The Spell of Switzerland

During Calvin’s life no theatrical representations were allowed; but just forty years after his death, in 1604, some of the students of one of the professors with his authorization learned a comedy by Garnier and proposed to enact it before a select company of guests. When the authorities heard of it they were in a panic and hastened to forbid it “for fear the students might take occasion for debauchery and waste time and lessons.” In 1681 “The Cid” was presented with scenery at the house of M. Perdriau. The performance ended with a farce. About three hundred spectators were present. Several students took part. It caused a terrible scandal. It was declared that if such a thing happened again the culprits should be whipped. They had the means to inflict this punishment. Discipline in those days was severe. The Regents were ordered to provide themselves with a sort of cat-o’-nine-tails, and they used it sometimes brutally. In 1676 a Sieur de Rochemont ordered his valet to thrash one of the Regents for having too severely punished his nephew. The valet carried out his orders with good will but was haled into court and condemned to languish in jail for a week, while his master, in spite of his rank, was punished even more severely – he was sent to jail for three weeks and had to pay a fine of two hundred crowns, after having begged pardon on his knees.

The University of Geneva, as at present constituted, is the outgrowth of that remarkable school. Its modern regeneration began in 1886. Many new buildings have been erected. It would take pages to give the names of the celebrated professors who have from the beginning helped to spread its fame and have attracted students from all over the world, especially from Russia. Out of the twelve hundred or more students registered a large proportion come from the empire of the Tsars. The institution is divided into a Collège inférieur and a Collège supérieur, the latter having four departments: the classic, the réal, the technical and the pedagogical.

We went with our guide into the Library, which, of course, we could only glance at; but later, when I spent a fortnight in Geneva, I found it most useful. We went to the Salle Lutin and looked at the fine portraits of Geneva celebrities, including those of many distinguished visitors, notably George Eliot’s. Here are also many fascinating manuscripts and books which would fill the heart of a bibliophile with hopeless envy. I had just time to look at the curious old map made in 1588 by a Genevan magistrate, the noble Duvillard, who was wounded in a battle and during his convalescence amused himself in tracing on paper “ce beau lac génévois,” to which he said Christians flock without cessation: —

“Pour louer Dieu, maugré princes et rois,Plumes, pinceaux, couleurs en tous entroitsJ’ai fait passer par villes et châteaux,Villages, bourgs, par montagnes et bois,Par champs et près et vignobles si beauxRochers, forêts, rivières et ruisseaux.”

But the morning was passing, and we had to tear ourselves away. We had not intended to go into any of the public buildings of Geneva, tempting as they might be, but to walk across the Treille, along the Promenade des Bastions and then take a tram for the Salève, from which, on such a clear day, the view would have been superb. But it was too late; we had to hurry back to the hotel for an early lunch and then continue our journey around the lake.

As we went back I registered a vow to spend at least a fortnight in Geneva, and I am happy to say it was not a vow in vain. I came to know and love the fine old town with its splendid educational advantages, its museums and libraries, its fascinating parks and its wealth of glorious walks. More than once as we went down toward the lake I turned around to look at the bold escarpments of the limestone cliff against which the twin towers and the tall spire of the Cathedral stood out so proudly.

I went one day to the Voirons and had perhaps the same view as James Fenimore Cooper enjoyed so much, when on his journey southward he suddenly emerged on their heights and got his first glimpse of Geneva and the lake and all those parts of Vaud that lie between Geneva and the Dôle. Of course, Geneva nearly eighty years ago was much smaller than it is now. He describes it with enthusiasm, and his picture still glows with colour: —

“A more ravishing view than that we now beheld can scarcely be imagined. Nearly the whole of the lake was visible. The north shore was studded with towns, towers, castles and villages for the distance of thirty miles; the rampart – resembling rocks of Savoy – rose for three or four thousand feet, like walls above the water, and solitary villages were built against their bases in spots where there scarcely appeared room to place a human foot. The solemn magnificent gorge rather than valley of the Rhône and the river, glittering like silver among its meadows, were in the distant front, while the immediate foreground was composed of a shore which also had its wall of rocks, its towns laved by the water, its castles, its hamlets half concealed in fruit-trees, and its broad mountain bosom thrown carelessly into terraces, to the elevation of two thousand feet on which reposed nearly every object of rural art that can adorn a picture…

“The beauty of the panorama was singularly heightened by the presence of some thirty or forty large barks with lateen sails, a rig particularly Italian, and which, to my eye, was redolent of the Mediterranean, a sea I had not beheld for twenty years. They were lying lazily on the glassy lake as if placed there by Claude himself to serve as models.

