does not note them in merely passing through as one notes the streets
of Winchelsea (where the town, however, was built, though it since
has largely perished). At Coppet, which comes next in succession, but
before reaching which the Canton of Geneva is exchanged for Canton
Vaud, the village, in pleasant contrast, is entirely delightful, with
a little church that faces directly on the street, and that has a
picturesque flamboyant west front and a delightful little bell-turret.
This sleepy little village is the second literary shrine that we
encounter on our pilgrimage along the northern shore of Lac Leman; for
here, in the ancient château on the slope above the lake, was the home
for many years (between 1790 and 1804) of the famous Monsieur Necker,
Minister of Finance to Louis XVI., and the occasional home, both then
and later, of his still more famous daughter, the Baroness de Staël.
Necker, of course, was Genevois by birth, though German by descent,
and even Anglo-Irish. According to Carlyle, he was a man of boundless
vanity: "Her father is Minister, and one of the gala personages; to his
own eyes the chief one ... 'as Malebranche saw all things in God, so
M. Necker sees all things in Necker'--a theorem that will not hold."
Madame de Staël is perhaps now best remembered for her letters; but it
is worth recalling at this moment, when the German genius has again
been weighed in the balance and found wanting, that it was her book
of German eulogy ("De l'Allemagne," published in London in 1813) that
did for the German genius in France something of the same sort of
friendly office that Carlyle himself performed for it in England. She
is remarkable, too, indirectly, as the subject of an epigram, as neat
in its way, and as cutting, as that which we have cited of her father.
Napoleon, when he banished her, summed up her talents in a line (it
may well have been unjust): "la manie qu'elle a d'écrire sur tout et
à propos de rien." She died at Paris in 1817, and is buried here at
Coppet; but I have not sought her grave. The château, at any rate, may
be easily found, for it stands high above the town, a picturesque old
pile, with the delightful mellow colouring--white walls, with gay green
blinds, and vast slopes of soft brown roof--that for some odd reason
unexplored is never found in England, but obtrudes itself at every turn
in Switzerland, or Italy, or France. It is built round a courtyard, the
entrance to which is framed outside with masses of wistaria.
From Coppet on to Nyon the way is well enough, with the azure levels of
the lake for companion on the right, and with Jura, of a darker blue,
like a rampart on the left. Nyon, placed pleasantly just short of the
point where the lake broadens suddenly from about three to about seven
miles by a huge expansion to the south, and thus at the termination
of the so-called Petit Lac, whose littoral we have hitherto followed
from Versoix, and less closely from Geneva, is one of those delightful
old towns--Rolle and Morges belong to the same category--that lend
such grace and character to the Swiss shore of the lake, and have such
delightful inland parallels at Aubonne, Morat, and Moudon. Morat, I
suppose, though it lacks the glorious lake, and the majestic distant
snows, here still visible, of Mont Blanc, must carry away the palm as
a triumph of pure mediævalism; but, Morat put aside, there is hardly
another small town in Switzerland so wholly delightful as this (the
Roman _Noviodunum_) in its charm of situation, or so rich in varied
combination of artificial and natural grace. High above the quays rises
the old sixteenth-century castle, the residence of the Bernese bailiffs
at a time when Canton Vaud was a mere appanage of Berne, though Geneva
still succeeded in maintaining her independence. You may reach it from
the shore by a multiplicity of ways--directly, by one of the narrow
lanes that climb steeply from the lake; or, less painfully, by the
broad terrace walk that rises gradually westward below the old town
wall, through avenues of tortured plane-trees of the familiar foreign
type, to the pleasant Promenade des Maronniers, with its growth of
vigorous chestnuts, and its splendid prospect of lake and mountain.
