Part 27 (1/2)
LETTER LXV.
LAKE LEMAN--AMERICAN APPEARANCE OF THE GENEVESE--STEAMBOAT OF THE RHONE--GIBBON AND ROUSSEAU--ADVENTURE OF THE LILIES--GENEVESE JEWELLERS--RESIDENCE OF VOLTAIRE--BYRON'S NIGHT-CAP--VOLTAIRE'S WALKING-STICK AND STOCKINGS.
The water of Lake Leman looks very like other water, though Byron and Sh.e.l.ley were nearly drowned in it; and Copet, a little village on the Helvetian side, where we left three women and took up one man (the village ought to be very much obliged to us), is no Paradise, though Madame de Stael made it her residence. There _are_ Paradises, however, with very short distances between, all the way down the northern sh.o.r.e; and angels in them, if women are angels--a specimen or two of the s.e.x being visible with the aid of the spygla.s.s, in nearly every balcony and belvidere, looking upon the water. The taste in country-houses seems to be here very much the same as in New England, and quite unlike the half-palace, half-castle style common in Italy and France. Indeed the dress, physiognomy, and manners of old Geneva might make an American Genevese fancy himself at home on the Leman.
There is that subdued decency, that grave respectableness, that black-coated, straight-haired, saint-like kind of look which is universal in the small towns of our country, and which is as unlike France and Italy, as a playhouse is unlike a Methodist chapel. You would know the people of Geneva were Calvinists, whisking through the town merely in a diligence.
I lost sight of the town of Morges, eating a tete-a-tete breakfast with my friend in the cabin. Switzerland is the only place out of America where one gets cream for his coffee. I cry, Morges mercy on that plea.
We were at Lausanne at eleven, having steamed forty miles in five hours. This is not quite up to the thirty-milers on the Hudson, of which I see accounts in the papers, but we had the advantage of not being blown up, either going or coming, and of looking for a continuous minute on a given spot in the scenery. Then we had an iron railing between us and that portion of the pa.s.sengers who prefer garlic to lavender-water, and we achieved our breakfast without losing our tempers or complexions, in a scramble. The question of superiority between Swiss and American steamers, therefore, depends very much on the value you set on life, temper, and time. For me, as my time is not measured in ”diamond sparks,” and as my life and temper are the only gifts with which fortune has blessed me, I prefer the Swiss.
Gibbon lived at Lausanne, and wrote here the last chapter of his History of Rome--a circ.u.mstance which he records with affection. It is a spot of no ordinary beauty, and the public promenade, where we sat and looked over to Vevey and Chillon, and the Rocks of Meillerie, and talked of Rousseau, and agreed that it was a scene, ”_faite pour une Julie, pour une Claire, et pour un Saint Preux_,” is one of the places, where, if I were to ”play statue,” I should like to grow to my seat, and compromise, merely, for eyesight. We have one thing against Lausanne, however,--it is up hill and a mile from the water; and if Gibbon walked often from Ouchet at noon, and ”larded the way” as freely as we, I make myself certain he was not the fat man his biographers have drawn him.
There were some other circ.u.mstances at Lausanne which interested _us_--but which criticism has decided can not be obtruded upon the public. We looked about for ”Julie” and ”Clare,” spite of Rousseau's ”_ne les y cherchez pas_,” and gave a blind beggar a sous (all he asked) for a handful of lilies-of-the-valley, pitying him ten times more than if he had lost his eyes out of Switzerland. To be blind on Lake Leman! blind within sight of Mont Blanc! We turned back to drop another sous into his hat, as we reflected upon it.
The return steamer from Vevey (I was sorry not to go to Vevey for Rousseau's sake, and as much for Cooper's), took us up on its way to Geneva, and we had the advantage of seeing the same scenery in a different light. Trees, houses, and mountains, are so much finer seen _against_ the sun, with the deep shadows toward you!
Sitting by the stern, was a fat and fair Frenchwoman, who, like me, had bought lilies, and about as many. With a very natural facility of dramatic position, I imagined it had established a kind of sympathy between us, and proposed to myself, somewhere in the fair hours, to make it serve as an introduction. She went into the cabin after a while, to lunch on cutlets and beer, and returned to the deck without her lilies. Mine lay beside me, within reach of her four fingers; and, as I was making up my mind to offer to replace her loss, she coolly took them up, and without even a French monosyllable, commenced throwing them overboard, stem by stem. It was very clear she had mistaken them for her own. As the last one flew over the tafferel, the gentleman who paid for _la biere et les cottelettes_, husband or lover, came up with a smile and a flourish, and reminded her that she had left her bouquet between the mustard and the beer bottle.
_Sequiter_, a scene. The lady apologized, and I disclaimed; and the more I insisted on the delight she had given me by throwing my pretty lilies into Lake Leman, the more she made herself unhappy, and insisted on my being inconsolable. One should come abroad to know how much may be said upon throwing overboard a bunch of lilies!
The clouds gathered, and we had some hopes of a storm, but the ”darkened Jura” was merely dim, and the ”live thunder” waited for another Childe Harold. We were at Geneva at seven, and had the whole population to witness our debarkation. The pier where we landed, and the new bridge across the outlet of the Rhone, are the evening promenade.
The far-famed jewellers of Geneva are rather an aristocratic cla.s.s of merchants. They are to be sought in chambers, and their treasures are produced box by box, from locked drawers, and bought, if at all, without the pleasure of ”beating down.” They are, withal, a gentlemanly cla.s.s of men; and, of the princ.i.p.al one, as many stories are told as of Beau Brummel. He has made a fortune by his shop, and has the manners of a man who can afford to buy the jewels out of a king's crown.