“I shall not affirm that this was the finest view we had yet seen in Switzerland, but I do think it was the most exquisite. It was Goethe compared to Schiller, Milton to Shakespeare, Racine to Corneille.”

Just about two centuries earlier Auguste de Sales in the life of his uncle Saint Francis, showed that he too loved the same view. Here is his picture, dated 1632: —

“Voiron is a very high mountain separating Le Chablais from Le Faucigny, looking east from Geneva. Toward the north the view embraces the great Lake Leman, and almost all the mountains of Burgundy and those of Switzerland in the distance distinguished by blue shadows. Nearer are the cities and lands of Geneva and Bern, an infinity of villages, churches, castles, rivers, ponds, forests, meadows, vineyards, hills, roads, and the like in such variety that the eye receives from it a wonderful recreation and nothing in the world can be seen more beautiful. Toward the south one sees with a sudden horror the mountains of Le Faucigny and at their extremity the haughty summits (cimes sourcilleuses) of Champmuni, covered with eternal ice and snow, so that the eye of him who looks now one way now another, receives an unequalled satisfaction.”

I shall never forget the first expedition that I made to Les Treize Arbres and the Crêt de Grange Tournier, the highest point of the Salève, with their superb view up the lake and far into the valley of the Rhône. Yet the Salève is not a part of Geneva; it is not even Swiss; it belongs to France. If Switzerland and Savoy should at the present time have a war it would be easy enough for big guns to be mounted on those heights and batter down the helpless city; compared with what war is now the most dramatic event in Genevan history seems rather ludicrous; but the Fountain of the Escalade commemorates an heroic achievement.

Quietly around the city were gathering the hostile armies. Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy was planning to strike a final blow; he had more than six thousand men – Savoyards, Spaniards, Neapolitans and Piedmontese – collected in various places within convenient distance. On the night of December 12, 1602, a storming party of two hundred men marched up to the Corraterie rampart carrying fagots, hurdles, ladders, and implements for breaking and smashing things. Each man also had an amulet warranted to keep him from trouble in this world or the world to come; it was given to each one by a Scotch Jesuit named Father Alexander. They filled the moat with their hurdles and fagots; they fastened their ladders to the walls. They killed the one sentinel on guard, for the Genevans had no thought of such a treacherous attack upon them, and they annihilated a small body of the watch, all except one man, a drummer, who escaped and gave the alarm. The battle was on.

The Genevans at La Porte Neuve happened to fire off a gun loaded with chains and iron scrap; the discharge smashed all the scaling ladders and swept them off the walls; the army of four thousand men led by General d’Albigni, who was expecting to follow up the success of the two hundred, was helpless in the moat outside. All able-bodied citizens got out their guns and swords and gave battle. Hot soup and other scalding fluids and a rain of deadly missiles were flung down on the unhappy invaders, who finally fled, leaving thirteen prisoners and a large number of dead. The Genevans themselves had seventeen killed and a score wounded. Duke Charles Emmanuel is said to have called his defeated general a booby (misérable butor) and expressed himself in somewhat the same kind of vulgar language as Victor Hugo attributed to Marshal Ney in “Les Misérables.”

Geneva was saved, and the next morning the venerable Pastor de Bèze, who had slept all through the tumult, having learned of the battle, went to the cathedral and helped to conduct a thanksgiving service – the last public appearance which his failing health permitted him to make. And ever since the Genevans celebrate the day of the Escalade.

Rousseau wrote of this rather grandiloquently: – “The generous nation received its baptism of blood; this night put our ancestors beside the men of Sempach and Morgarten; they defended their freedom like men who could not understand how life could be separated from liberty.”