From here, or from the sister terrace that lies to the south of the
château, the opposite hills of Chablais are now become noble objects:
not merely Mont Blanc himself, always and insistently a king, but
lesser rocky heights that lack only summer snow--the Dent d'Oche beyond
Evian, the Pointe de Grange and the Cornette de Bise (curiously enough,
according to some maps--and anyhow there is only a difference of a
mètre--both exactly of the same height, and each of them, still more
curiously, just exactly 8,000 feet high) on either side of Abondance,
and the pinnacled Roc d'Enfer--to justify as attendant squires to their
great and peerless king. On the way between the two terraces is passed
the parish church, in part, I think, of the fifteenth century, but
with traces of Romanesque. The castle itself, on its sovereign brow,
is picturesque enough, with its round towers at the corners (but one
is octagonal), and its extinguisher, or pepper-pot, turrets--which are
found again in Scotland, who borrowed so industriously from France, but
never, I think, in England--and with its curious wooden galleries in
an additional courtyard to the east. Inside is the town museum, with
some lake village antiquities of the Bronze Age, in addition to the
usual banalities of stuffed animals and birds: it is perhaps just worth
visiting when the door is open, but hardly when you have to get the key.
[Illustration: THE SAVOY ALPS IN SUMMER. FROM VILLENEUVE.]
From Nyon on to Rolle we still keep closely to the lake, though never
on its margin, past unfenced woods at intervals that invite us to
step aside to hunt for lily-of-the-valley and Solomon's seal in their
"green of the forests' night." Always across the water are the solemn,
splendid summits of Savoy: always on our left the level line of Jura,
which after Rolle, however, retires from the lake to give place to the
central plain of Switzerland, which here debouches on the waters till
we meet the Alps beyond Lausanne. Rolle is another quaint old town,
consisting chiefly of one long, old-fashioned street, with another
typical castle placed at its farther end; but in this case both town
and castle are built wholly on the level, on the margin of the lake.
The Dent-du-Midi is now visible to the right of the Pointe de Grange,
but has not yet assumed the isolated supremacy that it wears presently
in the landscape, being partly merged for the moment in the company
of hills. A little beyond Rolle a turning to the left mounts slowly
up the hill past a lonely little burial-ground, and through the rich
vineyards of La Côte, to the upland town of Aubonne. I took this road
myself on a mild evening towards the close of April, chiefly because
I was drawn to Aubonne by what Byron wrote of it in his Journal under
date September 29, 1816. "In the evening reached Aubonne (the entrance
and bridge something like that of Durham), which commands by far the
finest view of the Lake of Geneva; twilight; the moon on the lake;
a grove on the height, and of very noble trees. Here Tavernier (the
Eastern traveller) bought (or built) the château, because the site
resembled and equalled that of _Erivan_, a frontier city of Persia;
here he finished his voyages, and I this little excursion,--for I am
within a few hours of Diodati, and have little more to see, and no
more to say." I am not sorry that I took this road, for, ever mounting
higher, it commands ever wider and wider views of the crescent lake,
whose centre we now approach, in both directions, with the glorious
Chablais mountains embraced in its noble curve. Aubonne, however, is no
more like Durham--I speak, of course, of my own impressions: Byron
saw it with different eyes--than any other old town that is perched on
the edge of a winding ravine, with a river and bridge at the bottom.
Certainly any resemblance it has--I do not admit any--is due to natural
situation, and not at all to artificial charm. The parish church, which
contains, however, the grave of the great Admiral Duquesne, who is
commemorated by a statue in the market square of his native town of
Dieppe, is apparently of little architectural interest (I did not get
inside), and the castle is of no account at all. Durham to my ignorance
has only one real rival, where the great red-brick cathedral and castle
of Albi are piled above the Tarn like Durham above the Wear. It is
worth your while, however, to make this digression to Aubonne (quite
a pretty little town) for the sake of the long ascent from Rolle,
through miles of purple vineyard, and for the sake of the journey
back to Morges, where we regain the margin of the lake and the main
highroad from Geneva to Lausanne. The descent, by way of contrast, is
through continuous apple-orchard and meadow, the pink and white blossom
floating freely round your shoulders as you pursue the unfenced road in
middle spring.
