<SPAN name="Second_Paper" id="Second_Paper"></SPAN>
<h2>Second Paper</h2>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<h3>I</h3>
<p>The winter and the vintage come on together at Villeneuve, and when the
snows had well covered the mountains around, the grapes in the valley
were declared ripe by an act of the Commune. There had been so much rain
and so little sun that their ripeness was hardly attested otherwise.
Fully two-thirds of the crop had blackened with blight; the imperfect
clusters, where they did not hang sodden and mildewed on the vines, were
small and sour. It was sorrowful to see them; and when, about the middle
of October, the people assembled in the vineyards to gather them, the
spectacle had none of that gayety which the poets had taught me to
expect of it. Those poor clusters did not</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">"reel to earth<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Purple and gushing,"<br/></span></div>
</div>
<p>but limply waited the short hooked knife with which the peasants cut
them from their stems; and the peasants, instead of advancing with
jocund steps and rustic song to the sound of the lute and tabor and
other convenient instruments, met in obedience to public notice duly
posted about the Commune, and set to work, men, women, and children
alike silent and serious. So many of the grapes are harvested and
manufactured in common that it is necessary the vintage should begin on
a fixed day, and no one was allowed to anticipate or postpone. Some cut
the grapes, and dropped them into the flattish wooden barrels, which
others, after mashing the berries with a long wooden pestle, bore off
and emptied frothing and gurgling into big casks mounted on carts. These
were then driven into the village, where the mess was poured into the
presses, and the wine crushed out to the last bitter dregs. The
vineyards were a scene of activity, but not hilarity, though a little
way off they looked rather lively with the vintagers at work in them. We
climbed to one of them far up the mountain-side one day, where a family
were gathering the grapes on a slope almost as steep as a house roof,
father, mother, daughter, son-in-law, big boy, and big girl all silently
busy together. There were bees and wasps humming around the tubs of
crushed grapes in the pale afternoon sun; the view of the lake and the
mountains was inspiring; but there was nothing bacchanalian in the
affair, unless the thick calves of the girl, as she bent over to cut the
clusters, suggested a Mænad fury. These poor people were quite songless,
though I am bound to say that in another vineyard I did hear some of the
children singing. It had momentarily stopped raining; but it soon began
again, and the vintage went sorrowfully on in the mud. All Villeneuve
smelt of the harsh juice and pulp arriving from the fields in the
wagons, carts, tubs, and barrels which crowded the streets and
sidewalks, and in divers cavernous basements the presses were at work,
and there was a slop and drip of new wine everywhere. After dark the
people came in from the fields and gossiped about their doors, and the
red light of flitting lanterns blotched the steady rainpour. Outside of
the village rose the black mountains, white at the top with their snows.</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
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<h3><i>The Wine-press</i></h3>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p>In the cafés and other public places there were placards advertising
American wine-presses, but I saw none of them in use. At a farm-house
near us we looked on at the use of one of the old-fashioned Swiss
presses. Under it lay a mighty cake of grapes, stems, and skins, crushed
into a common mass, and bulging farther beyond the press with each turn
of the screw, while the juice ran in a little rivulet into a tub below.
When the press was lifted, the grapes were seen only half crushed. Two
peasants then mounted the cake, and trimmed it into shape with
long-handled spades, piling the trimmings on top, and then bringing the
press down again. They invited us with charming politeness to taste the
juice, but their heavy boots bore evidence of too recent a visit to the
cherished manure heap, and we thanked them with equal courtesy.</p>
<p>This grape cake, when it had yielded up its last drop, would be broken
to pieces and scattered over the fields as a fertilizer. The juice would
meanwhile have been placed to ferment in the tuns, twelve and thirteen
feet deep, which lay in the adjoining cellar.</p>
<p>For weeks after the vintage people were drinking the new wine, which
looked thick and whitish in the glasses, at all the cafés. It seemed to
be thought a dainty beverage, but our scruples against it remained, and
I cannot say what its effect upon the drinkers might be. Perhaps it had
properties as a "sweet, oblivious antidote" which rendered necessary the
placard we saw in the café of the little Hôtel Chillon:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">"Die Rose blüht,<br/></span>
<span class="i3">Der Dorn der sticht;<br/></span>
<span class="i1">Wer gleich bezahlt<br/></span>
<span class="i3">Vergisst es nicht."<br/></span></div>
</div>
<p>Or, in inadequate English:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">The roses bloom,<br/></span>
<span class="i2">The thorns they stick;<br/></span>
<span class="i0">No one forgets<br/></span>
<span class="i2">Who settles quick.<br/></span></div>
</div>
<p>The relation of the ideas is not very apparent, but the lyric cry is
distinctly audible.</p>
<h3>II</h3>
<p>One morning, a week before the vintage began, we were wakened by the
musical clash of cow-bells, and for days afterwards the herds came
streaming from the chalets on all the mountains round to feed upon the
lowland pastures for a brief season before the winter should house them.
