across the old brown roofs, immediately below
us, of the upper city of Geneva, and across the battalion of bright,
white villas that gleam from suburban woods. Contrariwise, if the
day be clear--and the number of such days in this sunny climate is
astonishingly great--the whole landscape, at any time so beautiful,
is embellished and transfigured by the presence of one grand object,
that hangs so high in heaven, though forty miles distant in a bee-line,
and that gleams so white and ætherial, that one almost hesitates for a
moment whether to address it as cloud or mountain. For there, almost
due south-east from Calvin's city, though one doubts whether Calvin's
inward-brooding eye ever brightened at its prospect, or ever heeded it
more than carelessly; there, in distant magnificence more supreme, and
in majesty of height more completely realized than is experienced to
my knowledge in the case of any other great hill in Europe (save only
by Monte Rosa possibly, as seen between Milan and Pavia); there, with
its glorious central dome enshrouded in deep masses of overwhelming
snow, and even from this distance those snows are palpably deep and
overwhelming, and not to be confounded for a moment with mere thin and
transient sprinkling; there, towering above its immediate satellites
with a complete and unquestioned supremacy that is never felt when we
see it fore-shortened, as most people come to see it, in the naked
valley of Chamonix; there, giving unity and perspective to the whole
vast and varied panorama, is the dominating presence of Mont Blanc
himself, even at this great distance still patently a king. There is a
passage in _Præterita_, recalling one in Wordsworth, in which Ruskin
describes his pure delight as a boy in the presence of the hills,
without seeking further to read their lesson, as Wordsworth learnt to
read it, and afterwards Ruskin himself, in the light of "the still sad
music of humanity." "St. Bernard of La Fontaine," he tells us in the
chapter headed "Schaffhausen and Milan," "looking out to Mont Blanc
with his child's eyes, sees above Mont Blanc the Madonna; St. Bernard
of Talloires, not the Lake of Annecy, but the dead between Martigny
and Aosta. But for me the Alps and their people were alike beautiful
in their snow and their humanity; and I wanted, neither for them nor
myself, sight of any thrones in heaven but the rocks, or of any spirits
in heaven but the clouds."
Immediately round the Cathedral, on the crest of the old acropolis,
clusters most of what is still left in Geneva of the ancient city
state. City state, in truth, it was, rather than capital, like Sion
or Berne, of a canton: the territory, in fact, of Geneva was always
insignificant, and merely a civic adjunct--a hundred odd square miles,
or so, of suburban orchard, or garden. The Canton of Geneva, in short,
was subordinate to the city, and never the city to the canton. "Quand
je secoue ma perruque," said Voltaire, "je poudre toute la République."
[Illustration: GENEVA FROM THE ARVE]
Of ancient municipal buildings, perhaps the most interesting is the
Hôtel-de-Ville, which exhibits a picturesque Renaissance staircase
or inclined plane. Opposite is the old Arsenal, with its outside
paintings--a feature that is typically Swiss. We have noticed already
the sites of the old houses that were associated respectively with
Rousseau and Calvin in the Grande Rue and the former Rue des Chanoines.
At the foot of the latter thoroughfare, in the Rue de la Pélisserie,
and also marked by a tablet, is the house in which George Eliot resided
between October, 1849, and March, 1850. From near the apse of the
Cathedral we may descend steeply to the low town along the shore of the
lake, either directly, by the Rue de la Fontaine, or, more indirectly,
by a network of little streets that cluster round the mediæval church
of the Madelaine. The Rue de la Fontaine in itself is worth a visit,
with its tall, old, shabby tenements, like those in the old town at
Edinburgh. I forget from what fountain it gets its name; but Geneva,
like other towns in Switzerland--like every village in fact--is full
of them. None, that I know, has the character, or quaintness, of some
of those at Berne; but the pretty Swiss custom of decorating them
in summer with growing flowers may be noted here with gratitude and
pleasure.