[Illustration: LAUSANNE CATHEDRAL FROM MONTBENON.]
Morges is another quaint old town, with yet another quaint old castle,
and with a glorious view of Mont Blanc, seen in this case in long
perspective up the valley of the Dranse, which opens deeply through
the heart of the Savoyard mountains on the opposite shore of the lake.
It is worth while landing here for a few hours, if only to mount the
slopes behind the town, deep with wood and orchard, to the noble
old castle of Vufflens, which is perhaps the best of its class in
Switzerland. Seen from the surface of the lake--and it is seen thence
conspicuously--this has a very modern look, and suggests that the
whole building has been grossly over-restored. You never doubt, in
fact, that the place is still inhabited, and most likely furbished up
to the point of loss of interest. You approach with heavy heart, but
are pleasantly surprised to find only part of the pile still occupied,
apparently as a farm, whilst the whole is quite unspoilt. The plan
is widely different from that of Nyon or Chillon (themselves not
really similar), and absolutely unparalleled by anything in Britain.
Tower-houses were still built in England as late as the fifteenth
century--Tattershall in Lincolnshire is a prominent example--but
these were not really keeps; and they were primarily meant, not for
places of refuge in the last resort, but principally for residence
and comfort. The great fourteenth-century donjon at Vufflens, on the
contrary, is plainly intended for defence not less than the Tower of
London in the eleventh century, or than Rochester keep in the twelfth.
Moreover, this enormous tower--it is one hundred and sixty feet high,
and thus again without equal or rival in England, though formerly
surpassed by the great cylinder at Coucy-le-Château in France, which
was actually about two hundred feet--is girt about its base with four
lower towers, or satellites, as though for extra strength: the whole
is very grim and menacing. It is built of yellow brick, and everywhere
heavily machicolated. The vaulted kitchen, towards the basement, has a
very striking fireplace, with a vine pattern running round in a deeply
hollowed moulding. A vice, or spiral stair, ascends in the thickness
of the south wall, which is thickened out to hold it in the form of a
circular turret. Most of the roof is modern; but the visitor should
notice the heavy wooden shutters that close the big, segmental-headed
openings for hurling stones or shooting arrows, and that run on wheels
in wooden troughs, so that a man might discharge his missile and
immediately close the aperture ere the enemy could reply. The view,
of course, is magnificent, and would alone repay the climb, unless
the visitor happens to be giddy-headed. To the south of this great
tower lies an open courtyard, and to the south of this, again, is the
dwelling-house, or palace. This planning, in my experience, is unique;
but there seems to be something like it (I speak only from distant
view) at the great country castle of the Bishops of Lausanne at Lucens,
which forms so conspicuous and delightful a feature on the hill on the
west side of the valley of the Broye between Moudon and Payerne, in
that delightful central vale of Switzerland that is perhaps so seldom
visited, yet combines such unexpected charm of pleasantly pastoral
landscape with such wealth of old-world interest as we find at Avenches
(the Roman _Aventicum_), Morat, and Estavayer.
I mention these places with less reluctance, though certainly not
on the shores of Lac Leman, because they may all be easily visited
from Lausanne, and to some degree may even be thought connected
with it--Lucens, because the Bishop-Princes of Lausanne (who, like
the Bishop-Princes of Coire, were also Electors of the Holy Roman
Empire) had here a noble hunting-seat; Moudon, because its lovely
thirteenth-century church is supposed to exhibit close analogies to
Lausanne Cathedral; and Avenches, because this was actually the seat
of the Bishop's stool before this was translated to Lausanne by Bishop
Marius in 590. Lausanne itself is now a city of very modern aspect,
stretching with its villas in the usual straggling Helvetic fashion--in
contrast with the neat compactness of France: Neuchâtel and Bienne are
other bad examples--for a distance of nearly eight miles along the
gentle slopes of Mont Jorat that impend above the lake, and presenting,
as seen from the water, a long line of clustered white houses (not
unpicturesque in distant view), crowned by the lofty tower of its
beautiful cathedral of Notre Dame. This is a purely residential city,
and gives one the same impression as Milan of superabundant prosperity
and wealth. These factors, indeed, have proved its ruin--I mean, of
course, æsthetically--for the Swiss (they are great iconoclasts) have
of recent years remodelled it so drastically that soon, one is afraid,
there will be nothing ancient left save here and there a church,
preserved like flies in amber. In every direction are fine new streets,
with splendid new houses and blocks of tenements. The result, no doubt,
will be very magnificent; but Morat is more to my taste, or Payerne.