We were sitting at the _table d'hote_, with about forty people, on the first day of our arrival, when the servant brought us each a gilt-edged note, sealed with an elegant device; invitations, we presumed, to a ball, at least. Mr. So-and-so (I forget the name), begged pardon for the liberty he had taken, and requested us to call at his shop in the Rue de Rhone, and look at his varied a.s.sortment of bijouterie. A card was enclosed, and the letter in courtly English. We went, of course; as who would not? The cost to him was a sheet of paper, and the trouble of sending to the hotel for a list of the new arrivals. I recommend the system to all callow Yankees, commencing a ”pus.h.i.+ng business.”
Geneva is full of foreigners in the summer, and it has quite the complexion of an agreeable place. The environs are, of course, unequalled, and the town itself is a stirring and gay capital, full of brilliant shops, handsome streets and promenades, where everything is to be met but pretty women. Female beauty would come to a good market anywhere in Switzerland. We have seen but one pretty girl (our Niobe of the steamer), since we lost sight of Lombardy. They dress well here, and seem modest, and have withal an air of style; but of some five hundred ladies, whom I may have seen in the valley of the Rhone and about this neighborhood, it would puzzle a modern Appelles to compose an endurable Venus. I understand a fair countryman of ours is about taking up her residence in Geneva; and if Lake Leman does not ”woo her,” and the ”live thunder” leap down from Jura, the jewellers, at least, will crown her queen of the Canton, and give her the tiara at cost.
I hope ”Maria Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs” will forgive me for having gone to _Ferney_ in an _omnibus_! Voltaire lived just under the Jura, on a hill-side, overlooking Geneva and the lake, with a landscape before him in the foreground, that a painter could not improve, and Mont Blanc and its neighbor mountains, the breaks to his horizon. At six miles off, Geneva looks very beautifully, astride the exit of the Rhone from the lake; and the lake itself looks more like a broad river, with its edges of verdure and its outer-frame of mountains. We walked up an avenue to a large old villa, embosomed in trees, where an old gardener appeared, to show us the grounds. We said the proper thing under the tree planted by the philosopher, fell in love with the view from twenty points, met an English lady in one of the arbors, the wife of a French n.o.bleman to whom the house belongs, and were bowed into the hall by the old man and handed over to his daughter to be shown the curiosities of the interior. These were Voltaire's rooms, just as he left them. The ridiculous picture of his own apotheosis, painted under his own direction, and representing him offering his Henriade to Apollo, with all the authors of his time dying of envy at his feet, occupies the most conspicuous place over his chamber-door.
Within was his bed, the curtains nibbled quite bare by relic-gathering travellers; a portrait of the Empress Catharine, embroidered by her own hand, and presented to Voltaire; his own portrait and Frederick the Great's, and many of the philosophers', including Franklin. A little monument stands opposite the fireplace, with the inscription, ”_mon esprit est partout, et mon coeur est ici_.” It is a snug little dormitory, opening with one window to the west; and, to those who admire the character of the once ill.u.s.trious occupant, a place for very tangible musing. They showed us afterward his walking-stick, a pair of silk-stockings he had half worn, and a night-cap. The last article is getting quite fas.h.i.+onable as a relic of genius. They show Byron's at Venice.
LETTER LXVI.
PRACTICAL BATHOS OF CELEBRATED PLACES--TRAVELLING COMPANIONS AT THE SIMPLON--CUSTOM-HOUSE COMFORTS--TRIALS OF TEMPER--CONQUERED AT LAST!--DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF FRANCE, ITALY, AND SWITZERLAND--FORCE OF POLITENESS.
Whether it was that I had offended the genius of the spot, by coming in an omnibus, or from a desire I never can resist in such places, to travesty and ridicule the mock solemnities with which they are exhibited, certain it is that I left Ferney, without having encountered, even in the shape of a more serious thought, the spirit of Voltaire. One reads the third canto of Childe Harold in his library, and feels as if ”Lausanne and Ferney” _should_ be very interesting places to the traveller, and yet when he is shown Gibbon's bower by a fellow scratching his head and hitching up his trousers the while, and the nightcap that enclosed the busy brain from which sprang the fifty brilliant _tomes_ on his shelves, by a country-girl, who hurries through her drilled description, with her eye on the silver _douceur_ in his fingers, he is very likely to rub his hand over his eyes, and disclaim, quite honestly, all pretensions to enthusiasm. And yet, I dare say, I shall have a great deal of pleasure in remembering that I _have been_ at Ferney. As an English traveller would say, ”I have _done_ Voltaire!”
Quite of the opinion that it was not doing justice to Geneva to have made but a three days' stay in it, regretting not having seen Sismondi and Simond, and a whole coterie of scholars and authors, whose home it is, and with a mind quite made up to return to Switzerland, when my _beaux jours_ of love, money, and leisure, shall have arrived, I crossed the Rhone at sunrise, and turned my face toward Paris.
The Simplon is much safer travelling than the pa.s.s of the Jura. We were all day getting up the mountains by roads that would make me anxious, if there were a neck in the carriage I would rather should not be broken. My company, fortunately, consisted of three Scotch spinsters, who would try any precipice of the Jura, I think, if there were a lover at the bottom. If the horses had backed in the wrong place, it would have been to all three, I am sure, a deliverance from a world in whose volume of happiness,
”their leaf By some o'er-hasty angel was misplaced.”
As to my own neck and my friend's, there is a special providence for bachelors, even if they were of importance enough to merit a care.