There was something charming to ear and eye in this autumnal descent of
the kine, and we were sorry when it ended. They thronged the village in
their passage to the levels beside the Rhone, where afterwards they lent
their music and their picturesqueness to the meadows. With each herd
there were two or three goats, and these goats thought they were cows;
but, after all, the public interest of this descent of the cows was not
really comparable to that of the fall elections, now coming on with
handbills and newspaper appeals very like those of our own country at
like times. In the cafés, the steamboats, the railway stations, the
street corners, vivid posters warned the voters against the wiles of the
enemy, and the journals urged the people of the Canton Vaud to be up and
doing; they declared the issue before them a vital one, and the crisis a
crisis of the greatest moment.</p>
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<h3><i>Castle of Aigle</i></h3>
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<p>In the mean time the people in our pension, who were so intelligent and
well informed about other things, bore witness to the real security of
the State, and the tranquillity of the Swiss mind generally concerning
politics, by their ignorance of the name of their existing President.
They believed he was a man of the name of Schultz; but it appeared that
his name was not at all Schultz, when we referred the matter to our
pasteur. It was from him, indeed, that I learned nearly all I knew of
Swiss politics, and it was from his teaching that I became a
conservative partisan in the question, then before the voters, of a
national free-school law. The radicals, who, the pasteur said, wished
Switzerland to attempt the role "<i>grande nation</i>," had brought forward
this measure in the Federal legislature, and it was now, according to
the sensible Swiss custom, to be submitted to a popular vote. It
provided for the establishment of a national bureau of education, and
the conservatives protested against it as the entering wedge of
centralization in government affairs. They contended that in a country
shared by three races and two religions education should be left as much
as possible to the several cantons, which in the Swiss constitution are
equivalent to our States. I am happy to say that the proposed law was
overwhelmingly defeated; I am happy because I liked the pasteur so much,
though when I remember the sympathetic bric-à-brac dealer at Vevay, who
was a radical, but who sold me some old pewters at a very low price, I
can't help feeling a little sorry too. However, the Swiss still keep
their old school law, under which each canton taxes itself for
education, as our States do, though all share in the advantages of the
universities, which are part of the public-school system.</p>
<p>The parties in Switzerland are fortunately not divided by questions of
race or religion, but the pasteur owned that the Catholics were a
difficult element, and had to be carefully managed. They include the
whole population of the Italian cantons, and part of the French and
German. In Geneva and other large towns the labor question troublesomely
enters, and the radicals, like our Democrats, are sometimes the
retrograde party.</p>
<p>The pasteur spoke with smiling slight of the Père Hyacinthe and the
Döllinger movements, and he confessed that the Protestants were cut up
into too many sects to make progress among the Catholic populations. The
Catholics often keep their children out of the public schools, as they
do with us, but these have to undergo the State examinations, to which
all the children, whether taught at home or in private schools, must
submit. He deplored the want of moral instruction in the public schools,
but he laughed at the attempts in France to instil non-religious moral
principles: when I afterwards saw this done in the Florentine ragged
schools I could not feel that he was altogether right. He was a member
of the communal school committee, and he told me that this body was
appointed by the syndic and council of each commune, who are elected by
the people. To some degree religion influences local feeling, the
Protestant Church being divided into orthodox and liberal factions;
there is a large Unitarian party besides, and agnosticism is a
qualifying element of religious thought.</p>
<p>Outside of our pension I had not many sources of information concerning
the political or social life at Villeneuve. I knew the village
shoemaker, a German, who had fixed his dwelling there because it was so
<i>bequem</i>, and who had some vague aspirations towards Chicago, whither a
citizen of Villeneuve had lately gone. But he was discouraged by my
representation, with his wax, his awl, and his hammer, successively
arranged as New York, Cleveland, and Chicago, on his shoe-bench, of the
extreme distance of the last from the seaboard. He liked his neighbors
and their political system; and so did the <i>portier</i> at the Hôtel Byron,