The modern splendour of Geneva, to which we descend almost reluctantly
from the old, grey, upper city on the heights, if certainly very
modern, is also certainly very splendid; and leaves us with the
impression that the front towards the quays, with its gardens, and
palatial hotels, and gigantic cafés, is one of the brightest, and
gayest, and most animated scenes anywhere to be met with on the
Continent. Moreover, it offers at least one point, where the Rhone,
like an arrow from the string, suddenly discharges itself from the
blue placidity of the lake, and storms in triumphant volume through
the openings of the bridges to swirl past the little tree-shaded
Ile-de-Rousseau and the other islands that lie behind it, where even
the quiet lover of Nature, to whom gay throngs of all sorts are
abhorrent, may feed his soul as completely with splendid, natural
spectacle as anywhere among the torrents and glaciers of the remotest
and most secluded valleys in which this magnificent stream has origin,
and from which it descends in thunder, but never in purity like this,
to traverse the whole Canton of the Valais from end to end, and to
repose at length in quiet in the lake. To lean across the west parapet
of the Pont-du-Mont Blanc at Geneva, and to gaze down into this deep
volume of absolutely transparent and deep ultramarine water that shoots
forward with Alpine strength and lightning-like rapidity, and is only
broken into sheets of seething, delicately sky-blue foam at the point
where its majestic impetuosity is arrested by the dams of the electric
works, is to come face to face with just such a combination of natural
force and loveliness as is nowhere, I think, to be found in Britain,
and perhaps at few spots in the Alps. The extraordinarily deep-blue
colour of the Lake of Geneva, and of the Rhone where it first emerges,
and before it is polluted (alas! in half-a-mile or so) by the influx of
the grey and glacier-stained Avre--till the last state of the Rhone,
below Geneva, is no better than its first, above Villeneuve--has been
the subject of comment and learned inquiry, but has never, unless
I mistake, been satisfactorily explained. Most other Alpine lakes,
whether in Switzerland or Italy, are deep, or emerald, green: and
emerald, or deep green, are the strong rivers that discharge from
them--the Linth from Zurich, or the Reuss at Lucerne, or the noble Aar
that lends grace to Thun. Tennyson tells us how Guinevere and Lancelot
rode together in the may-time woods
"Over sheets of hyacinth
That seem'd the heavens upbreaking thro' the earth;"
but to sail on a sunny day on the waters of Lake Leman is to sail on
the perfect blue of heaven itself.
This exquisite phenomenon then, which has been compared with the
tender, suffused blue that is seen when looking down into the depths
of a crevasse, has never been accounted for, though theories are not
lacking in profusion. And not only is this nascent river the most
beautifully coloured and transparent thing on earth--every pebble
at the bottom is visible through I dare not guess how many feet of
depth--but its surface is also the most lustrous in the world. Even
at night, when the moonlight glances on its water, or at least the
electric lights on the promenade and bridges, this quality of lustre,
and to some extent of colour, still remains proudly visible, when
other rivers, if still lustrous, would be black. In daylight, too,
this bridge is a pleasant spot to linger on, not merely for joy of the
crystal depths below, but for joy of the scene above. Nowhere, I think,
is Geneva seen to better purpose than hence: to the left the towers of
its ancient Cathedral, high on their crowded hill above the stream; in
the centre, the Ile-de-Rousseau, with its picturesque clump of trees;
and to the right, above more old houses, the long blue wall of Jura,
lofty enough and abrupt enough wholly to hold the eye, till, turning
with an effort, we cease to sigh for Jura, because there, though at
greater distance, are the altogether more dazzling splendours of the
Alps.
Next to the ex-Cathedral the best object of artificial attraction
in Geneva is undoubtedly the new Museum of Art and History. Few
provincial collections exceed, or even rival, it in the interest of
their specimens or their excellence of arrangement. Here, in addition
to the remains of glass and wood-work, already mentioned, from St.
Pierre, are several relics--ladders, helmets, a banner, etc.--of that
famous Escalade by which the Duke of Savoy--always an uneasy neighbour
to Geneva--attempted to take the city by stealth, and did in fact
nearly succeed in taking it, during the night of December 11-12, 1602.