That very year the Landgrave of Hesse was visiting Geneva incognito and he composed a Latin epigram beginning: —

“Quisquis amat vitam sobriam castamque tueri,”

which has been Englished in the quaint old style of long ago: —

“A strict and sober life if you’d embraceLet chast Geneva be your dwelling-place;Or would you lead a lawless life and freeThe same Geneva your abode must be.Convenience here for either life is found —The Air, Land, Water and Religion sound!”

One more attempt was made to capture Geneva. On September 21, 1792, without any declaration of war, the French entered Savoy, seized Mont-Mélian and Chambéry and overran the whole duchy with the result that it was incorporated with France as the Département du Mont Blanc. Etienne Clavière, banished from Geneva in 1784 because of his writings, had become one of the six Ministers of the French Republic, and being full of animosity against Geneva urged his colleagues to attack that city. Orders to that effect were issued by Servan, Minister of War. Geneva appealed to Zürich and Bern for aid and prepared for defence. But no attack was made. Clavière committed suicide the following year.

Gibbon wrote to Lord Sheffield: – “The terrors which might have driven me from hence have in great measure subsided. Our State prisoners are forgot; the country begins to recover its old good humor and unsuspecting confidence and the last revolution of Paris appears to have convinced almost everybody of the fatal consequences of the Democratical principles, which lead by a path of flowers into the abyss of Hell.” After Savoy became a part of France Gibbon wrote: – “My noble scenery is clouded by the Democratical aspect of twelve leagues of the opposite coast which every morning obtrude themselves on my view.” In February, 1793, he wrote again: – “The new Constitution of Geneva is slowly forming without much noise or any bloodshed and the Patriots who have staid in hopes of guiding and restraining the multitude flatter themselves that they shall be able at least to prevent their mad countrymen from giving themselves to France, the only mischief that would be absolutely irretrievable.”

He predicted that the Emperor and the French would compound for the neutrality of the Swiss. His prediction was very nearly fulfilled. But the penchant of the Genevans for France may possibly be explained by the fact that it is so Parisian in its modern brightness and gayety. That is why I like it.

CHAPTER XV

FAMOUS FOLK

IMMEDIATELY after luncheon we reembarked in the swift Hirondelle, which was impatiently waiting for us, and started Lausanneward. As in our trip down, we hugged the shore. High up on the hillside we saw the Musée Ariana in its beautiful park. Later we visited it and saw its pictures, its antiquities, – especially interesting the old Genevan pewter-ware, furniture, weapons and stained glass and its still more ancient relics of the Alemanni; nor did we forget the Alpine Garden and other curiosities of the Botanical Park. This is situated directly on the Lausanne highway.

High up also, and affording a magnificent view, stands the Château Rothschild dominating Pregny. Then we rushed by Genthod, the home of Switzerland’s most famous scientists. There was a regular nest of them there. Birds of a feather! not the least of them being the zoölogist François Jules Pictet de la Rive. I wondered what Raoul Pictet, who did good work in liquefying gases, would think of the latest developments in the use of liquid air. A professor whom I met in Lausanne informed me that it now cost only a half-cent a pound. As it is composed of two liquids, nitrogen and oxygen, which boil at different temperatures, it is easy to eliminate the nitrogen and leave pure oxygen, which, of course, is invaluable in foundries to stimulate a high temperature.

The possibility that the enormous drafts on the nitrogen of the atmosphere for manufacturing nitrates, and which have made some people conjecture that we might ultimately become so excitable through the preponderance of oxygen, need no longer bother us. The nitrogen will go into nitrates all right but the balance will be kept even by the withdrawal of oxygen for blast-furnaces, and all we need fear is that there won’t be any air left. But let us not worry; après nous le vide! The Swiss torrents offer many chances for the electrical manufacture of these liquid gases at small expense.

At Genthod also lived the De Saussures. Will suggested that from their exploits in climbing mountains they should have been named the Snowshoers, a slight change not comparable with that exemplified in his earliest known ancestor, Mongin Schouel de Saulxures, Grand Falconer to the Duke of Lorraine!