Certain old quarters of Bâle have thus recently been levelled, and
Neuchâtel is now almost wholly of modern aspect. A city, no doubt,
belongs primarily to the people who inhabit it; they have to live their
lives in it, and consult their own convenience; but at least one may be
permitted to hope that this sort of civic madness will not hastily lay
criminal hands on Geneva, or Berne, or Fribourg.
Lausanne itself is built at some little height above the lake, and
visitors land from the steamer at Ouchy, which at once is port and
suburb. Here, "at a small inn" (then the Ancre, but now the Hôtel
d'Angleterre: everything at Lausanne expands to over-maturity), Byron
wrote his "Prisoner of Chillon," perhaps the best of his poems in
irregular metre, in the short space of two days, whilst detained "by
stress of weather," "thereby adding one more deathless association to
the already immortalized localities of the Lake." From Ouchy ascend
at once by cable tramway, unless you have a particular fancy for
perambulating miles of new streets, to the old "cité" on the height;
and climb at once to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Here, standing at the
entrance to the great south porch, with its noble Romanesque statuary,
and with its glorious views across the water to the splendidly rocky
summits of Savoy, you can easily forget the gay swarms of pacing
idlers, and even a great bun-shop that for vastness and magnificence
(and Lausanne has less than fifty thousand souls!) would strike you
with astonishment in Piccadilly or Regent Street. This Cathedral of
Notre Dame is of about the same length as Beverley Minster, or King's
College Chapel at Cambridge; and is not only a splendid example of
thirteenth-century architecture (the classic moment of Gothic), but
far and away the finest monument of ecclesiastical art in Switzerland.
Protestant since 1536, when its Bishop was deposed--he has now his
throne at Fribourg--the interior suffers, of course, from the usual
cold and bare austerity that characterizes a Calvinistic place of
worship hardly less in Switzerland than Holland. Of recent years,
however, it has been lovingly restored, and the lack of Catholic
furniture and ritual--I write always from the æsthetic point of view,
and never from that of divinity--is perhaps felt no worse at Lausanne,
or, for the matter of that, at Geneva, than it is felt in Dunblane
or Glasgow Cathedral. Remarkable externally is the north-west tower,
with its curious open-work buttresses like those at Bamberg and Laon:
remarkable inside are the early sixteenth-century stalls, now misplaced
in the south nave aisle; the extravagant complication of the vaulting
system in the nave (it is different in almost every bay); the exquisite
beauty of the south end of the south transept; and the four or five
recumbent effigies, or monuments, of mediæval Bishops that are still
allowed on sufferance in this abode of rigid presbyterianism. One of
these is said in Murray (but Baedeker ignores it) to be that of Pope
Felix V., previously Duke of Savoy and Bishop of Geneva, who retired
from the Papal throne to end his days as a mere monk at Ripaille, near
Thonon, and died there in the monastery in 1451.
[Illustration: MONTREUX FROM THE LAKE--AUTUMN.]
Eastward from Lausanne, the hills, now foot-stools of the Alps,
drop more immediately to the actual margin of the lake than any yet
encountered from Geneva to Lausanne. From top to bottom they are
richly dotted with vineyards, with hardly a green field in between;
and everywhere among these vineyards, on the slope of the hillside,
are innumerable little white villages, with their mellow red-brown
roofs, clustered at frequent intervals round a central parish church.