Calvin had been already nearly forty years dead (in 1564), but his
old friend and disciple, Theodore Beza, in whose arms he had expired,
and who, like Calvin himself, was by birth a Frenchman, was still
living in Geneva, though then eighty-three years old; and it was Beza
who gave out the next day, in public thanksgiving in church, the
one-hundred-and-twenty-fourth Psalm ("If the Lord Himself had not been
on our side") that is said ever afterwards to have been sung on the
anniversary of the Escalade. Stored with these relics in the basement
are some important specimens of thirteenth-century glass, or even
earlier. But perhaps the chief value of the museum is to be found in
the cases upstairs, with examples, bronze and iron, of the pre-historic
ages. Here, in addition to the usual celts, daggers, spear-heads, etc.,
that one finds in all collections of the sort, is a really wonderful
assemblage of bronze bracelets, pins, knives, and razors from lake
villages; whilst the Iron Age is represented by tridents, shears,
safety-pins with spiral springs, choppers with hooked points, and
reaping-hooks, many of which exactly resemble those still in use at the
present day: the persistence of shape is really marvellous. Here too
are long, deadly pins, with big bead heads, precisely like those that
women still stick through their hats to-day, though the world is more
than two thousand years older. Here too are human tibia bones, each
with its four bronze anklets still _in situ_, and here is one end of a
"dug-out" canoe that was found in the lake, at Morges, in 1878. Some
museums of this sort are distinctly dismal; but this at Geneva is so
rich in this particular direction, and so admirably marshalled, that
even those who are little interested in origins will not regret an
hour's loss of sunshine on lake and hill.
[Illustration: SUNSET ON MONT BLANC, FROM ABOVE GENEVA.]
II.
I suppose one is justified, or even compelled, in writing even a
short sketch, such as this, of Geneva and its lake, to say something
of the valleys that penetrate southward from its basin into the
mountain highlands of Savoy. The man is to be pitied who can gaze at
the distant snows of Mont Blanc, or the Aiguille-du-Midi, from the
quays at Geneva, yet is stirred by no violent passion to view them
at closer quarters: who can linger by the junction of blue Rhone and
turbid Avre, where the streams for a space flow parallel, but do
not consent to mix, yet experiences no impulse to track up the Avre
itself to its majestic source, where it issues in volume and thunder
("magno cum murmure montis") from the foot of the Mer-de-Glace. Few
writers, in short, on Geneva fail to conduct their readers to the
bleak upland vale of Chamonix; where they may worship "at the temple's
inner shrine" what they have worshipped so long at a distance, in the
Galilee, or vestibule. I do not, however, propose to expend a deal of
space in dealing with the usual line of approach to Chamonix by way of
Bonneville and the Baths of St. Gervais, or even on Chamonix itself.
Nearly thirty years ago, when I first travelled between the two towns,
but in the reverse direction, it was necessary to drive by diligence
the whole distance between Geneva and Chamonix: now the journey that
took formerly a whole long summer day is easily effected in a few short
hours, and the old, leisurely, unrestricted view from the coupé of
the diligence is bartered away for a series of flying glimpses--and
hardly that, if the compartment is full--framed for half a minute, and
lost before fairly realized; seen, like the film of a cinematograph,
amid surroundings equally stifling and dull. From St. Gervais, it is
true, where the ordinary railway terminates and the electric line
begins, you may stand, if you like, on the open platform at the end of
the little carriage, and marvel thence, as you mount steeply, at the
depth of the wooded gorge below you, and at the fierce waters of the
Avre, and look back at the bare, brown, limestone precipices of the
colossal Tête-à-l'Ane, or forward to the more colossal snow-peaks
that tower and still tower above you in ever-increasing splendour,
till you climb at last to the bare strath of the cold, upland valley
that was once the monastic _Campus Munitus_, and are shocked perhaps
by the vulgarity and hopeless anti-climax of modern Chamonix itself.
Chamonix, indeed, though emphatically no longer a mountain village, is
picturesque enough inside in the picturesque French fashion, regarded,
as it ought to be, as a mountain "ville-de-plaisir"--as Luchon, for
instance, is picturesque in the Pyrenees, or as Mont Dore, among the
highlands of Auvergne. Visit the place in spring, when winter-sports
are over, and the tide of summer tourists has not yet commenced to
flow, or visit it in autumn, when the tide has fairly ebbed, and you
may still catch something of the solemn inspiration that filled the
soul of Coleridge when he wrote his great "Hymn to Mont Blanc." At
other times, I confess, the swarms of well-dressed idlers--they infest
the paths to the Flegère, or Montanvert, like droves of human ants,
and overflow in aimless wandering the unfenced, communal fields--are
hardly less an annoyance than Wordsworth found the ragged children who
tried to sell him pebbles when he landed on Iona. The Baths of St.