another German, with whom I sometimes talked of general topics in
transacting small affairs of carriage hire and the like, and who invited
me to notice how perfectly well these singular Swiss, in the midst of a
Europe elsewhere overrun with royalties, got on without a king, queen,
or anything of the kind. In his country, he said, those hills would be
covered with fortifications, but here they seemed not to be thought
necessary.</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
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<h3><i>The Market at Vevey</i></h3>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p>I made friends with the <i>instituteur</i> of the Villeneuve public school,
who led the singing at church, and kept the village book-store; and he
too talked politics with me, and told me that all elections were held on
Sunday, when the people were at leisure, for otherwise they would not
take the time to vote. He was not so clear as to why they were always
held in church, but that is the fact; and sometimes the sacred character
of the place is not enough to suppress boisterous party feeling, though
it certainly helps to control it.</p>
<p>After divine service on election Sunday I went to the Croix Blanche for
my coffee, to pass the time till the voting should begin. On the church
door was posted a printed summons to the electors, and on the café
billiard tables I found ballots of the different parties scattered.
Gendarmes had also distributed them about in the church pews; they were
enclosed in envelops, which were voted sealed. On a table before the
pulpit the ballot-box—a glass urn—was placed; and beside it sat the
judges of election, with lists of the registered voters. But in any
precinct of the canton an elector who could prove that he had not voted
at home might deposit his ballot in any other. The church bell rang for
the people to assemble, and the voting began and ended in perfect quiet.
But I could not witness an election of this ancient republic, where
Freedom was so many centuries old, without strong emotion; it had from
its nature and the place the consecration of a religious rite.</p>
<h3>III</h3>
<p>The church itself was old—almost as old as Swiss freedom, and older
than the freedom of the Vaud. The Gothic interior, which had once, no
doubt, been idolatrously frescoed and furnished with statues, was now
naked and coldly Protestant; one window, partly stained, let in a little
colored light to mix with the wintry day that struck through the others.
The pulpit was in the centre of the church, and the clerk's desk
diagonally across from it. The floor was boarded over, but a chill
struck through from the stones below, and the people seemed to shiver
through the service that preceded the election. When the pasteur mounted
the pulpit they listened faithfully, but when the clerk led the psalm
they vented their suffering in the most dreadful groaning that ever
passed for singing outside of one of our country churches.</p>
<p>It was all very like home, and yet unlike it, for there is much more
government in Switzerland than with us, and much less play of
individuality. In small communes, for example, like Villeneuve, there
are features of practical socialism, which have existed apparently from
the earliest times. Certain things are held in common, as mountain
pasturage and the forests, from which each family has a provision of
fuel. These and other possessions of the commune are "confided to the
public faith," and trespass is punished with signal severity. The trees
are felled under government inspection, and the woods are never cut off
wholesale. When a tree is chopped down a tree is planted, and the floods
that ravage Italy from the mountains denuded of their forests are
unknown to the wiser Swiss. Throughout Switzerland the State insures
against fire, and inflicts penalties for neglect and carelessness from
which fires may result. Education is compulsory, and there is a rigid
military service, and a show of public force everywhere which is quite
unknown to our unneighbored, easy-going republic. I should say, upon the
whole, that the likeness was more in social than in political things,
strange as that may appear. There seemed to be much the same freedom
among young people, and democratic institutions had produced a kindred
type of manners in both countries. But I will not be very confident
about all this, for I might easily be mistaken. The Swiss make their
social distinctions as we do; and in Geneva and Lausanne I understood
that a more than American exclusivism prevailed in families that held
themselves to be peculiarly good, and believed themselves very old.</p>
<p>Our excursions into society at Villeneuve were confined to a single tea
at the pasteur's, where we went with mademoiselle one evening. He lived
in a certain Villa Garibaldi, which had belonged to an Italian refugee,
now long repatriated, and which stood at the foot of the nearest