Opposite, as we advance, the prospect of distant Alps grows more and
more magnificent, as the view opens deeper and deeper, beyond the head
of the lake, into the great valley of the Rhone. So we come at last
to Vevey, the second town of Vaud, from whose pleasant quay, with
its lines of young chestnuts and planes, in the neighbourhood of the
Marché pier, is got what is perhaps the last good littoral view, as we
journey in this direction, of the glorious head of the lake, without
base suburban admixture to disguise and disfigure the foreground. The
Marché itself is open to the lake, but enclosed on its other three
sides by old-fashioned brown-roofed houses, among which stand out
prominent the picturesque open arcades of the Market House, and above
which, on the hill, though backed itself by charmingly wooded lines of
higher hill, rises the tower of the old town church. To the left, as
we look eastward, is the prettily timbered promontory of the Tour de
Peilz (the tower itself is visible), which luckily shuts out the long
line of villas past Clarens and Montreux; and beyond this, again, the
gaping valley of the Rhone opens in unrivalled magnificence deep into
the bosom of now considerable Alps, guarded on the left by the sharp,
horn-like precipices of the noble Dent-de-Morcles (9,775 feet), and
on the right by the still nobler, boldly cut, square summit of the
Dent-du-Midi (10,695 feet). The view is one of simple magnificence, not
of such involved and complicated hill forms as we contemplate with a
different kind of pleasure from the quays at Lucerne, but compounded
only of a few grand elements. The lights are always changing on this
stupendous mountain range; now the distant hills are intensely blue,
now purple, or red, in the sunset; now their summits stand up sharply
in an unbroken summer sky, now their edges are blurred by fleecy white
clouds, or obscured by golden mists,
"curling with unconfirm'd intent,"
but never static for a moment, or less than unearthly and beautiful.
I have spoken deliberately of this grand view from the quays at Vevey
as the last good littoral view (and I put the stress on "littoral")
that one gets of the lake as one continues on one's journey eastward
from Lausanne, or Ouchy, to Chillon. The littoral, in fact, from Vevey
as far as Chillon is now virtually a continuous line of huge, flaunting
hotels, restaurants, villas, and tea-rooms: not even the French Riviera
between Cannes and Mentone, which I take to be the second vulgarest
spot in Europe, has forfeited so entirely its original character, or,
from the scenic point of view, been so utterly ruined. The line of
devastation, it is true, is luckily very thin; and though the hills
above Montreux and Territet are themselves loaded at frequent intervals
with monster hotels, and laced in every direction with a perplexing
network of lifts and mountain railways, it must frankly be confessed
that to look at this five-mile-long string of pleasure towns from a
distance--as, for instance, from those windows of Chillon Castle that
project farthest into the lake--is a much less trying test of temper
than to contemplate the glories of the head of the lake with Territet
or Montreux for foreground. The destruction of these odd five miles
of natural loveliness--and such natural loveliness--forms part of a
fierce denunciation by the late Mr. Ruskin, which those who hardly
think at all will probably think extravagant, but which seems to
others entirely just: "You have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake
of Geneva." Clarens, indeed, was formerly a place of such exquisite
loveliness that Rousseau chose it as the ideal dwelling-place for
the heroine of his "Nouvelle Héloïse." "Allez à Vevey," he says in
the fourth book of his "Confessions," "visitez le pays, examinez les
sites, promenez-vous sur le lac, et dites si la Nature n'a pas fait
ce beau pays pour une Julie, pour une Claire, et pour un St. Preux;
mais ne les y cherchez pas." Nor was Byron, coming here in 1816, any
less enthusiastic. "I have traversed," he writes in a letter of June
27 of that year to Mr. Murray--"I have traversed all Rousseau's ground
with the 'Héloïse' before me, and am struck to a degree that I cannot
express with the force and accuracy of his descriptions and the beauty
of their reality. Meillerie, Clarens, and Vevey, and the Château de
Chillon, are places of which I shall say little, because all I could
say must fall short of the impressions they stamp." And Byron himself,
with the "Héloïse" in recollection, addresses Clarens in the third
canto of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," in the stanzas beginning--
"Clarens! sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep Love!"