Gervais, moreover, at the bottom of the hill--not the picturesque old
village on the slopes above the Bon Nant--have been spoilt of recent
years by one of those vast electric "usines" that form so vile a menace
to the beauty of the Alps. The strath of this lower valley, from the
gorge of Cluses, past Sallanches, to Chedde, can never have been
distinguished for its charm. It is one of those lower Alpine valleys
that are absolutely flat-bottomed--they look like dried-up marsh--and
that are dusty and coarse in all their features, whether natural or
due to man: dusty and coarse in their long, straight, unfenced roads;
dusty and coarse in their wastes of tumbled boulders; dusty and coarse
in their jungle of stunted scrub; in their straggling cottages, and
untidy saw-mills; in the very flowers, parched and sun-dried, that
survive by the side of their dull, dry roads. They are bordered, of
course, by noble hills; but even these look monotonous and garish when
seen across a foreground so ragged and entirely flat. Compared with the
green valleys of the higher Alps, where the emerald pastures fall in
soft curves to the exact level of the stream, and where every scrap of
detail is fresh with moss or flower, these hot and arid vales are like
the blazing hours of noon, with its pitiless lack of shade, in contrast
with the long soft shadows of evening, or the dewy freshness of early
morn.
Now for all these reasons--the presence of the railway, the electric
works at Chedde and St. Gervais, and the dullness of the actual bottom
of the valley between St. Gervais and the "gate of the hills" at
Cluses--one would scarcely choose to travel by this orthodox route
from Geneva up to Chamonix--though fine enough in places, and almost
everywhere full of interest--provided one were offered a prettier
alternative, and one not otherwise too heavily handicapped in point of
greater distance or fatigue. Such a route, in fact, there is, though
for pedestrian, or horseman, only, which, beautiful throughout, attains
supreme and final excellence in the section that lies beyond Sixt.
Probably very few tourists of the annual thousands who visit Chamonix
are ever sufficiently adventurous to shoulder pack, or _rucksack_,
and thus desert the broad valley of the Avre, with its rather obvious
graces, for the shy and retiring loveliness of the valley of the
Giffre. The steam-tramway along the road may, I think, legitimately
be taken as far as Samoëns, where it ends; for it is at Samoëns that
the interest of the walk begins. Sixt, beyond Samoëns, is a charming
old village, at the junction of two wild Alpine streams that descend
respectively from the Buet (10,201 feet) and the Pointe de Tanneverge
(9,784 feet). Here in the Middle Ages was a small Augustinian abbey,
the domestic buildings of which are now utilized for a simple, but
clean, hotel, and the chapel of which is now the parish church. The
dining-room is the old refectory; and painted round the wall-plate of
its wooden ceiling may still be read its history: "... hoc opus fecit
fieri Hubit' de Mon XI Abbas de Six Ano. Dni. MDCXXII. Deus converset.
I.H.S. Maria."
From Sixt we ascend through forest by the side of the rushing
stream, through a landscape that is enlivened with as many splashing
waterfalls as greeted Ulysses and his companions with their music when
they came to the afternoon land of the Lotos Eaters. A little below
the Eagle's Nest, the pleasant summer home of the late Mr. Justice
Wills, the forest virtually ceases, and the road ends altogether;
and thenceforward on to Chamonix we have only a mountain track, or
mule-path, which mounts at first abruptly by a series of sudden
zig-zags, but afterwards for an interval keeps a leveller upland route
across wild and desolate pastures that lie round the big mountain tarn
known as the Lac d'Anterne, beyond which rise in superlative grandeur,
for more than two thousand feet, the giddy, sheer rock precipices of
the strangely named Tête-à-l'Ane. All this is very splendid, and every
inch of going pleasant; but I have brought you all this distance for a
single point of view that bursts suddenly into vision, without warning
or preparation. Suddenly, as perhaps you are getting a little tired, or
finding the landscape a trifle monotonous, literally almost a single
step brings you to a little break in the ridge of the opposite hill,
whence the whole majestic chain of Mont Blanc--not only the monarch
himself, but his whole range of attendant satellites and regally
shattered aiguilles, from the Aiguille du Tour, on the left, to the
Aiguille du Gouter, on the right--leaps splendidly into view--such a
vision of splintered crags, and snows of dazzling, unsullied purity,
and dark hollows of sullen glacier, and plinth of green pasture and
forest, as certainly you will not find anywhere else in the Alps, nor,
for ought I know, though the scale may be bigger, among Andes or
Himalayas. Nor does all this magnificence here rise, as it rises when
seen from closer and more familiar quarters, from the Flegère or the
Brévent, directly from the foreground of the rather shabby Vale of
Chamonix, with its electric railways to Argentière and the Montanvert,
and with its unspeakable vulgarity of an aerial flight, or whatever
they call their piece of villainy, up the pinnacles of the Aiguille
du Midi, and with Chamonix itself in the centre, a mass of obtrusive
roofs; but here it springs heavenward from above, and beyond, the
long, dark ridge of the sombre Brévent itself, which serves in its
comparative humility at once for measure and foil; whilst immediately
below us are the dark, unpeopled depths (save for a small, solitary
inn) of the upland valleys of the Diosaz and its tributary streams.