mountain. To reach the front door we passed through the vineyard to the
back of the house, where a huge dog leaped the length of his chain at
us, and a maid let us in. The pasteur, in a coat of unclerical cut, and
his wife, in black silk, received us in the parlor, which was heated by
a handsome porcelain stove, and simply furnished, much like such a room
at home. Madame P——, who was musical, played a tempestuously
representative composition called "L'Orage" on the upright piano, and
joined from time to time in her husband's talk about Swiss affairs,
which I have already allowed the reader to profit by. They offered us
tea, wine, grapes, and cake, and we came away at eleven, lighted home
through the vineyards by Louis, the farm boy, with his lantern.</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
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<h3><i>The Market, Vevay—A Bargain before the Notary</i></h3>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p>Another day mademoiselle did us the pleasure to take us to her sister,
married, and living at Aigle—a clean, many-hotelled, prosperous town, a
few miles off, which had also the merit of a very fine old castle. We
found our friends in an apartment of a former convent, behind which
stretched a pretty lawn, with flowers and a fountain, and then vineyards
to the foot of the mountains and far up their sides. We entered the
court by a great stone-paved carriage-way, as in Italy, and we found the
drawing-room furnished with Italian simplicity, and abounding in
souvenirs of the hostess's long Florentine sojourn; but it was fortified
against the Swiss winter by the tall Swiss stove. The whole family
received us, including the young lady daughter, the niece, the
well-mannered boys and their father openly proud of them, and the
pleasant young English girl who was living in the family, according to a
common custom, to perfect her French. This part of Switzerland is full
of English people, who come not always for the French, but often for the
cheapness which they find equally there.</p>
<p>Mr. K—— was a business man, well-to-do, well educated, agreeable, and
interesting; his house and his table, where we sat down to the mid-day
dinner of the country, were witness to his prosperity. I hope it is no
harm, in the interest of statistics, to say that this good Swiss dinner
consisted of soup, cold ham put up like sausage, stuffed roast beef
which had first been boiled, cauliflower, salad, corn-starch pudding,
and apples stewed whole and stuck full of pine pips. There was abundance
of the several kinds of excellent wine made upon the estate, both white
and red, and it was freely given to the children. Mr. K—— seemed
surprised when we refused it for ours; and probably he could have given
us good reason for his custom. His boys were strong, robust, handsome
fellows; he had a charming pride in showing us the prizes they had taken
at school; and on the lawn they were equally proud to show the gymnastic
feats they had learned there. I believe we are coming to think now that
the American schools are better than the Swiss; but till we have
organized something like the Swiss school excursions, and have learned
to mix more open air with our instruction, I doubt if the Swiss would
agree with us.</p>
<p>After dinner we went to the <i>vente</i>, or charitable fair, which the young
ladies of the town were holding in one of the public buildings. It was
bewilderingly like the church fair of an American country town, socially
and materially. The young ladies had made all sorts of pretty
knick-knacks, and were selling them at the little tables set about the
room; they also presided, more or less alluringly, at fruit, coffee, and
ice-cream stands; and—I will not be sure, but I <i>think</i>—some of them
seemed to be flirting with the youth of the other sex. There was an
auction going on, and the place was full of tobacco smoke, which the
women appeared not to mind. A booth for the sale of wine and beer was
set off, and there was a good deal of amiable drinking. This was not
like our fairs quite; and I am bound to say that the people of Aigle had
more polished manners, if not better, than our country-town average.</p>
<p>To quit this scene for the castle of Aigle was to plunge from the
present into my favorite Middle Ages. We were directly in the times when
the Lords of Berne held the Vaud by the strong hand, and forced
Protestant convictions upon its people by the same vigorous methods. The
castle was far older than their occupation, but it is chiefly memorable
as the residence of their bailiffs before the independence of the Vaud
was established after the French Revolution. They were hard masters, but
they left political and religious freedom behind them, where perhaps
neither would have existed without them. The castle, though eminently
picturesque and delightfully Gothic, is very rudely finished and
decorated, and could never have been a luxurious seat for the bailiffs.