which Sir Edward Bridges pronounces "exquisite." Yet not the natural
beauty of Clarens itself--
"'tis lone,
And wonderful, and deep, and hath a sound,
And sense, and sight of sweetness; here the Rhone
Hath spread himself a couch, the Alps have reared a throne"
--nor the associations with Rousseau and Byron, could save this "little
nook of mountain ground" from being sacrificed to the dictates of a
thoughtless and idle fashion. "You have destroyed the Clarens shore of
the Lake of Geneva."
One is glad indeed that the famous Castle of Chillon, with which
we must now conclude our perambulation of the north shore of the
lake, and the little walled town of Villeneuve, which now, however,
notwithstanding its name, seems ancient and venerable indeed in
comparison with this gay modernity that pulsates at its doors, should
lie just beyond the limit of this land of ruined Edens, and should thus
restore us to the right mood in which to take farewell of the Lake of
Geneva. Chillon is far from the finest castle, considered merely as a
building, in Switzerland (an honour due to Vufflens), nor, in fact,
is it even the most beautifully situated (an honour surely due to
the crag-perched residence of the old Bishop-Princes of the Valais
on the towering rock of Sion). Its chief curiosity of site is the
immense depth of water that lies immediately below its walls, which is
sometimes said (I cannot vouch for so astonishing a statement) to have
been "fathomed to the depth of 800 feet, French measure"--
"Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls:
A thousand feet in depth below
Its massy waters meet and flow;
Thus much the fathom-line was sent
From Chillon's snow-white battlement;"
but it is due neither to its value as a specimen of military
architecture, nor to its charm of situation, nor to this marvel of
subterraneous precipice, that Chillon maintains the extended reputation
that renders it perhaps the most visited and best known of all the many
famous castles of the world. Its cult is rather due to its association
with Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon," which was written, as we have
seen, in the old Ancre Inn at Ouchy in the short course of a couple of
days in 1816. Byron himself has entitled this a "fable," and it has
certainly little or nothing to do with the historical Bonnivard, who
was certainly imprisoned here for six years, between 1530 and 1536, but
was released in the latter year, and subsequently became a Protestant,
and married four wives in succession! Byron, however, in the last six
lines of another poem--the "Sonnet on Chillon"--has paid a stately
tribute to the actual Bonnivard, which will be recalled with interest
in the striking, half-subterranean dungeon in which he was confined for
more than four years of his captivity:
"Chillon! thy prison is a holy place,
And thy sad floor an altar--for 'twas trod,
Until his very steps have left a trace
Worn, as if the cold pavement were a sod,
By Bonnivard! May none those marks efface!
For they appeal from tyranny to God."
I do not know whether these footmarks are still visible, or, indeed,
were ever visible; but if we choose to imagine them--Bonnivard was
chained to the fifth pillar from the entrance--we shall not do
much amiss. At least it would be better thus to err on the side of
imagination than to imitate the English lady of whom Byron complained
when he visited Chillon, not for the first time, on September 18, 1816,
that he met her on his return fast asleep in her carriage--"fast asleep
in the most anti-narcotic spot in the world."
INDEX
Abondance, 37
Chapel of, 37
Aiguille du Gouter, 29
du Midi, 23, 30
du Tour, 29
Anterne, Col d', 30
Lac d', 29
Argentière, 30
Aubonne, 48
Avenches, 53
Avre, River, 13, 24, 27
Bellegarde, 13
Beza, Theodore, 21
Bon Nant, River, 26
Bonneville, 24
Bonnivard, 62
Brévent, the, 30
Brogny, Cardinal Jean de, 10
Buet, the, 28