Around is utter solitude, and wherever the eye can penetrate; and in
front this unspeakably splendid chain, revealed in a single second, and
viewed in its total length. A man would perhaps do well, who wishes
to appreciate to perfection this sovereign of Alpine hills, never to
approach it more closely than this crest of the Col d'Anterne.
[Illustration: THE DENTS DU MIDI FROM GRYON, ABOVE BEX.]
III.
In America, I suppose, if you stand in the centre of the Michigan shore
of Lake Superior, you can no more make out Canada across the water than
a man can make out Normandy though he strain his eyes for ever from
Selsey or Beachy Head. A lake, in fact, may be so big that it ceases,
for all landscape effect, to be a lake at all, and becomes merely an
inland sea. Perhaps the most beautiful lakes of all are those of such
modest dimension--yet more than mere ponds or tarns--that you can
comprehend their total shore-line from some eminence on their bank, as
Buttermere, for example, is comprehended from the slopes of Red Pike,
or Loch Lomond, very nearly, from the summit of Ben Voirlich. The Lake
of Geneva, from this point of view, is much nearer Buttermere than
Lake Superior; but still, in a sense, not whimsical, but real, must
be reckoned as much too big. And not only this, but its basin also is
a hotch-pot of different kinds of scenery, and of different ranges
of hills. It is encradled, as a whole, neither in Alp nor Jura, but
lies rather in a plain between the two. It's head, indeed, penetrates
superficially into the lower Alps of Vaud; whilst the greater Alps
of the Valais, and in particular the noble Dent-de-Morcles, and the
yet nobler Dent-du-Midi, guard its upper waters at such a distance
that, though really far removed, they appear as we approach to rise
almost from its margin, and form an immediate and splendid setting
for its reaches above Evian and Vevey. Its southern shore, again, is
bordered fairly closely, for almost its whole length, by rugged Alps of
Savoy that open behind Thonon to admit glimpses even of the far-away
snows of Mont Blanc himself, revealed in crowning majesty beyond the
valley of the Dranse. So far, indeed, Lac Leman may be fairly claimed
for Alpine; but turn to the opposite shore, and we must tell another
tale. From Geneva towards Lausanne the background is formed, though
at considerable distance, by the south-east escarpment of the Jura,
whose long, level-crested wall of limestone rock--exactly like the
long limestone wall of the Pennine hills above the Vale of Eden, or
of Mendip above the marshes of mid-Somerset--affords the strongest
contrast in the world to the abruptly pointed, opposite, Savoyard
summits of the Dent d'Oche or Pointe de Grange, though not without
analogy, near the city of Geneva, in the hog-backed ridge of the Grand
Salève, which might almost belong to Jura itself. Moreover, this ridge
of Jura, which at Geneva itself is not more than some ten miles or so
away from the lake, gradually, after Rolle, or Aubonne, in its straight
course towards the north-east, trends farther and farther from the
lake, which here begins to curve towards the south, so that part of the
north shore of the lake, between Rolle and Lausanne, actually abuts
on neither Alp nor Jura, but terminates, rather tamely, on the great
central plain of Switzerland. Geneva, however, though thus diverse in
setting and scenery--for the hill forms of the Alps, to go back again
for a moment to our familiar home comparison, are as widely different
from the hill forms of the Jura as are those of English Lakeland from
those of the opposite Pennine chain--is superbly simple in shape.
It is, in fact, an almost perfect crescent, or half moon (save that
the south-east horn at Chillon is unduly blunted and truncated), the
convexity of which is turned towards the north, whilst its concave
face embraces the hills of Chablais, or Savoy. It follows that, in
order to appreciate Geneva as a whole, so far as this can ever be
achieved in the case of so big a sheet of water, it is necessary to
view it from the high ground, and from the vineyards, above Aubonne or
Lausanne, which command, more or less imperfectly, both curves of the
bending lake. It follows again that Geneva, with this form of extreme
simplicity, exhibits none of the mystery and surprises of such highly
complex lakes as Lugano or Lucerne: everything here is exceedingly
straightforward, and depends for its effect, not on continually new
grouping of interlocking ranges of hill, but on the gradual majestic
unfolding of a short series of dignified scenes.