It is now used by the local courts of law; a solitary, pale, unshaven
old prisoner, who seemed very glad of our tribute-money, inhabited its
tower, and there was an old woman carding wool in the baronial kitchen.
Her little grandson lighted a candle and showed us the <i>oubliettes</i>,
which are subterranean dungeons, one above the other, and barred by
mighty doors of wood and iron. The outer one bore an inscription, which
I copied:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">"Doubles grilles a gros cloux,<br/></span>
<span class="i2">Triples portes, fortes Verroux,<br/></span>
<span class="i2">Aux âmes vraiment méchantes<br/></span>
<span class="i2">Vous représentez l'Enfer;<br/></span>
<span class="i2">Mais aux âmes innocentes<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Vous n'êtes que du bois, de la pierre, & du fer!"<br/></span></div>
</div>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
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<h3><i>Germans at Montreux</i></h3>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p>But these doors, thus branded as representing the gates of hell to
guilty souls, and to the innocent being merely wood, stone, and iron,
sufficed equally to shut the blameless in, and I doubt if the reflection
suggested was ever of any real comfort to them. For one thing, the
captives could not read the inscription; it seems to have been intended
rather for the edification of the public.</p>
<p>We visited the castle a second time, to let the children sketch it; and
even I, who could not draw a line, became with them the centre of
popular interest. Half a dozen little people who had been playing
"snap-the-whip" left off and crowded round, and one of the boys profited
by the occasion to lock into the barn, near which we sat, a peasant who
had gone in to fodder his cattle. When he got out he criticised the
pictures, and insisted that one of the artists should put in a certain
window which he had left out of the tower. Upon the whole, we liked him
better as a prisoner.</p>
<p>"What would you do," I asked the children, "if I gave you a piece of
twenty-five centimes?"</p>
<p>They reflected, and then evidently determined to pose as good children.
"We would give it to our mamma."</p>
<p>"Now don't you think," I pursued, "that it would be better to spend it
for little cakes?"</p>
<p>This instantly corrupted them, and they cried with one voice, "Oh yes!"</p>
<p>Out of respect to me the oldest girl made a small boy pull up his
stocking, which had got down round his ankle, and then they took the
money and all ran off. Later they returned to show me that they had got
it changed into copper and shared equally among them. They must have
spent an evening of great excitement talking us over.</p>
<p>The October sun set early, chill, and disconsolate after a rain. A weary
peasant with a heavy load on his back, which he looked as if he had
brought from the dawn of time, approached the castle gate, and bowed to
us in passing. I was not his feudal lord, but his sad, work-worn aspect
gave me as keen a pang as if I had been.</p>
<h3>IV</h3>
<p>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
<i>répertoire</i> 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."</p>
<p>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 <i>par excellence</i>, the
book of the fireside, and on Sunday the exercises of devotion took the
place of the public amusements."</p>
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<h3><i>Church Terrace, Montreux</i></h3>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>V</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
<i>entourage</i>. 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.</p>
<h3>VI</h3>
<p>I did not find Aigle and Blonay enough to satisfy my appetite for
castles, and once, after several times passing a certain <i>château meublé
à louer</i> in the levels of the Rhone Valley, I made bold to go in and ask
to look at it. I loved it for the certain Louis XV. grandiosity there
was about it; for the great clock in the stable wall; for the balcony
frescos on the front of the garden-house, and for the arched driveway to
the court. It seemed to me a wonderfully good thing of its kind, and I
liked Napoleon's having lodged in it when his troops occupied
Villeneuve. It had, of course, once belonged to a rich family, but it
had long passed out of their hands into those of the sort of farmer-folk
who now own it, and let it when they can. It had stood several years
empty, for the situation is not thought wholesome, and the last tenant
had been an English clergyman, who kept a school in it for baddish boys
whom no one else could manage, and who were supposed to be out of harm's
way there.</p>
<p>I followed a young man whom I saw going into the gateway, and asked him