“The illustrious” Horace-Bénédict de Saussure’s father was an authority on farming in its scientific aspects as they were then understood; his mother was the sister-in-law of the naturalist Charles de Bonnet, who, until his eyesight failed him and he had to take to philosophical speculations and to controversy with Voltaire, was interested in studying parthenogenesis, the respiration of insects and leaves, and kindred abstruse subjects. After a truly Rousseauesque education, whereby he was trained to bear hardships and fatigue and all unavoidable inconveniences without complaining, Horace de Saussure became professor of philosophy at Geneva at the age of twenty-two. Two years earlier he had offered a prize to the first person who should find a practicable route to the top of Mont Blanc, though it was then, and for years afterwards, believed to be inaccessible. He had been to the peak of Le Brévent on the other side of the Valley of Chamonix – in itself no small climb for those days at least – and he looked across that tremendous chasm and up to the forbidding white dome of the monarch of mountains, towering almost twice as high, and that intense ambition to get to the top of the world came over him. He believed it could be accomplished.

For fifteen years no serious attempt was made to win the prize. Then four peasants thought they might do it in a day, but dared not spend the night on the ice and so they came down. In 1783 three chamois hunters spent the night at the Montagne de la Côte, and the following morning started up over the icy slope, but one of them grew sleepy, and as it was regarded as dangerous to sleep on ice and they were afraid of sunstroke they also relinquished the task. One of them told De Saussure that if he tried it again all he would take with him would be a parasol and a bottle of smelling salts! In 1787 De Saussure caused a hut to be built near the Glacier of Bionnassay and tried to win the prize for himself. But it was too late in the season and he had to give it up.

The next attempt was made in August, 1788, by Marc-Théodore Bourrit, called “the Historian of the Alps.” He was a miniature painter. He was also precentor of the Cathedral at Geneva. There was a tradition that it was possible to cross the Alps from Geneva to Turin in thirty-eight hours. Bourrit provided himself with a fourteen-foot ladder, a couple of hatchets, ropes and staves, and started with a small party. They had a terrible time among the crevasses but reached Courmayeur at ten p. m. He was the first to discover the Col du Géant. He believed Mont Blanc to be inaccessible. He tried it, however, a second time with his son, an Englishman named Woodley and a Dutchman named Kampfer. They had twenty-two guides, nineteen of whom were overcome. He claimed that he got beyond the Camel’s Humps within ten minutes of the top but was prevented by a hurricane from actually reaching it. He gave himself away by declaring that he could see the Mediterranean. He would have had to see it not only through a snow-storm but also through the top. It is now believed that he did not get above the Rochers Rouges. M. Auldjo traced the limitation of vision by a map and showed it was impossible to see the Mediterranean.

The next year partisans of two different routes tried in rivalry to go up from opposite sides. Each party was made up of three men; a fourth, named Jacques Balmat, attached himself to one of them, and, when they deserted him, he continued alone, and by digging steps in the ice along the crest of the Rochers Rouges got within less than three hundred meters of the summit. He realized that if he went alone no one would believe him; when he managed to retrace his steps and reached the Grand Plateau he was overcome by snow-blindness. He kept his eyes shut for half an hour and his sight returned, but it was growing dark. He was obliged to spend the night where he was. He burrowed into the snow and kept alive.

When he reached Chamonix the next day he was so worn out that he slept twenty-four hours at a stretch. Then he went to the doctor of Chamonix, Michel Paccard, and told him his secret. They determined to try it. They started August 8, 1786, not together but one taking the right bank, the other the left bank of the Arve, so as not to awaken suspicion of their purpose. They camped on the Montagne de la Côte, and the next day attained Les Petits Mulets, about a hundred meters below the tip-top. Here they were nearly blown off the crest by a fierce gust of icy wind. The doctor refused to take another step. People were watching them from the village with a telescope. Balmat went alone to the top, and wigwagged a greeting to the villagers, who answered it. Then he went down and got the doctor by main force to the top. Balmat had practically to drag him down to the valley; the poor man was completely blinded and half frozen to death.