[Illustration: THE SAVOY ALPS IN WINTER, FROM THE ROAD TO CAUX.]
It will be gathered from what has already been said that, for the
greater part of its length, the finest shore views of Geneva are
commanded from its north, or convex, margin, looking south across
splendidly broad stretches of water--opposite Thonon, where it is
nearly at its broadest, almost exactly eight miles--to the grandly
marshalled Alps of Chablais that tower above the opposite shore. To
look northward from this opposite shore, across the water to the Jura
and Central Plain, is to contemplate quite a different lake, and one
of less superlative degree. It so happens, again, that the north
shore is the more interesting of the two, by reason of the succession
of ancient and picturesque towns, such as Nyon, Rolle, Morges, and
Aubonne--to say nothing of partially modernized Vevey, and of almost
wholly modernized Lausanne (which has yet in its Cathedral a jewel
of priceless worth), or of castles like Vufflens and Chillon--that
stud its immediate shore, or lie barely a trifle inland. The best
way, no doubt, to appreciate Geneva is to sail again and again up its
gracious sheet of blue; yet no one who has leisure will repent a quiet
pilgrimage, best made I think on bicycle, to the villages and towns
along its north bank.
This pilgrimage we hope to make presently; but for the moment it
will be as well to turn our attention to the two gay watering-places
of Evian and Thonon (promoted of recent years to be Evian- and
Thonon-les-Bains, though an old Murray in my possession, published
in 1872, knows them as Evian and Thonon only), and to penetrate a
little deeper up the valley of the Dranse to the roots of the rocky
mountains that form so grand a background to the lake as viewed from
the castle terrace at Nyon, or from the cathedral porch at Lausanne.
Neither Thonon nor Evian need detain us long; for, though each has a
nucleus of ancient town, each is now rather overwhelmed by its vast
and fashionable modern hotels. Respectively they lie to the west and
east of the Dranse, which, descending in three separate streams from
the highlands of Savoy--the Dranse proper, the Dranse d'Abondance, and
the Dranse de Morzine--here pushes out in united delta into the lake.
Thonon is the capital of the old Savoyard province of Chablais, and
has actually, in excuse of its modern pretensions, a set of chalybeate
springs. Evian, however, with water containing bicarbonate of soda, is
much the quainter and pleasanter, in its ancient parts, of the two;
has also the great advantage, in comparison with Thonon, of being
situated farther to the east, and thus commanding nobler views of the
mountains above Vevey, and towards the head of the lake; and lastly is
distinguished for its pleasant, tree-shadowed promenades by the actual
water-side (whereas Thonon is on the cliff above the lake), whence you
see across the blue expanse the white houses of Lausanne, clustered in
profusion on the sunny slopes of the opposite shore, or twinkling in
the twilight with a million electric lamps. No one should quit either
Evian or Thonon without making first an "inland voyage" up the valley
of the Dranse to visit the quaint little mountain villages of Abondance
and St. Jean d'Aulph (_de Alpibus_). At Abondance is a small monastic
church, with a picturesque cloister, that dates in its inception from
as early as the sixth century; whilst at St. Jean (on the whole less
charming) are the very pretty ruins of a little Cistercian abbey that
is remarkable in more than one direction--its possession of a triforium
and some foliated capitals--for its unusually early departure from
the usual architectural severity of the early Cistercian rule. The
valley of the Dranse d'Abondance is refreshingly green and pastoral,
and is bounded in places by magnificently rocky hills; but it is only
towards its head, beyond the Chapel of Abondance, and before reaching
the low pass that leads to Morgins in Switzerland, that the sudden
apparition of the splendid Dent-du-Midi--pre-eminently entitled,
notwithstanding its comparatively low height (only 10,695 feet), to
rank in point of form and truly Alpine aspect amidst the giants of the
Alps--lifts the whole landscape in a moment to the level of Alpine
sublimity. Abondance, though much frequented by French families
in summer, has absolutely nothing of the modern fashionable spirit
that is rather too apparent at Thonon or Evian-les-Bains. Its inns,
though comfortable enough for those who are not unduly fastidious,
are still genuine mountain hostelries; and the type of French family
life, though possibly wholly bourgeois, that may be studied here in
August is amusing and piquant indeed, in contrast with the rather dull
banalities of much more fashionable watering-places, such as Vichy or
Aix-les-Bains.