if I could see the house. He said "Yes," and summoned his mother, a
fierce-looking little dame, in a black Vaudois cap, who came out of a
farm-house near with jingling keys, and made him throw open the whole
house, while she walked me through the sad, forgotten garden, past its
silent fountain, and through its grove of pine to the top of an orchard
wall, where the Dent-du-Midi showed all its snow-capped mass. Within,
the château was very clean and dry; the dining-room was handsomely
panelled, and equipped with a huge porcelain stove; the shelves of the
library were stocked with soberly bound books, and it was tastefully
frescoed; the pretty chambers were in the rococo taste of the fine old
rococo time, with successive scenes of the same history painted over the
fireplaces throughout the suite; the drawing-room was elegant with silk
hangings and carved mirrors; and the noble staircase, whose landing was
honored with the bust of the French king of the château's period, looked
as if that prince had just mounted it. All these splendors, with the
modern comfort of hot and cold water wherever needed, you may have, if
you like, for $500 a year; and none of the castles I saw compared with
this château in richness of finish or furnishing. I am rather particular
to advertise it because a question, painfully debating itself in my mind
throughout my visit, as to the sum I ought to offer the woman was
awkwardly settled by her refusing to take anything, and I feel a
lingering obligation. But, really, I do not see how the reader, if he
likes solitary state, or has "daughters to educate," or baddish boys to
keep out of mischief, or is wearing out a heavy disappointment, or is
suffering under one of those little stains or uneasy consciences such as
people can manage so much better in Europe—I say I do not see how he
could suit himself more perfectly or more cheaply than in that pensively
superb old château, with its aristocratic seclusion, and possibly
malarious, lovely old garden.</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<div class="figcenter"> <SPAN name="gs114" id="gs114"></SPAN> <ANTIMG src="images/gs114.jpg" alt=""/></div>
<h3><i>Tour up the Lake</i></h3>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<h3>VII</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
<i>spirituelle</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>VIII</h3>
<p>When December came, and the vintage and elections were over, and the
winter had come down into the valley to stay, Italy called to us more
and more appealingly.</p>
<p>Yet it was not so easy to pull up and go. I liked the row-boat on the
lake, though it was getting too cold and rough for that; I liked the way
the railway guards called out "Verney-Montreux!" and "Territey-Chillon!"
as they ran alongside the carriages at these stations; I liked the
pastel portraits of mademoiselle's grandmothers on the gray walls of our
pretty chamber that overlooked the lake, and overheard the lightest lisp
of that sometimes bellowing body of water; I liked the notion of the
wild-ducks among the reeds by the Rhone, though I had no wish to kill
them; I liked our little corner fireplace, where I covered a log of the
<i>grand bois</i> every night in the coals, and found it a perfect line of
bristling embers in the morning; I liked Poppi and the three generations
of Boulettes; and, yes, I liked mademoiselle and all her boarders; and I
hated to leave these friends. Mademoiselle made a grand Thanksgiving
supper in honor of the American nation, for which we did our best to
figure both at the table, where smoked a turkey driven over the Alps
from his Italian home for that fête (there are no Swiss turkeys), and in
the dance, for which he had wellnigh disabled us. Poppi was in uncommon
tune that night, and the voice of this pensive rheumatic lent a unique
interest to every change of the Virginia reel.</p>
<p>But these pleasures had to end; it grew colder and colder; we had long
since consumed all the old grape-roots which constituted our <i>petit
bois</i>, and we were ravaging our way through an expensive pile of <i>grand
bois</i> without much effect upon the climate. One morning the most
enterprising spirit of our party kindled such a mighty blaze on our
chamber hearth that she set the chimney on fire, thus threatening the
Swiss republic with the loss of the insurance, and involving
mademoiselle in I know not what penalties for having a chimney that
could be set on fire. By the blessing of Heaven, the vigor of
mademoiselle, and the activity of Louis and Alexis the farmer, the
flames were subdued and the house saved. Mademoiselle forgave us, but we
knew it was time to go, and the next Sunday we were in Florence.</p>
<p>THE END</p>
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