The next year De Saussure, with Balmat as guide, and a large party, bearing scientific apparatus, successfully reached the summit – the professor dressed in a long-tailed silk coat with huge buttons, which is preserved as a mute witness of the achievement in the De Saussure house at Genthod. Balmat lived to be an old man and was proud of the patent of nobility which the King of Sardinia conferred on him in honour of his feat.

Later, Dr. Paccard forgot what Balmat had done for him and how generously he had shared with him the honour of first conquering the proud monarch, and he began to claim all the credit of the enterprise. He issued a prospectus of a book, which should bring him a reward for his exertions. He promised to give a short history of previous attempts, an account of his own success, and a description of the stones and rocks, the insects, the rare plants, as well as his physical and medical observations, and all necessary notions for those who might wish to visit the glaciers. The subscription price was to be six livres de France for copies on fine paper and four livres, ten sols for copies on ordinary paper. He very cordially invited persons of a higher class who might desire to join in giving the author a prize for this conquest, and they also were promised a share in some of the curiosities found on Mont Blanc. He succeeded by this means in securing a number of subscribers.

De Saussure did not climb the Alpine mountains for sentimental reasons; his purpose was purely scientific, but occasionally in his writings there are passages of charming freshness and humanity. Once he camped out on the bleak Col du Géant for more than two weeks. He thus describes the last evening: —

“The sixteenth and last evening which we spent on the Col du Géant was ravishingly beautiful. It seemed as if all those lofty summits desired that we should not depart from them without regret. The icy wind which had made the most of the nights so uncomfortable did not blow. The peaks which looked down upon us and the snows lying between them took on the most beautiful tints of rose and of carmine. The whole Italian horizon seemed to wear a zone and the full moon came rising above this zone with queenly majesty and glowing with the most exquisite vermilion. The atmosphere about us had that purity and that crystalline limidity which Homer attributes to that of Olympus, while the valleys, filled with mists condensing there, seemed the dwelling-place of gloomy shadows.

“But how shall I depict the night that followed this lovely evening, when after the twilight the moon, shining alone in the sky, poured forth the waves of her silvery light over the vast pile of snow and rock surrounding our cabin? What an astonishing and delicious spectacle under the gentle radiance of the luminary of night was made by those very slopes of snow and ice the sight of which is unendurable in the sunlight. What a magnificent contrast those granite crags, darkened and hewed out with so much precision and boldness, made against these glittering snows! What a moment for meditation! How many trials and privations find compensation in such moments! The soul is elevated, the mind seems to cover a wider outlook, and in the midst of this majestic silence you may believe you hear the voice of Nature and become the secret witness of her most hidden works.”

De Saussure’s “Voyages dans les Alpes” are still well worth reading. He was acquainted with most of the great men of his day; Goethe sought him out to ask his advice; the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, explorer of glaciers, Buffon, David Garrick, Sir William Hamilton and dozens of others were proud of his friendship. In a way, he was the father of modern mountain-climbing. He crossed the Alps by eight different passes and penetrated to parts of the mountains never deemed accessible before his day.

Women began quite early to have aspirations to get to the top of the mountain. In August, 1823, a Mrs. Campbell of London, with her daughter, got to the Col du Géant and tried to reach the summit but failed. In September, 1838, Mlle. Henriette d’Angeville, no longer young, succeeded. It was then regarded as an extraordinary feat. She says she “looked out toward those superb mountains which lifted above the plains and mediocrities of the earth their brows adorned with an eternal splendor;” she was “attracted by their solitude where she might breathe the free pure air of the mighty Alpestrian Nature;” she was bound to climb “on the white carpet of the spotless snows to those glittering peaks which are like luminous altars, the sojourn of joy, of sweetness, of infinite serenity.” Her relatives and friends tried to restrain her but she cried: “If I suffocate, take my body to the top and leave it there.” She started with seven guides and two porters, and succeeded.

Afterwards she confessed: – “If we had started from the Grands Mulets at four o’clock instead of at two, the ascension would have been a failure and we should have got caught in the tempest; if we had gone back without reaching the summit, they would have made sport of us; if one of my guides had perished I should have been stoned and if I had perished it would have been said: ‘Too bad, but what business had she to get into such a scrape?’”