IV.
We come at length to that north shore of the lake which already we
have noted with critical preference. We shall penetrate no longer
amidst royally wooded hills, nor linger on mossy banks by the side of
impetuous mountain streams. Our immediate natural environment, on the
contrary, will now be comparatively dull; but by way of compensation
we shall have always across the water, provided the day be clear, the
massed and tumultuous grouping of those stern and shapely mountains of
Savoy, which hitherto we have inspected, in the three secluded valleys
of the Dranse, by sample and parcel only (as one cannot see the
wood for the number of the trees). Moreover, instead of fashionable
Thonon, and perhaps still more fashionable Evian, we have now in rapid
succession a series of villages and small towns, along the actual
margin of the lake, that are mostly of very old-world aspect, and often
of some historical regard. We shall begin, however, by deserting the
actual littoral for a short digression inland over the frontier into
France, to visit one of those two or three great literary shrines that
are connected with Lac Leman, and are not without interest to the
student of the French Revolution and of modern thought.
[Illustration: EVIAN LES BAINS, HTE. SAVOIE.]
From Geneva to Ferney Voltaire is a pleasant jaunt of about five
miles. There is a steam-tramway along the road, but this hardly
detracts from its agreeable rurality, which is remarkable, as we first
quit Geneva, for its number of good and old-fashioned residences,
and especially for the abundance and luxuriant growth of the timber
along its borders, which is more English-like in character than one
usually finds in France. Ferney consists of a single long street of
white houses, backed, as we approach it, by the long blue wall of the
Jura, towards whose foot we have been steadily advancing ever since
Calvin's Geneva was left behind. From Calvin's Geneva to Voltaire's
Ferney is a journey, long indeed in the history of human thought,
but quickly enough effected on bicycle or foot. The château where
Voltaire lived from 1759 to 1777 lies towards the head of the village,
and was built, like most of the village, by the philosopher himself.
Unhappily, it is shown only in summer, and then only on a single
afternoon in the week; but as it is said to have been greatly altered
since Voltaire's residence--though his bedroom still remains--little,
perhaps, is missed, especially as the front of the house is well seen
through the iron gates at the end of the public drive, as well as the
little chapel to the left that he raised to the honour of God: "Deo
Erexit Voltaire." Whatever view may be formed of Voltaire's religious
and ethical opinions, undoubtedly there are aspects of his life to be
praised. It was at Ferney that he caused to be educated, under his
superintendence, the grandniece of the dramatist Corneille, whom he
had "rescued from extreme want," and whom he endowed with the proceeds
of an edition of her ancestor's works that he himself was at pains
to edit. It was at Ferney, again, that he interested himself so
passionately in denouncing the breaking on the wheel of poor Jean Calas
by the Parliament and priests of Toulouse. English poets, no doubt,
have conspired to present his character in a very unfavourable light.
His contemporary, Cowper, writes of him:
"The Scripture was his jest book, whence he drew
_Bon-mots_ to gall the Christian and the Jew;"
whilst Wordsworth styles his "Optimist," or makes his "Wanderer" style
it:
"this dull product of a scoffer's pen,
Impure conceits discharging from a heart
Hardened by impious pride."
It is fair after this to recall what is said by Mr. Lecky: "The
spirit of intolerance sank blasted beneath his genius. Wherever his
influence passed, the arm of the Inquisitor was palsied, the chain of
the captive riven, the prison door flung open. Beneath his withering
irony persecution appeared not only criminal but loathsome, and since
his time it has ever shrunk from observation, and masked its features
under other names. He died leaving a reputation that is indeed far from
spotless, but having done more to destroy the greatest of human curses
than any other of the sons of men."
[Illustration: NYON CASTLE, LOOKING ACROSS THE LAKE TO MONT BLANC.]
From Ferney we return to Switzerland, and the shores of the lake, at
Versoix, which impresses one disagreeably as dusty and untidy, though
the Duc de Choiseul in the eighteenth century destined it as a rival
to Geneva. "A pier was built," says Murray, "a Grand' Place laid down,
streets running at right angles were marked out; but beyond this the
plan was never carried into execution. Hence the verses of Voltaire:
"'A Versoix nous avons des rues,
Et nous n'avons point de maisons.'"